World's Worst X-COM Commander Part1World's Worst X-COM Commander Part 2World's Worst X-COM Commander Part 3 After waiting an excruciatingly long five days I welcome my new recruits to the base. I quickly forget their old names and welcome Fist Rockbone, Stump Beefknob, Smash Lampjaw, Punch Rockgroin, and Buck Plankchest to the team.In another miracle, we finally have a soldier with a high enough rank to take advantage of officer training school. I do so to quickly bump the squad size from four to five. It's not long after doing so that we get a positive signal on a UFO. I send out a single interceptor and say a silent prayer. It's a close one, but the interceptor manages to bring the ship down.I've been doing this long enough to know that now we gotta go investigate the crash site. This ship is a little bigger than the last one and houses these alien/cyborg monstrosities that want nothing more than to destroy the soldiers where they stand. I beg for the pilot to take off and leave the strike team behind. The pilot recites some jargon about orders at which point I remind him that I am the commander and I command him to leave.Everything gets a little fuzzy after that. I'm told I slipped and banged my head. I certainly have a large bump on the back if it. Anyway, I hear later that the strike team managed to take the nightmare monsters down. At one point, Lampjaw, one of the new recruits got overextended. She was out ahead, all by herself when she fell within range of two sectoids. I'm told that Squaddie Drinklots thought she was all but lost when he remembered that he had a smoke grenade. He was just close enough to lob the grenade between Lampjaw and the sectoids, obscuring their view and causing their shots to miss.Lampjaw did not hesitate to lob her frag grenade at the sectoids which made quick but messy work of them. I'm told the rest of the mission was pretty standard. The soldiers made their way carefully through the ship, taking out any X-rays that were still there. Another alien RoboCop was there but he didn't last too long. There were a few injuries but nothing major.I remember thinking to myself that we must be getting the hang of this whole anti-alien strikeforce thing. In retrospect, this feeling that I was experiencing can best be described as hubris. Not more than a few days after returning, we're called to a site of alien abductions. The mission is predicted to be "difficult". I find every mission difficult so this has got me particularly worried.  I choose my mission and carefully select my squad. I briefly consider personalizing the squads outfits but decide against it at the last minute. We take off into the sky on our way to operation Silent Chant. To be honest, I can't even remember where we were. Everything is beginning to run together.It was another urban setting with a fast food building. My squad members take a step forward only to find aliens boiling out of every corner. We're vastly outnumbered. There are floaters everywhere. They must be able to smell fear because they go berserk.I instruct the members of the strike team to take cover, but the X-rays, they got laser guns.  Walls and defense structures don't stand up too well to lasers.  Before I know it, everyone is exposed and taking hits.We start to whittle-down the extraterrestrials but it just isn't enough. Outnumbered as we are, the few that we manage to take out barely makes a dent into their reserves. Their retaliation is devastating.And then, Bold Bigflank gets herself into a really tight spot. In the days that have followed, I've wracked my brain trying to figure-out if I could have predicted this.I replay the events over and over in my mind. I put her there. It's my fault. Hopelessly outgunned, and in the sights of four bloodthirsty monsters, Squaddie Bold Bigflank took a nasty shot and went down. She was dead even before she hit the ground.I took a moment, just a few seconds, to acknowledge the loss and reassess the situation. Then I give permission to Squaddie Fridge Largemeat to use her rocket launcher.She unslings the tube, aims, and fires. He efforts are rewarded with the utter annihilation of two floaters. Another of my squad members gets a shot of on the sectoid providing a telepathic link to another, killing both in the process. Squaddie Drinklots rushes forward, managing to take out the last X-ray while crouched over the body of  Bold Bigflank.We return to the base, utterly devastated by the loss. There is a subdued feeling around the base now, like everyone is walking on eggshells. We knew the situation was serious before, but now, now things are different. As if I don't have enough dealing with the loss of a soldiers and falling morale, now, we're in danger of losing India and Japan due to high panic. Hopefully, we'll be able to get the satellite uplink built and the satellites launched to help those guys calm down. I suppose what bothers me most, more than everything else, is that until she died, I had no idea who Bold Bigflank was. Sometimes, at night, when everyome's asleep and things quiet down, I walk down to the memorial wall and sit there in silence.I can't help but wonder, "How many more names will be on this list before this is all over?"