You're In the Imperial Army Now

"I'm excited this is exciting." He was a young man carrying his rifle askew and was the first to die in our unit (sorry I'm not a very good not telling you the outcomes of what happens teller). We were walking towards the front line after getting dropped off by our transport a mile away from the fighting (I could hear artillery landing up ahead, Hanlon stuff I could tell from the whistle). The rest of the unit was not excited, including me. My uniform itched, my rifle had blood stained into the wood from where the last user of it probably bled right into it, and my boots didn't fit. Overall I wasn't impressed with the imperial army. In the future I would not reenlist with the imperial army, if it were around anymore, which it is not. But should it be resurrected I would not join up again, most likely not.

I did notice my unit appeared alone on the path we were walking, which I hoped meant other units were coming in from a different direction, but it appeared to mean we were alone and being sent to die (which was the truth). I didn't understand the strategy to be honest. It seemed stupid to send people in to die, but I have never been one for grand strategy (burn, necromancy, buy my way out of trouble).

We got massacred pretty badly. The artillery hit near by and started to kill people almost immediately. The young man and the two people standing near him got splattered by an artillery shell. The people in front of me were felled with rifle fire. I did the bravely heroic thing of ducking behind the pile of corpses and decided to wait for reinforcements who weren't coming. It took me a moment to realize they weren't coming (because I'm an optimist you see). No apparently our strategy was to sacrifice a couple units to make it appear like we were being lead by idiots, and then the other side died of laughter. I couldn't even tell you why they were doing this, the imperial army had more men, more guns, and superior positions, but they apparently didn't like having an actual strategy anymore than I do!

So my first battle with the imperial army went a lot like my first anything cowering behind a bunch of corpses hoping for the fighting to stop. Its a lot like having bad neighbors, in that its nothing like having bad neighbors at all.