Post by niklas risto on Mar 16, 2010 2:09:05 GMT
Most definately accepted, but Sergeant is the highest NCO rank I can give you under the new app legislation.
-JT
Account E-Mail: EDITED OUT!
Name: Niklas Risto
Nationality: Finnish (Finland)
What Army will Your Character Serve Beneath? American Army
Character History:
Niklas was born nineteen-eleven (1911), September fourth at six o’clock in the morning during one of Helsinki’s heavy winter bombardments of the year. It was a miracle amongst the hospital matrons, as the birth of a healthy young blue eyed boy survived the painstaking labour lasting longer than forty-eight hours and low temperatures eerily creeping through room to room. Many of the hospital’s in-patients had already contracted hyperthermia or tuberculosis, but through the midst of the hospital’s dark hour of need, the young pink faced baby breathing for the first time, gave a new hope to many.
The years passed slowly for Niklas, his childhood foreboding a long legacy of learning difficulties, with a strained relationship between his mother and father whom both directed and owned several small grocery stores. Time for Niklas was few and far between, with their business coming foremost first, how deep their pockets were a close second and great dining a gradual third. Niklas lived a middle-classed lifestyle with his parents, but the solemn solitude he suffered with nannies and child minders soon became his surrogate mothers; changing fortnightly, due to Niklas’s outburst behaviour, uncontrollable as he wreaked for attention from his parents. They soon silenced his ranting cries, by locking him away in his room for hours on end or belting his buttocks with a fine leather hide belt. Sometimes the buckle end of the belt was used for good measure too.
Eventually, Niklas found himself keeping quiet as the years continued to drape away with a slithering slowness and soon enough, his learning difficulties began to refine themselves, as he mentally changed his attitude. A young man of few words, but spoke a dozen a minute with just his expressions. Niklas earned good grades towards the end of his teenage life in school and often trips to boarding school down south for a majority of his summer vacations; the family business was thriving within it’s prime by now and his parents littered another dozen minor stores across Finland. A job was to soon be on Niklas’s hands, a store manager perhaps? Director of the company maybe? But Niklas never stayed around long enough to find out, as by the age of eighteen, he fled Helsinki in a bid to make a better life for himself. One he could only have dreamed off for many-a-years.
By his early twenties, Niklas worked small jobs throughout his travels. Mechanical apprentice for a good year, blacksmith’s errand boy, dish washer in at least half a dozen restaurants and then, a fascination equated his senses; art. By luck, Niklas acquired an assistant job for a well known town artist, who extravagantly expressed himself through a means of his artwork and desire for a colourful life, in such a bland black and white Finland, where you had to look beyond the cobbled streets and stone mason walls, towards a more colourful picture of life; as if the streets were clothed with Spanish sunlight and British corset dressed woman. He learnt a lot from the artist and even found himself expressing his deep turmoil of emotions across canvas paper most evenings.
By a number of years later, Finland was under threat and Niklas became one of the immediate volunteers to stand for king and country. The motherland and fatherland of Europe were ascending fast from military supremacy and Poland was already at hilt’s end towards a full scale invasion. It was these days that Niklas would shape his life to be for the future, as a second world war broke loose…
Military Rank: Sergeant or Staff Sergeant.
Writing Sample:
Scenario: You’re alone behind enemy lines and you get the eerie feeling someone’s watching you. You’re trying to remain quiet, stay low, work your way back to the frontlines - but you can’t help but feel you’re being followed… (How does your character React? What’s running through their mind?)
Peering between the tight gap of two barn doors, Niklas observed the open crop field, covered by a blanket of darkness under the shimmering starlight and moonlight. It was an opaque full moon tonight and the skies were clear above, which alarmed Niklas somewhat, as the Nazis would be more on alert to an air-raid; the distant spotlights from flakverling gunnery crews watched the night skies with an intent alarm and the faint ‘burbbling’ of engines in the distance conveyed the presence of German patrols within the area. The night was far more dangerous than he would anticipate, but this was the only time he could move, daylight hours would have been far worse and patrols tenfold on the nearby roads. He needed to move tonight, now.
Dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform, with field cap, body-equipment and jackboots lined with felt, he looked the part of a German soldier, but failed to carry any appropriate documentation of papers. It was for this reason, he couldn’t chance passing any German patrols or even being seen by the Nazis. The uniform only cloaked him for a while if he were to be spotted or at least give him a minor chance that he wouldn’t be stopped and prodded with questions for identification papers or the sort. No, the uniform’s duty was to give him enough time, that if spotted, the enemy wouldn’t open fire immediately on a presumed friendly unit, a comrade. It was this minor time he could savour for an escape route or cunning plan, hopefully -- nonetheless, he was about to embark and take all the necessary stealth precautions any other Allied soldier would take behind enemy lines. Wearing a Nazi uniform or not.
Niklas had been attached to a special operation, a twelve man team to destroy a transmitter nearby, but their plans were soon absconded the moment their drop zone was eleven miles past their allocated landing zone and any planned retreat zones he’d been informed off in the briefing. They were literally dropped atop of the enemy and the twelve man team soon disbanded as soon as three halftracks each carrying fifteen men arrived on the scene, all mounted with gunners and an AFC gunning onto their position from the main road a matter of yards away. Niklas barely made it out with his life, he saw at least seven guys go down in the first wave of fire from the German patrols and that included a few wounded guys; urghh! Their cries of pain still tortured him a little, a harrowing sound to hear for any man, woman or child. He made his escape so far with Thomas and Jones, a lieutenant and corporal who had dashed into the same direction as himself, as soon as all the crap started hitting the fan.
Lieutenant Thomas Pickney was shot by a marksman two miles into their escape, must have been a good marksman, because the Germans were at least five or six yards behind them, if not further. Corporal Jones Lewisham was an Englishman with American roots, so his cockney accent and British persona was misleading for a man dressed in American battle fatigues. He was a good man though and as soon as they evaded the enemy that night, they separated paths early next morning. They stood a better chance going at it alone and now Niklas found himself creeping out of a barn just after midnight, perhaps six days later. He’d made miles and miles back towards the French mainland, towards the Allied lines. He didn’t have too far left to go, perhaps another two night’s worth of trekking? Then signs of battle torn towns would start emerging, from his guess anyway, where the fight was ongoing with Jerry - the frontier.
Throwing the German 98 Karbiner rifle over his shoulder, he crept out of the barn silently, heading for the tall wavering crop-field to conceal himself from any patrols moving across the roads nearby or spotters flying low overhead - the skies were clear after all. He must have been walking for an hour or two, until he started hearing unsettling noises from behind? He was quite sure it was his imagination, until he tweaked the noise of heavy brushing, as if someone were parting their way through the massive crop-field too, but not that far behind himself? Eventually, Niklas reached the edge of the crop-field leading on towards a nearby scattering of trees in an open green field, sloping downwards from a large hillside. Inhaling quickly, Niklas ran for the nearest tree twenty-five paces, taking large strides as he dashed from the open terrain towards cover, immediately falling into the tree’s shadow the moment he was close enough.
Pulling and twisting the bolt on his rifle, Niklas laid himself prone against the protruding roots surfacing out from the ground and rested his rifle steadily into a groove notched into the tree root before himself. Shouldering the rifle, he watched the crop-field sway in the gentle breeze, still unsure whether someone was following him or not, but had to make sure. He hadn’t eaten well in the past days, so he wasn’t sure if the deficiencies in his diet and stress were making him overly paranoid. Whatever the case may be, he had to be sure no one was following him and decided to stake the field out for at least five or ten minutes before moving on. He was cautious and had to be for the right reasons.
Three minutes passed and Niklas almost gave up the ghost, presuming it was his imagination, until a figure emerged from the field cautiously looking around. Inhaling with a shocked breath, Niklas trained his weapon on the silhouette through the fog of darkness and strained to make out whom it may be? Then another figure appeared near the first one and Niklas immediately began to panic inside, assuming he had been spotted the moment he left the barn. The two silhouettes seemed to silently speak to one another with a nodding of the head and body gestures, before they split up and began walking in different directions, one of them heading straight towards the tree he was hiding behind.
