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This is the hundred-nineteenth in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series or go back to the master post to pick up where you will.

Back in the day, I had a friend who loved his PC games and he worked very hard to push me into the hobby of non-casual games. But I was poor and, on top of that, I was cheap. So even as he tempted me with selections from his vast library, he struggled to win me over. Among the games in which he thought I’d be interested was Harpoon – and given the time frame of all this, it must have been the original 1989 version of Harpoon. I remember how he told me all about his ongoing game, enticing me with its wargaming goodness.

The scenario he was playing involved Israel and some torpedo boats. A quick search online couldn’t turn up a title to match but if you were a Harpoon fanatic, you may know which one it was. To me, it seemed like such a limited focus for such a game. I figured that if I was going to shell out real money for a simulator of modern naval operations, surely I’d want to be lining up carrier group alpha strikes, not commanding a bunch of little boats with machine guns. In the end, Harpoon never mounted a seriously challenge to my wallet. Oh I was tempted, but never pulled the trigger until after that series was overtaken by Command, in its earlier iteration.

I take this boat ride down memory river because I now find myself playing a scenario in CMO that features a similar array of the small scale. Operation Market Time, 1968 is one of the stock scenarios for CMO. It is a snapshot of the long-running American operation to interdict sea-bound arms supplies to the insurgency in South Vietnam. Despite their presence, this was not an operation for the carrier groups sitting in the Gulf of Tonkin. The weapons of choice were OV-10 Broncos and Swift Boats.

Let’s see who that is

Contrast with my previous CMO outing – this one is billed as easy and of low complexity. For me, that makes for a nice breather. Also, the fact that I don’t have all that other Vietnam-era stuff floating around makes it easy to wrap my mind around my task. That I’m not faced with the state-of-the-art of communist war machinery means I can avoid that sinking feeling when I realize that my Broncos and Swift Boats can’t possibly accomplish anything other than a complete disaster.

So yes, the game was easy enough, although I admit didn’t execute it perfectly. As it turned out, I lost my best aircraft, a P-2H Neptune, by flying too close to (what turned out to be) an armed combat vessel. I also learned, the hard way, that my Broncos don’t have the range to span the entire map… much of my air support had to turn back without engaging, effectively removing any contribution by them from the scenario. Even with that, the U.S. Naval assets were sufficient to the task allocated to them, particularly if the boat in question was armed with a mortar.

Typically, when I take on a newly-installed PC game, I would probably try to sort the scenarios out from easiest to hardest. By then playing them in, roughly, that order I could be aided in my climbing of the game’s learning curve – something that CMO certainly features. But because of its high level of historical fidelity I am rather, as you know, playing these games in chronological order. As a result, it took me a while to get to stumble across this fight, one that turned out to be at just the difficulty level I was looking for.

Maybe I should have given that Israeli torpedo boat scenario a whirl, way back when.

Return to the master post for the Vietnam War or move ahead for another Steel Panthers scenario to be played as the North Vietnamese.