Name: Malcolm Castleton
Rank: Staff Sergeant, Drill Instructor
Age: 36
Birth Date: 01/06/2511
Background History: ==This is part of my soon-to-be Captain... I felt lazy
==
Malcolm, or Mal to his friends, was born on the starship
Firestorm in the early 26th century. His parents were traders and owned the ship. He had an older brother who was already attending the Corbulo Academy of Military Sciences.
There is little one could say about his youth. Mal received pretty much everything he needed. His parents didn’t have much, but what they had they gave to him. Being a spacer, he didn’t have an awful lot of friends but he did not mind that. He had enough friends with the other children of the crewmen.
Ever since his brother was killed in 2526, his parents lost faith in the UNSC and affiliated themselves with the insurrectionists. He had his own views, however. When he was seventeen he finally found an opportunity to run.
The ship was on Reach and his parents let him off to enjoy himself in town. He took this time to enlist with the Marine Corps and was sent off to boot camp that same day.
After completing Boot camp at the top of the class, he was sent to join a unit fighting the Insurrectionists as a Private First Class. It would turn out that he would get quite some time off when he took a bullet to his chest during his first taste of combat.
He spent the next year in a hospital on Reach, but did get a promotion to Lance-Corporal with time. He also met a girl there. She was one of the nurses that treated him. She would spend countless of her free evenings just talking with him, just talking.
When Lance-Corporal Walker finally had to return to his unit, Malcolm was moving in with her in the mansion she inherited in the outskirts of New Alexandria. Not that he had a lot of stuff to move. He had his dufflebag which contained some clothes. That was all.
Malcolm’s unit was deployed to a planet that was 90% sand. He considered it’s value to be less than zero, but apparently the Innies were using it as a base so a front was opened there. Malcolm hated it, though, and so did just about every other person in the unit. The sand got into everything. Their underwear was no exception.
Malcolm spent months doing nothing but patrol the city. He wrote to Susannah whenever he was not in the jackshack or busy cleaning his rifle. At one point, he just accepted that the sand was everywhere, and that there was little he could do about it.
He was glad that they were finally leaving the planet after nine months there. Apparently a company of ODSTs had attacked the main base of the Innies and blew it up. Malcolm could not care less about the reason, though. He would be enjoying some time with his girl again.
On his return to Reach, Malcolm was promoted to Corporal. He was surprised that Susannah was not there to pick him up, but he found out why soon enough. She had been hiding the fact that he was the father of a baby boy. She didn’t tell him because a friend of hers had said that “a distracted soldier is a dead soldier”. To make it up, though, she let him have the honours of naming him.
The boy was named Nathan James. Nathan was baptized in a small ceremony where only Malcolm, Susannah, Nathan and the boy’s godparents were present a week later.
A week later, he was back out there, doing his bit. Now as a Fireteam leader. The bad news was that they were now deployed to fight the Covenant. While of course they had heard of the Covenant, they were not sure how they would fare against the Aliens. They were optimistic about it, though. They were sure that they would fare well against the Covenant. Little did they know about what the future had in store for them.
The unit’s first action against the Covenant was deemed a pyrrhic victory. They had managed to get their objective. It came at a great cost, though. The Company was nearly decimated. Only twenty per cent was still able to walk on their own. The rest was either dead or almost dead.
The unit was pulled back and while it was getting reinforced, Mal continued his studies. He was getting closer and closer to getting his degree. He did enjoy himself during this time. He also became the De Facto leader of his squad. Whatever was left of it, anyway.
The unit received replacements. Not as much as they would have liked, though. Mal had to retain his squad leader’s position simply because there weren’t enough Sergeants to go around.
He was once again sent into combat. This time it was on a cold planet. The planet was experiencing an unusually long and cold winter which resulted in snow and ice being everywhere. The average temperature dropped to forty degrees below zero. They were back to fighting Insurrectionists.
Six months, and a promotion to Sergeant later, Mal found himself back on Reach. Nathan was one now. The boy looked like his mother, but one could easily distinguish features such as the eyes and nose that came from his father. He wanted to be closer to his family, and because of that he requested Drill Instructor duty.
For some time he has been a DI now, and was recently promoted to Staff Sergeant.
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