#sierra toy soldier company

[blackkudos]

Louis Gossett Jr.

Louis Cameron Gossett Jr. (born May 27, 1936) is an American actor. He is perhaps best known for his Academy Award-winning role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman, and his Emmy Award-winning role as Fiddler in the 1977 ABC television miniseries Roots. Gossett has also starred in numerous film productions including A Raisin In The Sun,The Landlord. Skin Game, Travels with My Aunt, The Laughing Policeman, The Deep, Jaws 3-D (1983), Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine, the Iron Eagle series, Toy Soldiers and The Punisher, in an acting career that spans over five decades.

Early life and education

Gossett was born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, on May 27, 1936, to Hellen Rebecca (née Wray), a nurse, and Louis Gossett Sr., a porter. He is an alumnus of Mark Twain Intermediate School 239 and Abraham Lincoln High School. His stage debut came at the age of 17, in a school production of You Can't Take It with You when a sports injury resulted in the decision to take an acting class. Polio had already delayed his graduation.

After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1954, he attended New York University, declining an athletic scholarship. Standing 6'4" (1.93 m), he was offered the opportunity to play varsity basketball during his college years at NYU, which he declined to concentrate on theater. His high school teacher had encouraged him to audition for a Broadway part, which resulted in his selection for a starring role on Broadway in 1953 from among 200 other actors well before he entered NYU.

Career

Gossett replaced Bill Gunn as Spencer Scott in Broadway's Take a Giant Step, which was selected by The New York Times drama critics as one of the 10 best shows of the year. He was 17, and still a student at Abraham Lincoln High School, with no formal drama training.

Gossett's Broadway theatre credits include A Raisin in the Sun (1959). Gossett stepped into the world of cinema in the Sidney Poitier vehicle A Raisin in the Sun in 1961.

Also in 1961, Gossett appeared in the original cast of Jean Genet's The Blacks, the longest running off-Broadway play of the decade, running for 1,408 performances. The original cast also featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou and Charles Gordone.

In 1965, Gossett appeared in the musical play, Zulu and the Zayda on Broadway as Paulus with music and lyrics by Harold Rome.

Gossett wrote the antiwar folk song "Handsome Johnny" with Richie Havens which Havens recorded in 1966.

His Emmy Award-winning role of Fiddler in the 1977 television miniseries Roots first brought Gossett to the audience's attention.

In 1983, he was cast in the title role in Sadat, a miniseries which chronicled the life and assassination of Anwar Sadat. While filming An Officer and a Gentleman, Gossett was also starring in the 1982–1983 science fiction series, The Powers of Matthew Star. His role as drill instructor Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He was the first African-American male to win an Oscar in a supporting role, the second black male to win for acting, and the third African-American actor to win overall.

In 1986, Gossett starred in another role as a military man (Colonel Chappy Sinclair) in the film Iron Eagle. It was followed by three sequels.

Gossett is the voice of the Vortigaunts in the video game Half-Life 2 and is the Free Jaffa Leader Gerak in Season 9 of the sci-fi television series Stargate SG-1. He provides the voice of Lucius Fox in The Batman animated series. He recorded several commercials for a Nashville-based diabetic company, AmMed Direct, LLC. In 1997, Gossett presented When Animals Attack! 4, a one-hour special on Fox.

He played the role of fictional U.S. President Gerald Fitzhugh in the 2005 film Left Behind: World at War. In 2008 he filmed the "Keep It Real" series of commercials for the Namibian lager Windhoek.

In 2009, Gossett also lent his voice talents in the Thomas Nelson audio Bible production known as The Word of Promise. In this dramatized audio, Gossett played the character of John the Apostle. The project also featured a large ensemble of well known Hollywood actors including Jim Caviezel, John Rhys-Davies, Jon Voight, Gary Sinise, Jason Alexander, Christopher McDonald, Marissa Tomei and John Schneider.

In 2013, Gossett starred in the controversial drama, Boiling Pot, which is based on true events of racism that occurred on college campuses across the country during the 2008 Presidential election. The film, written and directed by the Ashmawey brothers under AshmaweyFilms, also stars Danielle Fishel, Keith David, M. Emmet Walsh, and John Heard. Gossett plays a detective attempting to decipher a murder case that was fueled by racism, all while putting aside his own prejudices. Boiling Pot was released in 2014. Gossett returned to television in the CBS All Access series, The Good Fight, guest starring as founding partner Carl Reddick of Diane Lockhart's new firm.

