Greetings!

geophf here. My squat-mates call me 'Buck.'

I'm an ODST. Sure, the Spartans get all the press and all the glory — it sure sounds like they are the only ones fighting in this war! — but when it comes to getting all the dirty work done?

Well there are the marines for most of the ops, but black ops? tough ops?

ODST geophf, getting it done with the rest of his squad, at your service, sir.

Just point to where the trouble is on the planet, and we'll drop right in from orbit, and your troubles? Well, they'll be ... 'handled.'

Also a bit of a writer.

What? Why are you looking at me with that funny face? Sure I'm a marine, meaning I'm tough as nails. Hell, tougher: I eat nails for breakfast, for the iron content. When they say, 'bite the bullet, geophf,' I take them literally.

I pity the bullet.

I'm ODST-tough. That doesn't mean I'm stupid, nor illiterate, as some hoity toities who put on airs seem to think.

Besides, where does real literature that means anything come from?

That's right, the soldiers. We've written poetry, from both sides of the philosopher's (thinking) stone, and we've been written about since writing existed. What did Homer write about? Soldiers. Battles. Real stuff.

So, call me Aeschylus. That fits: a man footnoted in history as a writer but moreso as a participant in the war that threatened all civilization.

I am a soldier in the great Human-Covenant war, and I'm also a writer.

And what does a soldier do? He fights.

And what does a writer do? He writes.

Here's not a story about me, but a story, and it turns out to be, like me, a footnoted one, but an important one, lost to history.

Well, here is that bit of history.