“Welcome to duty.”

He knew the words, timed them exactly on the split second and mimicked them along with the determined female voice. The tune began to play in his mind before he heard it on the headset. He logged into his account and waited. Michael was most impatient during the few seconds that it took for the connection to register his account. Then finally, he closed the promo window, and clicked multiplayer. The list of servers loaded, as he watched the counter run up into the hundreds, over five hundred, just over a thousand global servers, running Battle Field 2. He looked for his favority map called Strike at Karkland and looked for the low pings and high number of players. He picked the *]V[* clan server, the screen switched and Strike at Karkland map started loading while the white bar slowly progressed. It would take a minute or two before the map would be loaded and his account information was verified. These were the longest minutes of the day, he was eager to play, eager to report to duty.

Michael’s nickname was SntFrncs911, his score wasn’t very outstanding, and not surprisingly he never had risen above the rank of lance-corporal, despite for the fact that he had been playing Battle Field 2 for well over two years now. He had received a purple heart fairly early on once and quite honestly he should have been rewarded one more than once. But despite this, SntFrncs911 was an extremely skilled player, and to be honest, there were only few players as well able to execute their tasks on the battle field as Michael was.

He always choose only one role, that of a medic, although when he had just started playing he would sometimes choose the role of anti-tank fighter. The big advantage of picking the anti-tank role, he reasoned, was that when you right-clicked your mouse and zoomed in on a target with your Predator SRAW for instance, that your opponent would be alarmed of being locked in. While he patiently kept them locked in, most often they would race backward in their M1A2 tank or LAV-25 vehicle until the red square and alarm would disappear again, only to move cautiously ahead next time. The effect was Michael argued that of appeasing the battle, holding up and postponing the confrontation, and at the bottom-line, the game would last longer, but with fewer clashes. He never actually triggered the weapon, except once in the beginning when he came under fire and accidentally hit his mouse button, but luckily no one got hurt. The projectile missed the target although be it barely. But this strategy and rationalization would not always be true, sometimes for instance it would advance the vanguard, but making the actual assault more deadly. So he started doubting the anti-tank role and abandoned it ultimately.

So Michael switched to the role of medic eventually and for the last year this was the only role he had played any longer. Being a medic had turned out to be really terribly fulfilling. You had to risk your own life in the heat of battle, your courage was tested and in contrast to the more cowardly sniper with his M24 or the nervous assault with his M203, both of which you could shoot from quite a far and safe distance, you had to get as close to the dead or wounded as could be, literally you had to be within reach of the patient. For Michael, the greatest moment of the game, more rewarding and exciting than any other, was the moment that you would revive a killed brother in arms with the defibrillator that he as SntFrncs911 had at hand. The moment that bullets were flying and you would at the cost of a hit resurrected one of your fellow men, while you hollowed out at a hit and a crescent lighted up around you as a red neon halo was simply priceless. This is what SntFrncs911 played for.