Learning Thunderbolt Apache Leader: A Hapless Commander’s Journal, Pt. 2
It’s about to get hot: Thor’s A-10A and Mohawk’s F-16 are poised to criss-cross the 10-hex tactical map—at low altitude and high altitude, respectively—and knock out as many surface-to-air threats as they can on their first pass. The hexes are sprinkled with 10 units from an enemy armor battalion, including tanks, anti-aircraft units and choppers.
Between them is Grandpa, hovering menacingly in his AH-1 over a hex that contains an enemy mobile command vehicle, all plump and dumb and gunless. The plan is to have Grandpa mop up these high-point targets while Thor and Mohawk swoop over ridgelines and across desert, hunting targets that can shoot back.
My armament strategy was, “A little of this, a little of that.” I used three SO points against the weight allowances of the craft. The strategy? Buy munitions that had a lot of different names: “GBU-16, you say? Oh, that sounds lovely. Let’s bring along a bit of that.”
The boys went shopping and found some stuff they liked
Which brings us to a consideration of the imaginative space where these bombs, in a split-second of game time, will fall. I’m no fan of the last few decades of the U.S.’ actual desert escapades. There doesn’t seem to be an option for even voting against them anymore. Think about it too much and you’ll crawl atop your wargame collection in despair, doused in lighter fluid, for a fiery penitence.
But since I’m secretly 12, I still can’t resist the “toys” themselves—or the games that allow a 54-year-old to go “PEW! PEW! BRRRRT!” in tactical systems with a toothsome degree of verisimilitude and no stakes outside the pebbled plastic of my Wal-Mart folding table.
But shit, you know what time it is: I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if some version of this hardware I’m playing with isn’t falling on Palestinian families right now. What one person considers an escapist shoot-em-up will be the next person’s depression spiral. Who can settle in for a night at the opera when you can hear Napoleon’s artillery rumbling at the outskirts of town?*
Immersing myself in the world of Thunderbolt Apache Leader as a private exercise takes some delicate bargaining with the imagination and the conscience. While I like games with militaries and combat, I get why people would rather play in arenas with anthropomorphic badgers building point systems on riverbanks, or trading buttons, or seeing who can make the fastest abstract bowl of noodles in a fictional restaurant. It’s an age of crisis. The theater walls and our psyches are paper-thin. The Worst of Everything is heaved from the wings directly onto center stage with volcanic fury. Play how you will, and when you can.
But back to my table and its accepted boundaries: I’m at the step where my pilots’ thumbs quiver angrily over the Fire buttons while I double-check attack rules, line of sight, altitude, target, and armament stats. Because all hell’s about to break loose. (P.S. I love this rulebook. There’s a lot of information, but it’s fastidious and procedural; crisp examples and well-chosen illustrations abound. I sense now—as I did when I first heard about it in 2012—that once the bookkeeping and engagement steps become second nature, this game will pack the perfect balance of engrossing detail and propulsive action.)
Frankly, it’s a godlike feeling and one of the most beautiful things about of the tabletop medium. The luxury of feeling the anticipation of a decision stretch in time. Seeing how it’s a node in a living story, part of a vivid diorama of tense action, partly under my control. Just maybe in a universe without an American God, one where flying sorties into Pakistani airspace is just a wacky thing that happens, and is forgotten in an afternoon.
*Every night for a year I’ve fallen asleep to the sound of Toby Longworth narrating Dan Abnett’s Warhammer 40,000 books. It’s been a long day. Time to drift off to the sounds of a hive city being shelled into fragments. To mangle the famous Josef Stalin quote: “10 million deaths is a tragedy, 100 million is hysterical.”