Sometimes I think about Wash and how when he got Epsilon, he basically had Alpha in his head. And how maybe he was so insistent about Alpha coming along to finish things at Sidewinder because the Alpha he knew–the Alpha who still had his memories–would have wanted it. And Wash wanted to give him the vengeance he would have wanted if he’d remembered.
And sometimes, of what drove Wash so far and for so long to get that revenge, I wonder how much was Wash’s natural talent for grudges and how much was Alpha’s/Epsilon’s anger.
Even if the investigation promised to go anywhere (did it? I don’t recall seeing any proof), it’d still have no bearings on where Wash would be. Presumably chewed up and abandoned by the military industrial complex.
Wash was ready to die. He wanted to die doing what was right.
…What drives people to do anything, really? Much less revenge? Why do people want to live and breathe?
I may have gotten this wrong – i’m not familiar with Halo verse – PFL was a secret project of UNSC. UNSC was in cahoots with Hargrove. Wash was enlisted with the UNSC. This was the same organisation that – the book came later, yes – expelled him for punching an officer. Later, we see it on screen (as in, inside one of the screens) – the celebratory picture of the reds and blues + two freelancers – being congratulated by Hargrove. Wash was fully aware of how corrupt the institutions were. His paranoia was well-founded. And according to the plot, he turned out to be right.
That potential court-martial for punching a superior officer was for refusing to take his squad on a suicide run (or did he disobey orders & save them? I don’t have the book yet). Add in that Wash probably had a heaping helping of the AIs anxiety/paranoia on top of his already justified distrust, and you had a recipe for disaster if you were a corrupt asshole
I don’t have the book, either. But some kind members of the RVB community have scanned Wash’s interview. It’s floating around right now. (10% of a book, or 1 chapter, is fair use being reproduced – student).
The interview is actually pretty interesting. You see certain changes of attitude and behavior at certain KEY junctures during the conversation. None of the information in this interview contradicts what we already know about Wash; in fact, it supports it.
(Come to think of it, the “punching” bit is purely fanon, since I don’t see it in the interview explicitly. But it is clear that the records state that he injured a commanding officer – we do not know the extent and reading between the lines do not help in this instance – and the incident regarding Cecil Kyle was brought up, on purpose, by the counselor, to further make a point about Wash’s psychology and coerce him into signing onto the project. You can see a sharp demarcation between the point where he made an actual choice – to trust the Counselor and open up – and where the Counselor made use of it to manipulate him. There was also explicit reference towards the UNSC.)
Looking through it, the interesting bit about Agent Washington’s replies to Counselor is that he just flat out doesn’t trust authority at all, but he let his guard down because he was convinced that it was critical for the Project.
He’s constantly reading between the lines, trying to guard himself against what the Counselor is doing. And he is keenly aware of how authority works. You’ll probably be aware with the pattern in the later part of the interview if you read between the lines – common in dystopian literature and depiction of authoritarian coercion. (I could give a line by line analysis proving my interpretation, but I’d rather not.)
As a point of order, they didn’t expel him. They were going to court martial him–try him
before a military tribunal
on charges of, I assume, disobedience and assault on a superior
officer.
While exactly what Wash did to the staff sergeant is vague, honestly it doesn’t matter a whole lot (well, if he was using a weapon, it might increase the maximum penalty he was facing). In pretty much any military, any form of threat or attack upon a superior officer is grounds for a court martial. They never like that. It’s not a special sign of corruption, it’s just how they work. For example, in the US military, attack, threat or even wilful disobedience of a commanding officer are all lumped together under Article 90 in the code of military justice.
In the actual military, there’s a thing called ‘fragging’ (at least in the US, though I’m sure other militaries have their own names for it). This happens when the troops hate their commanding officer so much that they attempt to off him–traditionally by blowing him up with a hand grenade (hence the name), although it can also be ‘friendly fire’ or something else. Most often it’s basically because the troops think their CO is so bad at his job that he’s going to get them killed, and so in their minds it’s self-defense, but generally the law doesn’t see it that way. Not that we know whether Wash tried to actually kill the staff sergeant (probably not, or I imagine the guy would be dead). But what I’m saying is that there’s long precedent. What he did isn’t made-up, and you can read about the psychology that goes into such an action.
But this all makes the Counselor’s offer extra-insidious. Wash’s position was to either accept the invitation into Project Freelancer, regardless of what that might entail, or spend probably a very long time in military prison (or maybe even worse, depending on exactly what he did and if the UNSC still has the death penalty).
