Harry Tanner
From FEInfobase
| {{{firstname}}} | |
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| Species: | |
| Homeworld: | |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Born: |
2367 |
| Eyes: |
Blue |
| Hair: |
Brown |
| Height: |
6'3" |
| Weight: |
183 lbs. |
| Affiliation: | |
| Assignment: | |
| Rank: |
Corporal |
| Player: | |
| [ Source ] | |
A veteran of the Borg War, Corporal Harry Tanner has served in almost every environment the Federation's galactic combat has had to offer, and in almost every major ground campaign of the last twenty years. Refusing almost any offer of responsibility or authority that has come his way, he is the quintessential 'grunt', bucking authority but getting the job done. Tanner has served as a front line soldier, as a squad leader, as a drill instructor and, most significantly and recently, as a member of the Federation's special forces. Currently, he is a member of the Hell Hounds, the Federation Mobile Infantry's first Special Projects team.
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Family
Father: Stephen Tanner (deceased)
Mother: Sophia Tanner (deceased)
Sister: Laura Tanner (37)
Ex-Wife: Andrea Palmer (38)
Daughter: Nicola Tanner (16)
Service Record
- 2383: Joined the Marine Corps; entered Basic Training
- 2384: Completed training, given the rank of Private
- 2386: Promoted to Private First Class, Time Served
- 2389: Promoted to Lance Corporal
- 2389: Decorated with the Bronze Star, Bravery and Ingenuity in Combat
- 2391: Assigned to Starfleet Special Forces
- 2393: Promoted to Corporal
- 2397: Returned to Infantry Unit; assigned as Squad Leader
- 2398: Assigned to Fort Tranquility as Drill Instructor
- 2403: Assigned to SABRE Team India
- 2406: Assigned to Hell Hounds
Physical Description
Harry Tanner is a tall, well-built man, though certainly not particularly huge by the standards of most of his comrades in the Federation Mobile Infantry. It is clear that he takes good care of himself, however, and that he works to remain in peak physical condition. There is precious little about him, however, that stands particularly military. His dark hair, whilst not long, goes beyond what the FMI would ever accept, often dangling into his eyes, prompting him to wear an environment-suitable hat when on an operation. There is also often a goodly amount of stubble along his rather square jaw, and this, along with his rather tanned skin, only prompts to make his deceptively blue eyes seem somewhat brighter. His features are strong, and his nose looks like it has been broken at least once. His hands are rough, workman's hands, and slightly over-large even for his size. But perhaps the most characterful and memorable aspect of Tanner's appearance is that which is sometimes missing - the smile he often wears, a broad smirk of malicious glee that promises immense fun or immense pain. Or sometimes both.
Background
Childhood
Born in London, Earth, to a schoolteacher father and a mechanic mother, Harry Tanner was the eldest of two children. He was always a more physical boy, enjoying sports and with little time or patience for academic study, and his parents' attention resultingly fell far more on his younger sister Susan, always brighter, always more of a hard worker, always with more 'potential'. This would lead the slightly disillusioned Harry, deprived of the parental attention that he craved, towards 'acting out' so as to be noticed. Petty juvenile crimes dotted his childhood, and all it succeeded in doing was making him more distant from the world in general and his parents in particular.
At age sixteen, his father, sick of bailing young Harry out for minor crimes repeatedly, insisted that the boy got himself a job so as to make some use out of himself. By this time, the Borg War had started up, and along with it came a barrage of a recruitment drive from Starfleet. Bribing a suspect friend of his to alter his records, Harry thus - to make himself 'useful' and to escape from what he considered his moderately oppressive family - lied about his age and enlisted in the Marine Corps.
Military Career
In better times, the Federation might have balked at a delinquent such as he, but recruiting officers were desperate enough that they even allowed a shoddy job of altered records to slip by without taking any sort of a closer look. And thus, Harry Tanner was away, intent on making something of his life after all. He had not joined for idealism, for protecting the Federation; he was interested solely in having something to do, and freedom to enjoy himself without consequence at the end of the day.
