Chapter 8
141: Pride is worthless: You're proud of yourself? Good for you. Like having a third nipple, it's pretty pointless. Unlike a third nipple, it can lead to death. Look, if you think proving something to someone is worth throwing your life away, then fine, fine by me. Just don't drag anyone else down with you. There was this cult leader, damn expert with a sword, and he insulted the sword kills of some local champion. Said champion had his guard charge the guy to prove a point. Turns out the cult leader didn't even want to fight him, he had planted landmines in front of his position. By the end of the day he was doing heretical but slightly funny puppet shows with what was left of the guy and his men.
142: Don't be stupid about revenge: I'm not going to tell you that revenge is bad. A good look at 80 will tell you why, but be SMART about it. If I had a Throne (I think that's the currency of the Imperium but no one can seem to make up their mind about it) for every half assed revenge scheme I've seen, I'd be a minor noble by now. I'll keep it short and just leave the three worst examples. Shooting a noble in his quarters and then writing a suicide note. In Low Gothic. With several spelling mistakes. Snapping an ex-lover's neck and then pushing them off a cliff to make it look like the fall did it. When the cliff is only five feet high. And worst of all, assassination via grot. I don't want to talk about that one.
143: Knives don't work if they can't reach the organs: If you're facing a cultist, feel free to stab them in the gut to your heart's content. Most other things however? Either go straight for the throat or don't bother. If you can't reach the throat, don't bother. Things out there like Orks aren't seriously wounded by knives. At best, you hurt them. Sometimes not even that. One Ork asked if a guardsman was trying to tickle him when she stabbed him. He wasn't being sarcastic, he actually thought she was trying to tickle him. So he took her knife and "tickled" her back. In the lungs, the kidneys, the stomach and the face.
144: Do not steal Ork vehicles: Assuming you can figure out how they're supposed to work, and assuming that you don't have to fill up the gas tank via a straw, and assuming that you can figure out that that human femur was the key, Ork vehicles just aren't' reliable. Mainly because they're designed for creatures much bigger and stronger than us. In addition to being designed by dipshits who are so stupid the laws of reality sag under the weight. After our raid I told everyone to get back in the Chimera, but some wet behind the ears rich boy had his servants help him steal an Ork buggy, and as it turns out he couldn't reach the brakes. And even if he could, he didn't have a boulder to press it down. And that was a freaking tall cliff.
145: Do not try and make the Tyranids fight Orks: I'm seriously toeing the line here so I need to be vague. Let's just say that a certain ex-Inquisitor had the Tyranids and the Orks fight one time, and it did not work. It did not fraking work, it could not have backfired any harder if they had tried. Orks from all over kept jumping on the bandwagon, and the Tyranids were at an all you can eat buffet where the food ran towards their mouths. So whichever army eventually wins is going to be ten times stronger when they come out. Because apparently when dealing with a race that constantly consumes organic matter to refresh its ranks, this idiot forgot that the Necrons exist! They aren't organic! The Tyranids would come out of fighting them either dead or with wasted resources! No wonder the Inquisition kicked him out! Ugh. Anyway, the moral is keep Tyranids away from Orks, lead them to Necrons. Not the Eye of Terror though, the idea of Tyranids adapting to Chaos makes me shudder.
146: Learn what momentum is: See, when something gains movement, it keeps moving until something else stops it. Whether it be gravity or a solid object. Some people can't seem to wrap their brains around this concept. So when you're trying to do wheelies in a Leman Russ tank and you go down a pretty big hill, you're going to go faster and faster. And someone else can clean the bone fragments out of the treads next time!
147: Pride REALLY IS worthless: Ok, get this through your thick skulls people. Your pride isn't worth a damn thing. It doesn't carry out the Emperor's will, it doesn't secure planets, and it doesn't kill the nightmare incarnate monsters out there. If you let your pride rule you, you end up like Cato Sicuntius getting other people killed just so that you can feel like you have a big dick and/or cilt. Not everyone wants to engage the Eldar Warp Spiders in melee just because they said your corset looks tacky. We only came out on top because we outnumbered them twenty to one, and even then we lost half our unit. Oh, and onto the next one.
