AAR - Pathfinder Event - The Battle of Ia Drang

**ACOGRecon** · 09-04-2010, 03:00 PM

Overall a great job was done by all, especially my Alpha Squad who worked very well together! I have a bunch of screens to post later, but for now I'll leave you with the team picture. Post your AAR's below.

**blackraven93** · 09-04-2010, 03:23 PM

overall, it was a fun day. Minus the fact that the mission wasn't working as it should.....

**Rampart_CH** · 09-04-2010, 03:27 PM

here you go gents....this is what it was like for the weps team!!!!!

**johnflenaly** · 09-04-2010, 03:36 PM

Well I was in the weapons squad with the rest of the 18th. Me and rampart were on mortars. Starting off was pretty good. We touched down and me and ram started setting of out firebase to the west of the rest of the platoon. The rest of the squad was intialy sent elsewhere for perimeter defense. We were given a few fire missions but we found out real quick that 90% of thoes missions were under our minimum distance to ingage. We spent most of the mission poping off illumination. Somewhere in there our squad leader died. Cheif stepped up to the plate to lead, however he was having issues trying to talk to the platoon lead. Shortly after that I had to leave for work

. I hope it went better for the rest of you all.

**Jacezz** · 09-04-2010, 07:09 PM

Yarr, I think the whole thing was pretty ineventful for the weapons team sadly, in fact aside from the contacts appearing to our rear which a quick shift of our first buddy team sorted, there wasn't a lot we actually managed to achieve, chief must have let off a few thousand rounds himself to achieve little more than suppression from the range we were at against little but sporadic fire in our direction. Think the weapons team would have been more use had the mission been made a lot harder, it was pretty cakewalk all round, that said I suspect it was on regular difficulty ;P

Then there was my net death :/ Sorry guys! I've given it the lash accordingly.

Awesome atmosphere going on though, that is until I went up deaf - seriously, no earplugs for anyone but the machinegunners themselves? What? I do need to operate close by them as their Squad leader.

**Dredge** · 09-04-2010, 07:55 PM

It was on Recruit actually. Will be doing a hardcore run soon.

**Antiik** · 09-05-2010, 05:39 AM

Thanks for the weps team! You made this a really good night (atleast for me it was night) despite being a quiet evening for us in the LZ. Thank you for Daishi too who keep company with us!

Hope that we get some more photos or even video from the frontline too!
Can't wait for the next event! I'll definately sign up if only I can make it!

**Ceud** · 09-05-2010, 06:07 AM

I apologise unreservedly for missing the event. For reasons known to no one (including myself) I was convinced the event was at 11pm UK time. I was only 7 hours late. =[ For what it is worth, I am very sad that I missed it.

**LowSpeedHighDrag** · 09-06-2010, 07:57 AM

From the feedback the mission was on overall a success. I too, as with Ceud have missed the event. Due to my work phone being corrupted and me trying to fix it before the weekend was over.
I'm greatly looking foward to the next event!

**Thomas R Harper, Jr** · 09-06-2010, 10:57 PM

Merlo and I handled the arty support. I had forgotten how hard it is not to know everything happening at the battle. When you do fire missions, you only hear if things went horribly wrong as in "Cease fire, you are targeting friendlies!" We did not hear that. Like the mortars squad, we fired a lot of illumination across the battlefield and dozes of rounds of HE and Willy Pete. We took the guns because someone asked if anyone was comfortable with the arty operation and he and I were. Like most of you, I would have rather been at the helo landings.

Hope we helped ..... missed the photo op ... no one remembered to come pick us up after battle on RTB. We tried to provide illum for photo but we were out of range. Great night's fun.

**Dredge** · 09-06-2010, 11:20 PM

I'm glad everyone had fun!

I would like to do another run of it soon and crank it up too 11. Also, I will be reworking it for release on Alpha (non ace) server. So everyone can partake in the awesome mission brought you by nthamma aka Lq.Snake

**Merula** · 09-07-2010, 02:02 PM

I was in the company M119 detachment with tiggr and we were kinda abandoned at the end, but I still had fun, what with the fact that the area of operation was set at almost the maximum range of the howitzers and that required some creative aiming to actually manage to hit something.
Three things I think should be pointed out to improve future missions:
1) next time you have an artillery battery outside the AO, make each operator a one-man team: tiggr was my SL and the only one that could see the map markers. And when he had connection problems he lost them all. Making each arty-op a one-man team allows all of them to recieve map markers via command channel, avoiding having to clutter the map on side channel
2) be careful where you call in artillery: the M119 and other big artillery units have a huge splash area, are none too precise, and ordering a strike less than 100 meters from a friendly squad is a really bad idea (I would also like to apologise for that bit of FF near the start, although I think we got lucky without any dead)
3) use colored map marker to distinguish between the various pre-designated artillery targets: due to how the artillery targeting module work, when firing at that distance, all we could see was a big black blob. Of course, we used the map to ID the targets, but if we had multicolored markers it could have made targeting the area quicker.

As you might have noticed, point 1 and 3 are due to game limitations, and should not in any way be considered as criticizing the excellent CO we had during the mission.

**Dredge** · 09-07-2010, 03:26 PM

Personally, I prefer to mark things like arty marks and enemy locations in side chat so its available to everyone. I will about fixing the group issue though.

**Daishi2442** · 09-07-2010, 03:54 PM

I think it went pretty well, all things considered. Apparently the mission broke or something so we weren't fighting the epic onslaught it was supposed to be....but eh, it's a good start at reviving arma2 events.

I played as a corpsman in the command squad, but was tasked with tending to charlie company, who had the good luck to not get shot once while I was there. All in all, I had fun observing the fight. Oh, and I was happy because I called out the first contact.