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Old 10-24-2022, 03:23 PM
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chico20854 chico20854 is offline
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October 12, 1997

Two battalions of Rangers and 82nd Airborne Division pathfinders are dropped into the Tabriz area. Accompanying them is the young female American journalist Fanya Ayn Wilkerson, who films the spectacular airborne assault upon Tabriz. The eerie grey-green of her low light-level mini-cam as she films the ghostly arrival of 6000 paratroopers descending in silence upon the sleeping city jolts the nation on the six o'clock news when it airs.

(Unofficially) The US Department of Agriculture signs a series of major procurement contracts at the onset of the nation's fall harvest. The USDA buys over 100,000 tons of grain throughout the country, arranging for much of it to be stored in commercial grain handling facilities and additional amounts to be stored aboard covered barges in the inland waterway system. The purchase serves a dual purpose - to provide FEMA with a ready reserve if the nuclear exchange in Europe is to disrupt commerical food distribution in the US or elsewhere in the world, and (for the third fall in a row) to offset the loss of farmer's income from the cutoff of grain sales to the USSR and its satellites. (Officially) Despite these actions, the glut of food produced results in low prices for the commodities and many farmers hang on to their harvest awaiting higher prices.

Czestochowa, Poland is incinerated by a 150kt blast from an American cruise missile, leaving the city smoking rubble.

Unofficially,

A team from Army Materiel Command, in one of the war's more audacious missions for its personnel, travels to North Kroea to meet with soldiers from the 7th Infantry Division (Light) about their experience with the PAMSS shelter systems. The Palletized Armored Shelter Systems were fielded in early September to the division, offering an improved portable hedquarters environment for combat commands. The response from the units that received the prototype units are mixed - they, to a man (and woman), find them more convienient, comfortable and useful than the array of truck and HMMWV-mounted shelters and tents that PAMSS is intended to replace. The biggest challlenge is their method of transportation - by PLS truck, which is in short supply in light infantry divisions and not assigned to the units that operate PAMSS, requiriing either tasking from a unit that has PLS trucks (which is seldom timely) or assignment of the heavy trucks to the PAMSS command, an inefficient use that also requires another stream of spare parts, heavy wreckers and all the additional logistic burden that comes from adding another vehicle to a unit's table of organization and equipment.

Under the superb leadership of the regimental commander, Colonel Steven Myers, the 107th ACR makes good progress towards rejoining NATO lines in western Poland. They are supported by allied airpower and the unseen efforts of a number of NATO special operations teams that help clear the way for the regiment, which is moving on foot.

The Red Banner Northern Fleet dispatches two surface ASW groups (one from Severomorsk in the White Sea, the other from Ostrovnoy in the remote eastern Kola) to locate and destroy the American submarine which has been marauding the Barents Sea for weeks.

Southern Front deploys additional troops to Istanbul, halting mopping-up operations to clear the last remnants of bypassed Turkish formations in Thrace. The 810th Naval Infantry Brigade moves south in the Black Sea aboard ships, closely following a small flotilla of minesweepers that are clearing a path for them.
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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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