Invictus Launch Week has come to an end. It’s over. What remains, after all the pomp and celebration, is a sense of emptiness. An emotional void that echoes the vacuum of space. The same one we face every time we leave the surface of a planet or moon to venture into our own personal journey or business. And often, when we do that, we take an important, almost absolute, truth for granted: Nothing should be taken for granted. The chance to live the life we choose. The chance to follow our own intimate path. All of these opportunities come at a price. And because of how the human mind is wired, they must be seized. Clawed at. Fought for.
And if there’s one thing we’ve carved into our minds in bold letters, it’s this: there’s a limit to those opportunities. If we don’t tend to them, if we don’t nurture them, they can fall apart right before our eyes, throwing our personal adventure, our personal story, onto a completely different track, one that risks becoming someone else’s story. From that perspective, Invictus Launch Week fulfills a crucial purpose. With its ships on display and its parade of officers, it shows us a different kind of daily reality. Not our story, but a military story. One made of infinite smaller stories. Infinite lives absorbed by the relentless engine of the Imperial military machine.
And it is that story, the one hidden between the lines of this imperialistic celebration of warcraft and muscle-flexing of the Empire’s might, that Imperial Geographic chooses to focus on. Through our photographs. Through our observations. Thousands of years ago, a general named Douglas MacArthur once said “The soldier above all others prays for peace, for it is the soldier who must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war.”
And once again, to make sense of the present, to bring these stories into focus, we’ve borrowed the words of our past. A past that, without fail, returns to our doorstep. To the threshold of our world. To remind us that, for better or worse, this, too, is who we are.