At least once in every man's life, an event occurs which rattles him to the very foundation of his core. Some unfortunate souls, myself included, experience this phenomenon more than once: perhaps many times. Regardless, it is this moment that causes people to reconsider themselves, their lives, and their purposes, and results in the most fundamental change in all human existence.

My first such experience came with the loss of my biological parents. I can say with complete honesty that I remember nothing about them: Not their faces, not their voices, not their loving touch, and I have never felt guilty for that fact. Still, the deaths of these strangers caused the first change in me, an unconscious but wholly necessary shift toward independence that numbed me to the sin of theft and the sorrowful state of beggary in which I lived for so long. Then came the church, my life with the Father and the Sister who opened me to empathy and love that I had never known before and may never know again. From my experience with them I came to realize that a selfish, shameless, and cynical Duo Maxwell was not the man I wanted to be, so I adopted happiness and optimism in all situations, even those in which such flagrant cheerfulness seemed inappropriate. Only very rarely did the new me give way to the old.

And so it went until they died.

It would sound too self-pitying to suggest that my life has been filled with life-altering tragedies, but so, too, would it be a lie to suggest that my formative years were not shaped by a series of incredibly traumatic events. It took well into my adolescence, but once I managed to gain my footing in life, things settled for a time. Certainly, bumps in the road caused me great pause—my involvement in the One Year War and my budding (and subsequently ended) romantic relationship among those—but nothing since the Maxwell Church massacre has stopped me so dead in my tracks. Not until now. Not until M-204.

Having now watched the footage of the explosion I've come to understand that I may no longer be the person I thought I was. Perhaps I was never that man to begin with. Perhaps it was all a cleverly crafted and flawlessly executed lie grown so large that I myself had started to believe it. Prior to my viewing I had believed the words of my friends who said that the striking of the colonial core was pure accident, an unfortunate and deadly coincidence over which I had no control, not least of all because I was utterly out of my mind. Yet as I watched the events unfold on screen I understood—I remembered—that I had been in my right mind. For a brief and fleeting moment, I had been lucid and clear-minded enough to take aim at that massive warship knowing full well that the colony floated defenseless behind it, and I took the shot anyway.

There was no way I wouldn't have known the consequences of pulling the trigger. I've been too well trained to misjudge. Yet I must have been so focused on vengeance for the wrongs committed against me that I didn't care, and the result speaks for itself. I murdered thirty-seven million people in cold blood. At the very best, at the very most lenient, I am responsible for the negligent homicideof those millions of people. Yet I take no comfort in even considering that I may have connected on an oversight. I know that's a lie. I'm left to wonder exactly what I saw. Never in my life have I been so inattentive as to miss even a civilian spacecraft in my monitors. I could never imagine missing something as massive as a colony.

So now I ask: Who am I? What am I? How did I lose myself so completely? And when did my humanity escape me?

It must have been the moment I gave in to the Quell, the moment I relinquished the core of my emotions to a needle and a bottle and convinced myself that such was for the best. It was the path of least resistance; not only for me but also for those I loved and those whose companionship I valued. Immediately after waking from stasis I realized that the less stable I was, the less stable they became, and as my mania increased, so did theirs. What kind of person would it make me to willingly allow such a pattern to persist when the decision to correct it was well within my power and my rights? All I can say is that I'm sorry it took so long for me to rectify that terrible mistake.

In the numbered days remaining to me before my court martial I will need to give much thought to how I will proceed, both with the way I present myself and the way I interact with those around me. I hope never again to cause them such pain, even if it comes at the cost of my own liberty, even if it costs me my integrity. I can and I will change the man I am to ensure that such a tragedy as this never happens again. Until then, I can only hope to learn how to move on from the past.

-MSgt. Duo Maxwell