Evening gents! Here follows a write up of my experiences as the Red force HVT this weekend at Operation Orchid Dawn with Tier 1 Military simulation. Enjoy! Having not managed to get airsofting for a little while due to work, I was extremely excited to get to Tier 1 Military Simulation’s 36-hour milsim, ‘Operation Orchid Dawn’ last weekend. The weather forecast was decent, we had a lot of people in attendance, and it was all for a good cause so anticipation couldn’t be higher. As usual, I would be playing on the Red Force side, along with some good friends from back up north. I’ve now been to about half a dozen Tier 1 games as Red Force and love them. At Tier 1 milsims, the playing experience varies greatly depending on which side you’re on; the differences go far deeper than just what kit you’re wearing. Blue force, the ‘good guys’, operate as a proper military force- think patrol routes, sentries and careful planning of high-risk raids on high value targets. Red Force players have more diverse taskings- for a couple of hours they might be civilians in a ‘Shura’, a traditional meeting between tribal elders and foreign troops, before laying a carefully planned ambush with booby traps and pyro and then melting away into the alleyways to evade the Blue force counterattack. On both sides, you come to a Tier 1 game to be tested above and beyond your regular airsoft experience, and there’s no better place to play their type of games than the Stanta Afghan training environment in Norfolk. We congregated late on Friday night in the barn for the briefings, and seeing the number of Reds we knew we were in for one hell of a game. Historically, Red force have been small in number, outnumbered by the guys in multicam and plate carriers, but we’ve never been there to be cannon fodder. We’ve consistently held our own against much larger opposition numbers, including some of the ‘top tier’ UK milsim teams. At Orchid Dawn, we had the best Red Force turn out I’ve seen yet and the Red force veterans were seriously up for going toe to toe with the Blues on an equal footing for a change. Another excellent thing to see was the commitment to the scenario in terms of clothing choice- everyone had made a great effort to look like proper opfor, as opposed to some milsims I’ve been to where the ‘rebels’ look like they’ve just walked out of a Magpul training DVD. The safety briefing was excellent- comprehensive, concise, and humorous. That out of the way, we were split into our call signs and given our initial taskings. While most of the Red force began the op as civilians and local militia in the village, some of us were proper bad guys tasked with more dubious activities. My callsign were a terrorist cell based in a building the local bad guys were using as a bomb making factory, the core of the weekend’s scenario. I myself would be the Blue force’s main High value target, a Mullah named Wakeel (complete with a photoshopped mugshot for the Blue force’s briefing pack). I was to avoid capture at all cost, and capturing me would be one of Blue force’s main priorities for the weekend. Tier 1 then gave out command radios and medic tabs to each call sign’s medic and radio man, and then we were off. The game had begun. The first night was relatively quiet; we managed to catch some sleep for a while, before we were rudely awakened in the early hours. Blue force were infiltrating the area of operations and hitting houses on the other side of the village. Gearing up, we headed off into the night en masse. We carefully filed out, moving through the darkened buildings of the Stanta site towards the sound of heavy AEG fire and booms of pyro going off, lit from above by parachute flares. Most of the initial fight was based around a series of buildings at the bottom of the village the Blues wanted to use as their base, and our plan was to sneak up behind them and give them the good news- unfortunately, we literally ran around a corner straight into a Blue patrol and when the shooting stopped, most of my body guards were dead. Realising I, the high value target, was alone and very close to a large number of the guys who were out to get my head on a plate, I courageously ran away and hid in the basement of a nearby building. There followed a stressful half an hour in the pitch darkness while the Blue force guys who’d shot my teammates moved in upstairs and started talking loudly amongst themselves. Thankfully however, they failed to clear the building properly and I managed to find an open basement window to escape out of and creep off into the early morning to safety. While Red force and Blue force were taking up positions, we began laying up remote pyro and traps around our building- we were determined not to give up our impressive 3 story building without a fight. While we were getting breakfast and sleeping in shifts while watching for the Blues, we began to observe a trio of rather suspicious individuals.They were in proper Afghan dress and robes, but we hadn’t seen them at the briefings and they seemed very interested in what everyone was doing- asking questions about our booby traps, asking about our numbers and not being able to give us a legitimate Red callsign. Knowing there is often a CIA or ‘undercover’ element of Blue force at T1 events, most of the veteran Red force players had them pegged more or less immediately. We resolved to keep an eye on them, and after one question too many later executed them in the street to cheers from the other Red force. We later found out that they had actually