Soldiers
Title: Soldiers
Rating: G (aka should be healthy for just about anyone.)
Fandom: Star Wars
Summary: Ahsoka Tano talks to Shekel Squad in the wake of Bardan Jusik’s row with the Jedi Council. Anakin learns that in some ways, Jedi and clone troopers really aren’t that different after all.
Warnings: A bit of Traviss!bashing and deliberately creating a different ethical paradigm.
-
Ahsoka Tano hadn’t really known Bardan Jusik.
He had been the Padawan of Master Zey, and a Padawan while she was still an youngling in the creche. He had been a Senior Padawan, and then Knighted long before she had been Anakin Skywalker’s apprentice.
But the Togruta girl remembered him - vaguely. He’d showed Leetha how to do the Gaussian slip-knot, only with the lightsaber. It was tricky, and Ahsoka couldn’t get the hang of that move, but Leetha was a Teevan, a humanoid far more flexible than a Togruta or a human. It was easy for her.
Master Skywalker spoke vaguely of Jusik’s public row with the Jedi Council over the clone troopers.
“Do you think he was right?” She asked him.
He paused, eyes going opaque and unreadable. It wasn’t so much his eyes, it was the way he looked through whatever his eyes met, as if he wasn’t there anymore. Sometimes, although perhaps it was her imagination, he even seemed to retreat away from the Force. Or he seemed to bring a sense of brooding static, crackling unhappiness into the Force.
Ahsoka could never reach him when he was this distant. It was odd sometimes, how her Master was two people at once - the brooding, distant, adult, and the Jedi who (according to a dry statement by Master Obi-Wan) needed an extra dose of maturity.
It was sudden. He was back there again, the sparks of his Force-presence flared again, the currents and circuitry flowing as if nothing had happened. Anakin shrugged. “I don’t know, Snips.” He said, using her nickname. “I really don’t know.”
She supposed that was an answer of sorts that indicated her Master really didn’t care about Jusik’s perspective. It didn’t matter.
But still, as she trudged off to her quarters, she wondered if she could just drop by the bunkrooms. Point probably had his own perspective on things.
-
Pinpoint, or Point, as his brothers called him for short, did not have any perspective on matters when nosy female Togruta Jedi apprentices woke him in the middle of a sleeping cycle for something that was decidedly not combat.
He snapped to awareness instantly, mind running through the quick checklist that had been drilled into him from an embryonic stage.
Where am I?
Safe.
Where is my weapon?
By my bed.
Where are my brothers?
Sleeping.
He focused immediately on the disruption, but did not groan. “You should know better than to wake a trooper so suddenly.” He said. It wasn’t a threat. It wasn’t a reprimand either. It was just a statement. “Some of the fighting-mad ones would shoot you before you could blink.”
The Togruta was not sorry.
“I am a Jedi.” She said, brushing aside his statement. Her hand unconsciously went to the hilt of her lightsaber.
Ah, whatever, Point decided. It was her neck.
“So what is it?” He asked. She was technically a commander, as a Jedi apprentice, but something suggested she wasn’t doing anything in a position of authority. Military discipline was one thing - being ordered by a teenage Togruta girl was another thing. It didn’t chafe. But he knew the orders came from General Skywalker. “The General wants us?”
“No.” She said. She had the grace to look a little sheepish. At least he thought she did. Togruta mannerisms were similar to human ones, he’d learned in xenobiology lectures. Those centered mainly on how best to kill or to interrogate different aliens. “You know about Bardan Jusik?"
Point snorted. “You think I know every Jedi? Oh wait, he’s the one on the HoloNet for making the ruckus about us troopers, isn’t he? What about him?”
“Do you…agree with him? Think he was right?”
“That it’s wrong for us to fight?” Point thought of spitting, but figured he shouldn’t be doing it in front of a Togruta girl. Even if she was a Jedi. He grabbed his blaster rifle - she hesitated, as if she thought he was going to shoot her. Instead, he started checking the components again. He’d reassembled it, but he may as well make sure it was in working condition. They would be arriving on-planet at 0500 hours, Coruscant Standard Time.
Take care of the equipment, and the equipment will take care of you. It was the common admonition they’d learned on Kamino, when they were given rusty blaster rifles, blaster rifles with worn out power cells, blaster rifles that had a faulty spring component, a trigger with too much friction…
“Jedi, do you think we care? He’s as much a fool as any. Too much time with some of the bleeding hearts in the civilians, and some of the messed up troopers. He’s just like that Ike Travis, was it? That HoloNet reporter?” He realised the butt-hinge plate wasn’t snapped into place properly, and made sure it slid in. Good.
She paused. Stared at him questioningly.
He took out the power cell, snapped it back in, checked the charge. He could hook it up to charge, he decided. It looked good enough earlier, but now, he suspected it would soon be out of charge when he went into combat.
“You think you’d give up on being a Jedi? Throw away that lightsaber and pick up a blaster and shoot things?”
“No!” She exclaimed at once, emphatically, hand going to cover that lightsaber of hers.
“Free will, and all that krevshit is for the HoloNet reporters, Jedi. We don’t care. Most of us - we wouldn’t pick another life, fighting with our brothers. What do you think we are? So many say we are human. Do you think the same?”
“Your genes are human.” She agreed. “Doesn’t that make you human?”
Tech laughed - he’d woken up sometime during their conversation, Point knew, and he’d noticed. “It’s that simple, Jedi. We’re soldiers first. We’ve been trained for battle - and we’ve been conditioned for battle. The only thing we want is the game of superiority that’s war. We’re better than the droids, except we tire and they don’t. It’s all the skills we keep finetuning, like how you Jedi keep practicing with those lightsabers of yours. We like the courage. The fighting.”
