Chapter 2: Looking Back from Retirement
Between fighting my first battle on Christophsis and my last on Endor I served first the Republic and then the Empire for a grand total of 25 years. Over that unpleasantly long period of service I fought, or at least ran from, droids, Geonosians, Talz, Sith, Jedi, rebels from every corner of the galaxy and countless other enemies with names I can't even pronounce, let alone spell. Of course my time in the army need not have ended with the destruction of the Death Star II and the route of our forces on Endor. I hear that there remains a bit of the Empire still out there somewhere, hanging on by its fingernails and calling itself the Imperial Remnant. I suppose there are some clone troopers (or I suppose nowadays I should say storm troopers) who would have tried to find their way to whatever is left of the high command and pledge them their allegiance. Well as far as I'm concerned the Empire can go and take a running jump!
I'm enjoying my hard earned retirement on Coruscant and have no intention of ever putting myself back in the firing line, not for love nor credits, and that is final. However although I no longer spend my days ducking blaster bolts and praying that a thermal detonator isn't about to land in my lap, I suppose I'm still a soldier at heart, whether I like it or not. You see when you've been a solider you never forget; all it takes is for me to hear the tramp of a droids metal footsteps and I'm running for the nearest doorway shouting "take cover, clankers incoming!" Of course it'll turn out to be a cleaner-droid or a security-bot, and I then have to carry on my way down the street, trying to ignore the amazed stares of the shocked civilians around me.
Often it only takes a tiny sound or phrase or sometimes even a smell and your back in the past, but in the case of Order 66, it was something rather more solid that brought back my memories of that most terrible of nights. A few days ago I was walking through the city centre, not really thinking about where my feet were taking me (anyone who knows Coruscant well may think me a fool for this, but when you wear a blaster pistol at your hip, even the most daring of pick-pockets tend to give you a wide birth) and suddenly I found myself standing in the great plaza in front of the Jedi Temple. The place was a hive of activity; with countless workmen, stonemasons, carpenters, scaffolders, architects, engineers, artists, load-lifters and groundcars, all of them working at cross-purposes and all of them getting in each other's way. The place is being rebuilt at last and will shortly house the new Jedi Order. As far I can see that pretty much just consists of young Master Luke Skywalker and a handful of others at the moment, so I imagine the place is going to be pretty quiet.
I however barely noticed the scarcely controller chaos around me, my eyes drawn irresistibly towards the Temple itself. It towered over all of us, like a great grey mountain, managing to appear quiet and serene even now, with the pandemonium raging around it like a storm tossed sea. I no doubt would have continued to stand where I was, starring at the old home of the Jedi like a damned tourist, but I was suddenly pulled roughly from the past and dumped unceremoniously back in the present. "Oi get out of it!" bellowed a thickset Bothan driving a load-lifter carrying a dozen large engraved bronze doors "you got a death wish or something?"
I quickly took a step back to avoiding being crushed by the vehicle, shouted a few well chosen insults after the driver and then took my leave. It wasn't that I'd never seen the place before, far from it, I must have entered the Temple at least a dozen times during the Clone Wars. I had not however set eyes on it since the night of Operation Knightfall, as it came to be known (old Palpatine must have been so pleased when he came up with that!). As I walked back to my apartment I could not shake the memories from my mind that had come flooding back; my fellow clones changed before by eyes into mindless killers, the strange echoes of blaster fire reverberating down the long marble corridors of the Temple, Skywalker reborn as Darth Vader and Rex, standing over Ashoka, as she sat huddled in a doorway.
Of course I also remember that night because I was almost decapitated or shot to ribbons any number of times, could very well have been lynched by my own men and had any number of other near death experiences. It's a strange thing really; over the years since Order 66 the number of those who survived that night, clones, Jedi and Temple staff, has steadily decreased. Some hunted down, others killed in battle and many more simply succumbing to old age. I doubt now whether there's more than a handful alive today that can say that they were there that night. I know two of them well, put I can't see either of them sitting down to write an account of it any time soon. So I suppose it falls to me to set down for prosperity the events of that dark night, as I saw them and as I came to understand them in later years. Once again I sit at the desk in my study, surrounded by the various trophies of battlefields far away and long ago, and wonder where to begin. I suppose I should start my tale in the mess hall of the 501st Legion, on a rather warm evening in midsummer, twenty five years ago...