A Field Guide

Track Em, Find Em, Kill Em

A field guide dedicated to the destruction of The Expendables, achieved by following the first and most important rule of combat.

“Kill First.”

Jean Vilain
Isometric 3D render of a dark tactical operations room with teal-lit screens and stacked weapon crates on a charcoal floor

Field Manual

The Guide, Section by Section

Every chapter of the field guide is filed under its own heading. Start with the team, work outward to the missions, then drill down into the craft that keeps everyone breathing.

Mission Briefings

Stonebanks and Ross form the EXPENDABLES as a special black-ops team, sent on missions by the CIA too dangerous for any other team.

Open briefings

Field Triage

Survival and medical protocols for black-ops environments, and maintaining operational readiness under fire.

Open triage

Survival Tactics

Strategies for enduring long-term deployments and adapting to hostile terrain and enemy tactics.

Open survival

Combat Tracking

Surveillance techniques for black-ops teams, identifying and following high-priority targets.

Open tracking

The Expendables Team

Profiles of Barney Ross, Conrad Stonebanks, Doc, Church and Jean Vilain — the roster of the field guide.

Open team profiles

Rule of Engagement

Chokehold

There is an Unholy Trinity of close quarters combat. Three laws, learned once and carried into every room entered in the dark.

  1. 1 — This is The FatherKnow you will win no matter what.
  2. 2 — This is The SonKnow the body’s Kill Points.
  3. 3 — This is The Holy ShitPrecisely strike them with a fluid, powerful motion that transmits the hit’s energy and delivers maximum damage.

Read the full close quarters breakdown in Close Quarters Combat, and pair it with the heavy firepower notes in Artillery & Weapons.

Roster

Who Is In The Expendables

Five names carry most of the field guide’s pages. Their files sit side by side, because the team is only as strong as the least predictable member of it.

Character profiles held in the field guide
NameFiled note
Barney RossA long list of missions with the US Army. Trained in field and air strikes.
Conrad StonebanksField artillery and weapons training in the Australian Special Forces.
DocFresh out of the clink, master of knives.
ChurchPart of the team that carries the missions out.
Jean VilainAntagonist. His rule of combat: Kill First.

Open the full team profiles for the complete files.

Threat Assessment

Neutralize The High-Value Targets

The work is straightforward to describe and hard to survive: track them, find them, kill them. Every target on the list is profiled first — movements, habits, blind spots, and the terrain that gives them away. Antagonists like Jean Vilain are the reason the guide exists; profiling them is the whole job.

Threat work feeds directly into the rest of the manual. Threat Assessment sets the target list, Combat Tracking covers surveillance techniques and following high-priority targets, and Traps & Ambushes covers setting ambushes for enemy forces while defending against improvised explosive devices and traps.

Mission tempo has been running since the early days of the guide: posts dated 06/24, 06/27 and 07/11 carried the #EX3 tag, and the 08/30 posts were filed under The Expendables 2. Follow @expendables2 for the current feed.

This site is a field guide to the destruction of The Expendables, assembled as a tribute to the muscle-and-metal spirit of the franchise's first and most important rule of combat: kill first. Rather than a plot summary, it works like a dossier, filing characters, missions, weapons, and moments into clearly marked sections so readers can move through the material at their own pace and drill into whatever catches their attention.

The team roster is the heart of the guide, and the introduction sets the tone with a stark maxim borrowed from the film's rhetoric. Each member gets a briefing covering background, temperament, and the particular skills that make them valuable in a firefight. The writing leans into the heightened, pulp-driven voice of the series while keeping the profiles readable and grounded in the tone of an armed forces training document.

Mission briefings occupy the middle of the guide, following the crew through the escalating set pieces that define the trilogy's action. From reconnaissance and surveillance work to close-quarters engagements and aerial strikes, each operation is broken down with the vocabulary of tactical planning. The effect is part guidebook, part love letter, treating every firefight and every improbable escape as something worth studying closely.

A dedicated section covers the arsenal, cataloguing the blades, sidearms, rifles, and heavy ordnance that populate the franchise's armories. The entries describe how each piece of hardware fits into the choreography of a scene, and how the team leans on its specialist weaponsmiths for the tricky work. Weapons training, silent handling, and close-quarters knife work all receive their own treatment here.

There is also a chapter on survival and triage, because in this world the wounded do not simply lie down. Field medicine, extraction procedures, and the grim arithmetic of who does what when the plan falls apart are treated with the same seriousness as the firefights themselves. It is a grim but honest corner of the guide, one that respects the stakes the films pretend are lower than they are.

Archival footage anchors the experience, offering readers a place to watch the action rather than only read about it. Curated clips and flashback material sit alongside a media section, and the page encourages visitors to keep following the ongoing coverage of the franchise. Sharing tools for reblogging and commentary let readers spread the guide around, which fits a project built on enthusiasm for the source material.

Interleaved through the guide are pull quotes drawn from the films, set against generous whitespace so they land as punctuation rather than decoration. A thin accent rule marks each quotation, and the surrounding layout stays airy and editorial, letting a single column of text carry the rhythm. The dark palette and restrained styling keep the emphasis on words and images instead of interface chrome.

Read as a whole, the guide aims at fans who want to go a level deeper than the cinema, offering background, structure, and appreciation in one place. The tone balances reverence for the franchise's violence with genuine affection for its camaraderie, the strange family of specialists who ride together into increasingly impossible situations. Come for the kill count, stay for the team dynamics.