A week later - the Daggerwolves

Yesterday I arrived at the secret rebel base located on Talus, and today my first training commenced. There were more ‘newbie’s’ just like me. Our captain is called Val-Tane Ricaud, he gave a speech.

We all introduced ourselves, after which we ‘maggots’ had to run around the garrison building a couple of times. It was difficult for me to keep up with the rest, I’m not that good at keeping myself running for a while. But at the end I sprinted that hard that I arrived at the same time as the rest. There is something that can let me run pretty fast, and that's my hatred for the Empire. There was this wookie, he ran very hard and arrived way before we arrived. I guess it is because wookies can run harder than humans..? He had to make extra rounds because of this.
We got our uniform and I like it very much. There is this kewl long jacket, I always wanted to have such one. And now it is part of my Alliance Specforce uniform J I don’t mind being called ‘maggot’ and such, it is just part of being new and it will get better. A lot of things are totally new to me, we local rebels from Tatooine behaved in a different way, this is more like the military.

Suddenly somebody got a distress call from Tatooine: there was a Twi’lek hidden somewhere in Mos Entha and stormtroopers were looking for him. I hoped that we were going to get him out of there, and I told one of my new superiors that I know a big part of Entha by heart. I have lived here for a few months, and somehow I pretty quickly create a mind map of every place where I stay. I don’t get lost easily. To my delight Val-Tane decided that we go and rescue the Twi’lek.
So we ran to Chaja, where a shuttleport is to one of the bigger cities of Talus. The reason that we didn't use speeders was so that ‘they’ cannot see our speeder traces.
With public transport we went to Mos Espa, where we got a last briefing. We all got a ‘binome’: a mate, so that we were divided in little teams of two. It is very important to keep your binome alive, anxious as I felt I hoped I would manage this.

I have quite some pistol experience, but only one time I have fought with stormtroopers, and that was just to distract them so that others could get away. I remember this vividly. I shot at them, jumped on my swoop and pushed the gas. They tried to catch me by chasing me, but I managed to get rid of them with moving through the smallest alleys. I cannot tell if I’m good enough to kill them in a fight, because I don’t have experience with this. But we are in a group now. Even though I have never killed somebody before, in my whole life.

We moved through the city. First person one from the binome had to move forward, then comm or shout ‘CLEAR!’ after which person two did the same thing. I felt like I was in some kind of a movie, but it was real! Maybe it is better to feel like you are in some kind of a movie in such a situation, because else you realize that you can really die or get wounded and because of this you can get too frightened to even proceed with the mission. But you should also keep your wits with ya; to have the feeling that you are in a movie doesn't mean that you cannot die at all anymore. It is like creating some kind of balance so that you can function the best as a soldier, psychologically.

The Twi’lek seemed to be in the Fallen Star, so we went there. The Fallen Star is one of the bigger cafes in Mos Entha, situated in the very south east. It is created out of a big crashed starship, which looks pretty kewl.
The officer in charge asked me to help them move the best way towards this subject. Armed, in desert gear, kneeled, peeped around corners, tip-toed, crouched and sprinted from corner to corner. We split in two groups and via some back alley my group arrived at the south east side of the cafe. There I saw the stormtroopers. Standing on top of the ramp, fully armoured and armed. Over the ground we crouched towards their direction, and then, on command of the officer that was leading my group, open fire at one of the Imperial troopers. It was a big, tense but short fight; the stormtroopers seemed to totally not have expected this. Prolly before they were even able to feel their own surprise they were shot. We won within a few minutes, and my heart made a jump in delight! We, a little group of rebels, have beaten a group of those Imperial bastards! That scum had hit the side of my left arm though, leaving a big smoking hole in my outfit and a feeling of burned flesh. One of my new fellow Specforce troopers, a field medic, gave me a pain killer injection, disinfected the wound and then applied some of that funny red bacta onto it. Bacta is handy stuff; within two days the wound had vanished completely. It is handy but also hard to get. So sometimes, when there is too much of a shortage, they have to go on fighting missions without it. One better not get wounded then!

For now.. we saved the Twi’lek :)

After the fight we drank some at the base to celebrate. Somehow, after today, I feel like a real grown-up now, like a real soldier.