Here's a piece of fiction I've wanted to write for a while. I know its going to get flamed but *I* think it could happen.

From: General Maxwell Rappaport, NAC Armed Services Information Office
To: Michael Hanke, Combine Department of Morale
Date: November 30, 2084

Here is the article from Liberty magazine we discussed on the phone. Though I am loathe to forward this refuse, I believe it will help you see why the army wants to see this periodical shut down: it scoffs at the honor in teamwork, and falsely glorifies the "one man against the machine" ethos that is so destructive.

The North American Combine Armed Forces has no record of a John H. Taylor serving in any armored battalion in the European theatre since the Paneuropeans began using Mark IIIs, nor serving in any capacity at Sheffield. We can find no S-3 report describing an action anything like that recounted here. I am required to say that these statements necessarily excludes classified material.

Max Rappaport
NAC ASIC

Text of article from Liberty dated October, 2084:
The Statement of John H. Taylor

Our Ranger heavy tank was hull-down behind the remains of a cement block fast-food place on a small rise two clicks from the main road, ten clicks north of the supply center at Bastogne. When the Ogre came down that road it covered both lanes in both directions - as it ran by and over the scene, it looked like a kid's playroom floor with the toys out of proportion to each other. The supply center was still being evacuated: nothing goes right in a retreat. We were the rearguard.

Lt. Freeman was on the phone immediately. The evacuation had just run out of time.

We traded ineffectual shots at maximum range as the Ogre cruised past. The cement blocks around us were not enough to absorb any damage, but they did make us a little harder to lock on to. I guess since the Ogre's ECM didn't have any other threats to deal with our shots didn't have much of a chance either. We drove through the last of the wall and pulled onto the road after it, trailing by a kilometer and a half.

People who wonder why a heavy tank can't out run an Ogre when its maximum speed is higher ought to see an Ogre run across a real battlefield - I was locking sights on that thing and watched it go over a thirty foot crater and through a sixty foot tree. One passenger car exploded as the Ogre crushed it, and the treads snuffed the explosion like wet fingers on a candle wick.

Then the Ogre we raced down the slope and through two fences to create a new on-ramp to the main road. I called out, "Target acquired - distance fourteen ninety meters." I looked up from my screen, Wallace and I grinned at each other. No tanker ever wants to fight an Ogre, but if you have to this is the position you want - directly behind and racing at full speed. If handled correctly you can shoot all day long and the Ogre, with its front facing weapons, can't shoot back. Wallace was handling it just right.

Locking onto the Ogre in this situation is easy, but takes some self control. We got off some shots and I was hoping, dearly hoping, I had hit the thing when I saw the puff of white smoke, but I should have known better. The smoke was white, not black, it was going down, not up, and it was on the right side of the Ogre when I was aiming down the left. So it was the commander who made the call.

"Vampire! Vampire! Vampire!"

Wallace pulled off the road and put on the brakes. I tried to get the point defenses to lock onto the missle, but they wouldn't see it.

The commander yelled, "ECM negative, bail out!"

By the time I unfastened and turned around Wallace and Freeman were in the hatches. My brain was screaming, "Seventeen seconds, you have seventeen seconds to get three hundred meters away," and I was waiting in line. That's when I saw Wallace's bag abandoned on the floor.

Wallace is a decent mechanic in addition to being a great driver, and never goes anywhere without a few tools. I grabbed the bag and followed Freeman out the left hatch. We hit the ground and sprinted. Without a word, without recognition, I passed the Lieutenant and kept going.

In training we learned how to recognize good cover, since you that you can't get far enough away from a nuke in time. We spent days learning to recognize the kinds of cement that will block X-rays and the kind that turns to powder, but most of the guys felt it was like the "Duck and Cover" propoganda from the cold war - useless stuff to give us the confidence to fight. But it didn't matter, we were in a big empty, no structures within a hundred meters, and I couldn't run even that far...

But I wanted to live so I ran, telling myself, "I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it." By the time I came to the creek I had convinced myself I was going to make it, but adrenalin won't get you over a 3 meter creek. I jumped, hit the far side and fell to the bottom, face down in mud and water.

I pulled my face up, took one gasp, and then a giant hand shoved my face back into the mud. The ground shook, up and down. I felt my back get hot and start to burn, then chunks of mud started falling on me. I wanted to breathe and panic was telling me to lift up my head and inhale, but even if I could have lifted myself it wouldn't have done any good - there wasn't any air up there.

When the chunks quit falling and I couldn't stand it anymore, I lifted up my head and gasped, and gasped. The air was hot and hurt my throat. Then I noticed that it was completely silent. It was also a lot darker than it was a few moments ago.

I sat in the water and choked for several minutes. I couldn't stop myself from gulping air, but it was hot and thick with dust and gagged me. Eventually I recovered enough to think about something besides the burning in my lungs, and I crawled out of the ravine.

