Spoilers for “The Veteran” Ahead
Over the past six years, From a Certain Point of View (FACPOV) has been an exercise in the margins. These anthologies were an opportunity to expand Lucasfilm’s author base and provide glimpses into the lives of characters who might only appear for a split second on-screen. New voices, new faces, brought to the forefront and given new interiority. Fandom has even made a game of trying to guess which characters would be so honored. An unexpected recipient of Return of the Jedi’s FACPOV was Dexter Jettster in Adam Lance Garcia’s “The Veteran.”
Unlike many other faces in FACPOV, Dex does have past development that leads into the anthology. He’s become quite the complex character in Star Wars literature and comics. Garcia takes Dex’s previously-established interiority and follows up in satisfying ways.
The bad knee given to Dex by Rob Coleman and the digital artists of Attack of the Clones is present in the form of chronic pain. The dereliction of his diner and the smuggling tunnel beneath – established in Aftermath: Empire’s End by Chuck Wendig – are crucial settings. But they’re more than throwaway references that check off a Wookieepedia list. Sure, Lenahra and Athus Klee are name-dropped, but those are hardly the most important connections to Padawan (Kiersten White) or The Smuggler’s Guide (Dan Wallace). The essential connections are found within what initially looks like a contradiction.
In Brotherhood by Mike Chen, Obi-Wan Kenobi teases Dex. He calls the Clone Wars, “a war you started, by the way.” Dex counters, reasonably, “Hate to break it to you, but those clones were already there, whether or not you went to Kamino.”
“The Veteran” opens up with the old Besalisk referring to the same conflict as “The war Dex helped start.”
This shift from deflection to guilt is a painfully believable progression of Dexter Jettster.
In examining Dex’s previous appearances, we can see that Dex tends to hide his true face. There’s a certain mask of cheerfulness that he projects. It causes people to underestimate him, and it shields his secrets. Even Obi-Wan has been on the receiving end of it. However, this mask consistently cracks when Dex finds himself unable to help someone in need.
In Padawan, he listens to his fellow miners die on a job, on an entirely different ship, far from his aid. He’s the only one to challenge their employer on the matter and does so with “accusation in his tone and tears in his eyes … ‘None of those crews signed on to die for you.’” In The Smuggler’s Guide, Dex’s boisterous confidence breaks when he comes across a Crimson Dawn labor camp and realizes, “I can’t save everyone. I’m just one person. I can’t even save one of them.”
Another previously established characteristic is that Dex places immense trust in the power of small actions. “One crate in the right place can change everything,” he tells Sabé in Queen’s Hope (E.K. Johnston). “I know stealing one worker won’t make any difference to Crimson Dawn. But I figured it’d make a difference to this guy,” he tells himself in The Smuggler’s Guide.
So if Dexter Jettster believes that every simple action ripples out powerfully…
If Dexter Jettster is cut to the quick by simply being unable to stop harm…
…what happens if – due to a simple action – Dexter Jettster believes himself responsible for immeasurable harm?
Garcia pulls no punches to answer this question. There is a brutality to “The Veteran” that is hard to read but feels deeply appropriate. Everything that we’ve been told about Dex in canon (and Legends) points down this path.
“The Veteran” is permeated with a sense of exhaustion and futility. His knees ache. He cries himself to sleep. He sees the fallout of pointing Obi-Wan towards Kamino – the war, the Purge, the Empire – and that all the actions he took after to help were never enough. We are following a man who wants to give up. A man who believes he should give up.
But that’s not who Dexter Jettster is.
That appears to be one of the central themes of “The Veteran.” Recognizing oneself – one’s true face – even through pain.
In this story, Dex sees a crowd rioting, their blood up from the announcement of the Emperor’s death. Out of their rage and pain at Imperial oppression, the crowd nearly commits a murder. A young girl stops them, declaring “This isn’t who we are!” As the crowd eventually settles and agrees with her, they are ambushed by Imperial forces. Dex takes charge to guide everyone to shelter.
“A few other rioters joined [Dex’s] efforts, helping those who fell and carrying those too injured to walk towards safety. One of them was the man with the crate hook. Their eyes met, and they shared an unspoken moment of solidarity; this was who they were.”
Out of his guilt and pain, Dex believes his actions to be futile. He tells himself repeatedly that it’s pointless to try. Only for his actions to betray him.
