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Old 09-20-2022, 04:00 PM
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chico20854 chico20854 is offline
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Septmber 3, 1997

Nothing official for the day. Unofficially,

The survivors of the 40th Infantry Division (Mechanized) returned to California are granted two weeks of leave to recover before reporting to Camp Rilea, Oregon to begin forming a new division.

FEMA begins to restock the Defense Logistics Agency storage depot in Pontiac, Michigan, which has been largely emptied of its reserve of machine tools.

As casualties mount on the continent, the House of Commons introduces a conscription bill.

The air over China is the clearest it has been in years as combat operations wind down. The American Volunteer Group II, sucessors to the Flying Tigers of World War Two, are disbanded, surviving aircraft, ground crew and pilots joining USAF and US Naval air units in the Korean Theater. Their Soviet opponents are transferred west, mostly to European skies, although a few aircraft are directed to the skies over Iran.

Pro-Communist guerrillas remain active behind the lines in Poland. Outside the Polish city of Wegrow east of Warsaw a band captures two American soldiers who were travelling (against standing orders) in a lone vehicle, a M1009 CUCV Blazer. The prisoners are Father (Major) John Burroughs, chaplain for 2nd Brigade, 28th Infantry Division, and his assistant, Specialist Karl Cray. The vehicle is hidden in a nearby grove and the prisoners rushed away.

The US Army orders the transfer of the 197th Field Artillery Brigade from USAEUR to Alaska. The formation, in reserve since July, have become experts in Arctic warfare and will add badly needed firepower to X Corps' effort to halt the Soviet offensive in Alaska.

The Olympia attacks the Russian coastal convoy, sinking the corvette SKR-29 with a Harpoon missile and the freighters Bratsk and Kuloy and icebreaker Dikson with torpedoes. The minesweeper RT-350 and the small tanker Imant Sudmalis escaped, radioing for assistance.

The battleship Wisconsin engages Greek coastal positions with its massive 16-inch guns as the resupply convoy enters the Adriatic with a vital cargo of supplies and munitions for the NATO effort in the Balkans. Aircraft from Sixth Fleet carriers patrol overhead, easily dealing with the feeble effort of the Greek Air Force to interfere with the ships' passage.

Private Randall Cutler and 179 other recently graduated support soldiers arrive at Rhein Main Air Force Base in Germany. They are rushed onto busses to a nearby Bundeswehr Kaserne where Army personnel staff assign them to units as replacements.

Pro-Soviet Kurdish partisans launch an attack on the Batman Air Base in southeastern Turkey. When Turkish security troops respond to the truck bomb they use to breach the perimeter fence, a Spetsnaz team from the 15th Spetsnaz Brigade slips over the perimeter fence on the far side of the base. They attack several hardened aircraft shelters, capturing three of them (at the cost of 17 men), one of which contains a F-16 of the 149th Tactical Fighter Group. They destroy the aircraft and grab what documentation they can before withdrawing; thankfully the Batman base is not one of the six Turkish air bases that host American tactical nuclear weapons.

The 1st Marine Division continues its movement southward towards the Persian Gulf; the division commander, Major General John P. Leonard (proceeding on foot most of the way), describes the effort as "continuing the attack, just to our south". The command takes the unconventional decision to travel across the barren Dasht-e-Lut desert, which is much more lightly patrolled by the Soviet 40th Army. The Marine's native guides, provided by the IPA, identify underground qanat aqueducts that the command can use; when those have been left behind the command is reliant on what water is already aboard the division's vehicles and what is flown in by the nightly resupply flights from the coast.

The lead company of the 44th Railroad Brigade reaches the site of the Golden Spike nuclear strike in eastern Siberia by truck. The company commander reports that residual radiaition in the area is still at a high level. When the brigade commander orders him to have his company don their protective garments and conduct a site survey and begin work the young senior lieutenant is forced to tell the colonel that his unit was never issued protective garments, the unit's prewar stocks diverted to China in 1996 and never replaced.
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I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...
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