Extracts from David Hale's notebook

[Jihadjoe]

The following passage has been heavily edited due to file classification issues. However this was writen at the very height of the Rheinland/Liberty war, shortly after the Westfalen was captured by the Liberty Navy. One can presume that a good number of men or women under Hale's command had perished in the operation. Perhaps men and women he knew personally, or had commanded in the field himself.

Letters - 818 AS

There is someone who I recently met, a friend, who gave me a new perspective on this rather unfortunate element of my work. The loss of life in war is regretable, always, and something I find hard to reconcile with my own self image of being a protector. However I understand, as do most who join the Navy, that loss of life is unavoidable in defense of Liberty's people and values, or in defense of the rights of people outside Liberty. That intellectual position is what allows people such as myself to deal with the fact that through my actions many many people die on both sides of this conflict.

It is also deeply flawed. A trick you play on yourself to distance yourself from the issues it presents.

Any commanding officer will understand the trouble with writing 'the letters'. You tell the family that their son, daughter, wife, husband, brother, sister, mother, father, uncle or friend, died a hero in the service of his nation. That they fought bravely to the end and they sacrificed themselves so that others might live a free life. You lie.

Every soldier who has fought knows that in a battle you don't fight for an ideal, a flag, 'king and country' as the Bretonians might put it... You fight for your life. Nothing more. Those who die in battle don't die a heroic death. They die scared and lonely and thinking of their family, and they die knowing that their life was simply one in many. The rhetoric we use about defending rights, Liberty, an ideal and so on. That has no place in battle.

Each one of those letters is painful to write. You know there are no words that will help someone come to terms with the loss of a loved one, and nothing you can say which will bring them back to those that loved them. When I watched my brother's wife and my niece crying for the loss of Daniel, I realised this.

This short passage of writing seems extremely reactionary to the situation. With casualties high on both sides of the war, Hale is often quoted as regarding himself as failing in his duty to protect those under his command.

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