Withdrawing his rifle and himself from view, worried he’d been seen training his weapon on the person approaching, he slid behind the tree and tucked his legs in, panting for breath quickly, immediately searching for options inside of himself. He could hear the person getting closer, the soft treading of their feet and the distinct sound of rattling, the sound soldiers commonly made with their equipment tinkering from their body harnesses and webbing. Resting his rifle against the tree, Niklas reached into the felt of his jackboot and pulled his trouser leg up slowly, feeling for the leather frog concealing his boot-knife. Running his fingers along the leather, he watched in sheer awe as the now apparent German soldier walked within inches of the tree, his back towards Niklas as he casually scanned the area ahead, looking off towards the open fields, a maschinenpistole 40 hanging at his hip lightly.
Trying to keep calm and reframing from inhaling loudly, Niklas searched for the hilt to his boot knife and quickly grabbed for it the moment he felt cold steel. Sliding it upwards and out of the frog, his eyes were wide like the moon above, soaring the pearly blues of his irises at the German soldier humming to himself quietly, just watching dead ahead. Twisting the boot knife around within his palm, so the blade was facing downwards, he eased himself off the ground as slow as he could and as quiet as he could, watching the German soldier the entire time he arose from his huddled hiding spot. Taking one careful step forwards, Niklas raised his arm upwards with the boot knife and tilted his head back ever so slightly, as if the German wouldn’t be able to grab for his face the moment he throttled him with the knife. With a careful second step, Niklas sharply closed the gap and wrapped his arm around the German soldier’s throat, attempting to smother his mouth as he lunged the knife downwards into the man’s chest from over his back, again and again, stabbing frantically to kill the soldier swiftly.
Niklas winced as he felt the soldier bite into his fingers smothering his mouth, but just kept stabbing like a mad man, until he felt the soldier weaken and get heavy within his embrace, allowing the dead soldier to fall from his grasp gently, as to not make too much noise. Grabbing the dead soldier’s MP40 and pulling whatever ammunition he could from the man’s ammunition pouches for the weapon, he slung the strap around his neck and dragged the body towards the pit of the tree and cautiously moved out from cover, trying to look for the other soldier who’d walked the other way. He couldn’t see him, but he figured the other soldier couldn’t see him either, so Niklas made a run onwards towards the next tree and then the next tree, gaining ground slowly as he continued to make his way back to the Allied wire.
-JT
Account E-Mail: EDITED OUT!
Name: Niklas Risto
Nationality: Finnish (Finland)
What Army will Your Character Serve Beneath? American Army
Character History:
Niklas was born nineteen-eleven (1911), September fourth at six o’clock in the morning during one of Helsinki’s heavy winter bombardments of the year. It was a miracle amongst the hospital matrons, as the birth of a healthy young blue eyed boy survived the painstaking labour lasting longer than forty-eight hours and low temperatures eerily creeping through room to room. Many of the hospital’s in-patients had already contracted hyperthermia or tuberculosis, but through the midst of the hospital’s dark hour of need, the young pink faced baby breathing for the first time, gave a new hope to many.
The years passed slowly for Niklas, his childhood foreboding a long legacy of learning difficulties, with a strained relationship between his mother and father whom both directed and owned several small grocery stores. Time for Niklas was few and far between, with their business coming foremost first, how deep their pockets were a close second and great dining a gradual third. Niklas lived a middle-classed lifestyle with his parents, but the solemn solitude he suffered with nannies and child minders soon became his surrogate mothers; changing fortnightly, due to Niklas’s outburst behaviour, uncontrollable as he wreaked for attention from his parents. They soon silenced his ranting cries, by locking him away in his room for hours on end or belting his buttocks with a fine leather hide belt. Sometimes the buckle end of the belt was used for good measure too.
Eventually, Niklas found himself keeping quiet as the years continued to drape away with a slithering slowness and soon enough, his learning difficulties began to refine themselves, as he mentally changed his attitude. A young man of few words, but spoke a dozen a minute with just his expressions. Niklas earned good grades towards the end of his teenage life in school and often trips to boarding school down south for a majority of his summer vacations; the family business was thriving within it’s prime by now and his parents littered another dozen minor stores across Finland. A job was to soon be on Niklas’s hands, a store manager perhaps? Director of the company maybe? But Niklas never stayed around long enough to find out, as by the age of eighteen, he fled Helsinki in a bid to make a better life for himself. One he could only have dreamed off for many-a-years.
