“Fitz” and I were in country on a short term contact to train some new troops and some newly minted junior officers.

My specialties were rifle marksmanship and machine gunnery, and I assisted “Fitz” with patrolling and land navigation.

We were two and a half weeks into a four week contract when the fecal matter impacted the rotating air foil, but that is another tale for another time.

The locals grabbed up every available man and sent them out, leaving “Fitz” and I at loose ends. Our local contact asked us if we could help out for a day or two until they could bring in more troops from other commands. Of course, he offered us a “premium”. We naturally agreed.

They tasked us with covering a river crossing for a day, until the reinforcements arrived and could take over. We headed over to the arms room, but pickings were a little slim. I ended up with an M1C sniper rifle in pretty good shape and a sten gun that was rather the worse for wear. “Fitz” had to settle for a Remington pump shotgun and another sten. A little time on the range to zero and we geared up.

They put us in a pickup truck and hauled us out to the river. “Fitz” had them drop us off a couple of klicks from the crossing and we made our way to the river.

The terrain was fairly hilly, with some rather steep slopes in some places and gentle slopes in others. It was mostly double canopy, with brushy terrain in the areas where the soil was thinner and couldn’t support the roots of larger trees.

The location where we set up was about 100 meters from the river and 20 meters or so higher than the crossing. The crossing was a natural ford where the river flowed over a bench of hard rock. It formed a bit of a natural weir, impounding a small catchment of a hectare or so. Below the ford, the softer material had been worn away and the river was quite a bit deeper, well over head high. The bench of rock ran up away from us on the far side of the river, leaving a brush filled break in the trees about 20 meters wide and maybe 300 meters long before the forest resumed. There were several fallen tree trunks at intervals jutting into the clearing.

We got ourselves set up just about BMNT (beginning of morning nautical twilight, meaning that the sky was just beginning to lighten in the east). “Fitz” and I each made up range cards and then compared them, agreeing on a composite. We set up a watch rotation, taking turns to observe the area with binoculars and switching off every quarter hour.

It was late morning and “Fitz” was on watch when we noticed that things were getting quiet. The bird and animal sounds were gone. We went on alert and I got on the gun.