How about some merc work stories?

Now we normally dont like to be called "mercs", theres a lot of negative connotations to the name, but I'm not too fussed by it. Like a lot of other guys, I got my combat training and experience elsewhere. For me, it was a corporate private military. I'm not proud of what I did, and thats why I got out of that. For security reasons, I can't go into specifics of names and locations, I hope you guys understand. I'll be talking about my first experience with the organization, and things got hot before I ever saw any of their faces. It actually happened when I was on my way to get briefed for the first time. Me and a few other new recruits were on a train there, only to find out the train had been sabotaged by a major opfor organization. It wrecked and we were forced to make our way out of that location before any enemies showed up to finish the job.

This was a stroke of luck for us. We didn't really know the area well, but a local hermit came to investigate the noise, and led us back to where he was staying. It was a safe enough location and we were able to get our bearings and patch our thankfully minor wounds up while we figured out what to do next. He made the suggestion that we should head to a nearby abandoned village. When asked why it was abandoned, he said that just about everybody that lived there had become refugees or worse due to the high activity of opfor in the area. There was still one man there who refused to give up his home to the enemy, however.

The second man finally broke down and agreed that he should move on before he was killed too. Equipped with two people who knew the lay of the land and where our enemy was likely to be (and how to avoid them), we told them where we were trying to get to, and they said they knew the place and could get us there in exchange for shelter and safety. We promised them this (even though we had no idea if we could live up to it- Hey, we were pretty desperate) and they led us there.

The location our base had been set up was pretty secure. It was surrounded by mountains and inhospitable terrain with one road in and out. Opfor had been forced to resort to mortars and other indirect weapons to try to uproot it, but the base was equipped with anti-mortar/artillery defenses so they hadn't done much except run up an ammo bill. All in all a pretty solid place to be.

After settling in and being given time to adjust to our surroundings, we were given our first mission. A covert operative had been operating by themselves, and had been tracked down by an opposition group. They of course went to what was supposed to be their safe zone immediately upon realizing they had been sniffed out, but they were tracked there. Time was obviously of the essence. By the time we got there, the enemy had already tried to launch an exploratory result, only to find the operative had booby trapped nearly everything. This, of course, made actually reaching them quite difficult, but we found a way in and got them out before anything could get worse.

Now everyone was short-handed during the war, any vet will tell you that. It didn't matter your rank, anything less than first sergeant or captain was going out on patrol. The opposition knew this, and they ambushed one of our patrols that just so happened to have our security chief in it.

We knew he wasn't dead, because they must have known he was important. They attempted to send out communiques to ransom him, which we intercepted. We say intercepted because oddly enough they were not actually directed at us. They were, in fact, trying to ransom him to a different opposition group, one that had a grudge against our outfit, in the hopes of getting weapons and supplies from them in exchange.

This one actually didn't go so well. It could have gone a lot worse, but circumstances were in our favor, namely the two opposition groups turned on each other. The first group which was trying to ransom him discovered that the second's grudge was strong enough that they not only were not willing to pay, but that they were also willing to attack them to get the prisoner. In the resulting chaos we were able to extract him without much trouble, and by the time anyone realized he had been sprung, we were long gone.

Well, WE didn't bomb the train, but the phrasing makes for a nice ironic twist doesn't it? We had reports that our primary opposition group had been smuggling weapons and personnel aboard a train, and we were to act as cover for a demolitions expert who would attempt to stop it. It wasn't a question of if they were carrying; We had confirmed intelligence that stated they were transporting high value materiel. Launching a direct assault on the station was not possible, so we did what we had to. There we no civilians aboard the train, don't worry- Only a few enemy combatants and said materiel. The idea was to blow the tracks which would force train to come to a halt, but said demolitions expert was not exactly stable, and "accidentally" waited too long. The train failed to stop in time and was derailed.

Now, we weren't exactly sure what it was at the time, but along with the standard complement of arms and explosives, there was an electronic device about the size of a briefcase that definitely didn't look like it belonged. We sent some pictures and described the object, and base was baffled too, though they suspected it might have been a power source for something larger. Along with everything else, it was brought back to the base to be examined.

Turns out it WAS a power source, much like the ones we had been using, and just in time. We plugged it in before the base's shield generators ran out of juice, only to find out we had been duped. The opposition group that had been giving us so much trouble had rigged a decoy which overloaded and deactivated our base's shields. They immediately began to fire those orbital mortars again, and we had to resort to something drastic- Namely, using said recovered covert operatives Siren powers to assist the base's decrepit engines as they half-failed, get the base airborne, and teleport it to a safer location for repairs and figure out a safer way to keep the shields up and keep the base mobile.