75th Ranger Regiment Sergeant Foley leads his squad, including Cpl. Dunn and Allen's replacement Pvt. James Ramirez, in defense of a suburb in north-eastern Virginia against the enemy Russian paratroopers. During their assault in a Russian occupied suburban neighborhood, Shepherd contacts Foley and orders his squad to extract an HVI, claiming that he has intel vital to the war effort. Upon arriving at the HVI's safe house, Sgt. Foley and his squad discover the safe house breached and HVI murdered along with several deceased soldiers bearing odd tattoos. Foley takes notice that the safe room was not forcefully breached as Dunn checks bodies for intel. They later proceed towards a war-torn Washington, D.C., where U.S. forces are fighting the Russians for control of the capital city. Sgt. Foley and his squad proceed to the Russian occupied Department of Commerce to clear a 'Crows Nest' being used to pin down the evac site at the Washington Monument. They later provide air support for U.S. forces onboard a helicopter but are soon shot out of the sky. The squad, running low on ammunition, make a last stand against the Russian Army before a sudden flash halts their attack.
Back in the United States, Ramirez and his fellow squad mates seek shelter from the disabled aircraft that are now literally falling from the sky, and proceed to the White House after running into Pvt. Vaughn, a runner who tells the squad that Colonel Marshall is assembling whatever forces he can to retake the White House, which is now a stronghold for the Russian Army. After finally meeting Col. Marshall, he orders the squad that taking the White House is their top priority, but they later receive a transmission informing them that the Air Force is preparing to carpet bomb the entire city to deny the Russians a strong foothold. Foley's squad fight their way to the White House and set off flares in the nick of time, aborting the air strike. Flares are lit on the rooftops of other landmarks, signifying that the city is still in American hands. Angered over destruction of the Capital, Foley, Dunn and the rest of the Rangers vow vengeance against the Russians, claiming they will burn Moscow to the ground as they did with D.C.
RUNNING WITH RIFLES v1.65 SKIDROW
We didn't talk much now. It got tiresome on the leg muscles. We spent hours, about three, going up that long, long valley. In that time it grew to late afternoon and the light was grow ing amber and shadows were falling ominously in the valley of dry boulders and instead, though, of making you feel scared it gave you that immortal feeling again. The ducks were all laid out easy to see: on top of a boulder you'd stand, and look ahead, and spot a duck (usually only two flat rocks on top of each other maybe with one round one on top for decoration) and you aimed in that general direction. The purpose of these ducks, as laid out by all previous climbers, was to save a mile or two of wandering around in the immense valley. Meanwhile our roaring creek was still at it, but thinner and more quiet now, running from the cliff face itself a mile up the valley in a big black stain I could see in the gray rock.
Then suddenly everything was just like jazz: it happened in one insane second or so: I looked up and saw Japhy running down the mountain in huge twenty-foot leaps, running, leaping, landing with a great drive of his booted heels, bounc ing five feet or so, running, then taking another long crazy yelling yodelaying sail down the sides of the world and in that flash I realized it's impossible to fall off mountains you fool and with a yodel of my own I suddenly got up and began running down the mountain after him doing exactly the same huge leaps, the same fantastic runs and jumps, and in the space of about five minutes I'd guess Japhy Ryder and I (in my sneakers, driving the heels of my sneakers right into sand, rock, boulders, I didn't care any more I was so anxious to get down out of there) came leaping and yelling like mountain goats or I'd say like Chinese lunatics of a thousand years ago, enough to raise the hair on the head of the meditating Morley by the lake, who said he looked up and saw us flying down and couldn't believe it. In fact with one of my greatest leaps and loudest screams of joy I came flying right down to the
Then we drove to the huge Army Navy store in Oakland and went way in the back where sleeping bags were hanging from hooks and all kinds of equipment, including Morley's fa mous air mattress, water cans, flashlights, tents, rifles, canteens, rubber boots, incredible doodas for hunters and fishermen, out of which Japhy and I found a lot of useful little things for bhikkus. He bought an aluminum pot holder and made me a gift of it; it never burns you, being aluminum, and you just pluck your pots right out of a campfire with it. He selected an excellent duck-down used sleeping bag for me, zipping it open
A strange thing happened the next day, to illustrate the true power I had gained from these magic visions. My mother had been coughing for five days and her nose was running and now her throat was beginning to hurt so much that her coughs were painful and sounded dangerous to me. I decided to go into a deep trance and hypnotize myself, reminding myself "All is empty and awake," to investigate the cause and cure of my mother's illness. Instantly, in my closed eyes, I saw a vision of a brandy bottle which then I saw to be "Heet" rubbing medicine and on top of that, superimposed like a movie fade-in, I saw a distinct picture of little white flowers, round, with small petals. I instantly got up, it was midnight, my mother was coughing in her bed, and I went and took several bowls of bachelor's buttons my sister had arranged around the house the week before and I set them outside. Then I took some "Heet" out of the medicine cabinet and told my mother to rub it on her neck. The next day her cough was gone. Later on, after I was gone hitchhiking west, a nurse friend of ours heard the story and said "Yes, it sounds like an allergy to the flowers." During this vision and this action I knew perfectly clearly that people get sick by utilizing physical opportunities to punish themselves because of their self-regulating God nature, or Buddha nature, or Al lah nature, or any name you want to give God, and everything worked automatically that way. This was my first and last "miracle" because I was afraid of getting too interested in this and becoming vain. I was a little scared too, of all the re sponsibility.