Observers would have said that the discipline of the Marine Corps and the harshness of the war did Tanner good. He buckled down early on and became a model soldier, excelling particularly in close-quarters combat, but showing an aptitude with a whole range of weaponry. His was also a keen tactical mind, demonstrating an aptitude for efficiency above everything else.
Right out of Boot, he was assigned to a front-line regiment, trapped repeatedly on hell-holes of planets locked in continuous conflict with invading Borg landing parties. Early on, several things about Harry Tanner became remarkable. First was his considerable aptitude for killing things, showing an almost disturbing imagination when it came to improvising how to take down a Borg drone that had already adapted to the phasers. The second was that, although he proved himself to be an excellent soldier, he abhorred responsibility for anything other than himself and his rifle, happy to work with his fire team and squad, but refusing to take on any leadership roles. The third was his similar lack of respect for those who held such roles or responsibilities - just as he believed he had no place giving orders, he himself was awful at taking orders that he disagreed with or just felt to be unwise, and was repeatedly happy to inform a superior when he believed them to be flat-out wrong. This made him a thorn in the side of many a Sergeant, but most particularly an annoyance to young platoon leaders who would be called idiots in public and have their decisions challenged.
But such situations are difficult to deal with in the middle of a raging war when every soldier is needed. The fourth fact about Tanner would also prove to save him from himself, for he seemed to be cursed with always being assigned to a unit that was decimated in combat - and thus superiors rarely survived long enough, through being perfectly normal casualties of war, for that many reports of Tanner's insubordinate nature to reach higher levels. The high death count of those around him was in itself was not so unusual. After all, Tanner - by his own request - was almost always in a front line regiment, but sheer odds suggested that, by at least the third unit that needed to be disbanded due to too many losses, he should have been killed. And yet, five years on in a war where there were so many dead men's boots that promotion was usually awarded based on whether or not you knew which end of a rifle to shoot, Tanner remained a private, a standard foot-soldier, and was happy.
This would change at the campaign withdrawing from Khitomer. Tanner's regiment was landed on a moon, fighting Borg drones off until the civilians could be evacuated, but part-way through the raging battle, the Borg used the a local power facility to charge up a transporter inhibitor. Tanner's company was one of the major outfits assaulting the Borg-held city to try and destroy the inhibitor to allow the Marines to be beamed out, but the battle went from bad to worse. First, his squad was separated from the rest of the unit - then the squad took heavy damages, including their sergeant. As the remaining fire-team leader froze up completely at their apparent doom, Tanner stepped up to the plate. He rallied the other half a dozen or so men, and made an attempt to get them back to the rest of the regiment.
They had, however, become completely turned around and lost in the urban Borg wasteland and, in trying to rely on secrecy to go through the city rather than taking the long way around to where they knew the Federation forces were, almost inadvertently stumbled upon where hordes of troops could not make it to - the power plant the transporter inhibitor was relying on. In a snap decision, Tanner declared to the survivors that they were in a better position than anyone else to take action, and that they were going in.
Harry Tanner only made it back to the regiment with three other survivors of his squad, but it was to a drop-zone where, now, the Marines could be beamed back to their starship, and the withdraw from Khitomer's moon could be completed. Tanner was decorated for his actions in destroying the power plant, and superiors snatched at this operation to push him into more of a command role, desperate for competent NCOs.
He was promoted to Lance Corporal, with the intention that this would only be temporary while he learned the ropes and accellerated in rank. But it seemed Tanner had other ideas. He was happy enough with the men he was working with, a lack of manpower often leaving him as an acting squad leader within his regiment - the same regiment he had been with at Khitomer, and the longest surviving outfit Tanner had, to that point, served with. Yet he was never anything more than an 'average' troop leader, not suffering unnecessary casualties, but not pushing his soldiers to the levels of excellence that had become expected in the aftermath of his mission at Khitomer.
