The only smoke that hangs over Strupnic today rises from chimney pots and bonfires. The only tracked vehicles you see in fields and streets are Zendor 600 and 800 tractors. It’s hard to believe this village of cooing doves, dozing…
Several feisty eleventh hour orders should guarantee Operation Oryx goes out with a bang rather than a whimper. When we parted company last Monday, three of our mortarmen were running the gauntlet, our Patton was scrutinising a small patch of…
A TOW missile requires a second or two to warm up its battery and spin its gyroscope prior to launch. That delay plus an additional few seconds of operator indecision or inefficiency (we’ll never know which) proves disastrous for Muttley…
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov is nothing like his literary namesake. For the past fifteen minutes the turret tsar of the Podrabian T-55 pictured above has been itching to push forward… to get stuck in. When our M60A1 unwittingly promotes him to…
Finally! In response to his comrade’s excited “Enemy armour approaching!”, our patient Dragon tamer kneels, shoulders his drainpipe, and centres the approaching Podrabian tank in his sight.
How many of the motorists that hurtle along the M2 highway today, understand the significance of Strupnic’s plinthed T-62? How many stop to read the names engraved on the monument’s plaque? Viktor Somlac… Branko Somlac… Otto Pinkas… Milan Lesov Snr……
Checked last Monday by one of CM’s periodic order-issuing opportunities, Team Droopy’s last TOW missile regains its liberty in the opening second of turn 25. It presses on, following a very similar trajectory to the one traced by its predecessor,…
Despite being one man down, TOW Team ‘Droopy’ manages to fire all three of its remaining ‘Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided’ tank trashers during this sixty-second slice of play-by-comment Combat Mission: Cold War action. The second missile is foiled by foliage…
T+4. Fear? Foreboding? Indecision? Whichever phantasmal dire wolf had Lesov Junior firmly pinned to the leaf litter last turn, releases him four seconds into this one. Milan uses his liberty to tweak the trigger of his RPG-7. As a result…
Which word beginning with ‘o’ best fits this turn’s action? Oscitant (yawning; drowsy; dull)? Definitely not! Obtusion (the act of making blunt)? Tempting. Orthotypous (having a perpendicular cleavage)? A lovely word, but no. Obtruders (ones who obtrude)? Ah, that will…
The turn in which a tiny steel meteorite tears a diamond-shaped hole in Viktor Somlac’s John Lennon t-shirt, then tears a diamond-shaped hole in Viktor Somlac.
The T-80 the Soviet Union loaned to Podrabia in June of 1980 was for evaluation purposes only. Clause ‘C’ in the contract clearly stipulated that it wasn’t, under any circumstances, to be used in an actual war zone. The Kremlin…