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Fox Gaden
Immortal Guides
4465
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Posted - 2014.10.03 19:10:00 -
[1] - Quote
I learned my combat style from those I fight, and those I fight with.
Gaden is not a name often heard in the war rooms throughout history. We have no long warrior tradition within my family. The Gadens have always focused on Research & Development, or Administration.
Renier Gaden, my motherGÇÖs brother, was the first Gaden to enter combat in recent memory, and he did not exactly choose that path. Renier had been quite content working as a shuttle test pilot, responsible for the mundane task of running new shuttles through their space trials. But when he was overcome by a fit of conscience and blew the whistle on some fairly flagrant safety violations caused by recent cost cutting measures, he lost his job and was ostracized by the company. They promised him that he would not find work in Caldari space, and for a while they put some effort into backing up that promise.
Renier was forced to leave Caldari space to find work, and as an exile he was forced to take whatever he could get. The one thing his previous employment had done for him was to give him the implants of a Pod Pilot, although they probably would have taken that away as well if they had managed to get their hands on him. -- I could write chapters on his adventures, but this is a tangent that I feel I have spent too much time on already. -- Suffice it to say that while Renier spent much effort on getting into Science and Industry, the circumstances and associations he found himself in during his exile always seemed to drag him into combat roles.
Renier, although a reluctant warrior, gained an appreciation for the strategy and challenge of going head to head with a worthy foe. In his visits he related this philosophy to my younger brother Crash and I. We learned from Renier that there was as much to learn in the art and science of conflict as there was in any other field of human culture. We, my brother and I, were inspired to become warriors ourselves, but we did not have the connections or financial backing to become Pod Pilots like our uncle. We did however have contacts within the R&D community, so when the Company began to experiment with developing immortal soldiers, I was able to get into the early trials. I was later able to arrange for Crash to receive the implants as well.
I got my implants as part of the R&D testing of a new line of implants. I had no military background or training. While so many of the Immortal Mercenaries of today originally got their implants because they were handpicked for the programs based on their extensive military training and experience, I was just a glorified lab rat. But I figured, hey, I was immortal, so I could afford to learn the hard way! Many companies did not check your credentials. If you could animate a clone they would stick a gun in your hand and dropped you through an artificial wormhole without further questions.
As it turned out, learning the hard way is not as fun as reading about someone elseGÇÖs adventures in on your data pad. In my first battle I died 7 times before I managed find some cover between some rocks and got out of the line of fire for a moment. That moment was short lived, as was I. It was an extremely traumatic experience. I had died in the Lab during testing of course, but measured were taking to insure the test subjects did not feel pain. In that first battle I experienced a phenomenal variety of pain. There are so many ways to die in battle, and it seemed like I was destined to sample them all.
But I am stubborn, and nothing builds my resolve like failure, so I kept at it. I worked at it until my life expectancy started to lengthen. I started to shoot back and occasional was giving credit for a kill assist in the after action reports. Sometime in that first week I got my first kill. I had gotten lost and separated from my unit and as I stumbled around a corner I saw two enemy soldiers, not 10m from me, focused on targets they were shooting at in the other direction. I took probably 3 full seconds to line up my Militia Assault Rifle before pulling the trigger. The second solder then turned around and exterminated me, but I died happy. I had gotten a kill!
(Continued)
Hand/Eye coordination cannot be taught. For everything else there is the Learning Coalition.
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Fox Gaden
Immortal Guides
4465
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Posted - 2014.10.03 19:10:00 -
[2] - Quote
I have a unique talent for figuring out how things work. Maybe it is due to my R&D background. It took a little while to learn the basics, as I had started from zero, but after a while I started to figure out how things worked. When I saw on some of the mercenary forms all the hate over Snipers, with even the SniperGÇÖs own team mates claiming that they were cowardly and did not contribute to wining battles, I thought that something did not add up. I was sure that tactically Snipers had a role to play in the success of a battle, and I eventually concluded that many would be Snipers must be doing it wrong. So I traded in my Assault Rifle for a Sniper Rifle and set about figuring out how a Sniper could be an effective contributor to a battle.
Of course being from an R&D background I wrote up my findings in a report. Honestly I did so as much to write down the things I needed to remind myself to do, as to teach anyone else. I was not a great Sniper, but I was good enough to see how it was done. I ended up publishing my findings in a guide, mostly to get feedback from other Snipers in order to validate my findings. To my surprise many experienced Snipers, some much more skilled than I, were very impressed with my guide, and it became the benchmark for Sniper training throughout the mercenary community.
My fist guide also landed me a position as Director of Education at the prestigious DUST University. Of course that was the early days of the University, when everyone involved was still trying to learn the strategies of immortal combat themselves, so there was not a lot of teaching happening at that point. Most to the prestige of DUST University at the time came from its direct affiliation with the well-established EVE University. So for the next five months I built up the training programs at DUST University, while continuing to work on teaching myself to fight. The role was really more administrative, so the fact that I could not hit the broad side of a barn did not seem to be an impediment, just as long as I found instructors to teach the courses who actually knew what they were doing.
