When Chief of State Ponc Gavrisom signed the peace treaty with the Imperial Remnant, we all believed that the spectre of galaxy-spanning war was forever dead and gone. If the New Republic, and the Empire, could make peace after more than a decade of bitter, all-or-nothing-to-the-death combat, we believed, then how could any other war ever hope to engulf the galaxy?
Yet we prepared for it. We were a small, independent system surrounded by territory of the third-largest government the galaxy had ever known, and the General believed in being prepared. He would often say that "someone is always trying to start something, and you never really known who that someone is until the shooting starts." Even the treaty between the Republic and Empire could be broken, be it by a warmongering faction in the Senate (the sort of politicians that he would describe as "raised on bad holovids and never had to write a letter to someone else's sweetheart"), the Empire itself, or some malingering third party.
When asked how such a war could involve us, he would simply look the person in the eye and ask if the Golgan system was still gravitically anchored to the rest of the galaxy. When the person (assuming they understood the question) answered in the affirmative, he would just no and say "that's why it would involve us."
He always, I think, had an inkling that something was going to happen. Even as we honed ourselves in operations against pirates, slavers, and the occasional Imperial who didn't want to get in line with Pellaeon, he made his own plans, acting on a hunch and a drive that he could neither account for nor ignore. But even as he readied the Reserve Fleet, and even as he made sure our connection with the Aurora Force and the Kartuiin Sector government was secure, I don't think that even General DeLong really believed that a galaxy-wide war was coming.
We all believed that we would never see such a horror again.
Then the Vong came, and all that we believed turned to shadows and dust.
The General foresaw something; even without his ring the Force seemed to act on him, touching him and guiding him even if he could not touch it back. Yet, even now, looking back, I don't believe that even he saw what was coming.
No, I know he didn't see the whole of what the Vong invasion would bring; if he had, then there are so many things that he would have done differently, so many deaths and changes of fortune that he would have sold his very soul to prevent. Some say, in the ways he chose to fight, that he did sell his soul. I don't know about that.
I do know that his preparations let us pull off our own little miracle.
---
What else can I say about the Vong war? They came on us like a storm, a great shadow born upon beasts out of nightmares. They came in upon their vector prime, an onslaught that nearly brought us to ruin. For a time we fought over whether or not we should fight (as if the Vong left us any choice), and when we weren't doing that, we were throwing them the Jedi as an appeasement, hoping that Sguaru and Tu-scart would eat us last.
For the Vong would eat us all in the end. No matter what Tsavong Lah said at Duro, we all knew that the death or enslavement of all the native races of the galaxy was their strategy of conquest. We sat upon the worlds that they wanted, that their gods had given to them, and as such we had to go.
And meanwhile, as the galaxy argued over whether or not to fight, who should fight, who should lead the fight, whose fault it was that we were fighting in the first place, and which sector would get the lucrative defense contracts, the Vong cut a path of destruction from Belkadan to Coruscant and beyond.
But the day came when the new Alliance re-took Coruscant, and we finally awoke from the nightmare. Shimrra was dead. The Vong were defeated and broken. And as the battered remnants of our fleet left Coruscant behind and returned home, we realized something.
That beyond hope, beyond the fire and the flame, by strength of arms, by acquiescence, by chance, by providence, by the Force, by luck, by will, by helplessness, by courage, by cowardice, by mercy, by cruelty, by some special miracle, we had done it.
We had won again our right to live.
But what a price we paid.
-from the memoirs of Aral Contassia.
