Arnold Leroy Lewis Junior

Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps (Ret.) Arnold Leroy Lewis Junior (SN: 56225-25521-AL) is a Staff Noncommissioned Officer (SNCO) of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) Marine Corps. He would serve in the Human Civil War as a SPARTAN-I, and later as NAVSPECWAR operator, rising through the ranks during the Human-Covenant War to serve as Sergeant Major of Naval Special Warfare Team III. Although he would have no children, his legacy would live on in the myth and legend of the Special Operations community, in addition to the spoken history of the Marine Corps.

Early History
Arnold was raised in the greater-Colorado Springs Metropolitan Area, in the United Republic of North America. He worked hard in secondary school to go to college, as his parents wanted him to. After a failed United Nations Naval Academy candidacy and being rejected from several schools, he turned to the Marine Corps as an alternative to staying at home, despite the fact that the Marines were engaged around the Milky Way in the numerous brush wars that appeared throughout the outer colonies. Against his parents' wishes, he shipped out to recruit training, and would graduate as a Private First Class. After serving several months in an infantry unit, his name would appear in the database for the Military Intelligence Division, who were searching for qualified recruits for their special program.

Upon being ordered to report to Reach, Arnold underwent numerous medical examinations, only being told that he was being examined by the UNSC’s Medical Division for a study. After this, he was taken to a top-secret compound somewhere on the planet, and would be assigned to a fire team that consisted of Hank Wimbleton, Avery Johnson, Frank Mendez, Dean Jackson, and James Lee. They had trained together, bled together, shared countless cold nights together, and had even dragged each other out of bars when one said something stupid in a drunken stupor. They knew each other better than most brothers did, and ended up becoming one of the best, if not the best fire team within their own hierarchy. Following nearly five years of incessant training and augmentations, they were activated. Their first mission was codenamed CHARLEMAGNE.

Special Special Forces
Their team, as well as the other ORION fire teams were covertly inserted via Single Occupant Exoatmospheric Insertion Vehicle, at the time a controversial and experimental technology. The theory was simple; put a man into a pod, and shoot him out of a ship from orbit to the ground, usually under the cover of meteor shower. The bad thing was that it was not guaranteed that one would even make it to the ground in the pod, or if one did, if you came out of that pod alive. During insertion, a complication arose in another SPARTAN-Is pod, and they were killed from the extreme heat before even impacting the planet, named Eridanus II. Following their landing, Arnold and his team covertly moved to their objective, which was a warehouse on the planet known to house the kidnap victims of the Secessionist Union, the organization they were sent to dismantle.

Upon reaching the warehouse, the fire team breached through several entry points, and using suppressed weapons they quickly neutralized any threat that had presented itself. However, they had come too late; several of the hostages, especially the one they were tasked to retrieve in the first place were tortured to death, and several others executed. Whoever was left alive were secured, and escorted out of the warehouse and to the extraction site, where Arnold and his team were picked up by Falcon helicopters.

Following this simple task, the fire team was sent out once again to capture or kill Jared Mulkey Ander, leader of the Secessionist Union. They covertly infiltrated his stronghold via the sewage system, and after navigating several hallways, cornered the traitor. But, Ander escaped through a window into the waters below, leading the team to believe that he was dead. They exfiltrated from the stronghold through the sewage system, and would return to base with several pieces of high-value intelligence, including, but not limited to several arms shipping logs, connected to high ranking members of the Colonial Military Administration, phone numbers and personnel records, as well as several maps that showed the location of bomb manufacturing facilities and targets. Throughout the entirety of the forty-eight hour operation, the SPARTANs would effectively dismantle the Secessionist Union, and had seized thousands of kilos of illegal narcotics, thousands of weapons, and had stopped several bombings that were being planned against high-ranking Unified Earth Government dignitaries. Even though Ander had escaped, the operation was effectively a success for the United Nations Space Command, and the Military Intelligence Division’s Section II milked the victory for all it was worth, sending fear into the hearts of many who had planned rebellions. However, it wasn’t enough, and the rebellion began to heat up.