Rasq Writes: For Us The Living

1750 Hours, May 30, 2553
Upper Promenade, Hania Rani Arcology
Mare Serenitatis, Luna, Sol System
The bar wasn’t hard to find, even if Lieutenant Sherry Friday and Warrant Officer Richard Burbage had never been there before. Three troop hogs and a Mongoose parked out front made it absolutely clear who was patronizing the facility.
Inside, the bar was packed with soldiers of every stripe. Marines. Army. Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. Noncoms milled about in fatigues, and some officers stood in their dress whites. There were even some men in civilian clothing mixed in with the lot. They were veterans, and their artificial limbs and grievous facial scars bore silent testament to the reason why they left the service altogether. 
One of the bartenders looked up as Sherry and Richard walked in, and he waved them to the bar. He offered a mechanical arm to shake, but Sherry leaned over the bar and hugged him instead. 
“Matt! I haven’t seen you in years.”
“Sherry! It’s been too long! What have you been up to?”
“We were late to the Battle of Earth, and got thrown into the meatgrinder around Johannesburg,” Richard replied. “We’re not too late here, are we?”
“Not at all. The service starts in thirty minutes, but I think people are going to be trickling in and out of here all night. Can I get you something to eat?”
The two Marines ordered drinks and circulated through the bar, catching up on old acquaintances. Soldier, Marine, Trooper, what bound them all together was the fact that they were snipers. They’d all passed through Camp Keel on Reach, learned the tricks of the trade, and formed a tight-knit community of scouts and bushwackers. 
At the end of the war, maybe one in ten was still alive.
At exactly 1830 sharp, the floor was cleared and some Marines carried a very large table to the center of the room. They were followed by a chaplain that Sherry mostly knew by reputation. Lieutenant Damon Williamson had been through Camp Keel a few years before her, and hadn’t been present for any of the crosstraining exercises that had brought her back to Reach. Word was that microshrapnel injuries had put an end to his fieldcraft days.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll not speak long. God knows we’re already going to be here all night,” Williamson said. “We are gathered here today because Earth is saved. If the Covenant isn’t completely vanquished, then the tides of war have definitely turned in our favor. This is the first, and possibly the best time to remember the men and women who fought for this day, but never lived to see it happen. Their reward was no grave, not even a monument to mark the battle where they fell. We’ll honor them as best as we can, by carrying their memory into the future.”
The chaplain poured a glass of amber liquor from the keg and placed it square in the center of the table. “I’ll start with the woman who made most of this possible. Master Sergeant Tamara Booker didn’t run Camp Keel, but she was there when it transformed from a sleepy little training center in the Highland Mountains into a factory for turning out snipers, and her hands guided every stage of that growth. I don’t know if she ever fired a shot in anger at actual Covenant, but if the hingehead bastards ever landed in the South Ossetia river valley, they were up for one hell of a fight.”
The chaplain took his seat. One by one, other soldiers stood, poured a glass, and spoke of their fallen brothers in arms. Sherry tried not to cry, but after a few personal drinks, she decided that she had as good of a reason as any to get all weepy. 
More fallen snipers were remembered, and more drinks were poured out. At the end of the day, all that liquor would go back into a keg, and that keg would be used to consecrate the ground of whatever training center replaced Camp Keel.
Sherry didn’t know what she thought of that. She thought a whole bunch of things, most of them contradictory and all of them well-lubricated by the three shots of brandy. It was just a keg of Reavan whiskey, the kind of rotgut that these guys drank because they were too cheapskate for the good stuff. But poured out in memory of the fallen, and then poured into another keg, that whiskey would become something special, a stand-in for the bodies that could not be brought home.
She looked around the bar, at the faces of the men and women who had served alongside her. 
Somehow, there was a connection between the living and the dead, a connection that was sentimental, and yet more than just sentiment. It was real. And it was somehow mediated by a keg of ale whose only significance was that it came from the same planet that they all trained on. It was odd, and yet awesome at the same time, and Sherry finally understood what that business with the wine and communion wafers in her childhood had been.
She wanted to share some of this with Richard, see if he could help make sense of it, but she was buzzed and afraid that she’d just babble and make a fool of herself in front of him. Another man finished his memorializing and took his seat, and Sherry was on her feet before she knew what she was doing. Why be a blubbering mess in front of that special someone when you can do it in front of the whole room?
“I’m going to talk about a man who didn’t train at Camp Keel,” Sherry said. “But I take some small comfort in the fact that I don’t think I’m the first one to break that rule.”
She took a breath, trying to get a grip on the river of emotions that was running through her. 
“My dad wasn’t a sniper. He was just an armorer, but that was the UNSC’s loss because he would have made the best bushwacker ever. He taught me to shoot, and he took teenage-me hunting and… and I’m right here because of everything he taught me.”
With a shaky breath, Sherry poured out a glass of whiskey and set it on the table. She didn’t know what she was expecting, maybe a ghostly hand on her shoulder, but it wasn’t there. Not quite.
“Dad, I miss you so much. I have ever since the Marines called you up that one last time. And I’m going to build that life you would have wanted.”
All told, there were just over seventy people crammed into the bar as the lieutenant made a fool of herself. And for the briefest of moments, as she sat down at her table, and Richard quietly took her hand, she thought she felt the eyes of seventy-something-plus-one on her.