Saturdays are for the Boys
Posted: 23 Jul 2019, 07:54
Combined Special Forces Training Compound, Somewhere in Yunnan Province, China
October 4th, 1957.
Lance Corporal Wen Liyang shifted the big wooden log on his shoulder, and wished for the hundredth time that day that he knew what the fuck was going on.
The Hunan Campaign had gone normally enough, or at least as normal as you could get for a commando: infiltrate into the enemy's rear areas, blow up a few bridges, shoot a few poor bastards unfortunate enough to be wearing bits of tin on their collars, normal stuff. It'd helped that Wen's team leader had known the ground, and it'd also helped that the so-called Socialist Republic of Hunan's glorious leader Kai Wen (no relation, Wen hoped) had been a pompous idiot who'd insisted on throwing his own army away in mass suicide charges than doing anything which might have made his own people not hate him.
The fact that Wen had left Jiangxi with a nasty case of the shits wasn't unusual either. That sort of thing happened when you were out in the bush, especially when you were moving at the killing pace Captain Bulwer had insisted on, not that anyone actually died from it - but it was a close run thing.
No, things had truly stopped making sense when Wen had been discharged from the military hospital with a campaign medal, a commendation for excellent service, and a jump up to Lance Jack for his trouble. He'd been hoping to return to 1 Commando, maybe get his own team too.
But no. Instead, the powers that be (said power being one Captain Arthur Leopold Burnaby Bulwer DSO, Officer Commanding, 1 Commando, 3rd Commando Brigade) had pulled him right from the discharge and line into some new programme with maybe a hundred men from the rest of the Brigade. At first, Wen had thought that they'd been picked for some special assignment. It was an open secret that the General Staff were planning on a push into Guangdong. Wen had family in Guangdong once, for a few hours, he'd thought that maybe he would be assigned to a forward infiltration team.
No such luck. Instead, the next three months had been full of nothing but the most demeaning coolie work: carrying logs, carrying stones, carrying baskets of water, as if they were menials instead of the best damned fighting infantry in all of China. And every week, it seemed, the logs got longer, the stones got bigger, the baskets got heavier. And there were new requirements too. Now they had to cross rivers while keeping their loads dry. Now they had to move in complete silence. Now they had to carry a full pack too. It was complete and utter bullshit. What possible reason-
"Lance Corporal! A moment please?"
Wen turned carefully to see Captain Bulwer approaching, his mustachioed face still sunburnt under his wide-brimmed bush hat. He carefully shifted the load on his shoulder, tilting it quietly to the ground as he snapped to attention.
"Sir!"
Bulwer looked him up and down. "How are you holding up? All right, Wen?"
"They're keeping me occupied, sir," Wen replied. He'd fought with the Yinguoren for nearly thirteen years now, long enough that he'd started picking up their habit for understatement. At least it was better than picking up their barbaric habit for putting milk in their tea.
The Captain nodded ebulliently. "Very good. You can set that down now. I've got something to show you."
Wen set the log down with a sigh of relief. By the time he got back up again, Bulwer was already moving off into the trees. By the time he caught up, the two of them were passing through a pair of checkpoints, into the blessed shade of an underground bunker.
There was a table in the centre of the room, longer than a man was tall. On it was a slim outline in blued steel.
"Lance Corporal, do you know what this is?"
Wen stepped forward to take a closer look. Yes, he did know what this was.
Tanks had still been small, fragile things when a British officer named Henry C. Boys had drawn up his design for a device designed to allow infantry the chance of standing up against armoured columns. The weapon that resulted was a long, spidery-looking thing, an upscaled bolt-action rifle firing a massive 14mm round. Captain Boys had not lived to see the rifle which would bear his name enter service, and the weapon itself would not be effective for long before it became obsolete in the wake of newer, faster tanks with thicker, stronger armour. Faced with German panzers now impervious to the rifle's round, the British War Office had shipped thousands of the evidently-useless weapons to Burma, where it was hoped that lighter, thinner-skinned Japanese tanks would prove easier prey.