By his early twenties, Niklas worked small jobs throughout his travels. Mechanical apprentice for a good year, blacksmith’s errand boy, dish washer in at least half a dozen restaurants and then, a fascination equated his senses; art. By luck, Niklas acquired an assistant job for a well known town artist, who extravagantly expressed himself through a means of his artwork and desire for a colourful life, in such a bland black and white Finland, where you had to look beyond the cobbled streets and stone mason walls, towards a more colourful picture of life; as if the streets were clothed with Spanish sunlight and British corset dressed woman. He learnt a lot from the artist and even found himself expressing his deep turmoil of emotions across canvas paper most evenings.
By a number of years later, Finland was under threat and Niklas became one of the immediate volunteers to stand for king and country. The motherland and fatherland of Europe were ascending fast from military supremacy and Poland was already at hilt’s end towards a full scale invasion. It was these days that Niklas would shape his life to be for the future, as a second world war broke loose…
Military Rank: Sergeant or Staff Sergeant.
Writing Sample:
Scenario: You’re alone behind enemy lines and you get the eerie feeling someone’s watching you. You’re trying to remain quiet, stay low, work your way back to the frontlines - but you can’t help but feel you’re being followed… (How does your character React? What’s running through their mind?)
Peering between the tight gap of two barn doors, Niklas observed the open crop field, covered by a blanket of darkness under the shimmering starlight and moonlight. It was an opaque full moon tonight and the skies were clear above, which alarmed Niklas somewhat, as the Nazis would be more on alert to an air-raid; the distant spotlights from flakverling gunnery crews watched the night skies with an intent alarm and the faint ‘burbbling’ of engines in the distance conveyed the presence of German patrols within the area. The night was far more dangerous than he would anticipate, but this was the only time he could move, daylight hours would have been far worse and patrols tenfold on the nearby roads. He needed to move tonight, now.
Dressed in a Wehrmacht uniform, with field cap, body-equipment and jackboots lined with felt, he looked the part of a German soldier, but failed to carry any appropriate documentation of papers. It was for this reason, he couldn’t chance passing any German patrols or even being seen by the Nazis. The uniform only cloaked him for a while if he were to be spotted or at least give him a minor chance that he wouldn’t be stopped and prodded with questions for identification papers or the sort. No, the uniform’s duty was to give him enough time, that if spotted, the enemy wouldn’t open fire immediately on a presumed friendly unit, a comrade. It was this minor time he could savour for an escape route or cunning plan, hopefully -- nonetheless, he was about to embark and take all the necessary stealth precautions any other Allied soldier would take behind enemy lines. Wearing a Nazi uniform or not.
Niklas had been attached to a special operation, a twelve man team to destroy a transmitter nearby, but their plans were soon absconded the moment their drop zone was eleven miles past their allocated landing zone and any planned retreat zones he’d been informed off in the briefing. They were literally dropped atop of the enemy and the twelve man team soon disbanded as soon as three halftracks each carrying fifteen men arrived on the scene, all mounted with gunners and an AFC gunning onto their position from the main road a matter of yards away. Niklas barely made it out with his life, he saw at least seven guys go down in the first wave of fire from the German patrols and that included a few wounded guys; urghh! Their cries of pain still tortured him a little, a harrowing sound to hear for any man, woman or child. He made his escape so far with Thomas and Jones, a lieutenant and corporal who had dashed into the same direction as himself, as soon as all the crap started hitting the fan.
Lieutenant Thomas Pickney was shot by a marksman two miles into their escape, must have been a good marksman, because the Germans were at least five or six yards behind them, if not further. Corporal Jones Lewisham was an Englishman with American roots, so his cockney accent and British persona was misleading for a man dressed in American battle fatigues. He was a good man though and as soon as they evaded the enemy that night, they separated paths early next morning. They stood a better chance going at it alone and now Niklas found himself creeping out of a barn just after midnight, perhaps six days later. He’d made miles and miles back towards the French mainland, towards the Allied lines. He didn’t have too far left to go, perhaps another two night’s worth of trekking? Then signs of battle torn towns would start emerging, from his guess anyway, where the fight was ongoing with Jerry - the frontier.
