A Farewell to Arms

Day 619, 08:42 • Published in USA USA • by McDonnell Douglas

Yesterday was my e-birthday. I have been playing eRepublik for one year. This event and the current situation gave me pause for reflection. I have spent one year of my life building and organizing, growing and strengthening. But here, on this anniversary, it appears that such struggle, time and efforts have been for naught.

I have resigned as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I take complete responsibility for the continued losses of eUS regions and our failures of planning in this war. I have made many mistakes, the primary one being that I held to the belief that USA's extensive number of MPPs would be a stronger shield than any network of infrastructure. I did not believe that Russia, Portugal or Indonesia would risk opening a war with so many allied against them. I also planned and executed the military strategy that deployed US military abroad in recent months instead of focusing on national defense. These military actions were primarily intended to get the US military working smoothly, set procedures for logistics and rebuild cooperation with military alliance nations after the collapse of ATLANTIS, but they also served to provoke our enemies. I ignored the open wars with Russia and Portugal at our own gates. These failures of vision have led directly to the current situation where the eUSA finds itself in a 3 front (soon to be 4 front) war. Despite the fact that we were building political alliances in Fortis during this time, I continued to cooperate with nations who had a similar military agenda, our friends in EDEN. But these efforts still left us wholly unprepared for the storm that came. We didn’t have the reserves. We didn’t have the coordination. We didn’t have the unity.

I have always been removed from the politics of this game. I worked with the President and his top aides, but I have never dealt with party politics and rarely did anything with Congress outside of the military budget. It all seemed a silly distraction to me, pointless chest-thumping and power grabbing while the real game was being played out in international warfare. This too was a failure of mine. I do not know if I could have done anything to bring together the political parties of the USA and Congress. If the full-scale invasion of the USA couldn’t do it, I think it cannot be done. Another Presidential election is around the corner. Instead of uniting as our situation grows more desperate, the politicians are turning on each other like rabid cannibals. This I think is a failure of the eMerican character. I think that whatever the make-up of the US citizens playing this game, sadly we appear to be incapable of working together to achieve common national goals.

I am retiring from eRepublik, a game that has consumed all of my free time and too much of the time I should be spending elsewhere. There are many people I would like to thank for sharing this experience with me, many more than I could list. Good luck, eUSA.

General Eugene Harlot (Ret.)
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
Former Commandant of the eUnited States Marine Corps
Former Commanding Officer of Bravo Company
Former Lieutenant of Bravo 1 and Bravo 2
Former Squad Leader of the Fightin’ Fourth, eUS Army
Veteran of the Wars of eRepublik