But his discipline problems remained. When his latest platoon leader, replacing an officer promoted to be the Company CO, was a Second Lieutenant fresh out of Starfleet Academy, Tanner gave the poor man hell. The Lieutenant was no worse than any other new graduate, but lacked the sort of personality to tell this unruly Lance Corporal to shut up and take his orders - a trick most officers eventually discovered as working with Tanner, for if you couldn't talk sense then you could at least talk strength. This continued clashing, of Harry ultimately and inadvertently frustrating the Lieutenant into making mistakes, eventually culminated in a massive gaffe made on a training exercise which resulted in a blazing row. The row ended when Tanner struck his superior officer to argue his point.
Ironically, this would result in a positive change in Tanner's life and career. Charges were levelled against Tanner, which saw his file getting looked at by superiors - superiors who noticed the biggest bright spot of his service, and passed it on to those they thought might be interested. As light was shed on the operation on Khitomer's moon, Starfleet Special Forces approached Harry Tanner, recognising his true abilities. His were skills, they recognised, that worked best in small groups of other talented operatives with a set objective and vague, open parameters.
And if he said yes, the disciplinary charges could just... go away.
For six years, Tanner worked in the special forces, charged most often with going behind enemy lines with a small team of men and crippling Borg resources wherever possible. He was not a great leader, nor a good second - nor even was he particularly suitable as a sergeant figure. But he was an excellent soldier, with strong initiative when it came to his own responsibilities, and with his wits about him sufficiently to get himself and others out of the many hot situations they often tumbled into, sometimes intentionally. He polished his fondness for weaponry, expanding particularly his horizons in phasers and disruptors, discovering a greater comfort with non-Federation armament for its more military design. Also he uncovered a hitherto unknown talent when it came to stealth, on one training exercise managing to get so far as placing a sticker on the underside of the base commandant's office chair and getting out without being detected. Tanner similarly proved himself adept at surviving in a wide range of environments, particularly excelling at the training exercises that required him to survive in the wilderness without being detected by locals or sets of soldiers pursuing him.
The operations he participated in remain classified, and Harry seems to have no inclination to extensively discuss them unless he is directly asked by someone he thinks has any reason to need to know, but he gives no impression that his war-time experiences were anything very particular - that is, particular for a special forces soldier. But as the war drew on and the Federation came closer and closer to Sol with the encroaching Borg, special forces became less valuable than more cannon fodder, and Tanner's unit was disbanded, the members returned to the infantry units of the Marine Corps.
He led a squad through to the end of the War, managing to prove once and for all he was not an infantry commander. Time spent with special forces made him distant, a little inclined towards lone wolf operations compared to how a normal squad would act, and, most importantly, saw him getting very frustrated when dealing with normal soldiers who would often need a lot more instruction and precise orders than he was used to operating under or needing to give.
When the war finished, Tanner put in requests through whatever channels he could get his hands on for either more special operations, or just not having to hold a leadership role. A superior of his clearly took Harry's frustration with his men as a challenge, and in the direct aftermath, he was assigned to Marine Boot Camp to instruct Basic Training to the fresh post-war recruits.
Every new recruit is convinced that their drill instructor hates them. In the case of Corporal Tanner, they were right. He despised the low standards expected, standards that had dropped through the wartime desperation for soldiers, even soldiers not as adept at combat as they could be. Many of the lower-end recruits washed out of his classes even though they made the official grade, and were probably relocated to other, more 'gentle' instructors. Tanner didn't care, though, often taking to some of the most extreme techniques to teach his recruits. On one operation where they were dropped in an unfamiliar environment in the dark and were expected to navigate their way to a meeting point, Tanner provided each group with the wrong map and, on the back of it, had written down notes of landmarks that would lead them to the actual meeting location. He did, much to the criticism of his superiors, have favourites amongst his recruits - though not only was this based genuinely on merit, they themselves thought they were being punished, for Tanner's favour meant more intensive training. These 'Special Lads' would go on to form something of a bizarre old-boy's network in the post-War enlisted ranks of the Marine Corps, and would, after the fact, recognise the value of the lessons learnt from being pushed harder than anyone else. Many of these 'Special Lads' - though there were not that many per class - now serve as SABREs.
