John 117 - Master Chief
I got Cortana shortly after the battle of Black Harvest.
I remember the parties. I'm probably the only one who does, because I was the designated driver. I remember people getting plastered on Reach and being invited to pick Cortana up. Cortana back then was shy and said she would help me, I said it was an honor.
Her first time helping me was how to figure out how to get a serviceman's puke out of my armor, and then how to hold someone's hair so their puke wouldn't ruin their hair, and how to deal with alcohol poisoning. The next morning she helped me craft hangover cures for the rest of my unit, and then helped me get morning-after pills and how to fix the stuff damaged during an impromptu orgy. Because when you get a bunch of mixed gendered super athletic supersoldiers who don't get regular human norms and let them party, those things happen.
That was kind of my role in those early days, to be the dependable one, the sensible one. It made me less fun but someone had to do it. After the party, the propaganda just flooded everywhere. My unit was sent to Harvest to oversee the harvest, to oversee the looting of everything we could get our hands on.
It was a lot of ships, more than I had ever seen in my life. Ships that were more massive than anything I had ever seen before, their wrecks taken apart and towed. They were taken to Reach, taken to Earth, taken across the UNSC to be studied, salvaged, and at times shown off to the people back home to show them that the enemy was not invincible.
We needed that victory. Not just because a fleet that size would have destroyed us but to regain our confidence, to gain more tech to reverse engineer, and most of all to get some space to breathe because after a defeat like that the enemy would have to lick their wounds, even if only for a little while.
I read up on the propaganda. UNSC's propaganda tended to minimize the Front's contribution but I did notice that credit was given, even if downplayed. The semi hostility between the two nations went down quite a bit from there, I think in many ways the victory helped salvage some egos. While there was still talk even then about taking back lost land, at that point most people had more or less moved on.
So I read up on the propaganda from both sides, to get a feel for the Front.
Doctor Monk was their best scientist and I expected him to have a similar official reputation to Halsey. You know? smart, motherly, caring, and most of all trustworthy. The Front wasn't like that. The popular image of their doctor was one of him as almost a trickster figure, in some ways he seemed like almost a Loki-like figure. The front embraced the image of Monk as their resident mad scientist, a crazy genius who they kept leashed and woe to anyone stupid enough to make them angry enough to let go. After reading through this I had the thought that maybe Monk and Halsey had more in common than people wanted to admit.