Invasion Day: An Oral History of the Veech War by Micah Gurley (good books for high schoolers .TXT) 📕

That did it. The squadron room exploded with questions. It was that moment you've thought about for fun, but never really seriously, you know? A piece of your world crumbles as if you start to doubt everything you know to be true. It was... surreal.

We waited and waited. We didn't have any information, though people were scrambling all over the place. Confusion. That's the best way to describe it. I tried to call some of my contacts in the Pentagon, but nobody was answering. It was aggravating. I let my guys call their families but told them to keep the aliens out of it. Most of them told their families to stay inside, that sort of thing. I did the same thing.

Then we waited and watched. We were glued to that screen like it was the Second Coming. The guys were all experienced pilots, they knew the game of hurry up and wait, but this was something new. The tension in the room was thick. Anxiety. Fear. Adrenaline. We had it all. One of the guys, a clown named Will, tried to keep the mood light by going over things he had learned from sci-fi novels. He told us we needed to splash them with water or give them riddles. It helped.

We watched in real-time as the ships sat there. I remember it like it was yesterday. I think it was another hour or so before the media picked up on it. We switched to one of their channels instead of the satellites our tech guy had accessed.

We finally got word that the brass was waiting on orders. Nobody wanted to be seen as the aggressor, so they kept our jets grounded. The guys didn't like that, but that's just how they are.

After five hours of waiting, we saw the Veech launch their missiles. We couldn't believe it. We knew theoretically it could happen, but we convinced ourselves that they wouldn't attack after five hours of sitting. We watched as they shot out of the cruisers, then slipped right through our defenses. We didn't stand a chance.

We saw them hit Earth. I remember the room being deathly silent. We couldn't stop watching it, you know? It's weird, but I can remember that moment with such clarity – the shock and fear, the sheer outlandishness of it. I imagine I'm not the only one who can remember it so vividly. There was no explosion, and for a minute, we had hope, but word soon came in about a sonic weapon. We didn't know what that meant.

Being in Utah, we weren't close to any of the impact zones, and we hadn't heard a thing. A minute later, we got the go-ahead as their transport ships were seen opening and launching shuttles at Earth. The guys scrambled to their jets in record time, nobody wanting to waste a second. We were already launching when we received orders to head to L.A.

En route to L.A, my squadron was joined by two more coming from New Mexico. Word came down that the shuttles had landed in L.A. and were unloading ground troops. We couldn't get there fast enough.

In all, we were joined by fifteen squadrons on the way to L.A. We were told our orders and objectives, then set loose. It was a fantastic sight. Almost five hundred of the most advanced aircraft in the world flew into L.A. like angels of justice. We were ready for some payback.

Did you know about their shields?

Nope, not a thing. I believe we were the first to engage the Veech, so nobody had information on them. We found out fast, though. We launched missiles at their shuttles – fat things that couldn't miss. But we did miss, or rather, a number of our missiles did. They had some tech that threw off our locks. When we did hit them, a transparent dome would light up around the ship. The day couldn't get any stranger, so we just kept hitting them. We finally got one, and it was a sight to see! The thing exploded with more power than it should have. Must have taken out a thousand or so troops unloading from it. That's when the fighters, or interceptors, as they call them, showed up. There were hundreds of them, and it turned into the biggest air battle in history.

The fighters were sleek metallic things with four wings, which we called X-wings. Yeah, I know, but what can I say? They looked familiar. They could fly, I'll give them that. They turned on a hair and had terrific acceleration. We simply couldn't compete. We were annihilated. Our systems couldn't track them, couldn't lock on. The few times we did, their shields protected them. They were too fast. That's the simple truth of it. The battle turned into a disaster for us. We lost unit cohesion, and our formations broke down, which just made everything worse. We flew into death that day. (He stops talking, takes a sip of coffee.) We lost a lot of good pilots. Will, the clown guy, died in the first few seconds.

The battle was short. In minutes, they almost destroyed the greatest air force the world had ever seen. We took sixty percent causalities before we were ordered to withdraw and head west, finally coming under the protection of surface-to-air missiles that had been rushed out.

Overall, I think the Veech lost a craft or two. That's it. Then, they let us go. We were nothing to them, an inconvenience at best. They had another objective. Some of my guys wanted to stay and fight, believing we just needed to figure out their weaknesses. They were lost in a battle rage. But orders were orders, and we needed to regroup if we could.

A few pilots refused to leave, veterans of fifteen years and experts in their fields who just lost it. I know one of them had family in L.A. We didn't know at the time, but they were already dead. I guess he thought