First fan fiction based on my campaign

[Ancestor]

So, this is my first fan fic and is based on the campaign that I'm running for my sons. It's written from the perspective of an NPC, SPC Mike "Good Will Mikey" Callahan, who serves with the two PC's (CPT Smith and SGT Murphy, played by my sons). The PC's played a mission in Iran (several sessions) and then were sent to West Point as instructors due to their success.

We then had several sessions where their characters were on leave during the "Dain Dangerous" concert in Boston and they helped organize an effort to help a neighborhood against several gangs after the riots began. They have been sent back to West Point after leave but unbeknownst to them their characters will be deployed to Europe right after the TDM in order to help refit the 5th ID (leading to Kalisz). This was my way of trying to visualize the T2K world at that time. I welcome your thoughts and criticisms, please!

"The feeling on the way over the second time was 180 degrees from the first time. Sure, it was a chartered civilian airliner, but nothing else was the same. No sendoff, no hot stewardess rebuffing jokes about “hot nuts” (yes, I know that both the book and the film Jarhead are anecdotal. I know this because the sexually charged banter and raw testosterone displayed the first time I shipped out for the Gulf made for some far more amusing encounters between the Joes and the flight attendants than Hollywood could dream of producing), and no sense of tomorrow. When we flew out for the Gulf, just over one year ago, it was almost a big party. Booze (some smuggled, some supplied by the stewardesses for free on the down low), loud hip hop, dick jokes, each dude trying to outdo the other about how they were going to rock both the haji and the commie. Sort of a College Gameday meets that old movie American Pie with a healthy dose of wannabe badass thrown in.
This time, on our way to serve as replacements and a training cadre for the 5th Mechanized Division, is was a funeral dirge. No stewardesses (unless you count grouchy, ugly, and MALE NCO’s barking nonsense as such, which I certainly don’t). Flew out in the middle of the night in a freaking storm. Near vertical in our Dreamliner then taking evasive action, for God’s sake, less Ivan drop a mushroom on Logan International in the midst of our climb. My boy Ren, for all his bravado, puked all over himself twice. We hid the booze in our canteens and drank out of fear, not excitement. Hell, one of the pilots was wearing an Air Force flight suit-apparently we no longer had enough C17’s to keep him occupied so he was ordered to join our charter pilot to fill out our flight crew (at a much lower pay rate, not that US dollars were going to amount to much soon). The young (and even older, as I’m into the MILF myself) flight hotties all quit right after the TDM, leaving us to look forward to receiving MRE snacks served by 17 year old draftees (everyone called them recruits as a benign euphemism) one we level out. The even more awesome part is that the poor boys will be supervised by a burnouts who were just promoted from E5 (or sometimes E4) to E7 simply because at one point someone, somewhere (be it Poland, Germany, Korea, or even CONUS) had given them a million dollar wound that allowed them to rest, recover, and recycle to a higher pay grade. I’m not really hungry and I’d frankly rather spend the next nine hours into Frankfurt throwing up than eating “Cheese/Spread/w. crackers” and listening to said recently promoted former E5’s shout things like “Hooah” and “gonna kill us some commies” and what not, despite the fact that very few of them have seen combat like we have.
This is where I pause to thank God that I’m in Murph’s platoon. I can see him two rows ahead of me on the other side, right next to the Captain. He’s nodding his head, rocking the latest Beats Headphones, shoveling Cheezits and playing a video game on his phone. The CPT has his nose buried in what might be the last issue of Scientific American ever printed and is equally immune to the roller coaster flight we are enduring. It was really funny in the terminal. All the other BN NCO’s were acting all badass and bossing both their officers and recruits around. The CPT just looked at Murph and said “make sure our guys have enough to eat and drink for the flight before we take off. This is the time to rest and there will be no servitude in our company.” Murph just nods, disappears with three dudes, and they all come back an hour later with pizzas, cases of beer, bottles of booze, cases of soda, and more boxes of Cheezits than I’ve ever seen in my life, along with various and sundry other items. Between that and what Ren pulled off from the duty free, we’re set for life. But back to Murph…
I’ll never forget the first time I saw him, walking out of the Iranian desert, all badass and what not. The Captain (then First Lieutenant Smith) had just managed to roll our M117 and get Ren’s leg broken. Cap’s acting like, well, like a Lieutenant, completely assing up the MEDIVAC call while Ren screams like the pussy that he is, when all of a sudden Murph just walks out of the desert with his Ranger squad. Right out of the wasteland! Talk about the “thousand yard stare”, these cats were the Wikipedia photo for that phrase. Dirty and smelly as hell, a couple of them with blood stains on their uniforms (I didn’t ask whose). It was like a freaking movie or something. He strolls in, takes charge with about three words, calms CPT Smith down, and they get a bird inbound.
It was bizarre as that was when something changed in then LT Smith. He all of a sudden when from “quiet yet asshole smart guy Ringknocker football hero” to, well, a Commander. A Commander that I’ve followed into the gates of hell and am doing so again. It’s like Murph made him remember his inner badass and then LT Smith’s demeanor totally changed. Murph and Smith walk off towards the town, a Godawful maze of haji stone buildings and huts set in the shadow of a burning oil refinery and a horrendously polluted pond (it was freaking florusecent diareha colored, for Christ’s sake!). Pretty soon this well dressed older Iranian, kind of looked like the “Most Interesting Man in the World” from those old commercials, but more swarthy, comes up and starts talking to Smith and Murph. In about two minutes they are laughing like they are long lost brothers by another mother reuniting over a beer. I get sick of Ren wailing in pain like a little homo girl while waiting for the morphine to kick in, so I decide to get in the game and stroll over.
The most interesting Iranian in the world is talking to CPT Smith about MIT. As in, the Massachusetts’s Institute of Technology. That MIT! Now, I didn’t know if CPT Smith had studied a MIT at some point but, despite his inability to assess terrain, he’s WICKED smart. Like, near the top of his class at West Point in Engineering smart. So, I'm guessing he's familiar with the institution. Then all three of them start talking about Fenway Park and the Sox. So, I start thinking, the Iranian studied at MIT and the CPT may or may not have but is a baseball fan from a rich family in Virginia who’s probably seen a game or two at Fenway, but what’s Murph’s connection.
And then it hits me. South Boston accent with some legit Irish brogue thrown in. The easy way of a bartender but the intense way of the warrior. Slim but muscular, like a cheetah, or a white puma. Holy shit, SPC Murphy is (or was in a previous life) Boston’s own “Irish” Wayne Murphy, one eight count away from the unified middleweight boxing championship of the world…I guess they really did rig the draft to be fair this time!