His was not a natural aptitude for teaching, though he did get results. Rather than inspiring recruits to learn and improve, Tanner used their fear and their hate as motivators, and apart from the favoured recruits who had the natural aptitude to cope with his attitude, he was deemed unsuitable as an instructor for anything more sophisticated than basic training.
When the Marine Corps were disbanded and the Federation Mobile Infantry was formed, Tanner was offered his pick of jobs, instructing or troop commanding. Unable to understand why his superiors didn't know what he wanted, he refused point blank to take any assignment other than in the newly-formed SABREs. His first operation was in counter-terrorism against elements on the newly-rediscovered Bajor that were considered suspect, but though Tanner was happier in this work than he had perhaps ever been, here his superiors understood him better and recognised that domestic threats were not his favoured enemy. Subsequently, he was assigned to a unit which took operations first in the Vulcan conflict, then against major pirate elements, acting as the team's primary scout and infiltration expert.
His unit, and Tanner himself, operated with such success that they came to the attention of General Price fairly rapidly, and several names from the team were put forward when the formation of the unit designated 'Hell Hounds' came about. Corporal Harry Tanner was one of them, and he was the only to make it through to the elite team.
Personal Life
It is impossible to meet Harry Tanner and not have an opinion of him, though usually that is one of distaste for his arrogance and his rudeness. Nevertheless, he forms superficial attachments easily, and has many vague acquaintances throughout the Fleet. Friends are harder to make, and he has a difficult time relating to anyone who doesn't understand the special forces way of life, let alone the military life. So he has a scattering of contacts and friends, usually people he's served with, and the Federation's more localised habits means that Tanner can walk into almost any FMI-friendly bar on Earth and find someone he can have a drink or a brawl with - either are equal entertainment and social interaction to him.
His family life is mostly non-existent. His parents died in the Battle of Sol from the bombardment of London, though his contact with them was minimal since his enlistment and their death did not hit him very hard. His sister he always got on with, though she is now working as a lawyer at the Palais de la Concorde, having cultivated her intellect and made something of herself. She and Harry are as emotionally close as could be with their regular physical distance, but they are from very different worlds and lives and they both recognise this is a barrier almost impossible to overcome. Harry still writes to her often.
He somehow, over the course of his career, managed to get married, in a deeply ill-advised move. Tumbling into a catastrophic relationship with civil engineer Andrea Palmer while on extended leave on Earth, the two were married before he was redeployed in a classic tale of war-time desperation. The marriage collapsed within a year of impressive passive-aggressive arguing for such a long-distance relationship, but there remained the lasting testament to the bad idea in the shape of their daughter Nicola, who was born after the couple separated. Harry had precious little to do with her during the war, either through callous indifference or through expecting himself to get killed and thus trying to avoid any painful attachments, and only got into any regular contact once peace was declared. Theirs is a tenuous and new relationship, though Tanner has won his daughter's love by taking her out on trips of extreme sports, much to her mother's disapproval and the girl's amusement. Still, his connection to her is more that of a big brother, or some sort of estranged, amusing uncle than an actual father, something Tanner has not been willing to sacrifice his work for to correct.
The biggest impact Harry Tanner has perhaps made on the FMI is the unintentional network of comrades-in-arms that were once the favoured amongst the recruits he taught. The 'special lads' as he called them, usually using it as a derisive label, have all benefitted from both the extra training Tanner gave them, and his recognition of their potential. Many of them are young SABREs, and most of those who are not are already high fliers in the NCO ranks. They stay in contact with each other, considering that if another soldier has trained under Harry Tanner's harshest tutelege and lived to tell the tale, then he deserves their respect, and it has become something of a slightly suspect network of favours.
Tanner owns a bulldog, an ugly creature named 'Ripper' he used to use to scare his recruits. Since returning to active SABRE duty, he tends to foist the dog off on whichever random contact living on Earth will have it if he is off-world. His ex-wife refuses point blank to allow the animal in her house, but does not always get her way if there is particularly short notice. Nicola, to everyone's amazement and Tanner's amusement, adores Ripper, who has been labelled as potentially dangerous by animal experts if left unattended. Ripper, however, has yet to actually attack anyone without his master's express orders - which are sometimes given.