Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb'red.

The Mittani:

On May 22nd, 2009, PFC Roy Mason of Fairfield, California took his own life. A decorated Iraq war veteran of two tours, Roy's unit was set to deploy to Afghanistan when Roy left his base at Fort Carson, drove to a scenic overlook in Santa Cruz, and shot himself during the Memorial Day holiday weekend. He left behind several notes, and called the police before his suicide and requested that they 'clean up the area' so that no children had to witness the scene. A memorial quickly grew in his honor.

Roy was an extremely well-known member of Goonfleet, known as 'RoyofCA'. He was a fixture in our teamspeak lobby for years - sometimes from Iraq over a shaky satellite connection, sometimes from his home. He had a habit of buying forum avatars of his cat, Dr. FatWhiskers, for people on goonfleet.com; at one point it seemed as if half of the posters had Dr. FatWhiskers under their name. There was no doubt that his experiences in war had left him with serious emotional problems; to many of us, this was no surprise at all, as he had openly discussed taking his own life before.

Since his untimely death, I have been repeatedly asked by EVE players to tell the story of RoyofCA: how one man - alone - undertook a campaign to bring down an entire alliance of the Swarm's enemies, and succeeded. To speak of RoyofCA is to chart the demise of RISE, an alliance which once held the best space in Feythabolis...

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