Personal life

Gossett has been married three times and fathered one son and adopted one son. His first marriage was to Hattie Glascoe; it was annulled. His second, to Christina Mangosing, took place on August 21, 1973. Their son Satie was born in 1974. Gossett and Mangosing divorced in 1975. His third marriage, to Star Search champion Cyndi James-Reese, took place on December 25, 1987. They adopted a son, Sharron (born 1977). Gossett and James-Reese divorced in 1992.

Louis is the uncle of actor Robert Gossett who starred on TNT's The Closer.

According to DNA analysis, he is descended, chiefly, from people of Liberia and Sierra Leone.

On February 9, 2010, Gossett announced that he was suffering from prostate cancer. He added: the disease was caught in its early stages, and expects to make a full recovery.

On July 18, 2016, Mr. Gosset cohosted as a guest programmer on Turner Classic Movies' primetime lineup. Allowed to choose four movies to air, he selected Blackboard Jungle, Lifeboat, Touch of Evil and The Night of the Hunter.

Wikipedia

#Louis Gossett Jr. #05-27

[agoodflyting]

He That Fights With Monsters - 1/5  (monster!Kylo/Hux historical AU)

3100 words / Mature (for violence and gore, this chapter). This is basically a Kylux AU of the movie ‘Ravenous’.

W E N D I G O: a powerful creature from native american folklore. a man who consumes the flesh of another and is transformed into a monster with a fierce, insatiable hunger 

1842 Fort Spencer, California

The so-called fort is a ramshackle affair, barely deserving of the title. Little more than a cluster of rough-hewn wood and mud buildings- leaning, crumbling- huddled against each other inside a tall fence like children hiding behind their mother’s skirt. Fort Spencer cowered, at if frightened of the distant peaks of the Sierra Nevada Mountains which loomed on the horizon.

The place seemed thrown together thoughtlessly, additions tacked on without skill and as need arose. Piles of discarded lumber propped up the dirty thatch to make haphazard work shelters. Posts leaned like drunks. A few scrawny chickens wandered the yard freely, pecking at twigs on the frozen ground.

It was a neglected place. Unkempt and uncared-for.

The military brat in him, the part that- even now- folded his sheets neatly and polished all the buttons on his uniform every morning, had taken it all in with a faint sense of rising horror. There was no order. Pots and tools and washing lines hung from whatever was available. There was no sense of purpose to anything. It was hardly fit to be called an outpost of the U.S. Military.

It was the sort of place where you shoved the things you wanted to forget about.

That was, of course, why he had been sent there.

“You’re no hero, Hux.”

General Tarkin had taken him aside after Hux had disgraced himself at his own promotion ceremony, his first act as Captain being to sneak out and hide behind the building, shaking and vomiting like an addict when the sight of a too-rare steak at his own celebratory dinner had unexpectedly brought back the memory of his commanding officer’s half shot-off head.

The words rang like a condemnation. All of his flaws so neatly rolled into one. You’re no hero. When he was a boy, he used to sit at his father’s knee and beg for stories from the elder Hux’s time as a commander during Madison’s War of 1812. Sitting by the fire listening to the soft lilt of his father’s voice over a cup of tea or a game of chess were some of his fondest memories, and by the time he was ten he could recite the story of each battle as well as if he’d been there himself. There had never been a time when he hadn’t pictured himself earning his own glory on the battlefield someday. All of the men in his family had been soldiers.

Naturally, Hux had been top of his class at West Point. A promising young officer. A rising star. He developed a reputation for his intelligence, his skill with battleground tactics –  moving lines of men in his mind, like chess pieces – and his tenacity. Sharp-edged ambition ensured that these traits were noticed by the right people, and he was quickly promoted to first lieutenant without ever having seen battle.

Hux had loved everything about military life, from the brutish camaraderie of his men to the bright gold braiding on his uniform.

The day he got word that he was being deployed against Santa Anna with the rest of his platoon, he had never been happier. He hoped, only, that the fighting wouldn’t be over too soon. Not before he could distinguish himself. He excelled at everything- it had never occurred to him that battle would be any different.

That younger Hux seems like a character from a book to him now. Someone he has only read about, and even then, didn’t much like.

