The Burning Codex: A Personal Preamble

The day before deploying to the UAE I was a lot happier than I had any right to be. I would be taken from my family for year, with a group of people that I had grown to dislike pretty intensely, for a year. I'd had some health concerns which had been shouted down and I really didn't want to test the limits of said issues. Telling the Army that they are wrong about deploying you gets you looked at sideways, but actively fighting getting deployed gets them looking to get rid of you as fast as possible. So I was not in a good place. But I was pretty giddy that day, cause that's the day that the Burning Codex's Kickstarter was announced. I really wanted to see what they would take from Revised and improve, and I was even more excited to finally hold the book in my hands.

Boy, that's even more pathetic than it sounded in my head. Yikes

Of course I brought my Burning Wheel Gold and Revised books with me on deployment! I was heading into an area I knew I would have some free time and would need to find a way to relax. I kinda figured that, since I was having the Codex sent to me on deployment, I could finish whatever campaign I was running with the book. It wasn't much of an expectation, but somehow it kept me going, just that little thing to look forward to, in a way that I didn't know would be so important until later.

The deployment was horrific. One of the things that people do not understand in Air Defense is that -if there no one to shoot at- the chain of command is the enemy. Command has a little man complex; it's not sexy sitting around and hoping that your country is not fired upon, and so the command chain begins to make demands that are stupid... like constant 24 hours shifts, physical training (in the UAE sun) after said 24 hour shifts, and random bunk checks that may or may not cut into that essential sleep time. So I was pretty stressed out to begin with, but I was keeping my cool as best I could. I was talking to my family as much as I could and playing Burning Wheel and FFG Star Wars on my days off.

The straw that broke the camel's back was one of my NCOs. She had taken an immense (and undeserved) dislike to me, and ran me into the ground as often as she could, going so far as to shout at me in front of my higher ups and punishing me for things that she would never have dared to do to anyone else. My chain of command watched, and nothing was done. It's almost like if you're not a part of their particular little clique they didn't care what happened to you, or something! I tried talking to my NCO about it and to make peace but nothing seemed to help in the long run. Eventually she would return to punishing me for things that frankly didn't even exist. So I kept up Burning Wheel, running a game in the setting that eventually would be used in The Giggling Dark campaign, talking with my family, and trying to relax as much as I could, hoping against hope that things would get better, eventually.

They didn't. 

I almost didn't make it.

They had to send me home.

Three weeks of mental hospitals in two countries later and I was home by the beginning of August. The things that I remembered at the end of the deployment were haunting me on a moment-by-moment basis. I had found that I felt like a stranger in my own home, my country, and (most of all and especially) my unit. And, let's be honest, Army counselling is crap. It's used for two things: to either medicate the person into compliance or to get them kicked out on a technicality that robs them of any compensation they should get, so that way Big Army continues to roll. There were moments where I was in a darkness so intense I thought I could puke it up like stomach acid.

And yet I continued living, and I continued to wait for the Codex. I'm still not sure why it was important that I waited for this book and I will probably never find out. I checked my Battery mail as often as I could, only to eventually find out that they had misrouted my book and that I needed to wait a little bit longer. And so I did. I don't think I was excited for the book anymore, I just wanted to see the darn thing. 

It came. I was excited. And it began to fall apart. Normally I would have been pretty upset, but something about this turn of events didn't. The book had finally gotten to me, and it was beautiful, and faded, and falling apart, and I couldn't let it go. I tried decorating it a little bit as the gold faded, not to mention taping up the edges as the book frayed, but my son got his hands on the silver Sharpie I was using and this was the result:

My wife will get around to giving it a nice red cloth cover, like its damaged brother, Burning Wheel Revised Gold (which my wonderful one year old scratched pretty badly by dragging it across our cement front porch!), but for the moment this is enough for me. I don't know why, not completely, but I cannot let go of this book. The journey I took with it, by waiting for it, was even more profound than the books that actually went with me to the UAE, which is saying something, because those books are incredibly special to me too! The Gold book I took with me has been gifted to Kurlak, as he couldn't get the core book. It's even more battered than its Codex brother and there are days I find myself missing it, but it's in a good place. I'm glad it's doing good, as it should. I look at my Revised books and feel a contentment that they went through the journey with me and that they survived, seemingly unscathed. But every time I look at my beautiful wreck of a Codex I smile, because the pain and anguish of that time, which was seemingly transferred to my copy of the Codex, has melted and been forged into something sharp, hard, indestructible. My Codex still goes on, and so do I. We're a bit battered and bruised. But, although the gold on my book cannot be seen anymore it goes on, somewhere where the wind, sand, absurd heat, and evil NCOs cannot touch.