The education of Private Melvin: Difference between revisions

The education of Private Melvin (view source)

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-<div class="indent">{{a|opcoboone|}}Look, I’m not proud of it, but everyone was doing it.
+<div class="indent">{{a|opcoboone|}}
+“Look, I’m not ''proud'' of it, but everyone was doing it. Tough times, man.”
-We were five years into this raging war and we were bogged down by pointless, unwinnable conflicts with German regional savings banks. It was mad. Our CDO howitzers were running gangbusters, laying waste to credulous ECPs up and down the industrial heartland but the local authorities were getting wise. They were picking off our Locust Class attack funds. They had their own start-up challenger bank charlatans running behind our lines with BaFin cover. We didn’t know it but they were setting fused recession-sensitive timebombs. Just when things were turning down they would go off and throw the combat field into chaos.
+Melvin dragged on a cigarette and squashed it into an aluminium foil tray. He wiped his eye with his wrist.
+“You have to understand: we were five years into this raging transcontinental war, and we were bogged down. Five goddamn years. We hadn’t moved fifty metres, forward or back.  Oh sure, you’ve heard about the tranche warfare — ''everyone'' knows that: miles and miles of winding, sopping slits in the Belgian forests — but you didn’t have to ''live'' it.
+“Even the upper tranches were bad: cold, wet, wind-whipped, vulnerable from three sides, but the bottom tranches was hell.”
+“What was so bad?”
+“Mud. Oh, the constant mud. Sludge. I saw good men drown in that sludge. We were deluged — subordinated — by mud: cascades of mud. waterfalls of stinking mud, up to our waists in mud and all we had was these shitty, shitty credits that kept blowing up before our boys could even get them out of the warehouses, let alone into the howitzers. Every other one we got loaded up was a dud.
+“How so?”
+Cheapest to deliver. The Germans caught of them and sent them back
+“Germans?”
+“Landesbanken. Sparkassen. Handelsbanken. Though I have to think the mud was just as bad for them. I mean it wasn’t just the Jerries. The Dutch, the Belgians, the French — they were all at it, too. But the Germans were the best organised: the BvB drilled their units well and their liquidity supply lines where string and well-defended. Amazing, really, given the damage we could do with our CDO howitzers: they just stood and took it. We laid waste to their ECP emplacements up and down the front, but they just sucked it up. Eventually they started getting the upper hand. They began regularly picking off our Locust Class attack funds. They executed lightning raids behind our lines with their own start-up challengers. Incredible: just showered us with BaFin cover.
+We didn’t know it but they were setting fused recession-sensitive timebombs. Just when things were turning down they would go off and throw the combat field into chaos.
 The Europeans got better. The Spanish captured a British savings bank. They deployed engagement battalions in river deltas and semi-cultivated woodland thickets. They engaged in limited ways — effective ways. They trained their troops better.