Having heard from my beta,

I think this is about ready for presentation now. I'll be crossposting it to sgt_preston as well.

According to every source I have on the subject, Sergeant Preston's father was also a Mountie. He was murdered by an outlaw when his son was still fairly young; Preston joined the Northwest Mounted Police to catch his father's killer, and received his sergeant's stripes for having arrested the man and brought him in.

Despite the fact that this is a pretty damn seminal event for the character, I have never found any write-up of this in the canon*. Having failed to locate a reliable account despite a hell of a lot of searching, I therefore feel free to present my own take on this.

( The amount of effort it cost Corporal Preston to breathe as he lay sprawled on his back in the snow was terrible. . . )

Skippy's back! Yay!

http://www.skippyslist.com/ is operational once more! Apparently, Specialist Schwartz took it down upon getting his separation orders- didn't think it was appropriate to keep it up once he was no longer part of the Army. Too many people wrote to him or folks who knew him, asking what had happened, so he put it back up.

Huzzah for Skippy!