My Fireteam: Assault
June 23, 2008
A fireteam is a military unit, perhaps the smallest with just four members. The modern version was born in the jungles of Guadalcanal in WW2, when US Marines, in battling the Imperial Japanese Army and Marines, realized that the regular 8-man squad is difficult to maneuver in the jungle.
In my Joe-verse, considering the spec-op nature of the G.I.Joe team, the fireteam was adopted as the smallest unit. With only four members, the team can be easier to infiltrate and exfiltrate from enemy territory. To compensate, each team member carries tremendous firepower, aside from being sufficiently equipped to communicate with air and land and sea assets (i.e. strike aircraft, artillery and ships) to request for close support.
My first fireteam I call “assault,” because it has two of the Joes’ Rangers, Stalker and Beach Head; a heavy weapons specialist, Heavy Duty; and Joe small arms expert Grunt. In ops that call for assaulting a Cobra firebase or safe house, these four guys provide the shock to batter Cobra’s defenses.
