Day 0

Puking on the beach.
That's how I came to. No moment of wakefulness, just pure unadulterated heaving to wake me up. My head hurt, no hangover ever felt like this. I put my hand to the back of my head and pull it away. Blood, a lot of blood.  I put my hand back.  Jesus Christ, was that my skull?
I woke up again what I assume to be several hours later. The sun was going down when before it had been pretty high in the sky. Where's my watch? Wait, where the hell am I? Last thing I remember I was hiking in the hills around base. 
Oh, shit, nope, that's not the last thing I remember, I wish to hell it was.
Look around frantically, get on my feet and look around more. Pretty terrified now. About 50 meters away there's a white Toyota Hilux with a gun mounted in the back, just like the insurgents use. But this one was smoking and wasn't entirely white anymore, there was much black soot covering it, and three what appeared to be badly burned department store mannequins strewn about it. Do mannequins smell like burning pork chops?
Dodged a bullet there. Maybe literally. 
The last thing I really remember is hiking in the hills around base and having a bag pulled down around my head and something being yelled at me in Russian or whatever God awful language they spoke in this shit hole country. Then I remember just bits and pieces. 
Getting dragged and beaten, cruel laughter, a woman screaming as she was getting raped, a man crying for his mother. Getting pissed on. Getting the bag ripped off my head and there being a bright ass light and a camera and more Russainesse being shouted. 
I knew I was fucked. 
The insurgents were in the habit of nabbing any foreigner they could lay their hands on and asking for ransom and then killing the poor bastards anyway in a very public, painful, and gruesome way. I saw a video of a guy literally getting every bone in his body broken till he died. One by one, using a hammer and chisel in places. It was a 45 minute video. They made all us contractors watch it.  Just like the birthing video in High School health class, you know, to scare you into submission. We were not to, under any circumstances, go outside of base alone or not in convoy. 
Shit gets boring fast when you're on a dinky little Forward Operating Base (FOB) seeing the same 77 people everyday with internet that's total bullshit.  You get a little cabin fever. Anyway, rationalizing. 
I got "bagged", as the Jarheads called it. At this point the US high command wasn't even trying to find the baggers or bagees. Bigger fish to fry putting down the insurgency in the main hubs. 
Chernarus, or "some motherfucking nothing backwater Soviet shit storm sandwich", as the Marines put it had oil, or some shit. I don't know, I'm a diesel mechanic not some Political Science major. We were here because they had something we wanted, the current government was friendly to us, and there were people who wanted to change that. 
So here I was, in some stupid country I'd never heard of, getting paid a lot of money to sit on my ass and occasionally fix a shot up Hummer, and masturbate when the internet was working.
Now? Well now I'd gotten my golden fucking ticket and some Marine pilot had laid the hate on some insurgent assholes and saved my life. Where was my welcome wagon? Did Chernarus even have beaches? I was not in Kansas anymore, that was for damn sure.
I stood up again and looked around. There was a ribbon of highway running along the shore for as long as I could see. It looked to be a main thoroughfare, but no traffic. Oddly enough there was a burnt out bus about a half mile to the left. We must have kicked some ass right here to stop all the traffic on this busy of a highway. God damn my head hurt.
No houses or buildings anywhere to be seen. Guess I'll check out the bus. Walking's difficult, I'm hungry and thirsty like you wouldn't believe. Thinking sucks, is that a sign of dehydration?  Or maybe the skull cracking I got? God it's like I'm drunk. How long was I beaten and drugged? Take about a dozen more steps and puke again. This is going to be a long half mile. 
The sun had set by the time I got to the bus. It too smelt like burnt pork chops. What the hell was going on? This looked like a bus full of civilians. The bus looked like it had been heading west. 
Well, that was as good a direction as any. I had no idea where I was, I needed to find water and food, there should be some kind of city or town along the water. Outside the bus there was a small day pack that was somehow untouched by flame. These people weren't going to be missing it. Empty, of course. I'll take it anyway.
You never know when you're going to need to carry something....