Memoirs, feelings, and moving on

Day 2,020, 11:28 • Published in China USA • by Kria Erikson

First of all, I need to ask you to read this if you haven’t yet. Bradley Reala recently posted a memoir of sorts of his time playing the game on the eUS Military forum. It isn’t the entire document, although he did say he expected it to be shared outside that arena, I feel like it isn’t my place to do so. What this link contains is the two paragraphs where he discussed the friendship we had.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1M3_bJT6hnsTfulEh-jEQwlwMzSN9xfr2Ky7ogE6jTxI/edit?usp=sharing

I saw this memoir and didn’t read it right away because I knew (or thought I knew) two things: that I would be mentioned, and that I would be pissed off about it. I’m surprisingly only right on one of those counts… and if you read any other part of this so far you know which one it is. I’m writing this now because I feel it deserves a response, even this much past the main events for the sake of two friends who stopped understanding each other.

“I don’t recall exactly when it happened, but she and I had a falling out at one time. I don’t remember exactly what about, I just recall that I felt betrayed by it and after Bia I felt that Kria had owed me more than to stab me in the back like she did. She was getting political at the time, and so my feeling was that her actions were for her own gain, and at my expense. I didn’t appreciate that, and I believe I let her know that, which led to the falling out.”


I recall one of the main things that happened here, but there is some necessary backstory on my part. At this point (likely around the beginning of Brad’s time as USNG CO, or a bit before) it was my understanding that he held the feeling that it was possible to organize a group of people to work, possibly secretly, as part of the government to increase cooperation between military groups and the political ones. He was also one of my closest friends. I took a couple conversations we had along those lines somewhat to heart at the time, and that was one of my motivations for giving politics a try. Some time later, and after a time or two in congress, I was approached by Cerb about taking a job as a deputy in the NSC (which wasn’t so much of a question as receiving a PM where I was listed as one of his planned NSC deputies) which is essentially where the problems began. For those that are unfamiliar with the NSC, they handle the strategic war decisions for the eUS including some attack coordination on IRC and serve as representatives to alliances.

At the time, battles with rounds were new, and there was little coordination of damage in the morning, and there were not many JCS members on then to lead attacks. Being a senior officer at the time, if I saw an opportunity in the eUS military priority battles I would see if we could get some people to hit. There was a separate and somewhat loosely moderated channel for this. I always encouraged people to ask questions in this channel when they didn’t understand something. A question was posed as to why we weren’t fighting in a certain battle.I didn’t really think it was all that significant that someone wanted to understand the reasoning behind something, and it seemed so unimportant at the time that I can’t remember what the question was. The conversation was essentially this is why people from the government are saying to not fight there, but we don’t take direction from them, more of advice at the choice of the JCS, oh, and we should go fight in this JCS priority battle now because they pushed the wall back again :<. this blew up in my face later that day.> The same question was asked that evening and someone else beat me to the punch on the answer, but phrased it somewhat differently. Rather than taking the time to point out that the eUS Military and the NSC are separate, the response was phrased as ‘one of the NSC deputies said this.’ Since I was the NSC deputy involved here, there were a lot of heated phrases exchanged, and ultimately I ended up promising that I wouldn’t mention anything from the NSC anymore. There’s one thing that sticks out from this event to me, even still, although this was probably 2 years ago at minimum. I was mostly talking with Bombonato (Army CO, and an all-around spectacular guy) and Axe_Ccident (Bagsister is my best friend, and USNG XO at this time) about this. I gained a lot of respect for Bombonato through this, because he handled the situation very responsibly… and left out one part that Axe told me Brad sai😛


Tell Kria and Israel that they can shut up or get kicked out.


Imagine one of your closest friends tells someone to tell you to either not speak up when you have something to say or leave the organization you’ve spend the entire time in the game working for (and met them through!) because you got involved in more things through his inspiration. If anyone can honestly tell me that wouldn’t suck and you wouldn’t be pissed at them, you’re a better person than me.
After this, I honestly can’t remember having a conversation with Brad that wasn’t based on criticism on some level. Once the initial shock of that day wore off, I tried for the sake of what was a good friendship. There were some minor disagreements, but never conversation like what was before this. Eventually it got to the point where I felt that nothing was ever going to change so I might as well stop trying. I’m sure there was something that set that off, but I honestly can’t remember what it was, so it was clearly super important.

Last night, I read these two paragraphs from Brad and I cried. I cried, but I didn’t feel bad about myself as a person like I did when I finally felt I had to leave the JCS and the eUS Military. I have no urge to break down and not be able to go on in this same way like I did then. For the last few months of my time as a JCS I was avoiding the JCS portion of the forum and trying to focus on the Army the best that I could. It wasn’t easy, and I know some of this was issues that I was working through at the time but some of it was that people that I once considered very good friends were pointing out every failure I had at being a ‘good JCS.’ Whether this all resulted from not actually knowing how the JCS worked internally since I was forbidden access as a branch XO (primarily through the same people criticizing me) or trying to cope through avoidance/ non-confrontation, or some other reason, I ultimately knew I needed to leave when the stress and constant reminders of inferiority began physically affecting me.

The feelings haven’t healed. But I’m dealing with them and learning to move on the best I can. Reading the memoir and writing this response was actually very cathartic for me. Ultimately I finally got to see what I remembered as the Bradree I always used to talk with in this again, and I’m ok with it, even though I know we’ll likely never be friends again (and you know I always called you Bradree as a term of some sort of affection even though you hated it).

~Kria