The first time a ball had whizzed past his head close enough to ruffle his hair, Hux had frozen. Simply frozen, his knees locking up, limbs turning gelatinous with fear, as cannonshot exploded around him. The sound was deafening. A rolling boom like thunder inside his very bones. His ears rang and he tried to cover them with numb hands, but his limbs were liquid, useless- why had father never told him how loud it was-

Everything was screaming, exploding. The crack of gunshot and men dying all around him. Dirt and mud and blood- and someone is yanking on his arm, shouting at him to get his rifle- "Stop!"

He can’t tell which are his men and which are Santa Anna’s. Everything is moving too fast. He just needed to get his bearings, if everything would only stop-

“Move, lieutenant- Hux, come on!“

A cannonball bursts close enough that Hux’s teeth rattle, and he feels a little bit of shameful wetness seeping into the front of his wool trousers. Then he is on the ground on his knees. Scrabbling around in the muck. How did he get here-

There's a butcher's sound. The hand yanking on his arm goes slack, limp fingers clutching briefly on the woolen sleeve of his coat before the arm slithers heavily to the ground- severed. The man- his man- it had so recently been attached to is still alive. Staring up at Hux with wide, frightened eyes. His shoulder is nothing but meat, shattered by canon-shot, and the blood- there was so much, too much, how- turns the dirt under his hands and knees to warm mud-

Blue. They were blue eyes, and they remained open, staring at Hux, even after the man died.

“You’re no hero, Hux. I want you as far from my company as possible.” In private, General Tarkin’s voice was wry with scorn. The same voice which, mere hours before, had commended him in front of his father and all of his peers for ‘heroism above and beyond the call of duty’.

“I’m sending you to California- Fort Spencer.”

“Yes, sir.” Hux stood at attention, his sweat-slick hand gripping his new papers tightly. He feels that he may be sick again.

It was officially a reward. With his promotion, Hux will be second-in-command at Fort Spencer, the last military outpost west of the mountains. The papers clutched in his hand, which he had read and re-read dutifully, explain that it is a minor waypoint for travelers on their way to California, which sees little-to-no traffic in the winter, when the mountains become impassable.

“My first choice was a firing squad, you know. But seeing as how you did manage to capture the enemy post, I thought it might set a bad precedent.”

A compromise. A post where he can do no harm, and General Tarkin’s old friend Commander Hux need never know that his son is an abject coward.

“Thank you, sir.”

It is not the praise and commendation he had dreamed of as a boy, but he has proven that he isn’t fit for anything better.

“Do you have a hobby, Hux?” There was a knife’s edge of satisfaction in the twist of the General’s mouth.

“I… Swimming, sir.” He swam sometimes in the summer, for exercise. It was close enough to a hobby. His career has always consumed the majority of his life.

“Swimming,” General Tarkin echoed, amused. “I suggest you pack a book. It gets tedious out there.”

Hux had dutifully packed three books in his case. Aristotle, his father’s dog-eared copy of ‘The Federalist’, and a James Fenimore-Cooper novel he had grabbed last-minute at the final trading post before they crossed the Nevadas.

He rations them. Doling himself out words in careful measure, the way a starving man might his last meal.

Fort Spencer thrives on tedium, Hux discovers quickly. Once the cold sets in there is little to do.

Fewer than a dozen men occupy the fort during the winter- there for seemingly no other purpose than to allow the U.S. government to state that the place is occupied year-round. His command, Hux learns quickly, consists of other men like himself- disgraces. Drunks and cowards and madmen. Human detritus that the army has swept under the rug. His commanding officer is a greying, temperamental Major named Krennic. The name is vaguely familiar from some bit of fuss involving a saboteur when Hux was a cadet.

“The Spanish built this place as a mission. We inherited it,” Krennic had informed Hux when he first arrived, tipping a few fingers of cheap bourbon into a pair of antique crystal glasses that seemed, to Hux, far too fine for the use to which they were being put. He sat gingerly in the chair across from Krennic’s sturdy desk. “Along with Phasma. She’s local. Or raised by them, anyway. I can’t imagine you got a word out of her,” he added, referring to the tall, stoic woman who had guided Hux from San Miguel to the fort.

“It’s just us until the thaw clears in April. The only enemy out here is the boredom,” he flashed a thin smile at his own joke. “Mitaka does all the cooking. Rodinon used to be a veterinarian, so he plays doctor.” Krennic drained his glass in one swallow and cleared his throat, seemingly bored already with the task of briefing his newest officer. “I would suggest you don’t get sick. I’d say don’t eat, but then most of us have to.”

“Yes, sir,” Hux said, for lack of anything better to say.