been Pakistani Intelligence and had been on our side... Whoops. Ah well, they looked shifty. Better to be safe than sorry... Saturday continued to play out with a high level of both sportsmanship and pyrotechnics. The amount of booms at Tier 1 events are usually high, but some professional pyrotechnicians had offered their services for this event and true to the scenario of Special forces vs Bomb making terrorists, the amount going bang was incredible. Watching the professional pyro guys load up remote control cars and rolling barrels rigged with remote pyro and sending them Blue force’s way was great to watch. Elsewhere there were mortar strikes from both sides and enough booby traps and trip wires from our cell alone to take out the Blue force twice over. The proper, safe use of pyro is extremely immersive and one that T1 do very well. That said, we initially didn’t see a whole lot of Blue force for a lot of Saturday in our area of the village, but this changed when a period of ‘downtime’ was announced where we could act independently of command. Needless to say, we all went out to get some Blue force scalps. This was not an excuse to go into ‘skirmish mode’ however; Blue force were still very much operating tactically, and our discipline had to be kept high. My own callsign were cautious about going too close to the enemy base in case of capture, but my teammates took out their sniper rifles and with myself providing close protection with my shotgun, we went hunting. We couldn’t have had better timing, being lucky enough to come across a large squad of Blues stacked up on a building down the street at the same time as the dedicated Red force sniper team and another of our call signs. A ‘mad minute’ ensued, whereupon the poor Blue entry team found themselves on the wrong end of a 0.4g shooting range from multiple angles. With at least a dozen Blues taken out, we bugged out away from any reprisals back to base where we re-armed and spent the rest of the afternoon laying tripwires and booby traps around the area of Stanta we know as ‘IED alley’, which would plague Blue force for the rest of the weekend. As darkness fell, we were still up for getting into it with the Blues. A few of us had felt a lack of contact that afternoon, so we teamed up with the Red force Recce team and another call sign for a pretty simple idea of an op- find a Blue force base building, and smash it. They’d already identified a likely target (even sneaking in and even leaving a hello note on the Blue’s map board) so while still under a degree of autonomy we loaded up and headed back into the village with an assault ladder some of our guys had liberated from the Blues earlier. Under the command of Tom, the Red force recce team leader, we split into our three call signs and spread out, encircling the Blue compound. They had sentries at the gate, but no one on overwatch from the windows (the roofs were out of play due to site rules). Cautiously setting up the ‘borrowed’ assault ladder against a side wall, one of the recce team crept up, pistol at the ready. Pop... Pop... The two sentries at the gate were down. A couple of seconds, and then someone else inside the compound opened up at the gate, thinking that was the angle of attack. All hell broke loose. We threw pyro over the walls, killing the few Blues outside quickly as we poured in over the walls. The defenders started returning fire from the open windows, and we had to work hard to suppress them as we attempted to make entry into the buildings. Unfortunately, one Blue hadn’t quite understood the ‘not holding the doors shut’ part of the safety brief (when reminded of this rule, his classic response was ‘I’m not holding it shut, I’m standing behind it!’). However, six rather large Reds then rushed the door and made entry and he was taken care of. The defence inside was solid, with a pair of Blues using pistols and taclights effectively to slot anyone trying to come through the door we were attempting to breach through, and we took casualties. Using a window to get into a side room my teammate and I opened a door into the corridor and using my new Marui M870 on 6-shot I managed to suppress the defenders while he finished them with a grenade. We then went room to room, clearing out the remaining defenders (another good bit of dialogue; ‘Don’t shoot us! We’re Blue!’ ‘I know...’ ). Unfortunately, by this point there were a dozen Blue force QRF amassing on the outer gate and making entry into the compound to come and rescue their comrades. With the Reds outside in the compound quickly dealt with and only three of us left alive inside (And capture looking imminent), as the HVT I decided to avoid capture and blew myself up with my impact grenade, making myself a critical injury. It was around this point that I realised that a lot of the Blues didn’t seem to be recognizing me as their objective... Paying attention in briefings helps here gents! Bleeding out and heading back to our house, we settled in for what we expected to be a brutal and drawn-out night. I was still uncaptured, a situation I didn’t expect Ed and the rest of the T1 guys on Blue force to let stand. In our last briefing of the night we were told that the call signs around our building had orders to harass any Blue attack, but to let them get into the building to give them a chance. Setting up even MORE remote det pyro (including a booby-trapped ‘intel map’), we worked out our defensive positions within the second floor with an escape route for me all prepared and ready, and