I continued to experiment with different weapons systems, and continued to write guides to publish my findings. Eventually I left DUST University and teamed up with my uncle Renier to found Immortal Guides. There are several administrative and legal advantages to having a POD Pilot as the CEO of a Corporation, and I was happy to work with the man who had inspired me to follow this path. Besides, it was a chance for him to go legit. I also teamed up with other educators in the community around that time to form the Learning Coalition, which was a loose association of volunteers, groups, and Corporations dedicated to training new mercenaries.
After a year and a half of fighting through the trenches across New Eden, I have finally managed to train my body to do much of what my mind knows must be done, although I still consider myself only slightly above average as a fighter. The moto for the Learning Coalition is: GÇ£Hand eye coordination cannot be taught, for everything else there is the Learning Coalition!GÇ¥ Hand eye coordination just takes a massive amount of practice, and with only 18 months of practice I have a ways to go when competing with lifetime warriors, but I am getting there.
But back to the original point, which was to ask where I learned to fight. In one sense you could say I taught myself, but in another sense you could say that I learned from every member of every squad I have ever fought with, and have learned from every enemy who I have ever shot at, or been shot at by. I am constantly watching what people do and noting what works and what does not. When someone does something unexpected, I try to figure out why?
In a very real sense I am an Academic Soldier.
Hand/Eye coordination cannot be taught. For everything else there is the Learning Coalition.
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Fox Gaden
Immortal Guides
4469
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Posted - 2014.10.04 14:38:00 -
[3] - Quote
Reading through this thread I see there are a lot of hard cases with broken homes and misspent youth in here. I suppose that is to be expected. Mercenary groups throughout history have consisted primarily of hard cases from the streets, and military vets who know no other life.
I am neither of those things. To be frank, if it was not for the implants I would never have willingly become a solder. It is not that I am afraid to die. It is more that I would prefer to continue living.
Reading over the stories of other Caldari I realize that I did not mention my mandatory service training. Believe me, it was not much of an oversight. The idea of making every young person serve is fine in theory, but in reality not every young person it fit to serve, and the system unofficially adapts to that reality.
They had pegged me as someone destined to design new weapons, not weald them. My mandatory service training was simply going through the motions. My instructors did not expect me to ever see combat, and neither did I. I did not really pay too much attention. I learned to march and look good in a uniform but that was about all that they really insisted on. If I had any musical talent I am sure they would have put me in a marching band. As it was I fulfilled my mandatory service guarding things that no one was really interested in stealing anyway.
I had just completed my mandatory service when uncle Renier came to visit for the first time after his exile, telling me stories of his adventures fighting with and against pirates in Syndicate.
Of course the Company that drove him out took exception to RenierGÇÖs return, and they sent a number of large men to talk to him about it. Renier kindly extended to these men the hospitality of his crew, a crew he had picked up on freelance stations in Syndicate space. This induced the Company men to remain on their best behavior, but that obviously would not have been the end of it. Except that Renier had picked up some sensitive information relating to the CompanyGÇÖs operations when salvaging the remains of a cloaked industrial ship that had tried to slip through Syndicate space.
When Renier contacted Company management to discuss this information, they came to a mutual agreement that it would be best to stay out of each otherGÇÖs business. Renier had explained that there was no need for him or his associates to release this information to the competition, if the Company did not give them a reason. The Company concluded that continuing to take punitive action against Renier Gaden was no longer a financially sound course of action, so Renier was once more free to operate in Caldari space, as long has he took no further action against the Company.
So Renier was free to visit us, and on his visits he described his new perspective on conflict, explaining that battle was as much a mental endeavor as a physical. He was not the same man I had known as a child. He was confident and sure of himself. Facing death and rebirth had changed him, given him perspective. I, and my brother Crash, admired this, and we wanted to experience that sort of challenge ourselves, to pit our selves against a worthy opponent. I had harbored hopes of becoming a Pod Pilot like my uncle, but then I heard that my Company had landed a contract to design the next generation of cognitive interface implants used in the creation of Immortal Solders. Since I was already working in R&D, it was not hard to get myself transferred to the program, and volunteer as a test subject.
My younger brother Crash was just going into his mandatory service training when Renier first returned to inspire us with his stories, so Crash took his training far more seriously than I had and as a result he got a lot more out of it. Six months after my first battle as an Immortal Solder, I had developed enough connections that I was able to pull some strings to insure that Crash received implants as well. CrashGÇÖs first experience as an Immortal Solder was not as one sided as mine. He went in with some training, and gave almost as good as he got.
Hand/Eye coordination cannot be taught. For everything else there is the Learning Coalition.
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