Preston Cole (Earth-5875)

"They told me to fight, and that's what I've done. Let historians sort through the wreckage, bodies, and broken lives to figure out the rest."

- - Vice Admiral Preston Cole

Vice Admiral Preston Jeremiah Cole (service number 03956-26127-PC) was an officer of the UNSC Navy and a veteran of the Secession and the First Contact War. He was the effective leader of most of the Navy from 2525 to 2543 through the UNSC's war against the Covenant, and he was best known for being the creator of the Cole Protocol, an UNSC law meant to defend the location of Earth from the Covenant. He was a strategic genius, being able to defeat the Covenant in every battle he fought, though at the cost of most of his ships, leading his battle record to be as equal, or even better, than that of SPARTAN-IIs.

Early life
"How long can Earth and its colonies extend without producing offspring that differ sufficiently to want to break away from the parent? As William Butler Yeats said: "The center cannot hold."

- - Preston Cole Preston Jeremiah Cole was born on November 3rd, 2470, to Jennifer and Troy Cole, on Mark Twain, Missouri, on URNA, Earth. He was the only boy out of his parents' three children. His father was a farmer, and his mother was an officer of the CMB, although she herself had a criminal career decades prior duo to protests against high taxes. Cole's great-grandparents fought in the Rainforest Wars and the Interplanetary War. Because Troy refused the government's help to finance his business, Cole had to work in order to support his family.

Cole was a student at the Wallace Fujikawa High School, learning through glas with his teacher, Lillian Bratton, who considered him "a naturally intellectual boy", noticing Preston's obsession with over-analyzing things, which she though came across as annoying for "the tenth time". After scoring a high grade at his algebra class, he was accused of cheating by his peers and the school's staff, and so he did the test again, only to have a slightly worse score. A social worker was later sent to Preston's house following claims at his school that he was being overwhelmed at home. There, however, they found no evidence of physical or psychological abuse. At only sixteen years old, Preston wrote a school paper he titled "The Viability of Extended Colonization", where he theorized possible conflicts that could occur with the Domus Diaspora and the decentralization of Earth as an established power, and, although this work was not well received by Bratton, it was technically correct in prediction the Secession years later. His grades started to diminish, likely attributed to his eventual lack of interest in school and his parents' demands.

After gaining interest in traveling to the UEG's colonies, Cole enlisted in the UNSC Navy, seeing it as the only to escape from a life he long hated. After graduating from high school, he did not attend college, and his poor scores and lack of connections made it substantially harder to enlist at a prestigious academy, leading him to enlist as a crewman.