Note: The sequel to this story is going to be a multi-chapter piece that will take me a while to finish. So I've posted the introduction and full first chapter as a sequel! Go check it out! Below, you'll find the Introduction.
Reporting Life From Chorus
Five years after the Reds and Blues returned from the disastrous attempt to rescue Church, they've made progress building new lives. But they're all keenly aware of the last remaining hole in their lives: the still broken relationship between Grif and Simmons. But perhaps it's finally time to for this final wound to heal.
Excerpt from Khloe Goodnight's new biography on Captain Dexter Grif, "The Griffin: Herald of Courage and Bravery".
The United World of Chorus is a pretty popular beat for reporters these days. Five years removed from the end of its bitter civil war and the capture of the Staff of Charon , it's worked hard to rebuild. For a journalist, it has a heady mix of local color, excellent food, and the kind of stories of terror, heroism, and self-sacrifice that break hearts and win awards.
Unsurprisingly, it's also the backdrop for profiles of some of the most notorious individuals to emerge from the Great War - the soldiers of Project Freelancer. Erick Rottenburg and Dylan Andrews's three book Freelancers series is unquestionably the definitive work on the ill-fated Project and its agents. Get Your Hard On by Eduardo Falencki is an entertaining and saucy look at the life of Captain Franklin Delano Donut, and who can forget Elena Wood's masterful Red vs. Blue: The Soldiers Behind the Simulation ?
And yet, despite countless news interviews, Special Reports, and a few movie adaptations (of varying degrees of accuracy), there isn't a historian or reporter alive who wasn't painfully aware of the hole in the different tellings of Project Freelancer and the end of the Chorus Civil War: the story of Captain Dexter Grif.
The photo that accompanied the incomparable Dylan Andrews's original story that brought the Reds and Blues to the attention of the galaxy, Colorful Space Marines Stop Corruption (Interstellar Daily), perfectly summarizes Captain Grif's attitude towards the press. By which I mean, he's clearly wholly unimpressed and uninterested in every bit of the attention being paid to him and the other soldiers, simulation and otherwise. You can't look at that picture and not think that he would have stepped out of the frame if he thought he could get away with it.
As a result, when my agent called and asked if I would be interesting in taking a swing at writing a biography of this notoriously private and tetchy individual, I have to admit, I had my apprehensions. It's also a sign of how desperate the publisher was to finally get Captain Grif's story that they made a point to not tell me how many other journalists had tried to interview him and failed until after I'd signed the contract.
But signed I had, so with my book advance in hand, I packed my bags and booked the next flight to Chorus.
In the end, I spent two years on that planet. Two years ricocheting from city to city like a ping pong ball as I followed the threads of different stories; two years of writing and rewriting and rewriting again the same stories because there was always just one more layer to it; and two years slowly growing closer to Captain Grif and his family.
I am incredibly humbled that Captain Grif eventually opened up to me as much as he did. The story of his life, contained in this volume, is without question a story of a man who has spent most of his life surviving incredible hardship without ever losing his fundamental desire to protect the people he cares about.
Any part of his life, from his childhood in Honolulu, surviving the fall of the colony world Aurelia, his time as a soldier in Project Freelancer, to fighting in the war on Chorus, has enough in it for half a dozen documentaries. When you put them all together, you find yourself looking at one of those rare people in any generation who plant their feet and refuse to be moved when an entire galaxy takes a swing at them.
In medieval times, the griffin was used in heraldry to represent courage and bravery. A mythical creature with the body of a lion and the head of an eagle, the king of the beasts and birds respectively, I can think of no better symbol for Captain Dexter Grif.
Thank you, everyone, who helped me learn about and tell this story. The contributions of the Reds and Blues, the former agents of Project Freelancers, and the many citizens of Chorus whose lives intersected with Captain Grif's made it possible to find those hidden layers and moments where one man stared hard into the face of danger and refused to flinch.
Khloe Goodnight