One disadvantage to carrying the machine gun: it’s fucking heavy.

The last thing you want when you’re being pursued by attack helicopters is more weight. I would have pitched the thing into the bush and sprinted for safety with a lightened load if our unit had any machine guns to spare. We were ducking and dodging, sprinting from one area of thick forest canopy to another, when they spotted the mules.

See, Apache’s use thermal targeting systems. Thermals don’t always pick out things like wet people in wet forests that well. Big, fat, slow moving mules loaded down with gear and wounded tend to stick out a little more. The guys in charge of getting the stubborn beasts clear of the trails and scattered into the trees hadn’t quite finished. Bad for those guys. Bad for our pilfered equipment. Bad for our wounded.

Streams of fully-automatic 30mm high explosive rounds poured onto the mule train. It was a bit of overkill, if you ask me, but tearing our pack animals apart did put a huge dent in our plans.