8404 Diorama Studios

We’ve all had them, you’re going on about your business and one seemingly innocuous thing crops up and things get entirely too interesting for anyone’s liking. The proverbial reaction? Aw, crap…(the most polite way to put it). While the items needed to progress with the helo project have finally arrived, the project with the quad bike and Gecko infantry figures are just kind of falling into place. So, the helo has moved into a holding pattern until this one has been completed.

Our project has been inspired by an incident that occurred on my first tour in Iraq. The location, participants, and bad guys have been changed to suit the materials on hand. One of the things shared by the guys from Brand X was a propensity to stash contraband in places like schools, hospitals, and museums. In the real world we discovered a large cache of explosives and weapons buried on the grounds of a girls’ school; our information came from the locals who were complaining about strange men being at the girls’ school at night. Men at the girl’s school. At night. Uh-huh, we all doubted that they were the janitors or the local school board; or even the local pervs for that matter. If they were the local pervs, the locals would have handled it themselves (probably).

When we pulled out of town for the day a sniper team would remain behind, concealed but able to observe the school clearly. After only a couple tries the “visitors” showed up, half a dozen of them. They claimed they were only farmers and the stuff in the truck was “seed and fertilizer” when the QRF busted them. You betcha, Uncle Osama’s Grade A Det Cord ‘seed’, Uncle Vlad’s RPG 7 ‘seed’, Chairman Mao’s Finest 7.62mm ‘seed and fertilizer’. The cache we uncovered was full of weapons, ammunition and explosives. All buried in a schoolyard. So it did happen, it was a case of the bad guys using our fear of offending cultural sensitivities around Muslim women and girls to hide contraband where they figured we would never go.

So, in a nutshell that is what we will be creating here. Not this exact incident, not the exact scene. The people, place, and other parts have been altered to avoid any possibility of triggering my PTSD and to use the things in my stash that are begging to be used. So, game on!