The first thing he does upon stepping outside his door is protect a child. On his long journey through the smuggling tunnels on bad knees, he never once considers turning back. While it’s the girl who stops the crowd, Dex himself never stops trying to interrupt the murder. And the moment Imperial forces ambush, his first instinct is to protect the strangers around him. He cannot stop himself from helping others.
This is who Dexter Jettster is.
It takes him a moment to recognize himself, to see his own face true again. But by “The Veteran”s end, he’s back in the fight. He’s giving the Rebellion the exact tool they need to defeat the Imperials on Coruscant. One crate in the right place.
Garcia wrote a brutal, beautiful love letter to my favorite character in Star Wars. It’s consistent with Dex’s past appearances while still being a progression into something new. It centers a fat character with depth and respect to his emotional interiority (shout out also to “The Plan” by Saladin Ahmed and a stink eye to the stories that body-shamed Jabba in this anthology). Any physical struggles are due to chronic pain and age, not his body shape. It’s still rare to have this sort of representation, and even past Dex appearances have had varying degrees of fatphobia. While I am not qualified to judge if this story is perfect representation, the lack of overt body-shaming is a relief.
“The Veteran” is also one of the best-written stories in the anthology. Garcia is efficient in what he shows us. There’s no wasted space, but neither does he sacrifice emotions for plot beats. Each scene progresses the story and Dex’s character arc. There are multiple themes weaving together, more than I have touched on here. From a craft perspective, it’s impeccable.
I so wish I could love it unconditionally.
But there’s that pivotal scene. Where a young girl stops a rioting crowd from killing a stormtrooper who reveals himself to be a tearful young man.
“Dex had no love for the Empire and little compassion for those willing to fight for it. But he knew what was right. Using all four arms, Dex shoved his way through the crowd.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. ‘Hey! Put him down!’
But those who caught sight of Dex chose to look away. Who would listen to an old Besalisk when there were tyrants to overthrow?”
This hits a little too close to home.
After I finished college, I moved briefly to Northern Minnesota. Over the time I lived there, a grant was offered to purchase new riot gear for the Duluth police department in St. Louis County. Earlier that same year, Minnesota granted the energy company Enbridge approval to build a new oil pipeline – Line 3 – through the sovereign lands of the Anishinaabe.
We were not far out from the militarization of police against Indigenous protestors at Standing Rock. There were already protests against Line 3 from the Indigenous community. Concerns were raised at multiple city council meetings in Duluth. Against whom would this gear be used?
When I attended city council meetings – in solidarity against the riot gear purchase – I saw my Black neighbors, my Indigenous neighbors, and their allies provide detailed and researched examples of how riot gear has been used against marginalized populations. The protests of Line 3 specifically were brought up.
Those in favor of the riot gear played in hypotheticals. What if a protestor threw a brick onto an officer’s head, and the officer’s daughter never sees him again? Wouldn’t it be scary if protestors got out of control?
In the end, despite consistent vocal protest from the community, the hypotheticals won out. Duluth approved the riot gear purchase. One council member said that he was upset people didn’t have more of a chance to speak up – for or against – the purchase, but “I was concerned that if we didn’t move forward and show folks that we do support our police officers, that we were going to earn a reputation in this city as one that doesn’t support them.”
Four years later, it was revealed that Enbridge paid the government $8.6 million to cover the costs to police Line 3. $394.8K went to the St. Louis County Sheriff’s office. Nearly 900 people were arrested protesting the pipeline, many of whom were cited with misdemeanors. But others face escalated charges. Acts of non-violent civil disobedience were being charged with felonies or “aiding with assisted suicide.” Meanwhile, Enbridge itself has faced fines and criminal charges for violating environmental law, the exact thing the protestors were trying to stop.
I don’t know if Duluth’s riot gear had ever been deployed against the Line 3 protestors, but the fact remains that the Indigenous community’s concerns about police militarization was realized. And the arguments that made it happen involved playing into hypotheticals that gave faces to the police but ignored those of the marginalized.
Wouldn’t it be scary if protestors got out of control?