They hadn't, but in those desperate days, the XIVth Army needed all the weapons it could get. So they'd used it anyway, all the way through to the end of the war, the decade of exile, and the war with the Hunan bandits. Now, it was to be replaced with some new device that the factories in Chengdu were building, some kind of recoilless cannon capable of doing what the big rifle had been unable to do for more than a decade: punch holes through modern tanks.
None of which explained what this thing was doing here, sitting in a guarded bunker in a secret facility, deep in the jungle.
That was, until Wen took a closer look. There was something off about the rifle's outline: where the iron sights should have been, a gigantic agglomeration of lenses and scopes jutted out from the side of the weapon like lifeboats off the side of a ship. There was a telescopic scope there, and a few other tools as well, but the one thing that caught Wen's attention was the immense cylindrical disk attached just ahead of and opposite of the bolt handle.
That, he had not seen before.
Bulwer gave Wen an amused little grin. "I suppose all that fetch and carry makes sense now, eh?"
It did. Three months of training to carry heavy loads in silence - like a gigantic anti-tank rifle and its bizarre targeting scope. Wen nodded slowly. It looked like he had been picked out for a special assignment after all.
"Some of the rest of your training group already know what we're up to. The rest will be taken into this room, one by one, to be brought up to speed," Bulwer continued. "Take the rest of the day off, get some extra sleep. Tomorrow, you'll return to your current strength and endurance training programme. You will, naturally, speak of this to nobody."
Wen nodded immediately. "No, sir, not a word sir."
"Good. From now on, you shall retain your current training six days out of every seven. However, you will also be given one day a week on the firing range to familiarise yourself with the requirements of your new weapon. Have you any preferences?"
The Lance Corporal thought about it for a moment. "So long as it isn't a Thursday. I would not want to practise with a weapon on the fourth day of the week."
"Very good," Bulwer replied immediately. "Then from Sunday to Friday, you shall maintain your existing regimen. As for Saturday..."
Wen nodded. "Saturdays are for the Boys."
October 4th, 1957.
Lance Corporal Wen Liyang shifted the big wooden log on his shoulder, and wished for the hundredth time that day that he knew what the fuck was going on.
The Hunan Campaign had gone normally enough, or at least as normal as you could get for a commando: infiltrate into the enemy's rear areas, blow up a few bridges, shoot a few poor bastards unfortunate enough to be wearing bits of tin on their collars, normal stuff. It'd helped that Wen's team leader had known the ground, and it'd also helped that the so-called Socialist Republic of Hunan's glorious leader Kai Wen (no relation, Wen hoped) had been a pompous idiot who'd insisted on throwing his own army away in mass suicide charges than doing anything which might have made his own people not hate him.
The fact that Wen had left Jiangxi with a nasty case of the shits wasn't unusual either. That sort of thing happened when you were out in the bush, especially when you were moving at the killing pace Captain Bulwer had insisted on, not that anyone actually died from it - but it was a close run thing.
No, things had truly stopped making sense when Wen had been discharged from the military hospital with a campaign medal, a commendation for excellent service, and a jump up to Lance Jack for his trouble. He'd been hoping to return to 1 Commando, maybe get his own team too.
But no. Instead, the powers that be (said power being one Captain Arthur Leopold Burnaby Bulwer DSO, Officer Commanding, 1 Commando, 3rd Commando Brigade) had pulled him right from the discharge and line into some new programme with maybe a hundred men from the rest of the Brigade. At first, Wen had thought that they'd been picked for some special assignment. It was an open secret that the General Staff were planning on a push into Guangdong. Wen had family in Guangdong once, for a few hours, he'd thought that maybe he would be assigned to a forward infiltration team.
