HALO

Hello world!

Through jungles, over rivers, under water, in the air, up mountains.

Going to far away places, meeting strange people and snuffing them.
It start when the phone rings at 15H00 one Wednesday afternoon while i was busy mowing the lawn, the phone lying on the table starts to ring.
I take the call and the voice on the other side says we have been put on immediate standby and must report to Ops within the hour, so i have a bath and jump into my cammos and off i go for yet another hurry up and wait mission, or so i thought.
I get to the Ops room and wait for my stick (Group of six operators) to arrive). One by one they start arriving and at 16H00 we are all sitting waiting to be briefed. You can feel the tension as the guys sit talking to each other about this and that.
The door to the ops room opens and we are summond in by a stern looking RSM who looks as if he has’nt had much sleep the past few days.
The mission details are given to us and a whole 2 hours of information and looking at scale models and recon photo’s takes place.
After the brief we all get into the back of a white Land Rover and are driven to an airfield about 30 clicks from our base. We are offloaded in a hanger where we find all our kit standing ready for us to inspect.After going through the kit to see that we have everything our very friendly RSM arrives and hands us a Tooheys Beer from his own stockpile. He has a daughter who works for QANTAS and each time she has a stay over she brings him a case or 2 of his beloved Tooheys beer.This is a first for us and i now start wonderring if the old man knows more than he is letting on, as we have been through a few of these alerts and are usually left to our own device most of the time,bar the guards looking after the hanger. The old man sits telling us about the evening before they jumped at Arnheim in WW2 and thinking back now this was just his way of letting us know that we would not be alone in the mission that lay ahead of us.
At about 23H00 the RSM says his good bye’s and lets us settle in for the night.
We spend the next 2 Days doing various excercises at the mock up site and eventually we could go through the whole routine in our sleep.
Saturday morning we are all woken up at 00H30 and told that the mission is a go and we would be jumping in at 03H00.
Now the fun begins, it seems that a bunch of off wack soldiers have decided to take over a very small country and are holding 37 teachers and missioneries hostage in a school where they have been working and we have been tasked to extract the said hostages without collateral damage to the locals living near the school.
So we will be HALOing in on the target and doing the attack at first light.
All went well on the flight out, but when the green jump light went on and we deplaned the doggy do started hitting the fan. Firstly my altimeter went haywire and when i deployed my main chute it roman candled. On cut away the one capewell locked and the chute flopped above me so i had to cut it loose, then only could i deploy the emergency chute. Once on the ground we did the role up only to discover that my signaller was missing and we had no coms with him.We set up a TB(temp base) and two of us set off to find him, it was not long when we found him out cold after landing in a ditch of sorts and hitting his head on a rock with such impact as to crack his oralite helmet in half.
We eventually revived him and off we went to the TB. After doing our signals check we now set off to our RV where we were going to observe the school and wait for first light to extract the hostages.
On arriving at the RV the school below looked suspiciously quite,so i decided to send a recon team down to see what the situation on the ground is.
As i suspected the hostages had been moved during the night to a destination that we at that stage were not aware of.
We relayed the situation to com ops and were told to dig in until further orders.