Walter Skinner/Bio

===Vietnam and Marriage===
On his eighteenth birthday, Walter Skinner enlisted in the US Marine Corps out of blind faith, believing it was the right thing to do. He went to Vietnam to fight in the war while still aged eighteen. Three weeks into his tour of duty, he shot and consequently killed a ten-year-old North Vietnamese boy who had walked into camp covered with grenades. Skinner blew the boy's head off, from a distance of ten yards. This incident caused him to lose faith in everything, not only in his country but in himself, and he began to believe that there was no point to anything any more. 
Skinner survived the horrors of war by numbing himself with whatever was around, including drugs he inhaled. He saw lots of things during the war, none of which he gave credence to due to his drug-taking. Years later, he recalled that he had been "no choirboy" and had got through the experience of war "like most eighteen-year-olds. 
Skinner did hold the hands of fallen soldiers, though, including bodies that seemed like they had essentially been turned inside out, and he told them it was going to be okay. In 2002, he recalled that he had always thought that talking to the soldiers was "like praying; even if they can't hear maybe God can." 
One night when he and his unit were on patrol, they were ambushed by the enemy in thick jungle and everyone fell, including Skinner. In the morning, other Marines arrived and put Skinner in a bodybag He awoke in a Saigon hospital two weeks later, the only survivor of the ambush He was left with the assumption the Marines who had placed him in the bodybag had found a pulse before they had been presented with an opportunity to bury him.
Skinner believed that, while he had been lying in the thick jungle, he had looked down at his body from outside it. Apparently, he had initially failed to recognize his lifeless body, but he had later watched the Viet Cong strip his uniform and take his weapon while he had remained peaceful and unafraid, watching his dead friends and himself He also believed he had seen an old woman who had been with him, watching him as he was watching himself dying, while blood spilled from a hundred different places in his body. According to Skinner, the experience had ended when the woman had lifted him up and carried him back, away from "the light." He did not believe the event had been a near-death experience as he was convinced that he actually had been dying, and initially tried to dismiss the woman as another hallucination but ultimately couldn't. 
Skinner began a romantic relationship with a woman named Sharon, whom he married in 1979. The couple remained married for at least the next seventeen years. 
:On March 7, 1996, the date on which "Avatar" begins, Skinner reveals he and his wife have been married for the past seventeen years. It can therefore be determined 1979 was the year they married. Even though it is implied the two reconciled following seventeen years of marriage, Sharon Skinner is not seen or mentioned in episodes subsequent to "Avatar".
Category:Walter Skinner