NationStates Jolt Archive

Troops! Lying before you is the new Federal Territory of New Liberia. It is full of savages of various kinds – a military dictatorship under a guy called Lucius Mbwana Kilaq in the South, various retarded tribes in the far north, and a few People's Republics in the middle. It will be your duty to bring this territory under the Allanean flag, and to help liberate its people from the various oppression they suffer – with the rifle, the grenade, and the blade.

I will not lie. This will be hard work. But this be noble work, too.

In North-Western New Liberia, the Hatomiri and Mamori tribes waged a war. Perhaps it was because the Hatomiri were Muslim – or perhaps they were living around a priceless diamong mine. Maybe the mine was not all that priceless. The point was, the Mamori had waged a war of extermination against the Hatomiri, and the Hatomiri retaliated with equal ferocity.

Villages burned. Ten-year-old boys were driven away into military service. Hyenas howled upon the piles of the dead.

East of them, there were the ruthless, slaveowning Gargali, who raided both tribes for slaves and troops. Yet further east there was the Midani tribe, which had been suffering from a drought- as a matter of fact, most of Northern New Liberia was suffering from various droughts. Where there were not droughts, there were locusts, or inflationary crises, or perhaps the crops were simply burned by some tribe or another. Perhaps as many as 20 million people in this part of Karain, divided into an amazing array of warring tribes, principalities, and People's Republics.

South of them, in what the Allaneans termed Southern New Liberia, and the locals called Dirania, lived 30 million people whose lives were bereft of wars – but only through the rule of Colonel Lucius Mbwana Kilaq, President for Life, Glorious Friend of the Children, Commander of the Armed Forces, Beloved Leader of the People, Founder of the Nation, Champion of Democracy and Defender of the Freedom of Speech. The style of Colonel Kilaq's rule can be inferred from the fact that he added the title 'Defender of the Freedom of Speech' after executing the leader of the oppostion's Diranian People's Party, his friends, supporters, and family, and then going after their friends and relatives – until about six million people had been killed or tortured to death.

The final wonderful feature of this landscape was the Karainese Liberation Front. It controlled wide swaths of what was called by the Allaneans 'Middle New Liberia'. Their purpose was, on one hand, to unite the tribes in the North and, on the other, tto end the Colonel's rule in the South. They pursued both goals through the means of Maoist theory and Karainese practice – namely, burning villages, drafting ten-year-olds into military services, and leaving behind piles corpses three meters tall.

The Allaneans dealt with the situation with the typical behavior of Allaneans. They parked a Force Projection Battlegroup off the shore of what was about to become their new colony, and announced to the New Liberians that they were now New Liberians, and that they were going to introduce them to truth, justice, apple pie and the Allanean Way whether the Karainese liked it, or not.

In Dinaria, the broadcast was accidentally blocked out by the interference devices that Colonel Kilaq had ordered a great expense in Saharistan in order to protect the morality of his people against indecent broadcasts. Elsewhere it was ignored by tribes who had heard dozens of announcements like these in the past and grew apathethic eventually, or had no navy with which to react, or were deep inland and thoughr the Allaneas wouldn't get to them. Yet others had no radios, or simply knew no English – the Alaneans, for some odd reason, did not bother to translate their advertisement into the several dozen local languages.

And yet, despite the fact most of the locals have not been aware of it, New Liberia had been founded.

24 hours after the founding of New Liberia, a single Allanean submarine had arrived within range of the bases of the Dinarian Navy and flushed its tubes. The Dinarian Presidential Defense Navy's pride and joy, the aircraft carrier DPDS Colonel Lucius Mbwana Kilaq (deck capacity – 8 aircraft) has been struck five times by P-600 missiles. Fifteen other missiles have been distributed evenly between the fleet's five cruisers – at which point the mighty Dinarian Presidental Defense Navy had been reduced to an array of patrol boats, an aged landing ship, and two container ships the President affectionally called 'troop transports'.

On the same day, a raiding party in the North, sent out by the Mamori tribe to raid a Hitomiri fishing village, had been targeted by Alanean naval cannon even as their technicals' wheels first bit into the beach sand. Not a single man went home to tell his tribesmen technicals are no good against 14-inch shells.

