Not a bad theory Wrangler . . . knowing they were on the wrong side of the Civil War and 'given' to the SL to get them out of the FedSuns. I do not think it would take someone long, if they wanted to, to whip the rumor mill into saying they were being sent on suicide missions to continue the punishment. Imagine you are a line trooper who followed orders in the Civil War, get effectively exiled for losing, start hearing rumors of other FS units that were on the same side being sent on forlorn hopes and abandoned by the First Prince loving SL command structure, and be told you just got assigned to drop on to a horde of Taurians. You ask your CO if the rumors are true, they are being sent out to die . . . and get Standard Answer #43.
Honestly, easy to see how one of the Terran March units could have been manipulated into doing exactly what happened.
Plausible on its face, but the
timescale involves gives me pause. The Davion Civil War ran from 2519 to 2540. Roger Varnay’s ‘triumphant return from exile to reclaim his rightful throne’ was virtually
exterminated when he made it in 2565 — the naval component (and its CapCon ‘support’) was annihilated at Kigamboni, the ground-troops wiped out on Wappingers “nearly to a man” (according to
HB:HD).
Assuming enlistment at age 20 and mandatory retirement at age 65, a line trooper who signed up with the Federated Peacekeeping Forces at the start of the DCW in 2519 and ‘just followed (Varnay/Rostov) orders’ thereafter would be ageing out by the time of Varnay’s failed return and would’ve endured a
quarter-century of suspicion and dead-end assignments in the post-DCW AFFS... which is a
long time to retain the services of a man whose loyalties are held in question.
If this hypothetical trooper signed up at the very end of the DCW in 2539 or so, to still be in FedSuns uniform by the time of the Sterope raid in 2588, he’s
somehow escaped being jettisoned to the SLDF in 2571 (which Alexander Davion explicitly used to take a ‘new broom’ to his military, sweeping out units and personnel with a history of disloyalty to him and his branch of the Davion family)
and been retained years past his pension date.
I mean, I know BT leaders often practice collective responsibility when it comes to disloyal units, but to keep punishing the
children and grandchildren of ‘rebel’ troops two generations after the rebellion ended seems... a tad extreme, for the FedSuns. I’d half-expect it from the DC or CC (if not a blanket 9mm retirement package for all those involved directly after the Civil War), but as a general rule the Davions have had a relatively lighter hand when it comes to such things.
Eh. At this rate, I think I’ll just have to settle on a personal interpretation and call it good.
For my purposes, I’m going to assume that somewhere between the end of the DCW and the crushing of Roger’s Return in 2565, the Duke of New Syrtis — either founder or heir to one of the short-lived dynasties that replaced the attainted Varnays — assembled a nine-battalion ‘household bodyguard’ unit of ’Mechs and vehicles, the Syrtis Light Cavalry. (There’s canonical precedent for this — check out
Hot Spots or
Chaos March for the kind of shenanigans planetary nobles can get up to below the national radar.) The central AFFS either didn’t notice this formation, or for domestic political reasons chose not to act against it at the time of joining the Star League, but it became...
inconvenient to tolerate thereafter*, and the Duke was ‘encouraged’ to ‘downsize’ his bodyguard by, oh, three battalions or so. The Duke nominated the three unlucky battalions (the 2nd, 3rd and 7th), appointed a regimental commander and staff for the now-237th, and with semi-official sanction dispatched them to shoot up a Taurian planet as proof of New Syrtis’ loyalty to Alexander Davion (the timing being a matter of convoluted domestic politics), never intending to accept them back into the FedSuns. Unfortunately for the Duke, the troops he used in this ‘demonstration’
realised they were being expended on a one-way operation, simply so the Duke could cover his ass, and they had other ideas....
Your mileage may vary, of course.
* Hmmm... come to think of it, I’ve got just the historical justification for that, but it’s a spoiler!