Japhy was disgusted. Then we got in the jalopy and drove to Berkeley, across the rainy bridge, to the cottages of Oakland and then downtown Oakland, where Japhy wanted to find a pair of jeans that fitted me. We'd been looking all day for used jeans that would fit me. I kept giving him wine and finally he relented a little and drank some and showed me the poem he had written while I was getting my haircut in Skid Row: "Modern barber college, Smith eyes closed suffers a haircut fearing its ugliness 50 cents, a barber student olive-skinned 'Garcia' on his coat, two blond small boys one with feared face and big ears watching from seats, tell him 'You're ugly little boy & you've got big ears' he'd weep and suffer and it wouldn't even be true, the other thinfaced conscious concentrated patched bluejeans and scuffed shoes who watches me delicate, suffering child that grows hard and greedy with puberty, Ray and I with poorboy of ruby port in us rainy May day no used levis in this town, our size, and old barber college t and g crappers skidrow haircuts middleage barber careers start out now flowering."
"If anybody hears ya it'll just be the conies, or maybe a critic bear. Ray that Skagit country where you're going is the greatest place in America, that snaky river running back through gorges and into its own unpeopled watershed, wet snowy mountains fading into dry pine mountains and deep valleys like Big Beaver and Little Beaver with some of the best virgin stands of red cedar left in the world. I keep think ing of my abandoned Crater Mountain Lookout house sitting up there with nobody but the conies in the howling winds, getting old, the conies down in their furry nests deep under boulders, and warm, eating seeds or whatever they eat. The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire and wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is. All these people thinking they're hardheaded materialistic practical types, they don't know shit about matter, their heads are full of dreamy ideas and no tions." He raised his hand. "Listen to that quail calling."
Then would come wild lyrical drizzling rain, from the south, in the wind, and I'd say "The taste of rain, why kneel?" and I'd say "Time for hot coffee and a cigarette, boys," addressing my imaginary bhikkus. The moon became full and huge and with it came Aurora Borealis over Mount Hozomeen ("Look at the void and it is even stiller," Han Shan had said in Japhy's translation); and in fact I was so still all I had to do was shift my crossed legs in the alpine grass and I could hear the hoofs of deers running away somewhere. Standing on my head be fore bedtime on that rock roof of the moonlight I could indeed see that the earth was truly upsidedown and man a weird vain beetle full of strange ideas walking around up sidedown and boasting, and I could realize that man remem bered why this dream of planets and plants and Plantagenets was built out of the primordial essence. Sometimes I'd get mad because things didn't work out well, I'd spoil a flapjack, or slip in the snowfield while getting water, or one time my shovel went sailing down into the gorge, and I'd be so mad I'd want to bite the mountaintops and would come in the shack and kick the cupboard and hurt my toe. But let the mind be ware, that though the flesh be bugged, the circumstances of existence are pretty glorious.
At one point, his friend from training, Roger Wong, was found to be running a black market supplying the locals with weapons. To keep him away from the trial Frank was sent stateside for a month, running a recruitment office. It was here that he met Linus Lieberman, who would soon become Microchip, for the first time, when he disqualified him from the draft for having flat feet and being overweight.[51] He did not remember this meeting later, but Microchip did.[citation needed] 2ff7e9595c
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