James Rosone - Battlefield Russia

When their ordnance was spent, they radioed back to the base, letting them know they had cleared the battlespace so the artillery guys could begin their own mission. When the fighters landed, Sparkles and the rest of the pilots were surprised to see their planes had sustained quite a number of bullet holes. The ground crews did their best to make sure nothing critical had been damaged and that the planes could get back in the air when the next mission was called for.

Banavaram Reserved Forest

It was nearly 1700 hours. With maybe two hours of light left, Lieutenant Martinez weighed their options. The last couple of hours, they had been calling in one strike after another on the advancing mob of Indian soldiers several kilometers in front of them. Up to this point, they had only been probed with a few small-scale attacks, but eventually, the enemy was going to try and bum-rush their positions.

They could fall back to the airport now that reinforcements had arrived, but giving up their forward position right now also meant the enemy would be that much closer to encircling the air base. The longer they held this position, the more they made the enemy react to them, as opposed to the other way around.

“Lieutenant!” the sergeant manning the drone shouted in an excited voice. “They’re moving in,” he said, showing him the image of a mob of undisciplined militiamen surging toward their position.

Before Martinez could say a word, they heard the whistling sound of mortars starting to fall on their positions.

“ Incoming! ” he shouted. The soldiers around him hit the dirt just as a series of rounds landed in the cluster of trees where they were hiding.

Crump, crump, crump, crump, crump.

Five explosions ripped through the forest, sending hot shrapnel in all directions. Then a guttural sound emanated from the gathering horde that was now roughly a kilometer away from their position.

Sergeant First Class Price poked his head up from his fighting position and looked for the militiamen rushing toward their positions. He turned to the Rangers to his left and right, and yelled, “Hold your fire, men! Wait until they get within two hundred meters and then cut loose on them.”

More mortar rounds landed among their positions as they watched the enemy soldiers get closer with each passing second. Once the enemy left the smoldering ruins of the village next to the forest preserve, they had a brief hundred yards of open ground they had to cross before they edged into the wooded tree cover where the Rangers were set up.

Zip, crack, zip, zap.

Bullets whizzed over their heads, hitting some of the nearby trees and underbrush they were using for cover. Just as the enemy crossed into a stretch of open terrain that marked them to be roughly two hundred meters away, the Rangers cut loose with their M240G machine guns. The red tracers from their machine guns looked like lasers as they crisscrossed back and forth across their interlocking fields of fire, shredding the attackers. The first several waves of enemy soldiers were simply cut apart by the five M240s the Rangers had placed on this line of their defense.

Price raised his own rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the wall of enemy soldiers charging relentlessly toward them. Bullets were cracking all around him, but he zeroed in on each target and blocked out his other senses.

Bang, bang, bang, bang .

Sergeant Price just kept pulling the trigger. Time and time again, he scored a direct hit with nearly every trigger pull. However, despite every man he saw taken out by one of his shots, enemy soldiers just kept coming at him.

Price dropped his now-empty magazine, quickly slapping a new one in its place as the relentless horde continued unabated toward them, threatening to envelop them in a tsunami of bullets and pure suicidal hatred. Flipping his selector switch from semiauto to full-auto, he knew he needed to cut through the enemy ranks at a much quicker pace or they’d be on his position in minutes.

The chattering ratatat of the machine guns was almost nonstop as the gun crews did their best to cut down their attackers and keep them at arm’s length.

Crump, crump, crump.

Friendly mortar and artillery fire hit the enemy ranks, throwing bodies and parts of bodies in every which direction, adding to the carnage unfolding before them.

“ How can they keep charging like this? ” Price thought, horrified. In that moment, he just wanted to be anywhere but there.

He reached to his right as a string of bullets flew right past were his head had just been, and grabbed the first clicker, depressing the button.

BOOM!

An enormous explosion occurred seventy-five meters in front of him as his Claymore mine detonated, flattening fifteen or twenty tightly packed enemy soldiers as the wall of ball bearings cut them down like a scythe.

When the enemy reached within 75 meters of their lines, more of the Rangers detonated their Claymore mines. As the fighting continued, many of the Indian militiamen were now using any cover they could find to seek shelter from the fuselage of bullets and ball bearings being thrown at them. The Indian militia began to take more accurately aimed shots at the defenders, finally scoring hits against the Rangers, who up to this point had been absolutely butchering them.

Price turned to the Ranger next to him to tell him to blow his Claymore when the man’s head snapped back and disintegrated in a midst of blood and gore and his body collapsed to the bottom of their fighting position. Shaking the sight from his mind, Sergeant Price reached over and grabbed the Claymore clicker, detonating the last mine they had in front of them.

BOOM!

Another swath of enemy soldiers was cut down. His only remaining battle buddy threw hand grenades at the enemy like it was going out of style.

Crump, crump, crump . Shrapnel being thrown everywhere.

Just as Price thought, “ This is it—we’re going to be washed over by the enemy horde ,” he suddenly heard dozens of whistles. The militiamen fell back—not to their original starting point, but several hundred meters away. Shooting between the two sides continued unabated, but the relentless charges stopped for the time being.

Lieutenant Martinez tapped Price on the shoulder. “We have to get the heck out of Dodge, or we’re done. I don’t know how we just survived that,” he said in awe.

Price nodded. “It’s starting to get dark, LT. The enemy probably pulled back to allow darkness to settle in, and then they’ll resume their attack when it’ll be harder to see them.”

Martinez shook his head and then grabbed his radio. “All Zombie elements, fall back to the vehicles immediately,” he ordered. “We need to get out of here ASAP. Leave the dead, but make sure we don’t leave any of our wounded behind.”

Sergeant Price was a bit impressed as he watched Lieutenant Martinez trot up and down the line to make sure everyone knew they were falling back. “ Those Rangers don’t need to be told twice to leave ,” he thought with a smirk.

The lieutenant and Price met up on their way back to the vehicles, but Martinez made a critical mistake and looked back at the front line, where the enemy had been pushing toward them moments ago. He immediately grabbed his stomach and fell to his knees, retching. Price stole a glance backward—the carnage was unimaginable. The ground was practically covered in dead and mangled bodies all the way up to the edge of their positions.

“What kind of commander could order his men into such a slaughter?” asked Martinez as he wiped away the vomit from his mouth with his hand.