This, is a tale of my younger years.
It is a story unlike any other, so nightmarish and crazy, I
sometimes have trouble believing I saw it all myself. In the summer of 98…that crazy summer in 1998.
Goddamn I could’ve sworn it was all some crazy, sick, feverish dream.
To you, my dear reader, I will give you the same words that Vergil encountered at the beginning of
Dante’s Inferno, To all those who enter, Abandon all hope. The events transcribed in this book are not
for the faint of heart. Even today, they make me throw myself up from my bed screaming like a fucking
banshee. My wife understands it, she saw that stuff back there too, it is something we’re both cursed
to live with.
It began in Oberlandscheid, just a year after the short nuclear exchange that ended WW3. By all
accounts, my country, that is the Ulraznavian State, got off relatively Scot free from all the radiation
that followed the squabble of the two ideological antithesis that were the superpowers on this beautiful
gargantuan ball of blue that we call Firma. The Union of Vostokvakian Republics (UVR, or the commies
for short) had decided that it had been long enough and that being the cause of two of the planet’s
three Great War’s, was enough. It set free its satellites and quietly reformed itself into a new country.
Never again, would the Workers and Peasants Revolutionary Army ever instigate a war, or leave the
borders of the Union. It would now only be a part of peace keeping missions as part of the United
Nations Global Defense Initiative (UNGDI) for short.
Back in Oberlandscheid though, I had just started as a junior correspondent, a buck reporter, a rookie. I
was the guy the pro’s used as a servant, I got coffees and donuts for them, I did errands for the editor,
all in all, I was the personal doormat if I was being honest. But I was brimming with anticipation, and
most of all, ambition. I wanted to be a big reporter, I wanted to have my work plastered on front page
editions for all to see. I wanted to go big.
My hometown, is a respectively sized city, massive, and filled with glittering, boxy towers for skylines.
A side effect of being bombed to bits I suppose. Like all the big cities in Ulraznavia, Oberlandscheid
had to be rebuilt from scratch after Stovie (that is slang for Vostokvakian, dear reader) bombers
destroyed them during the Second Great War. As a result, there is very little “old” and classical
architecture to be seen, only neat rows and towers and skyscrapers. It was also home, to the
Oberlandscheid Tribune, a paper that editors trumpeted, was read in the Capital District and in the
capital, Salrzgräf itself. My hometown was a regional capital of the region called Goetia, a pretty
standard place to live by any means.
The Tribune was run, in the year of my big break, by a fellow called Hershel Rasbaum. He’d been a big
journalist the years before the Big War, covering everything from small wars to earthquakes and
assassinations. He’d taken the helm of the boat when the previous chief editor got sick and expired
due to exposure to radiation, a nasty way to go. Hershel wanted to bring the Tribune’s prestige back to
the “Gold Standard”, something trumpeted, but never understood by us workers that is.
Nevertheless, one day, as I was sitting for my lunch break, the editor walked over to me, a rare thing,
for the great man was always busy, and dropped the bomb shell that I was to fly out to the New Eden
region of the United Republican States. To embed with a unit of our nation’s troops that had gone over
as part of a UNGDI force. It was the last remaining stronghold of what was known publicly as the Divine
Republic of Ganymede, a theocratic white supremacist state. Hershel wanted me to cover the activities
of our boys as they stormed and bashed through as a opening salvo for the Concordian offensive.
Effective immediately.