Krennic slouched indolently in his chair, one hand toying listlessly with the gold braiding at his collar, which Hux could see was frayed in several places.

“With your promotion, you’re second in command. Lucky you.”

It didn’t sound like a compliment, and so Hux did not take it as one.

Krennic poured himself a second glass of bourbon and drank it more slowly. “Can I ask what you did to earn the honor of a Fort Spencer commission?”

Hux considered lying. He sipped at his bourbon, felt the cheap sting of it in his throat. “I captured an enemy fort single-handedly, after the rest of my unit was killed,” he said finally. It was the truth. Rather than being impressed, Krennic half-smiled, like Hux had reminded him of something fond. Or perhaps told a joke without realizing it. “Ambitious. Well don’t worry, this place will soon break you of that.”

After that first day, Hux rarely sees Krennic unless the man has some onerous task to assign him, or else he has run out of bourbon. Hux cannot complain overmuch. Assuming control over the daily running of the fort provides him with some sense of purpose, however flimsy. He wastes no time in assuming the brunt of command at Fort Spencer, merely because no one else seems to want it.

While whipping a sense of order into the motley assortment of men there does not make him popular, it at least occupies his time.

There is a running joke at Fort Spencer. It’s, “Did you do anything today?”

He rises at dawn, polishes his boots in the pale light and pushes aside the floating chunks of ice in his wash basin to shave. Drags the rest of the men under his command, protesting, cursing, and half-dressed, out of their beds, and endures muttered comments and hateful glares from all save a stammery little lieutenant named Mitaka, who seems to fairly worship the ground Hux walks on.

It is far from how he imagined his first command.

It would be easy- too easy- to allow the seeping entropy that permeates this place to take hold of him. So Hux deploys his men to whatever petty, tedious little tasks he can find that need doing. Fortifying the main gate, gathering firewood, re-stringing the washing lines- anything he can find to give some sort of shape and purpose to the endless parade of identical days.

Save Mitaka, the men seem to think he’s a senseless little tit for trying to fight the inevitable.

They have all been here longer than he has. Sometimes, when he lies awake in the depths of the pitch-dark night, unable to sleep without dreaming, he wonders if they’re right.

Nights like that he drags himself out of his chilly, narrow bed. With a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he pads to the window and draws up the oilcloth covering so that he can look out at the distant mountains. Moonlight reflects off their snow-covered peaks, leaving them nearly luminescent. They sit crouched on the horizon, and nights like this he cannot but feel that the mountains living things and that they are watching him back.

Cold frosts his breath. Hux draws the blanket tighter around his shoulders.

“How did you take the fort?”  The man had asked at his debriefing. Hux had hated him and his smooth, calm, nonjudgmental voice. He wanted to be judged.

“When the fighting started, I panicked. I froze.”

“You froze?”

“I was...” Scared. “I laid down on the ground. I played dead.” He remembers the dirt in his mouth, warm, tinged with his comrade’s blood. Closing his eyes, like a child who thinks that doing so will somehow make him invisible.

“You played dead while the rest of your unit fought and died.”

“Yes.”

“But you made it behind enemy lines.”

The words had stuck in his throat. “I was buried.”

A mass grave. His commanding officer’s half shot-off head inches from his face. The crushing weight of dead men piled on top of him. Blood and other filth covering him. The taste of lukewarm blood in his mouth, choking him, running down his throat-

“I climbed out once it got dark.” Pushing aside the dead weight of men twice his size like they weighed nothing. Covered in muck and gore as he climbed from an open grave, the first guard who had seen Hux had simply dropped his rifle in fear and bolted.

“And how did you take the post?”

How to describe that rush of power? The sudden influx of energy, like being possessed, and yet more in control of himself than he had ever been before. Predatory. Fierce.

It had been the adrenaline, surely.

