JONATHAN ROBIN YORK
Group:Walkers / Solo
Date of Birth:May 16th, 1987 (30 years old)
Occupation:19D United States Army, 1st Armored Division, 1st Stryker Brigade, 6th Squadron (Retired) (2004 - 2010) (2016)
East High School, Kansas City, MO Sophomore History Teacher / Assistant Football Coach (2014 - 2016) (2017)
Family life:Engaged†, no children.
Hair:Black.
Eyes:Blue-green.
Height:6'1" (185cm)
Weight:195lbs (88.4kg)
Blood Type:A+
Immune:No.
Gear:- One M4A1 assault rifle, one magazine, no ammunition
- One Sig Sauer 1911, modified for .22LR 10rd., two magazines, 20 rounds of ammunition
- One M9 Bayonet combat knife
- One backpack, medium-sized
- Two water canteens; (A) full, (B) ½ depleted
- One flashlight w/batteries
- One fire-ax
- One set of bolt cutters
- Small amount of canned food
Biography:Born in 1987 to Corporal Jackson York and his young spouse, Hannah, Robin grew up just shy of being a military brat. His father, Jackson, was over forty years old when Robin was born; Jackson was born at the tail end of World War II and drafted into service in 1965, when the United States began its ground war against North Vietnam. "
The battle against communism must be joined with strength and determination," said President Johnson, and Jackson York agreed enthusiastically.
Jackson spent the next twenty-two years of his life in the United States Marine Corps, retiring at forty three months before his son, Robin, was born. Despite his valor and service, Jackson was unfaithful, a womanizer and a drinker and a gambler - and a general degenerate. Robin's adolescence was pleasant enough, but as he made egress from his formative years and reached his late tweens, perhaps his early teens, Jackson's temper and perpetual need for a finger or four of Johnnie Walker came to a head.
The boy and his father bickered, quarreled, and - on more than one occasion - engaged one another physically. Hannah, ever the doting wife and silent third party, ignored Jackson's rage and vice and, instead, did what she could to nurse Robin's wounds. Meanwhile, Robin grew resentful, donning a jean jacket and Vans and blasting whatever filthy rock'n'roll he could dredge up from friends' CD collections. Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Bon Jovi, Alice in Chains, Nirvana, et. al.
Robin grew his hair out and began to act up: ditching school, smoking cigarettes and pot and joyriding in stolen cars. He would spend weeks away from his home, crashing on friends' couches, on public park benches, and in the back of abandoned cars. At seventeen, he became enamored with the idea of a steady source of money and the chance to tote a loaded gun: Robin enlisted in the United States Army, forging his father's signature and volunteering to fight terrorists.
19 Delta, Cavalry Scout: ten weeks of BCT, seven weeks of AIT, rolled into one grueling OSUT course at Fort Knox, KY. Robin came out the other side stronger, both physically and mentally, having discovered his absolute limits. He knew how to march, how to follow orders, and how to hit a man with an M4A1 at 300m.
In the year 2004, anti-Iraq sentiment was at an all-time high, and Robin was deployed with the 6th Squadron - 1st Cavalry Unit - to maintain peace and order in Iraq. Robin endured the hatred of Iraqi civilians, suffered the mental rigors of suicide bombers and children chucking dud grenades into his truck; fired upon and killed enemy insurgents, and lost more than one friend to roadside IEDs. It was a miserable time to be enrolled into a Combat Arms MOS, but Robin endured, and grew harder for it.
In 2008, the United States Army withdrew from Iraq. Robin found himself repurposed for the front in Afghanistan, fighting in Kandahar, the nation's most dangerous province. At twenty-two, Robin had lost count of the number of men's lives he had taken - yet the cold sweat and sheer terror of combat never abated, no matter how routine and perfunctory its mechanics had become.
After two tours, Robin had lost his taste of the Army and did not re-up for a third. In 2010, Robin returned to his hometown of Kansas City, MO, to begin his life as a civilian. Adjustment was difficult; he had never been on his own, independent of some overarching system, as an adult. He struggled, but used his G.I. payments to attend the University of Kansas, Kansas City campus; four years later, he received his Bachelors in History.
During his collegiate pursuits, Robin also met Kelly, a gorgeous, wiry brunette studying pediatrics at UMK. They soon fell in love and moved into an apartment in the city together. Robin gained employment as a tenth grade history teacher at East High School. He even wound up becoming one of the football team's three assistant coaches. Coming up on thirty, Robin had managed to string together a lovely suburbanite life - a far cry from his troubled youth and his time in the sandbox.
Meanwhile, a proxy war had been brewing in Syria since early 2011; Alawi government forces, supported by myriad other Shia groups, was locked in conflict with a rapidly growing Sunni rebellion. The Syrian Civil War erupted in 2013, dominating American news as several insurgencies came to prominence, the most noteworthy being the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant - colloquially recognized as
Islamic State, or
ISIL. They were a radical brotherhood of armed Muslims so extreme as to be disowned by Al-Qaeda, and for the first time since the late 1970s American SOF troops were fighting alongside members of Al-Qaeda, now in Syria, hoping to combat the global threat that was ISIL.
