As you may remember from my previous entry, the first few months of my career as a clone soldier were quite hectic and careless. I burnt through bodies faster than I could count, and I was laughing maniacally throughout it all, thinking I was truly immortal. Tibus Heth's attack on our enclaves knocked some sense to me, but I was still not really taking my whole career as seriously as I feel I should have.
Back then I was also fiercely loyal to the Gallente, and when the call to fight on the ground came, I instantly supported the Gallente. Sometimes I even joined the Caldari side to deliberately sabotage their efforts and drain their clone counts(I doubt I was the only one, but despite all this they still managed to emerge victorious on the ground, all the credit to them). I'll describe a certain contract I was deploying on the Caldari side for:
It was just like any other sabotage deployment I did for the Gallente. Spawn at the MCC, get some locus grenades and cook them until I disintegrated, I didn't even care what part of Caldari Prime I was deployed on, I was only ever going to be at the MCC. It was kind of humorous to me in a way, when I saw the other mercenaries looking at me funny as I exploded before they just kept moving, leaving me to my sabotaging.
As I stood there with a grenade ticking away in my hand, I had my thoughts wander off slightly. I don't remember what I was thinking exactly, but it went along the lines of:
"Heh, this will show those Caldari bastards their place! The stupid facist pigs deserve what they got for attacking our land. Why are they attacking anyway? Why is Caldari Prime part of Federation territory? What started this entire conflict?"
I kept going down that train of though, until the point where I just stopped killing myself. I jumped down from the MCC and hung around our base, watching the others fight and thinking why they were doing it. I glanced up at the sky, the wreck of the CN Shiigeru was crashing down into the ground as a massive ball of fire. I could see massive explosions and massive hulks being torn into pieces through the cracks in the cloudy sky.
Right as the battles was going to be finished, the wreck made contact with the planet, sending massive shockwaves kilometers from the impact point and causing massive amounts of damage. Our clones were cut off before we could feel or observe all the effects of the crash, and by the time I got into the next contract the dust had already settled, with the wreck of the Shiigeru burning in the horizon. The civilian casualties caused by the crash were countless.
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| This sight was quite shaking when you first saw it. |
After that contract, I spent the next few hours on my Neocom, browsing through various articles about the Caldari and Gallente history, what started their hostilities and war, and information about the reasons of this current conflict. What I discovered, shook me quite a bit. Looking back at my fierce loyalty to the Gallente, I felt kind of embarrassed, I was so ignorant of what was actually happening behind the conflict.
Throughout the rest of the conflict, I stopped picking sides. I just went for whichever side the contract system would put me in, and do my best on that side. When the firing ceased and Caldari emerged victorious of the ground battle, I went upon the mercenary message boards as usual. There was a thread about Caldari Prime made by a Gallente loyalist, congratulating other Gallente for successfully beating the fascists.
I promptly began writing how the entire conflict was foolish, for both Gallente and the Caldari, and I spent the next few hours debating about it on that thread. For once, I cared about the humanitarian aspect of the conflict, about the lives lost, about the senseless hatred between both sides, the endless amounts of ignorance both sides showed towards the other. Throughout the next few months, I started to be more aware of the state my homeworld Intaki was in, which eventually led me to this moment, as part of the Intaki Liberation Front.
The Battle for Caldari Prime was a long and painful conflict for both sides, with many unnecessary lives lost and massive damage done to the planet's atmosphere, but in the end a truce was made, which made peaceful relations between Caldari and Gallente possible after centuries of hatred and distrust. While cooperation is most likely something that will never realistically happen due to how distinctly different both empires are in politics and culture, peaceful coexistence is something that I would be looking forward to.
To those who were there on the ground and in the stars during the battle, both military and civilian, I wish you the best of luck. I truly hope coexistence can happen on the planet.
ཟར༴ཐ٦ཡཐ༴ འཤན༴བ བ༴ཏ༴མ༴ར٦ ٦ནད༴བ٦ ༴འ٦٦ད ན٦བ༴༴ٲ