Throwing the German 98 Karbiner rifle over his shoulder, he crept out of the barn silently, heading for the tall wavering crop-field to conceal himself from any patrols moving across the roads nearby or spotters flying low overhead - the skies were clear after all. He must have been walking for an hour or two, until he started hearing unsettling noises from behind? He was quite sure it was his imagination, until he tweaked the noise of heavy brushing, as if someone were parting their way through the massive crop-field too, but not that far behind himself? Eventually, Niklas reached the edge of the crop-field leading on towards a nearby scattering of trees in an open green field, sloping downwards from a large hillside. Inhaling quickly, Niklas ran for the nearest tree twenty-five paces, taking large strides as he dashed from the open terrain towards cover, immediately falling into the tree’s shadow the moment he was close enough.
Pulling and twisting the bolt on his rifle, Niklas laid himself prone against the protruding roots surfacing out from the ground and rested his rifle steadily into a groove notched into the tree root before himself. Shouldering the rifle, he watched the crop-field sway in the gentle breeze, still unsure whether someone was following him or not, but had to make sure. He hadn’t eaten well in the past days, so he wasn’t sure if the deficiencies in his diet and stress were making him overly paranoid. Whatever the case may be, he had to be sure no one was following him and decided to stake the field out for at least five or ten minutes before moving on. He was cautious and had to be for the right reasons.
Three minutes passed and Niklas almost gave up the ghost, presuming it was his imagination, until a figure emerged from the field cautiously looking around. Inhaling with a shocked breath, Niklas trained his weapon on the silhouette through the fog of darkness and strained to make out whom it may be? Then another figure appeared near the first one and Niklas immediately began to panic inside, assuming he had been spotted the moment he left the barn. The two silhouettes seemed to silently speak to one another with a nodding of the head and body gestures, before they split up and began walking in different directions, one of them heading straight towards the tree he was hiding behind.
Withdrawing his rifle and himself from view, worried he’d been seen training his weapon on the person approaching, he slid behind the tree and tucked his legs in, panting for breath quickly, immediately searching for options inside of himself. He could hear the person getting closer, the soft treading of their feet and the distinct sound of rattling, the sound soldiers commonly made with their equipment tinkering from their body harnesses and webbing. Resting his rifle against the tree, Niklas reached into the felt of his jackboot and pulled his trouser leg up slowly, feeling for the leather frog concealing his boot-knife. Running his fingers along the leather, he watched in sheer awe as the now apparent German soldier walked within inches of the tree, his back towards Niklas as he casually scanned the area ahead, looking off towards the open fields, a maschinenpistole 40 hanging at his hip lightly.
Trying to keep calm and reframing from inhaling loudly, Niklas searched for the hilt to his boot knife and quickly grabbed for it the moment he felt cold steel. Sliding it upwards and out of the frog, his eyes were wide like the moon above, soaring the pearly blues of his irises at the German soldier humming to himself quietly, just watching dead ahead. Twisting the boot knife around within his palm, so the blade was facing downwards, he eased himself off the ground as slow as he could and as quiet as he could, watching the German soldier the entire time he arose from his huddled hiding spot. Taking one careful step forwards, Niklas raised his arm upwards with the boot knife and tilted his head back ever so slightly, as if the German wouldn’t be able to grab for his face the moment he throttled him with the knife. With a careful second step, Niklas sharply closed the gap and wrapped his arm around the German soldier’s throat, attempting to smother his mouth as he lunged the knife downwards into the man’s chest from over his back, again and again, stabbing frantically to kill the soldier swiftly.
Niklas winced as he felt the soldier bite into his fingers smothering his mouth, but just kept stabbing like a mad man, until he felt the soldier weaken and get heavy within his embrace, allowing the dead soldier to fall from his grasp gently, as to not make too much noise. Grabbing the dead soldier’s MP40 and pulling whatever ammunition he could from the man’s ammunition pouches for the weapon, he slung the strap around his neck and dragged the body towards the pit of the tree and cautiously moved out from cover, trying to look for the other soldier who’d walked the other way. He couldn’t see him, but he figured the other soldier couldn’t see him either, so Niklas made a run onwards towards the next tree and then the next tree, gaining ground slowly as he continued to make his way back to the Allied wire.