Anyway, the Forest Service gate across the fire road was locked, we wasted five minutes while a guy three trucks ahead of us tried blasting the lock with a shotgun. Surprise! The Forest Service had anticipated somebody trying that, and that lock wouldn’t’t budge. So, a guy rammed the gate, and busted both the gate and the radiator of his truck, which then need to be pushed off the road before the rest of us could squeeze by and drive through.

Yeah, yeah, everybody has a story from that day, this is my story, so shut up and listen. One thing I’ve learned is that Ruhar Army grunts are like grunts across the galaxy; they want to get the combat over with and get back to their barracks, or dens, in their case. Did I hate them? Hell yes, but I don’t think they meant to kill people, at least, except as collateral damage. Whatever their objective was on Earth, these troops had missed their landing zone, and were making the best of the situation. Everybody would have been better off if those Ruhar had sat in their busted transport with their thumbs up their asses, called the Ruhar version of AAA, and waited for a tow truck. Combat ops don’t work that way. Something gets fucked up on every mission; you adapt and do the best you can to accomplish your objective. This group of Ruhar decided their objective was to secure Penobscot county, whether that made sense or not. The Kristang tell us the Ruhar’s most likely plan was to destroy our industrial infrastructure, and knock us back into the stone age, so we’d be no threat to them. If that was their original objective, they missed it by a couple hundred miles, when they landed in Thomson Corners. The Kristang were mostly telling the truth about why the Ruhar hit us, although they lied about everything else, which I’ll get to eventually.

We shouldn’t even be fighting the Ruhar, they aren’t our enemy, our allies are.

I’d better start at the beginning.