The Warfighter

The Warfighter
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My boots sloshed around through thick mud and urban debris washing through from the countless nearby settlements that smoldered beyond the bamboo treeline, mosquitoes whizzed around me, likely disturbed by every step my squad and I took deeper into the muddy abyss ahead of us.

The year is 2035 and I feel more dead inside than I ever have. The days are getting longer as I find myself sleeping less and fighting more. I'm so tired and my body aches... I don't know what time it is but the date rings like a bell in my head... The 20th of November. The anniversary of when hell came to earth from our skies above like swords from heaven like angry judgement.
We are Zulu Team 4 and I am Corporal Zaine Adam's, I am 35 years old and I have known death intimately since I was no older than 20.
Our current deployment is Northern Oolong, a vast mountain range where the old tea plantations once produced a fine harvest of designer chaay year after year, though looking at it now you wouldn't ever guess it, the once bustling towns that dotted these hills lay silent, the once vibrant fields are black and dead. Only ash and fire rest here now brought about by a series of provoked airstrikes and artillery salvos that rocked this region two days ago in an attempt to lay waste against the combined might of Unified Korea and the New Chinese Empire, both now led by their Absolute Emperor Xhi Jinping since the coalition led assassination of the defacto Korean Leader Kim Jong-Un in 2028.
The coalition between the EU and United States had been expected to weaken the Chinese Empire and its allies though all it did was cement the power of their emperor further through Asia like a red swath across the map.
Since then The People's Liberation Army of Unified Asia are near infinite to the minds of mere mortals and grunts like myself though the politicians in the heavens above place their forces at around 22.7 million strong and we're in the heart of it here in Oolong so it may as well be infinite. Those numbers don't really matter to me though... My Colt can only carry 30 rounds a clip.

Despite repeated operations to cull the red herd by the Coalition it's only resulted in the deaths of more and more warfighters with every push, many of whom don't even remember the cause for which we fight, they were too young to remember and there's no easy answer or explanation for this war either.
The Staff Sargeant would throw up some speel about the broken treaties and the South China sea, North Korea and the nuclear devastation that rocked western civilization all those years ago in that long distant time that seems like a fleeting dream.
Personally despite being there when it happened I don't even understand anymore and I'm not even sure that I ever did. I was merely a greenhorn back then, a young jarhead from the Kentucky Free State with a child to support and on my way to fight another oil war with Iran that I didn't particularly care about or know much about while my own homeland fell further into anarchy than I'd ever seen but then... Everything... Changed.

Looking back I don't really know how we had even passed ourselves off as a civilization for so long. You read all these books about gleaming cities in Rome or Egypt and other long forgotten civilization and you know this thing you call civilization to be another falsehood. I can honestly say that what I saw through my years growing up in the American South was not even a sliver of that glorified past.
The western world that I knew had devolved into nothing more than riots and blood spilled by bickering idealists and their radical followers. Ecological disasters and civil unrest were widespread from 2016 onwards. Wildfires engulfed whole cities as the earth warmed beyond previously reasonable temperatures, the civilian population quickly became ungovernable and much of North America and Western Europe went under martial law in a desperate attempt at keeping some semblance of sanity amongst the chaos, all the while madmen and scientists alike found themselves on spewing the same rhetoric and preaching tales of the end of days, an inevitable "Boogaloo", a societal collapse and an ecological crisis so big it'd have to lead to some kind of reset. "An era of peace" said the loons, another falsehood in our ultimately false reality. Little did they know though that the day had already ended, midnight had already come and only the sinners were left now to devour each other until the fires truly rained, and rain did... There was no reset, there was no era of peace, only more war, only more death. Perhaps the worst is yet to come.