I noticed a few pieces of the heavy around me. I checked by rad guage: the area was hot but not hotter than my suit could handle, if I'd been wearing the resperator. The dosimeter reading was bad news. It starts out black and lightens with cumulative radiation exposure. Mine was the color of newsprint - I could count on a couple of days of vomiting and diarhea, then a week of degeneration, bleeding from every organ and orifice, and a slow death. The joke in training was that this was the reason tankers still carried sidearms.

I thought long and hard about my pistol at that point, but I decided I hadn't trained for two years and travelled to the far side of the globe to shoot myself in a muddy ditch. I decided to look for the others.

I climbed out of the ditch and started walking back towards the road. Funny, its hard for your mind to really accept that you're going to die, which is probably why people live the way they do, and even why we fight wars. In my case, it explains why I kept checking the rad guage as I walked back towards ground zero. There was no sign of Wallace or Freeman, of course, and except for about a million dollars worth of scrap laying about, no sign of the tank. I saw one of the windows, still in one piece. Oh, and there was a black crater near the road.

I decided to go for a warrior's death, since I wanted neither to shoot myself nor suffer the radiation sickness. I started walking toward the road, on the assumption the Ogre would come back that way. Soon enough, it did.

I stood at attention, next to a seven-foot piece of the Ranger's hull, and waited for the Ogre to blast me. I tried to recall all I'd read of soldiers who had refused to outlive their unit, and looked for the honour in dying with my tank-mates.

The Ogre wasn't making full speed, someone had taken a bite out of its treads. Good for us, I thought. Gave me time to calculate when I would come in to range. I was only a little surprised when big guns didn't open fire, after all, why waste a twenty thousand dollar shell on one man? But when it got within a few hundred meters and the rail guns stayed silent, I was puzzled...

Then I got mad.

It wasn't going to fire. It wasn't going to give me a warrior's death. It was just going to run me down like any other piece of debris on what used to be a road. It had simply decided that I was no threat, no threat at all. That's when the fight came back into me.

Of course, being in a state of shock my irrational desire to fight an Ogre lead to a pretty foolish plan: shouting silently at the top of my lungs I drew my automatic and emptied the clip at the front of the Ogre. When the gun quit flashing as I pulled the trigger, I came back to my senses, and threw it away.

Seeing the Ogre bearing down on me, it had clearly run over something unhealthy. Half its right front treads silently flapping against the chassis, and armor plating hung down underneath, sparking against the ocassional pavement. The treads would pass to either side of me, but the hanging entrails of the damaged monster would hit me at 30kph, I needed cover.

The rear part of our Ranger's hull stood beside me like a BPC phone booth. Rationality had clearly not fully returned: I got in, and crouched down. My mind was saying that this wouldn't make a difference, but my body was not listening. I was still going to be smashed like a insect, but my ears heard only silence, my eyes saw only an overcast spring day. I could feel the ground trembling.

When the Ogre's torn underbelly hit my little shelter I was hit hard and spun around. The hull fragment jerked twice and was caught on something. I couldn't hear the scraping, but I could see sparks everywhere as metal struts and bolts in the BPC ground against pavement. The bouncing was terrible, I couldn't grab anything, I couldn't see anything long enough to orient myself, I couldn't even keep my arms around my head to protect myself. It could only have been a few seconds or I would have been knocked senseless, but I found myself hanging from bent sections of conduit hanging down from the underside of the Ogre. With pavement speeding by below me I pulled upward, climbing until I found a floor, crawled on, and collapsed.

As I caught my breath I realized I was in the after secondary ammunition bay. I had worked at Sheffield reloading these chambers during my training. I wanted to get away from the hole opening up to the speeding road below a meter to my left, so I opened the access hatch. These hatches are only secured from the outside, to prevent technicians from locking themselves in. Once through I was in the main accessway down the starboard side of the Ogre.

I tried to think of how I could hurt the Ogre from this location. I went forward to a maintenance terminal, and tried to log in. Needless to say, I had no codes that would work, and after a couple of attempts the terminal shut off. I realized the Ogre knew I was there. If I hadn't been deafened by the missle that killed our heavy I might have had a second's warning...

I was thrown forward against the terminal as pain cut across my shoulder blades and I was thrown against the terminal. I collapsed to the floor and saw the fire extinguisher receding down the dark passageway. This damage control device moved along the passageway on a track in the ceiling. It could move its full twenty meter sweep in two seconds, enough speed to kill me if it caught me in the center of the passageway. I tried to remember the clearance between the extinguisher and the floor; it seemed like a meter, but that was for one of ours, would the Paneuropean be any different?

Keeping low, I crawled forward, towards the Ogre's brain. I couldn't think of a way to hurt it, but I couldn't think of anywhere else I could do anything at all. As I reached it I saw the extinguisher coming - it was clearly going to miss me. I was gratified, the Ogre was actually going to fail to hurt me this time. Then it let loose with the foam.

