For over four decades the island of Mordent had known nothing but war in the form of drawn-out civil unrest between rival ethic groups and even full-blown invasions, the latter being responsible for the island being more or less divided in half. Only a handful of years earlier had the island been subjected to an invasion by the Kingdom of Imbrinium, then occupied until the western half was handed back to the Commonwealth of Morrdh. More recently there was an abortive attempt by Commonwealth forces to oust their Imbrinium counterparts from the island completely under the pretext of the still raging Great Dienstadi War, though that action only achieved shifting the border slightly east in a few places before a ceasefire was called. Since then an uneasy peace as held whilst the island's future remains uncertain.
Regardless the violence and the killing continued.
Nobody's entirely certain how or why Mordent's century old troubles began, but it is generally agreed that it stems from tensions between the two ethic groups of the Celtic Mordentish and the Slavic Norgorkans. During the earliest days of Mordent's origins as a whaling colony there were reports of unrest between the two groups, though time has only seen those divisions deepen as both sides saw rival groups form within their own ranks. Things eventually came to a head in the late 1960s when violent clashes suddenly erupted and forced the Commonwealth to declare a state of emergency, for the next forty odd years the Morridane Army was stuck in the middle of a civil war with countless numbers of its own soldiers wounded or even killed whilst attempting to bring a degree of sanity back to the island. The Imbriniums endured the same thing following their conquest of the island and still suffer today in the eastern part of the island that they control. It may be years before Mordent finally sees peace.
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For the National Service conscripts of the Royal Morridane Regiment's 14th Battalion, a scant few weeks after completely their training, this was their first tour of Mordent. They had heard all the old stories from the veterans and NCOs of the battalion and viewed the coming months with a mixture of optimism and fear. Before they even went on their first patrol they still had to get bedded in at their billets, an old mill since converted into a fort by the Morridane Army, and get their kit in order. As the newly arrived soldiers were drawing their bedding from the stores and lugging it back to their assigned billets, gunfire suddenly echoed round the yard and the conscripts quickly dropped to the ground. Though to their surprise a Royal Morridane Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (RMEME) armourer simply ran to the middle of the yard and started giving a one fingered salute at the gunman who was on the roof of a nearby school, then called to the conscripts laying prone on the ground amidst all their bedding. "Dunno wot all ye lot are doing, that bugger's firing an SMG that barely even has half the range needed to hit us!"
One-by-one and after sheepishly the conscripts get back onto their feet and soon joined the armourer in saluting the gunman with lewd gestures as the danced about and laughed. Very quickly the gunman was jumping up and down with rage on the school's roof before throwing away the SMG in a fit of anger before disappearing from sight, presumably climbing down off the roof on the far side of the school building with the soldiers rolling around with laughter in the yard of the mill.