No such luck. Instead, the next three months had been full of nothing but the most demeaning coolie work: carrying logs, carrying stones, carrying baskets of water, as if they were menials instead of the best damned fighting infantry in all of China. And every week, it seemed, the logs got longer, the stones got bigger, the baskets got heavier. And there were new requirements too. Now they had to cross rivers while keeping their loads dry. Now they had to move in complete silence. Now they had to carry a full pack too. It was complete and utter bullshit. What possible reason-
"Lance Corporal! A moment please?"
Wen turned carefully to see Captain Bulwer approaching, his mustachioed face still sunburnt under his wide-brimmed bush hat. He carefully shifted the load on his shoulder, tilting it quietly to the ground as he snapped to attention.
"Sir!"
Bulwer looked him up and down. "How are you holding up? All right, Wen?"
"They're keeping me occupied, sir," Wen replied. He'd fought with the Yinguoren for nearly thirteen years now, long enough that he'd started picking up their habit for understatement. At least it was better than picking up their barbaric habit for putting milk in their tea.
The Captain nodded ebulliently. "Very good. You can set that down now. I've got something to show you."
Wen set the log down with a sigh of relief. By the time he got back up again, Bulwer was already moving off into the trees. By the time he caught up, the two of them were passing through a pair of checkpoints, into the blessed shade of an underground bunker.
There was a table in the centre of the room, longer than a man was tall. On it was a slim outline in blued steel.
"Lance Corporal, do you know what this is?"
Wen stepped forward to take a closer look. Yes, he did know what this was.
Tanks had still been small, fragile things when a British officer named Henry C. Boys had drawn up his design for a device designed to allow infantry the chance of standing up against armoured columns. The weapon that resulted was a long, spidery-looking thing, an upscaled bolt-action rifle firing a massive 14mm round. Captain Boys had not lived to see the rifle which would bear his name enter service, and the weapon itself would not be effective for long before it became obsolete in the wake of newer, faster tanks with thicker, stronger armour. Faced with German panzers now impervious to the rifle's round, the British War Office had shipped thousands of the evidently-useless weapons to Burma, where it was hoped that lighter, thinner-skinned Japanese tanks would prove easier prey.
They hadn't, but in those desperate days, the XIVth Army needed all the weapons it could get. So they'd used it anyway, all the way through to the end of the war, the decade of exile, and the war with the Hunan bandits. Now, it was to be replaced with some new device that the factories in Chengdu were building, some kind of recoilless cannon capable of doing what the big rifle had been unable to do for more than a decade: punch holes through modern tanks.
None of which explained what this thing was doing here, sitting in a guarded bunker in a secret facility, deep in the jungle.
That was, until Wen took a closer look. There was something off about the rifle's outline: where the iron sights should have been, a gigantic agglomeration of lenses and scopes jutted out from the side of the weapon like lifeboats off the side of a ship. There was a telescopic scope there, and a few other tools as well, but the one thing that caught Wen's attention was the immense cylindrical disk attached just ahead of and opposite of the bolt handle.
That, he had not seen before.
Bulwer gave Wen an amused little grin. "I suppose all that fetch and carry makes sense now, eh?"
It did. Three months of training to carry heavy loads in silence - like a gigantic anti-tank rifle and its bizarre targeting scope. Wen nodded slowly. It looked like he had been picked out for a special assignment after all.
"Some of the rest of your training group already know what we're up to. The rest will be taken into this room, one by one, to be brought up to speed," Bulwer continued. "Take the rest of the day off, get some extra sleep. Tomorrow, you'll return to your current strength and endurance training programme. You will, naturally, speak of this to nobody."
Wen nodded immediately. "No, sir, not a word sir."
"Good. From now on, you shall retain your current training six days out of every seven. However, you will also be given one day a week on the firing range to familiarise yourself with the requirements of your new weapon. Have you any preferences?"
The Lance Corporal thought about it for a moment. "So long as it isn't a Thursday. I would not want to practise with a weapon on the fourth day of the week."
"Very good," Bulwer replied immediately. "Then from Sunday to Friday, you shall maintain your existing regimen. As for Saturday..."
Wen nodded. "Saturdays are for the Boys."