148: Do not engage Eldar in a field they specialize in: There's an old saying. Six Space Marines and six Eldar fight. The Space Marines kill five Eldar and then the last Eldar kills the Space Marines. The idea behind it is that they were fighting in a field that only one of the Eldar was trained in, and said Eldar was able to take on six Space Marines while the others were out of their depth. If Space Marines can't do it, you can't. Don't try to counter snipe a Ranger, don't' try to burn a Fire Dragon, and don't try to overpower a Farseer's mind. Just. Freaking. Don't.
149: Learn what logistics are. This is for all the commanders out there. Armies need food, water, weapons, armor, munitions, support vehicles, resupply lines, oh you should know this. So when a few million soldiers get dropped off with the clothes on their back and nothing else, they're not going to last very long. That was the RELIEF FORCE! At least the prick who did it died with them. Shame it wasn't Kubrik Chenkov.
150: Don't rely on cover too much: Once upon a happier time, you'd at the very least be safer if you were behind a stone while during a fire fight. That's before every asshole in the galaxy opened wide and shat out the crap we have to deal with on a daily basis. Needless to say, cover doesn't work that well anymore. Half of the things we fight like melee range anyway, so it's kind of pointless. Nice lady, if a bit air headed, thought her sandbags would keep her safe. Maybe they would've if it wasn't a World Eater with a chain axe trying to kill her. Minus the trying part.
151: Remember that Plague Marines are walking disease dispensers: I only ever went up against one Plague Marine, and it made its way into the top ten worst days of my life. The thing tore its way through an entire platoon and then hit mine. I lost three quarters of my men before we could finally bring it down. I learned a lot of important lessons about Plague Marines that day. First of all, burn the corpse, there is no such thing as a fire that's too hot for one. Second of all, one on one combat will end with it impaling your spine with its warhammer. Thirdly, taking its skull as a trophy will give you around a hundred known diseases and a couple of unknown ones that Nurgle probably spurted out of his chode early that day. And you'll finish off the rest of the platoon, minus their leader who had received med-evac because all of his cybernetics had shorted out. Cunt.
152: Noise Marine weapons are not stereos: I don't know how the screeching those things make can be called music, but some people were drunk enough to want to try it. Emperor knows how they moved it, even my wife is out of breath from carrying one, but they tried to start a rave with a few. Needless to say, it was a short event, blood was everywhere, a Comisar got involved and I downed a few more bottles I got off of dead morons.
153: Khorne Berserkers are not reliable allies: I know there's a lot of people out there who think that we can defeat Chaos by making them fight among themselves. Sadly I disagree. Chaos loves to clash, but there's always someone keeping them in line when they're fighting us. As such, you can't really rely on Khorne Berserkers always killing their own allies. Hilarious as it may be to watch a steroid abusing prick get halfway through "Blood for the blood god" before taking a chain axe to the teeth, Berserkers would still much rather be killing us. They hate everything, but they hate us slightly more. Oh, it turns out that trying to mimic a cultist's voice while insulting Berserkers from behind a rock doesn't work. And Berserkers have good throwing arms.
154: Rubric Marines don't burn well: With this and the last three, I realize that I've seen more of Chaos that I'm comfortable with. There was this one period, a good five years, where Chaos forces were moving into the the Calixis Sector. It turns out Abbadick doesn't have a monopoly on Black Crusades and these jokers were trying to start one. They came a little too close. Anyway Rubric Marines are dust and maybe a soul inside power armor. Trying to set them on fire is a waste of time. And it puts you in neck snapping distance. And head ripping off distance. I honestly think it was trying to go for a snap and ended up with a rip.
155: Only point a weapon at something you want to kill: You think that this would be obvious, but no. Then again I think it's clear that any training the Guard gets focuses purely on killing and not on staying alive. See the rest of the list for evidence. As it stands, the lasgun is not the most deadly tool of war, but it is still a tool of war. It doesn't matter if it is unloaded, it doesn't matter if you finger is off the trigger, only point the barrel at something you want to burn a hole in. Then again maybe he wanted to kill his mother-in-law. On the other hand, he probably didn't want to kill himself.