settled down to an uneasy sleep, myself hugging a bug-out bag with my pistol by my sleeping mat. Sure enough, in the middle of the night we were awakened by explosions from outside; our outer perimeter had been breached. Seconds later, there was an absolute storm of fire from our friendly neighbourhood Red support gunner next door, lots of shouts of ‘hit’, and ...nothing? Eh? Having been on the receiving end and having executed a T1 house raid, we were expecting multiple pyro, impact bombs, close quarters carnage, but there was only silence. As it turned out, some helpful guy had locked all the basement windows from inside (not us), and messed up the raid before it even got started. With the commanders of the raid hit in the initial contact (our neighbours had clearly interpreted ‘harass’ as ‘slaughter every Blue you see’), the Blues had withdrawn in disarray, leaving us to enjoy probably the best amount of sleep on a Tier 1 event Saturday night I’ve yet experienced. Sunday brought an escalation of contact, with something going on in the village almost constantly. Special mention has to go to the poor pair of Blue force guys who were spotted doing a recce on the outskirts of the village during one of our briefings, whereupon the entire Red force (60+ guys) charged out of our HQ compound and gave chase, myself and my teammate finally cutting off and capturing the last runner a mere three blocks from his base. Taking him prisoner was incredibly British- (‘Can we capture you? You can have a cup of tea.’ ‘Go on then.’), and once we took him back to command we left him in a stress position and got stuck in again. Blue force made a couple of unsuccessful assaults on our base, with the lads from Gun Ho doing such an epic flanking manouvre they ended up going around our target building and halfway around the village on the way back towards their base before they were finally run down and shot. Another contingent of Blues made a ballsy but ultimately futile frontal assault across eighty metres of open ground on our building (using tactics that worked so well at the Battle of the Somme), and got taken apart by aegs, snipers and mortar pyro. Then, around eleven, the final call to prayer sounded; the signal for Red force to stop shooting and regroup, during which we couldn’t fire unless fired upon. This is a great, atmospheric way Tier 1 have of taking pressure off a situation, and aside from a really surreal 30 minutes where the iPod skipped and we were subjected to a series of firefights to a load of bangra covers of Coldplay, it worked well. We knew this was a sign the final assault was coming; worryingly they were coming for me! We took on some last fluids and food, and settled down to wait. Our neighbourhood was finally in full contact. While we couldn’t engage until Blues were in our house, we were watching multiple engagements kick off all around us as the Blues established a perimeter. With a friendly callsign watching the stairs, we withdrew to our last stand position behind a barricade at the end of a corridor. We didn’t have long to wait, listening to the fight on the stairs as our teammates were overrun. As the first Blues stepped into our floor, we pressed off the first of our remote dets. Boom. Boom. Boom. Over the next half an hour we ducked grenade throws, medic tabbed each other, exchanged fire at close range and set off more remote pyro as the Blues started amassing in the corridor and pushing us hard in one of the tensest contacts I’ve yet had in airsoft. I was holding a side room with a primed grenade in one hand and a pistol in the other, determined to avoid capture. When my teammates were finally taken out with a grenade and another was shot, I finally dropped the frag to take myself out of the game and avoid capture. However, all was not over for Wakeel- the Blue forces came in and declared a new objective- to get my body back to their HQ. A pair of Irish Blue guys good naturedly manhandled me off the floor and downstairs, straight out the front door in the middle of a dozen Blues... and promptly all got mown down in a hail of fire from a counter-attacking Red force, who recovered my body (from under one very heavy Irishman) and spirited me away. We rejoined the final assault just as regens closed, and the final stand of Blue force took place in the Barn where 36 hours before the game had begun, with Reds sweeping in and clearing them out. All in all, Tier One’s Operation Orchid Dawn was a fantastic weekend with a great level of sportsmanship, tactical play and enough explosions to fill out a Michael Bay movie. All my guys had a great time, and I was chuffed to avoid capture. Ed and the Tier 1 guys put on a great game for all concerned, and the fact it was all in aid of a male cancer charity was even better and improved an already great atmosphere. It was fantastic to see so many Red force getting stuck in, and aside from the abortive HVT raid on the Saturday night it all went brilliantly well with so much going on. A huge thank you to all involved, from the organizers to the players to J-tac custom, UK tactical and Airsoft International for donating the prizes for the charity raffle at the end of the weekend. Their next event is Operation Deadlight, again at the Norfolk Stanta Afghan training area, on the 11th-13th of October. I can’t wait, and hope any players wanting a challenging milsim in a fantastic location will be there too. I highly recommend it.
Posted on: Thu, 22 Aug 2013 17:57:57 +0000
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