Tension boiled over in early 2016: the Syrian government was projected to control just 12% of Syria, the Sunni rebels another 22%, and ISIL a whopping 66% of the nation. Public, televised executions became a daily affair, and citizens of the western world grew weary of watching their brothers and sisters meet an executioner's blade, or be drowned, or immolated, or blown to bits. Things had gotten out of hand - but nobody wanted to legitimize ISIL as a sovereign entity, or, even worse, be the clean-up crew after ending the Syrian Civil War.
After an ISIL attempt on the life of the President of the United States of America in late January of 2016, "war" was inevitable. There was no declaration, no draft, no sounding of the alarms: tier one operators were deployed to establish local connections and geographic footholds; then, the Rangers were mailed to the outskirts of Syria via parachute, courtesy of the U.S. government; finally, infantry battalions were stationed across the country, and the War in Syria began. Critics noted the similarity of the war's opening stages to the abrupt invasion of Iraq during the early days of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Title 10, United States Code, Section 12305(a) states that "
the President may suspend any provision of law relating to promotion, retirement, or separation applicable to any member of the armed forces who the President determines is essential to the national security of the United States." In essence, because Robin had served in the War in Afghanistan, the Army could recall him for active duty service until six months after the end of the conflict; as the war had raged for the last fourteen years, Robin was eligible to return to service.
Return he did, kissing his girlfriend goodbye and joining the rest of his old unit in Syria. It was a war not unlike Iraq or Afghanistan before it, only noteworthy in that ISIL combatants were considerably more fierce than insurgents before them; it was odd, working alongside the same Al-Qaeda members that Robin had fought tooth-and-nail years before, but curious times made for strange bedfellows.
Only perhaps six months into his deployment, in the midst of a firefight, Robin's was wounded by shrapnel from an explosive device; after the skirmish, he was airlifted to a medical triage unit, and then flown to Germany for further treatment. It was determined that, with considerable physical therapy, his leg would heal just fine - but that he would lose perhaps ten to fifteen percent mobility in the process.
Deemed unfit for service, Robin was awarded a purple heart and given a medical discharge. He returned home to Kansas City, to Kelly, and - after a few months of physical therapy culminating in his recovery - to his job at East High School. Things were peaceful for a time, but, inevitably, war found Robin: on Valentine's Day, 2017, he proposed to Kelly - and she accepted. They told their close group of friends, tentatively scheduling a wedding date of April 15th, 2018.
In the days to come, society came crashing down around them; Robin lost Kelly early on to one of the living dead, affectionately referred to as "biters" by the company he kept. Emotionally devastated and considerably colder, Robin joined a group of veterans or former PMC-types, gathering firearms and charging tolls to cross major bridges and robbing other survivors at gunpoint.
His morality decayed, but Robin maintained a hard line that he would not cross: he refused to murder innocent civilians, or stand by as others did so; refusing to abandon some sense of humanity, Robin became the black sheep of the wolf pack, and was constantly forced to assert his dominance over other, less-experienced group members to avoid exile or execution.
In September of 2017, as a chill began to permeate the air, Robin lost his place in the pack. A younger, more hot-headed member - another veteran of the Syrian war, an infantryman - tried to rape a young woman held captive by Robin's scouting party. Pushed to the brink and worn thin from the world they now lived in, Robin cut the man's throat, and when the other member of the scout detail moved against him, Robin blew the man's brains out.
He cut the girl free and she fled - and he did the same. Kansas City was no longer safe for Robin, but he'd been mulling over an exit plan; Fort Leonard Wood, a military installation some two hundred miles from Kansas City, might still be operational. He hadn't seen any military convoys in the city to suggest as much, but perhaps the Marines had abandoned the larger settlements; they were, for the most part, overrun by biters or the vicious bandits that Robin had aligned himself with.
He was set, then: it would take some time, but Robin would make his way to Leonard Wood, and hope that some semblance of order might remain there.
Personality:Robin is tough, that's for sure: he's survived three wars and the end of civilization, and not many men can attest to similar experience. He's reasonably charismatic, capable of leading a group, and has a mind for strategy - but he's been made callous by the loss of his beloved, and no longer has much faith in the world or humanity as a whole.
Because of this callousness, Robin is more likely to partake in morally ambiguous activities, and think only of himself in a crisis; he's a good man at heart, and the desire to help others hasn't abandoned him entirely - but that good nature is buried deep, beneath many layers of grit and grime, and it would be difficult to recover at this point.
He's a wry man, a fan of tongue-in-cheek humor, and smiles come few and far between - but when they're there, you know they're for a damn good reason. He's fairly patient, though he inherited a temper from his abusive father. Due to his upbringing, Robin does not drink or partake in any drugs harder than marijuana.