“Some of the troopers interviewed don’t.”
“You think they don’t snap? Sometimes, they don’t have enough to stay strong for. They fall out of the training. You stand for your brothers, and they stand for you.” Point said. “That’s all there is to it. We wouldn’t even be born if it wasn’t for the war. Here’s the difference, Jedi. We’re trained not to gripe. You’ve been trained from young too. You know how training works. Maybe we’ve never had a choice. But free will - all that krevshit is for the civilian philosophers after this war. We’re here to fight. So the deserters get shot. That’s military justice for you. What is a soldier without war? Maybe we’ll find out.”
“A peacekeeper.” Ahsoka suggested. “Like the Jedi.”
“No, you aren’t.” Tech said. He was hooking his power cell up to the charger slotted into the durasteel alloy wall by his bunk. “Peacekeeping isn’t the same as war.”
“Isn’t it?”
“We’re similar.” Tech agreed. “You’ll see that. We both know battle, and the urge to win, to fight, to become better. We have trained for combat. The difference is, we do what needs to be done. Sometimes we think about it. We handle it. Your lot spends more time thinking and less time doing.”
At Ahsoka’s dubious look, Tech looked at Point, and they both shrugged. “Take it for what it is, Jedi.” Point said, finally. “Now shoo, before you wake the whole squad up.”
Ahsoka left the bunkrooms, with a lot to think about.
-
“Do you think they were right, Master?” Ahsoka asked, carefully.
Anakin blinked. “Do I think they were right to be scornful of Jusik, or Travis, or do I think they were right to say they like being soldiers - or that the Jedi are like them?”
“All of them.”
“Force,” Anakin grumbled, softly, but Ahsoka caught his words anyway. “Why do I get Padawans who ask more questions than I did when I was a Padawan?”
“Master Obi-Wan doesn’t agree.” Ahsoka pointed out. “And you only have one Padawan.”
“Obi-Wan’s just gloating.” Anakin groused, burying his head in his hands. He lifted it up soon enough. “You don’t just ask questions, you keep chasing them for answers like an akk-battle hound.” He took a deep breath. “One at a time. No, I don’t think they were right. It takes some people to cope with the things we have to do, Snips, and some people can’t cope. There was a Padawan in my year who was the same. Ferus Olin.” He paused, struggling with memories. “He...had very strong opinions about things. He would not have been pleased with so many things the Jedi have had to do since he…left.”
“Why did he leave?” Ahsoka asked.
“A matter for a different time.” Anakin answered, sharply. The abrupt, shuttered expression on his face told her that line of conversation was over. “I was a slave on Tatooine,” He said, changing the topic.
She gasped. She had known he was from Tatooine - but not that aspect of his past.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. The Hutts should be.” He said, darkly. “In any case, any of those who argued so much on free will should have liberated the slaves from Nar Shaada, Nal Hutta, Tatooine…the clones aren’t anywhere near slaves. And they are treated a lot better than them.”
He was silent for a time.
“It wasn’t easy. You weren’t a person. You were property, to be sold, to be treated badly at the hands of those who didn’t believe in treating slaves well. There was this transmitter implanted in us. It would blow us up if we ran away. Mine was removed surgically after I got injured on a mission to Nath with Obi-Wan.”
Ahsoka was quiet now. She wasn’t sure what to say. She wasn’t sure if it was even possible to say anything to such appalling treatment.
“But anyway. There are many Jedi who complain these days. We’re peacekeepers, not soldiers, Snips. And Obi-Wan says that’s giving us problems - because we have to do things…that aren’t the Jedi way. But we have to keep trying to be as Jedi as possible.”
“We have the choice they don’t.” Ahsoka suggested, tentatively. “We could leave the Order.”
Even as she said it, she knew it was a lie. They were taken in so early, the Order was their family. The Order was their father, mother, brothers, and sisters. It was hard to leave the Order - and most of the Jedi who did so had turned to the Dark Side, like Xanatos and Dooku. Or they had family, like Sorli.
“You know why that doesn’t work, Snips.”
They were both silent then, thinking of clone troopers and Jedi, and the fact that maybe they weren’t so different after all. In some ways, both were reluctant soldiers, even if some of the troopers were perfectly willing to plunge into the cauldron of war, death, and madness.
-
A/N: This was inspired by TheMacUnleashed. After your comment that you find yourself writing about characters you can’t stand, I was depressed to learn I had an Ahsoka plot bunny bugging me.
The rule is generally true though. At the moment, I haven’t watched The Clone Wars, and don’t plan to do so anytime soon, because I hate Ahsoka. As a result, here, to make it more palatable, I may have taken liberties with the Ahsoka portrayed in the movie. I assure you it was due to ignorance, although I did try reading Wookiepedia.
As for the reference to Karen Traviss, no offence to those who enjoy her books. I hated the Legacy of the Force series, and will be writing a spinoff that deals with Qui-Gon Jinn and Jacen Solo soon. I especially hated Bardan’s attitude towards the poor, pathetic clone troopers, and to be frank, I felt humanising them was stupid.
So as not to turn this into an essay on human behaviour, and the philosophy of free will, suffice to say that my beliefs are that if they’ve been programmed since young to be soldiers, while they have human urges, you have to deal with an extremely warped psychology here. Studying the variances of the behavior of human soldiers is one thing - but take into account the fact that they could just as easily be emotionally stunted in ways an average human isn’t. Yes, they can crack in war. But they’re not likely to go all libertarian about freedom, even if they are commandoes with less tinkering to make them obedient.
My approximation is thus: clone troopers are, in some ways, going to be human. And in their humanity, they are also going to be terribly inhuman in warped ways we can barely recognise.
-Cymru