156: Valkyries are not for crashing: You see those things on Valkyries? Those are called lascannons and missiles. They're what Valkyries use to kill things. You shoot them at the thing you don't like. You do not suicide bomb enemy positions when you have a full arsenal and haven't taken any damage. Giving your life in the name of the Emperor is one thing, but be smart about it. I mean at the very least you can do one thing. NOT FUCKING MISS!
157: You do not book a visit to the Golden Throne for yourself. You do it for your great-great grandchildren: I told her that the line was longer than she thought it was. Everyone told her that the line was longer than she thought it was. She didn't want to listen. And she tried to cut in line. There's not a list ranking actions by how heretical there are, but if there was, that'd be near the top. It ended with her body being "volunteered" for rations.
158: Remember to take a grave-chute when you jump: I've only been on one or two air-drop missions, they were mainly for encirclement tactics. I think I haven't been on one in awhile because of my wife. Don't tell her I said this but she weighs a lot with all that chrome, the chutes struggle to handle her. Anyway...yeah. Make sure you remember to put one on. You think it's awkward for you? Have you ever had an Ork look up to see where the corpse came from and tut disapprovingly at you? You don't know what that feels like.
159: Kill the Eldar AFTER the alliance has broken down: I've covered this before, Eldar can't be trusted. They'll always turn on us when we form an alliance of convenience, so there's no shame in beating them to it, but you have to know WHEN to stab them in the back. Literally, viciously and repeatedly. Usually it's after you manage to fight off the Necron invasion, not while you're still fighting to hold the line. The squad that killed that Avenger got off easy frankly. It was the Fire Dragons who found them. Their deaths were quick.
160: PRIDE IS FRAKKING WORTHLESS!: Yes I am saying this again because this is a lesson people need to freaking learn! I could start a whole other book filled with people who got killed because of pride. Since I doubt people will pay attention if they don't pay attention to this, I won't do that and instead I'll bring up the worst case I ever had to deal with. Every hear of the phrase "Shit flows downhill?" It's because the people at the top are assholes and we have to deal with it. So let me tell you a story of how we almost lost an entire system because of pride.
It was Tyranids, they had launched an invasion of a system where we had three colonies. We fought long and hard for the planet's surface, and my family was in the thick of the fighting. My daughter was going through hell, the Shadow of the Warp was doing a real number on her. Her sweetheart was keeping her safe, having used up all of her solid rounds and having scavenged a pair of hellpistols. My sister was on top of a burnt pile of gaunts while actively adding to the pile, and Zamora and I were gunning down Gargoyles, Zamora bringing a nice plasma rifle to the party.
But at the end of the day, they were Tyranids, and everything we killed had been sent down just to make us waste ammo. We nearly got killed by a Trygon that a nearby Raven Guard managed to put down, but it just went downhill from there. Now, at that point this is where most people throw in the towel. The Tyranids are a species where mindlessly throwing men at them is the dumbest thing you can do. At this point, you usually write the planet off, flee into orbit, and declare Exterminatus. Oh...but the stupid prick we were stuck with.
He wanted to fight to the last man, to make a suicide charge for the Hive Tyrant, because he had a family estate on that planet and he wasn't sacrificing it. Even though the Tyranids would've grown stronger from our futile struggle and taken the rest of the system. Nearly all of his commanders refused and abandoned the planet, and the Raven Guard were nice enough to provide a cyclonic torpedo to kill the Nids.
Little brat was furious, killed one of his commanders, and was about to keep going when an Inquisitor stepped in. No idea if the guy is still alive now. The Inquisitor dragged him off and he was never heard from again.
See where fucking pride gets you? Be prideful in stupid things that you won't get killed over, like the fact that you managed to somehow raise a kid in this hellhole, and the fact that you somehow managed to keep your family together. That they're all still with you, that you keep them safe and that they keep you safe, and that they make your life worth living.
…Sorry, I need to call it here. I gotta...need to…bye.