And as the third day of New Liberian history broke, elements of the Alexander Haig Mechanized Infantry division started making their way up the Marang river.

At a bend in the Marang river, the Allanean troops began to descend from their boats and set up camps. Powered armor thumped as the Allaneans stepped ashore, and quickly set themselves to work building a complex system of trenches on both sides on the river, clearing forest, and setting landmines and sniper blinds. In dug-in armor positions, IFVs and light tanks were deployed, scanning the edges of the clearing with the barrels of their massive automatic cannon. On the river itself, Type 12 patrol craft had their cannon turrets At a bend in the Marang river, the Allanean troops began to descend from their boats and set up camps. Powered armor thumped as the Allaneans stepped ashore, and quickly set themselves to work building a complex system of trenches on both sides on the river, clearing forest, and setting landmines and sniper blinds. In dug-in armor positions, IFVs and light tanks were deployed, scanning the edges of the clearing with the barrels of their massive automatic cannon. On the river itself, Type 12 patrol craft had their cannon turrets turned towards the shores, and in the sky, a pair of Soulharvester UCAVs circled like black scavenger birds.

Within two days, the Karain Liberation Front had heard of this development, and, of course, decided to do something about it. Thousands of troops converged on the place. Some approached on technicals and BTRs moving through tiny forest trails. Others – most – walked through the Karainese jungle on foot, hoping to approach the Allaneans under the leafy cover.

At 10:30 in the morning of the fifth day since the declaration of New Liberia, one of the Soulharvesters had spotted, through its FLIR arrays the first vehicle convoy. As the aircraft's patrol radius was fifty furlongs, it was perhaps through a failing of the Allaneans that the formation was only detected at fifty-five furlongs from base camp.

The 'pilot', sitting comfortably in a lawn chair at base camp, grinned at the FLIR imagery on his screen and input the front and rear vehicles as targets on FireTux. Two seconds later, the vehicles were nothing but burning wrecks, blocking the passage of the column.

And this was how it begun. The Liberation Army was cut down by automatic cannon and mortars, hunted by snipers with SSG-20 anti-material rifles, and those who made it within rifle range of the Allanean lines were shot like rabbits by troops with .308 rifles well before they could bring their AK74s to bear.

Yet some Allaneans did die – by RPG round, by grenade, and sometimes, when the Karainese got into rifle range, by Mosin rifle.

As the first assault of the Karainese troops broke, the Liberation Army sent in more and more – and yet, the Allaneans stood.

Marshal Watanabe initiated bombing runs from the battlegroup's carrier to support the Allanean forces, and hundreds of Karainese were caught in the blaze as napalm and FAE weapons rained down upon swaths of jungle through which they were passing. Even as the Karainese stormed the Allanean defenses, landing craft began to disgorge self-propelled cannon and MRLS launchers behind them.

And yet still men fell by the dozen as wave upon wave of Karainese rushed towards the Allanean trenches. There there would be a dense battle – rifle against rifle, man against man. Though the Allaneans wore powered armor that enabled them to kill Karainese troops with their very hands, the Karainese were many, and even after they had passed through the fire and steel of Allanea, they were still many more of them than there were troops of the Alexander Haig Division in the Marang river valley, and many an Allanean was buried under their sheer numbers and weight. In the end, 143 Allaneans and 3,000 Karainese were dead. Most have died without ever seeing an Allanean.

The battle raged on for two days and two nights, and near the dawn of the seventh day of Allanean presence in Karain, the Allaneans saw that the attacks were becoming more rare, and the enemy troops were becoming fewer in numbers. When the sun rose in full, it was all over.

The forest clearing had become much larger in size, as many trees fell, knocked down by errant rounds, or burned down as the Allaneans rained incendiary rounds on their enemies. The ground around the Allanean trenches was strewn with Karainese bodies to the very edge of the clearing.

The flagpole at the center of the encampment, above the Battallion Commander's tent, was bent, its ruined shape black against the rising sun.

And the flag was still there.