The foam expanded rapidly, filling the space around me. I couldn't get a breath, and didn't dare lift my head. I tried to crawl forward, but the floor was to slippery. I thrashed blindly on the floor, my lungs beginning to burn, until I kicked one side of the wall and got a grip on some panels on the other side. I pulled myself along, not even sure which way I was headed, until I felt free of the foam. Wiping it from my face, I breathed deeply.

I recognized the hatch to the main battery loading chamber. It has a lock, but at Sheffield we never used it. Perhaps it was the same at Gdansk. I tried it, it was open. I went in just to get away from the extinguisher.

Sitting on the floor I wondered what would happen to me. A POW would never get the amount of medical treatment I was going to need to survive, euthenasia could be interpreted as a war crime, nor would I be allowed a means of suicide. Would they just put me in a camp so that my grisly death would make my fellow prisoners miserable?

In the midst of this cheerful reverie I noticed something different about the loader mechanism in front of me. In the tanks I serviced there was a safety bar across the breech which prevented the shell from being removed rearward. Once the shell was in place the Ogre could set its fuse electronically before firing, but if the shell left the barrel without being defused its timer would start at the maximum delay, three minutes. This could be stopped by a technician removing a stuck shell, but it was stressful, so they added the bar so that the shell couldn't be removed before the Ogre had disarmed it. But that was after the Paneuropeans stole the plans to the Mark III. So this tank didn't have it. Finally I had a plan.

I needed a wrench. I checked my back - Wallace's bag. Sometime out there in the muddy field I had slung it on my back. I took it off and found it torn and nearly empty - it had taken that blow from the fire extinguisher, maybe saved my spine, but most of it was gone. But there was a 30cm crescent wrench.

I removed the breech plate, and with a screwdriver slowly pulled the shell out, assisted by its two hundred pound weight. It sat there, resting on the mechanism. No digital readout, no ticking, but I had three minutes.

I climbed out into the main passageway and ran. I had to risk the extinguisher for a few seconds. I dove into the foam and slid most of the way down the passageway. In my slippery state it was tough to get through the hatch into the rear ammo bay, but once in it was simple enough to fall out the bottom.

It was a three meter fall to pavement moving by at twenty kph: I added a dislocated shoulder and broken arm to my list. Training said, "seek cover," but no one was listening. I turned my head to watch the Ogre recede down the road.

With no hearing it was less exciting than I'd hoped: there was a burst of dust and debris from under the Ogre, and it stopped moving. If the ground shook I was too out of it to notice. I simply lay on the road and stared at the Ogre. Then a ringing came into my ears, and I wondered, "is that good?"

I woke up in a hospital, but days passed before I noticed time passing again. Both arms were in casts, there were many tubes in my nose, arms, legs, and side. I could faintly hear voices amidst the ringing in my ears. I was naseous beyond belief. And they had a guard posted.

I came to realize the others in the ward were also NAC POWs. I couldn't move or speak, but they came to me during the day, grinned at me, and said encouraging things I couldn't make out. They seemed excited. One day someone thought to hold up a note in front of me, "You killed an Ogre!" I blinked once for "yes."

I'm told it was a couple weeks later that I went in for surgery that replaced a lot of my outer and middle ear and removed my pituitary. The tubes stayed in for weeks until my spleen, pancreas, lymph nodes, and whatever else was cleansed and could function again. Pills replace the pituitary.

I don't remember them questioning me. Even in my weakened state I was determined not to tell them how I had done it; I ludicrously believed that it was a great military secret. But I was under enough medication that they could have learned whatever they needed without my knowing it. I wondered many times why I was receiving so much medical attention.

I was included in the POW exchange that accompanied the 14th Ceasefire of 2084. My debriefing officer scoffed at the Ogre story during our first meeting, but the second time he asked many detailed questions, then told me to consider the story classified and not tell anyone. Despite my partial disability I was retrained as a radar technician and assigned to a listening post in the Yukon.

I pondered for years the classified status of my story. Surely this was not a tactic they intended to use, nor could they be worried the Paneuros would try it. Daily recalibrations of the sensitive receivers started to numb my mind, but time spent in history books made me realize the real reason my story was stifled, and made me want to tell it here.

Scenario:

It seems like the cool thing to include a scenario with your story, so here it is. Pick your favorite map. Put an SP 40 supply center and a couple of 3/1 MI at one end and a Mark III enters from the other end. Put a heavy anywhere in the middle. When the heavy is destroyed replace it with half a militia unit.

Special rules:
Ogre cannot fire more than one AP weapon per turn at the half-militia unit. It may not slow down or reverse to gain additional shots at the half-militia unit. If the half-militia unit can get into an over run situation with the Ogre he can call out a number from one to six and then roll. If he rolls the number he called he gets to do it again. And again. If he succeeds the fourth time the Ogre is considered destroyed. Otherwise the half-militia unit is eliminated.

Victory condidtions: