Eleazar da Silva

Background: As far as he knows, Eleazar comes from a proud military family. His great-great-grandfather on one side fought on the front lines in WWII, and his grandfather was in the Brazilian military before it was completely overtaken by American forces; his father was a conscript in the resource wars. None of them wanted Eleazar to join up, but he had been promised full American citizenship if he enlisted, so he wound up walking right out of his high school graduation and into a recruiting office. 

His career wasn't a particularly notable one, and he wasn't present for any significant conflicts. Eventually, right before he turned thirty and had begun to understand that he would never be getting out, he wound up in Boston on a one-year leave. There he met Nora, a student at the Suffolk County School of Law, who was actively protesting the war when she ran into Eleazar. How they got to talking, no one really knows; it just seemed that one day they were arguing ethics, and the next they were attached at the hip. At one point he borrowed a car from a friend and drove them up to a nearby park, where they did quite a bit more than just talk...

A few days before Eleazar was supposed to be re-deployed to Alaska, Nora approached him. She'd just found out she was pregnant, and she wanted him to know, so they could decide what to do. They ran away to Atlantic City, and were married on the spot, with only one of Nora's roommates and one of Eleazar's squadmates as witnesses. They had just enough time back in Boston for Nora to introduce her parents to her new husband -- and for her father to swear violence against "that foreigner" -- before he had to leave, unsure if he would make it back in time for the baby's birth.

Alaska was mostly unremarkable for six agonizing months; how could he focus on patrolling an oilfield in frigid wilderness? They wrote to one another regularly. Nora kept him abreast of goings-on at home; her progress on her law degree, the growing unrest about the economy and the war, and of course, her pregnancy. Her father had threatened to disown her -- her mother had threatened to divorce him and take him for all he was worth if he dared. Eleazar kept her largely ignorant of what he was actually doing day-to-day. She wouldn't care that he walked 10 miles patrolling the oilfield, so he told her about oddities, like the time one of the guys cut a hole in the ice and fished up a huge sturgeon using a fishing pole he'd made from castoff junk, and how it was the first fresh meat any of the guys had had since they'd been stationed there.

He knew her due date was coming, and maybe that was why he didn't notice the IED next to the road when he and his detachment were on patrol. That it was the guy in power armor that stepped on it was the only reason it wasn't more deadly -- only that guy and one other died in the blast as the chassis absorbed the greatest measure of its energy, but the rest were riddled with shrapnel and thrown to the ground. The lights went out.

The next thing Eleazar could remember was waking up in a hospital room, and the next few weeks were a blur. Nora was there, and his mother... and at one point, a baby, placed in the crook of his arm as he fought for consciousness. His first clear memory is an argument, between Nora and her father. Her distressed voice finally pulled him back to consciousness and he made a clear, but groggy declaration.

"Shaun. We'll name him Shaun." Her father's name. "Now stop yelling at my fucking wife."

It was the last they heard from him, but at least he would leave them alone. Eleazar started pulling every string he could find; he cashed out his GI bill, accepted a military discharge, and bought a little house in a new subdivision outside Concord. He was still stuck in the hospital for PT, so he bought a robot butler to help Nora out with the housework and baby Shaun as she finished up and, finally, earned her law degree. He wound up with several plates and pins putting his legs back together, but he walked out of the hospital fundamentally whole.

He had precisely two weeks of calm home life with his wife and son before the world came to an abrupt end.