Blog Post by Jake Sully – “Sullys Stick Together”
Posted: [Pandora Local Net – Forward Operating Base Echo] Date: 2154 (Earth reckoning)
You know, people keep asking me what it’s like to be out here. Fighting in another man’s war on another man’s planet. They expect some big speech about duty or the RDA or how the Na’vi changed everything. But the truth is simpler than that.
It’s in the blood.
My great-grandfather was Francois Sully. Combat photographer in Vietnam, back when that whole mess was still called French Indochina at the start. He went in with the French, stayed when the Americans showed up, and kept shooting long after most people would’ve packed their cameras and run. Mortars, jungle rot, ambushes, villages that got turned into craters overnight—he was there for all of it. Black-and-white frames that still hit like a punch to the chest decades later.
He called it “some mean bush.” I said the same thing the day they briefed me for Venezuela. Different war, same green hell. When those words came out of my mouth I almost laughed. Like the old man was whispering in my ear: Yeah, kid. You’re one of us.
Sullys always stick together.
Doesn’t matter if it’s a rice paddy in Southeast Asia, a Venezuelan hot zone, or a floating mountain on Pandora covered in bioluminescent trees and ten-foot blue warriors who can drop out of the sky on banshees. We end up in the shit. We document it, we fight it, we try to make sense of it. Sometimes we lose legs. Sometimes we lose more. But we keep moving forward.
Grandpa Francois hauled film canisters through places where the humidity could ruin a camera in hours. I hauled my broken body in an exoskeleton until the Avatar program gave me a second chance. Different tools. Same instinct: see it, record it, survive it, and—if you’re lucky—bring some truth back with you.
I look at my kids now—half human, half Na’vi—and I wonder what stories they’ll tell their own grandkids one day. Will they talk about the crazy one-eyed Marine who linked with an Avatar and switched sides? Will they roll their eyes and say, “Yeah, that’s just what Sullys do”?
Probably.
The jungle changes. The war changes. The planet changes. But the Sullys? We stay the same. Mean bush or glowing forest, we stick together.
Oel ngati kameie to the old man, wherever his spirit ended up. You did your time in the green. Now it’s my turn.
Jake Sully Ex-Marine. Avatar. Father. Still a Sully.
