Brigadier General Xela Atsoc
3 Imperial Centre: Imperial Army High Command
Suite 179
26868 G.C.
1026 R.R.
24 R.G.C.
1400 Hours Imperial Centre Time

I've known Durlock Acibor since there wasn't an RGC date at the top of this journal, and it's a wonder I've gotten where I am today because of it. All the drill sergeants and junior officers in the Galaxy tell you that the top command ranks are reserved for only the most fanatical soldiers, unfailingly loyal to every doctrine of the New Order. Sure, I buy most of it, I wouldn't have all the colorful boxes and shiny cylinders on my uniform if I didn't; but all the time I've spent, all the discussions I've had, and all the drunken rampages I've participated in with Dur taught me that one of the Emperor's doctrines is a bit faulty: there isn't a way in the universe that all humans are superior to aliens. No way. No how.

I'll tell you, there's plenty of piece-of-shit humans out there who aren't fit to wipe Durlock's boots, or even Hiska's for that matter. Maybe Rhykis though, sometimes I wonder if that guy has a soul. The Galaxy owes all of those guys a thousand times over, but they'll never know it because of the New Order's silly rules. Funny thing is that I can hear Dur's voice in my head right now, accent and all, telling me: "It's be'er off that way, Xela, I don' wanna be fendin' off fans with a stick left an' roight." Sometimes I wonder if he should be a General and I should be in his shoes, but then I start to hear his voice all over again telling me why things are fine just the way they are.

The chain of command is a fickle mistress. I get the orders from Imperial Army High Command, then I pass them along to Durlock, and finally he delivers them right to "the lads." When one looks at it that way, it's clear that our military efficiency is more like a complicated, deadly game where the purpose is to screw up the message; we're lucky that what started out as "Crush the Rebels" didn't turn into "Dust the pebbles.

It all goes back to the men and women all up and down the chain that makes it work so effectively. War is hell, sure, but it'd be a shitload worse if it wasn't for the devoted people who fight it. From Private Olaf Dowding, dug into a trench on Clak'dor VII all the way up to Emperor Palpatine himself, they all fight to make the Galaxy a better place. Without them, there would be nothing but darkness.

Some of my colleagues here at High Command don't see that. Several of them look at the soldiers on the battlefield as statistics, and believe in the hateful doctrine of "acceptable loss." All too often, I have to remind some of my fellow generals that there is no margin of "acceptable casualties" in this war, in any war. The only tolerable casualties are enemy casualties. Each of those men, who appear as nothing but blips on a battlefield map here on Coruscant, are lives with families, friends, and histories; personally, I want to send them all back to those things.

I think the reason for my confrontation with my colleagues here is that I'm the only one who has actually climbed the rank latter from bottom to top. All of my fellow generals here went right out of the university into the officer's corps, a bit of sucking up or generous "gifts" later and they find themselves in High Command. I signed on as a noncommissioned recruit back home on Chommel Minor and proved my way up the top. Not to speak poorly of all my peers here, men like General Wellington and Surface Marshall Tallard I truly admire, but most of the others just enrage me; sometimes I miss the good old days of eight men in a foxhole

I first met the blue fish in a situation just like that, back in the "good ol' days." It was long ago in that marvelous time, the year 1 RGC. Me and an all-human squad were part of a pretty sizable operation to subdue an open resistance to the New Order; the entire planet of Commenor wasn't taking kindly to the idea of an Empire. So all us humans were let off your typical Sentinel-Class Landing Craft in the middle of an open plain. Simple enough, right? Yeah. The instant the lander was out of sight, we got hit. We got hit hard.

What looked like a nice, quiet LZ turned into the very mouth of Hell. The quiet was replaced by a nightmarishly oppressive din of soldiers yelling, blasters firing, and grenades exploding. They had hidden themselves in the tall grass, about fifteen Rebel soldiers armed with E-WEB heavy repeating blasters. If you don't get the picture just from that, let me tell you that one E-WEB would've been more than enough to take us all out. It was me, 7 other completely green troopers, and a veteran sergeant; we didn't even get a lieutenant for that operation. But I can't really blame them, we weren't expecting a tough op.

Sure enough, though, we had a tough op. The others tried to fight, but I had my wits enough to know we were royally screwed. So I fought fire with fire, I dove to the ground and hid myself in the tall grass. With the Apocalypse itself happening around me, I started to crawl. I crawled for what seemed like ages, on and on into the tall grass; I couldn't see anyone or anything, which is a good sign. On a battlefield, if you can't see them, they probably can't see you.

A battle, like everything else in the physical universe, is bipolar. After the ear-bursting din of the battle, there is an eerie quiet. The quiet fell somewhere during my crawl, I honestly don't know when, but the din had been a good ways behind me. My comrades were dead; the entirety of my all-human squad was butchered by those Rebel E-WEBs.

Even so, I don't hold some sort of divine grudge against them. They were doing their jobs; I can't blame them for that. Hell, we had the same job to do; if they didn't do it to us, we would've done it to them. Of course, they hadn't completely finished their work; they had still missed one trooper. They had still missed Private Xela Atsoc.

And that little soldier kept on crawling. To this day, I still don't know what I expected to happen, I can't think of what I wanted to reach or accomplish with my crawling. When I finally reached the end of that trek, I thought it was the end of everything else. The tromping of boots and the pushing aside of tall grass ended my crawl-journey, and I expected to look up and see a Rebel trooper's rifle in my face. But when I did manage to pull my head up, dead tired as I was, what I saw surprised me twofold: not only was it a friendly, it was a blue Mon Calamari in a grey trooper's uniform and a sergeant's rank patch. The fish barked an order in his weirdly accented Basic and before my exhaustion-racked skull processed the situation, a Sullustan and an Aqualish pulled me to my feet and supported me with their arms. I had been picked up by an all-alien trooper squad.

Durlock probably saved my life all those years ago, though I can never know for sure. Still, the gratification I received that day, I don't think it's ever been equaled at any other point in my life. After I explained what had happened to me out on that beastly hot Commenor plain, the blue fish said one thing: "Aroight, let's go get even, lads."

And he did, we all did. I slept softly that night with two things in my head: the first was the sweet music of screaming Rebels, and the second was the fact that all the New Order's talk about alien inferiority was bunk; pure, grade-A political shit.