This is an unfortunately common trope in media. One of the more recent, high-profile examples is The Falcon and The Winter Soldier. In her video essay on the series, Princess Weekes breaks down the parallels between the antagonist Karli and how people treat protests and revolutions in our world:
“People will talk about how horrified they are by police brutality one moment, but then say they are uncomfortable with terms like ‘defund the police.’ And then we see police commit murder on an unarmed Black man. Again.
…[Sam, our protagonist] talks to Karli and tries to catch her in a ‘gotcha’ about how she’s fighting corporations, but she’s building an army, and she’s going to be equally as bad. And what I find so interesting is that he’s doing the same thing that you see people do: these kind of hypotheticals about what kind of violence is too much violence in the world, and how violent you are allowed to be in defense of your personhood.
…Karli and the Flag Smashers are doing something that has happened time and time again. When downtrodden people rise up against an oppressive force, they are demonized.”
Wouldn’t it be scary if protestors got out of control?
In “The Veteran,” we don’t know why the crowd attacked the stormtrooper. Dex hears the trooper’s screams after the crowd already has him. In the text, the crowd is referred to as “rioters,” a loaded term. They are described as smiling (emphasis in the text) while the trooper is described as begging. When his face is revealed, a person “no older than twenty” is described as a boy, face wet with tears. The rioters, even as they shout against deeds that the text acknowledges as injustices are described as “angry” and “spittle-flecked.” An adult raises a crate hook to scare the girl stopping them from killing the “child” stormtrooper. The girl’s steeled, heroic expression is described. None of the rioters are given faces.
Wouldn’t it be scary if protestors got out of control?
Now, “The Veteran” makes a point to say that the Empire worked hard to dehumanize its soldiers, to take away their faces. It puts the blame where it belongs: on the oppressor. But in-turn, the text dehumanizes the oppressed and takes away their faces. The conflict that Dex steps into is manufactured in such a way that the oppressed are painted as the dangerous ones.
To his credit, Garcia doesn’t pull some “both sides” nonsense. The girl’s action to save the trooper doesn’t magically make the Imperials turn friendly. They ambush the rioters – the crowd – who are now depicted as heroic, helping their neighbors. It’s emphasized that Dex is helping people get to safety so that they have “a chance to fight another day.” He has the afore-mentioned moment of solidarity with the man who wielded the crate hook. And the hopeful ending for Dex is not some negotiation between Imperials and the crowd; he’s getting back into the fight to take the system down. Ultimately, the protestors are the good guys, and our protagonist comes into alignment with them.
On a certain level, it feels weird to single out “The Veteran” and Garcia – out of all 120 stories and 108 authors in all of FACPOV – for this intense critique. This is hardly the only story to paint an Imperial in a sympathetic light. It’s not even close to the most sympathetic. Hell, a sympathetic Darth Vader story comes immediately after. One could even argue that this scene is an encapsulation of what the FACPOV anthologies are about. Honestly, the intensity of this critique is a byproduct of “The Veteran” being about Dexter Jettster. It was going to be pulled to pieces by me, even if everything I had to say was positive. “Brotherhood” isn’t getting this sort of analysis because I don’t care enough about Anakin Skywalker to wrestle with that story for an entire week.
And, in case you forgot throughout the latter half of this essay, I love “The Veteran.” It is an exceptionally well-written and poignant exploration of trauma. I have been making music videos in my brain over it. I’ve got fanfic ideas. You need to see my collection of drafted tweets, and you will, because I won’t be able to shut up. “The Veteran” is one of my three favorite Dexter Jettster stories, it’s my favorite short story in the entire franchise, and when I place myself wholly in the world of Star Wars, I can love it as a whole. When I place myself in the context of the FACPOV anthology, I can understand the thematic relevance of the stormtrooper scene.
But no story exists in a vacuum, and “The Veteran” plays, however unintentionally, into a trope that has been used to demonize oppressed communities for fighting back. It would be irresponsible of me to leave such a serious concern unexamined. Especially one that fits so well into the question that From A Certain Point of View asks us to ponder:
To whom do we give faces?
For information on how to help Line 3 protestors facing criminal charges or to join the fight against Line 5, visit StopLine3.Org. You can follow James on Twitter @aDillonDev and read more of his Star Wars thoughts on Eleven-ThirtyEight and Cinelinx.
DISCLOSURE: I received a copy of this book from the publisher at no charge in order to provide a review. However, this did not affect the overall review content. All opinions are my own.