Excellent ideas, Chalk.
The scenario you presented offers players a degree of autonomy while still incorporating them into the bigger picture.
I just watched a segment on 60 Minutes (an American TV "news magazine") about a company of soldiers from the 101st Airborne operating out of a remote FOB in Afghanistan. It was a really cool segment with some pretty suspenseful firefight footage (soldiers were advancing towards the enemy through a cornfield where the stalks were six feet tall. They'd walk out of one field into a wide open patch and another field would be standing like a solid wall fifty meters ahead). Anyway, this sort of thing would be what PCs would be asked to do as the patrol/recon element for a company or battalion sized firebase.
They could also perform civil affairs ops among the locals on the outskirts of the FB, execute ambushes on enemy patrols, go on anti-marauder sweeps, defend the FB from enemy assaults, act as FOs for the FB artillery, recon disputed/enemy territory, etc. The are lots of possibilities.
It seems like many Poland-based campaigns end (or head back to the states) as soon as the PCs return to friendly territory. Attaching the party to a NATO cantonment's FF or FOB would allow the PCs to stay and provide the GM with plenty of fodder for a continued Poland (or E. Germany) based campaign.
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