The scope of the galaxy does little to hide the atrocities within it. I admit, I didn't buy into the myth of the reapers until it was too late, I figured it was some bizarre conspiracy for the humans to seize more power on the citadel. I believed that until the day my homeworld burned with the fires of their cannons.
Watching your friends and family being crushed, incinerated and devoured is a vicious way of recognizing your mistakes.
The war itself is a blur. How I survived, I still don't know. I remember fleeing Palaven, rallying some soldiers whose cruiser had somehow survived a crash landing. We got off planet in a half-finished freighter 'liberated' from a military dry-dock.
We joined up with the fleet in the defence of Menae just long enough to get shot down. I was told latter by the general that rescued us that I was a hero. That I had manage to save hundreds of civilian's lives by holding that flank. I didn't see my actions as heroic, hell, if I had seen a chance to run, I would've taken it.
All my military training, all of command's talk of the insurmountable will of the Turian race falls to pieces when you're face to face with something as monstrous as a reaper. All that remains is the need to survive.
And I'm damn good at that.
I do remember the evacuation of Menae clearly, if only because of how much of a cluster-fuck the whole thing turned into. After Vakarian and Shepard left with the general, what little fight we had mustered together fell apart. Almost all of the civilians we had gotten off of Palaven died when a group of cannibals and husks broke through our defences. I try not to remember their screams.
If nothing else, it cleared up space in the shuttles for us to get out of the system.
I was lucky, in that regard. My biotics had made me a priority during the evacuation. I don't want to think of how many people died because I was given that precedence.
We got to the Citadel, where I was given a command of my own at the head of a cruiser salvaged from a colonial junkyard. I was credited with two reaper kills during my position as captain of the Straticus. We were among a rare few to kill a reaper at all, but it still seemed pointless when their where a thousand others to take their place.
The Straticus was destroyed during Cerberus' attack on the Citadel. My survival was little more than luck, and I hunkered down in one of the hangers with the three members of my crew that lived. I didn't know their names when they died, and I haven't bothered to check since.
Apparently the slaughter was seen as heroic by a few people in high places, and I was put forward for a position as a Spectre. I didn't learn until latter that my position was little more than an effort to bolster their dwindling numbers, and I was chosen because I was already on the Citadel.
This war may have been won, but the scars its left won't be gone for a long, long while. My hometown on Palaven is gone now, replaced by the hollowed corpse of the reaper that destroyed it. The walls and fortifications of the major cities helped, but compared to the strength of the reapers, they were minor obstacles. In mere days, the proud and mighty Turian fleet was reduced to a small margin of what it once was, and the men and women that served it are now scattered across the galaxy with little to unite them.
Thessia hasn't seen a day of sun through the clouds of ash that encircle the planet, the gorgeous skyline of the endless cities reduced to rubble. Currently, only a few of the Matriarchs in Asari space are known to have survived, and the lack of leadership has made them prime targets for the newly liberated pirate bands.
Batarians are all but gone from the galactic theatre, with only a single, small group of them taking shelter on an abandoned colony. As of yet, they are unsure if they have the genetic diversity required to survive more than another few generations.
Tuchanka was already a ball of radioactive rubble, but there too, the damage inflicted by the reapers can be seen, and the losses inflicted on their populace have been so great it will be decades before any population growth can, if it ever will, be seen.
Earth is by far the worst though. What little information the resistance managed to pass on to the Alliance did little to describe the horrors inflicted upon the populace of the planet, and it was only after weeks of searching that the scope of the reaper's network of extermination became clear.
The most modest estimates put the death toll well into the trillions. The reconstruction process had indeed been rapid, but the genocide of so many is a stain not quickly removed.