Time passes in a listless trickle of days. Hux oversees the fort, dodging Mitaka’s earnest attempts to get underfoot, and the baleful curses of the rest of his men, who, never the cream of the crop in the first place, had grown lazy and indolent under Krennic’s lax hand. “No side trips. Go straight to San Miguel and back,” Hux refuses to relinquish his hold on the supply list until their errand boy, a particularly addle-brained young private named Cleeves, meets his stare. The man shifts and slouches on the back of his horse- one of their two broken down old nags, the other currently being ridden by Phasma- rolling his eyes like a teenager being lectured by his father and trying halfheartedly to twist the paper out of Hux’s hand. “I know what I’m supposed to be doing, goddamn-” he complains, in a thick southern accent. “Get exactly what’s on the list, nothing more, nothing less, you hear me? No dawdling. No drinking. No women,” Hux adds firmly, releasing the paper. He tempers the urge to smack the man off his horse, knowing it would only make him more enemies. “Aww, come on-“ “I’ll watch him,” Phasma says in her low, calm voice. She is swaddled up in grey furs, looking infinitely more comfortable in the frigid winter air than he is in his woolen greatcoat. Rumor around the fort was that they came from a wolf which she had killed bare-handed. Looking at her, it was not a difficult story to believe. “Thank you, Phasma.” Hux lifts the crossbeam off of the main gate and pulls open the doors just enough for their horses to pass through. Ironic, the woman had proven herself to be the only one of them worth a damn. Hux would have gladly traded his entire command for another of Phasma. The next week without her will be torment, but Hux doesn’t trust Cleeves to find his own prick with both hands, let alone make it two days overland with all their shopping intact, and this will be the last supply run they have time for before the winter snow well and truly cuts them off. On top of that, he had asked Phasma to pick him up another book. Hux reads by light of a single candle in the frozen evening hours, always with a blanket pulled up over his shoulders to ward off the chill that seeps into every corner no matter how much straw he stuffs into the cracks in his walls. He has finished the Aristotle and the Fenimore-Cooper and is dawdling over a re-read of The Federalist, hoping to make it last until Phasma returns with reinforcements, when the cold finally chases him out of his solitary room and into the warmer mess building, where the men stay up late in the evenings conversing, smoking, and warming themselves besides the big fireplace. If there is an epicenter of culture at Fort Spencer, it is the mess hut. He’s made a habit of absenting himself, aware of his own unpopularity, but even he isn’t stubborn enough to lose his toes just to avoid a bit of social awkwardness. Hux bundles himself up in his greatcoat, book under his arm, and crosses the frozen ground at a quick clip. His leather boots are unlined- made for the much warmer climate of New Mexico. There should be a new pair coming back with Phasma and Cleeves.

It has started to snow again, and flecks of it land in his copper hair and on the shoulders of his coat like stars. When he opens the mess door, the wind picks up, forcing a burst of flurries inside with him before he forces it shut.

To Hux’s surprise, his arrival barely stirs a grumble out of the half-dozen men lounging around the fireplace. There are a couple of amused mutters, Private Reich drawls, “Well look who decided to join us,” and that is the end of it.

Major Krennic is the only one who isn’t in the mess, but Hux isn’t surprised. Hux had seen the low light burning in his window as he crossed the square. Considering the hour, he was probably drunk.

Mitaka, who seems to be losing badly at chess with Rodinon, lights up when he notices Hux and he offers a breathless, “Evening, Captain-“ Rodinon takes advantage of his distraction to nudge Mitaka’s rook a few squares to the side.

Hux nods to them, but says nothing, holding his book in his hands like a shield against unwelcome questions. He finds a chair close enough to the fire that he can warm his frozen toes and sinks into it. The book is held open in his lap, but he only gazes at the page, unseeing. He only has a few dozen pages left of The Federalist, and it needs to last him the remainder of the week... In the quiet dark up here in the mountains, reading is the only defense he has to keep the memories at bay.

It’s a balancing act- reading a few sentences at a time, considering them as he watches the snowstorm pick up through the mess hut’s single low window, and returning to his pages before his mind can wander all the way back to New Mexico, and the pit of his comrades bodies that is waiting for him every night when he closes his eyes.

In between pages, he watches the men around him, surreptitiously, idly wondering what sins they committed to earn a sentence in this purgatory.

Rodinon was a cheat and a liar. The absent Cleeves was a fool. Mitaka had dropped his entire life story at Hux’s feet at the first prompting- he had been General Tarkin’s aide de camp until he spilled tea all over the man’s desk. The others Hux doesn’t know, but can guess.

How many of them had tried to escape the world, only to turn back around and try to escape this bleak, awful place?

Outside the window, the snow had begun to fall in thick drifts, and so Hux gazes aimlessly out into the night for long moments before he realizes, with a sudden jolt of fear, that something is gazing back.

#kylux #kylux au #monster!kylo #historical au #armitage hux #monster kylo #wendigos #tw:gore #tw: blood #look i wrote a monster kylo #my fanfiction