Although he would never tell Mal, and would only hint at it to Zoë, Wash had been in the war. He'd never seen hand to hand ground combat like they had, but as a pilot, he'd seen his share of the horrors of war.
He stayed out of the war at first, working on a freighter that ferried agricultural supplies out to the border planets. It was easy enough to forget about the war. The struggles the settlers faced were the same as always: sickness, draught, crop failure…Wash could understand that. The war didn't affect people like him.
That all changed when he returned to the family homestead on Hera for New Year. Two of his cousins had been killed, another was recuperating in a military hospital somewhere, and three more were deployed on active duty. His uncle had turned his highly successful fleet of cargo ships into a refugee convoy.
Wash was stunned. The war had found him after all. The dinner table was uncharacteristically quiet that year. The next day, Wash quit his job and went back to work for his uncle.
Owen Washbourne was the father Wash had never had. Wash's father had been killed shortly after Wash was born, and all that Wash had was a single capture of a mustachioed man waving with an idiotic grin on his face.
Like his younger brother, Owen had married into the Hoban family, and they were a close-knit group. When Wash's mother's lungs went bad, his aunt and uncle took him in without any hesitations. Wash divided his early years between visits to the rest home where his mother stayed and haunting the corridors of his uncle's ship, the Lucky River. That was where Wash learned to fly.
When Wash came back, Owen gave him a small freighter from his shipping fleet and a week's worth of supplies. "There's a small colony of settlers caught in between a rock and a hard place on Saint Alban's. See if you can't get them out."
Wash managed to fly into the occupied territory undetected, and spirit away the colonists whose water supply had been cut off by a vengeful Alliance general, and had almost left orbit when the Alliance finally picked him up on the radar. He managed to shake off the pursuit long enough to get the passengers unloaded onto a sympathetic Skyplex before the Alliance arrested him.
Wash was sentenced without trial, accused of aiding and abetting enemy combatants, and sent to the detention camps on XXXX. There, he teamed up with a young corporal from Shadow and they spent several months entertaining their fellow prisoners with shadow puppets and juggling.
Then the corporal was executed, and Wash was taken to meet Adelai Niska. The torture expert had free run of the prisoners detained here, and Wash was terrified of him. He had seen what this man could do.
"You are a funny man, no?" Niska questioned in a friendly manner, pacing around his desk. Wash, handcuffed to a chair, remained silent. "You like to make people laugh." He came to a rest in front of Wash and leaned back on his desk.
Wash cleared his throat and attempted a response. "I'm afraid I'll lose my charm if I don't practice." He tried to smile.
Niska smiled, a gesture that only made Wash more worried. "We are not so different, you and I." He leaned in. "We are both artists." Without warning, a knife flashed out of nowhere and buried itself in Wash's collarbone. Wash screamed. "Like you, I need my practice."
He prepared for another strike, as an Alliance colonel burst in. "Mister Niska! The Independents are holding at Serenity Valley! High command requests your immediate presence!" Niska swore in Russian and rushed to grab his things. "This is not over, funny man."
The next day, when soldiers came to Wash's prison block, he knew it was all over. He was cleaned up, and brought into a large clean office that Wash could only suppose belonged to the director. His Aunt Ruth was there. When she saw him, she burst into tears.
It had taken them six months to find him. The Alliance had fiercely denied the existence of political prisoners, and had only recanted in the last month or so after newsfeed from one of the camps was smuggled out and broadcast throughout the cortex. After that, it had been a long trek through miles of red tape. But his family had been persistent. And Wash was set free.
In the relative safety of the tiny commuter ship, Aunt Ruth explained the situation. The Alliance and the Independents were deadlocked in the Serenity Valley on Hera, a mere ten miles from the Hoban family homestead. It had been utterly destroyed by an Alliance offensive last week. "It's the three of us left now." She tearfully told Wash. Then she gave him a miracle, somehow she had managed to save his dinosaurs from the bridge of the seized ship.
Wash spent a week in the medical wing of the Lucky River recovering from the dual shock of the camp and the destruction of his home. Then he was back on duty, flying as many as a dozen shuttle missions a day down to the surface of Hera, dropping supplies, evacuating refugees.
In the midst of it all, he began to regain his sense of humor. He would prove to that bastard Niska that they were nothing alike.
The moment the Independents surrendered, Wash and his uncle were down on the surface, ready to get the remaining Independents to medical attention. It was chaos on the surface. Wash could hardly recognize the valley where he'd gone to fairs as a child. And the soldiers of both sides had a deadened, haunted look about them that Wash would never forget.
It was decided that the most grievously injured patients would go aboard the Lucky River, which had better medical facilities and a faster engine. The rest would go aboard Wash's smaller freighter, Jolene. He was helping a soldier with a missing hand into the hatch of the Jolene when he overheard a conversation.
"Zoë, you need medical attention. Get on that other freighter."
"I'm not leaving, sir."
"Zoë, get on that freighter!"
"Not if you don't, sir."
Wash lost track of the two for a moment, only to see them board his freighter moments later and sit down in the back. Years later, Malcolm Reynolds and Zoë Alleyne would seem familiar to him, but he would not remember why.
As they left Hera's orbit, an Alliance ship broke treaty agreements and fired on the Lucky River. Wash and the soldiers on his ship could only look on in horror as the Lucky River was incinerated.
The next day, Wash packed up his dinosaurs, sold the Jolene, and plunged back into the workforce. He managed to block out those months from his memories, and threw his entire energy into becoming the best pilot in the 'verse. "I am a leaf on the wind, Uncle Owen, watch me soar."