Eleftherios Constin was born on Canceron at a time when the only respectable people on the planet did work at one of the many coastal resorts, which catered to the idle wealthy of other colonies. There were the upper class- doctors and lawyers, most of them educated off planet. There was the middle class- entertainers, business owners, and the like.. And then there was the rest: cooks, cleaners, drivers, fishermen and many others. The Constin family was one of the rest, Elf's father Stelio did seasonal work as a landscaper at a few of the coastal resorts, while his mother Chloe was a maid at the same seaside vacation spots. The downturns of the tourist season were always lean months for the family, which involved doing odd jobs and managing the family savings with miserly discipline. Elf was the older of two brothers, and- as in many things, timing was never on the Constin family's side.
When he was a boy, the convict-staffed mining facilities at the planet's polar regions were shut down by the Quorum of Colonies for gross humanitarian violations. The revenues Canceron lost from the mines resulted in a minor recession, which closed several of the smaller coastal resorts, and made competition for jobs in the remaining vacation spots more intense. It was a financial blow the family could ill afford and by the time Elf had turned fifteen, the family was desperate. The polar mining operations had been privatized after the convict-staffed operation closed down, and one of the few jobs which could always be had on Canceron was signing a mining contract and taking a transport to either the northern or southern pole. The young man and his father accepted such contracts and signed on for the first of many one-year terms.
Mining operations involved a lengthy transport from worker's barracks to either below grounds, or out-to-sea installations, which resulted in shifts of three days on, and three days off. The installations were cramped, noisy, stinking places and the miner's barracks were only slightly better, as startup expenses had led the parent corporation to cut costs wherever able. The work was reliable, the wage was meager, but significantly better than nothing, and Elf's biggest difficulty was intense boredom during his three day stretches of downtime. A cheap outlet for both restless energy, teenage aggression, and severe feelings of isolation (there were few miners anywhere near his age, at first) was boxing, which remained his regular exercise and favored hobby throughout the next ten years of his life. Exercise facilities for the workers were required by labor law, and so long as no one was hurt badly enough to lose work, the workers were permitted to do what they wished when off duty.
Eleftherios and his father were permitted to work the same shifts throughout the first contract, and the second, and the third. The portion of his pay which wasn't assigned to room and board was sent back 'home' to his mother and younger brother, who Elf only saw once every two years from his fifteenth birthday onward. Gradually, the hard work turned him from a large boy into a tough young man, who- while none too happy with his lot in life, had come to accept it as his. By the time he turned twenty-five, Elf had lived a full decade as a miner. In his twenty-fifth year, everything changed.
His father Stelio, already aged well beyond his forty-nine years, suffered a broken leg in a workplace accident, and his health deteriorated throughout the remainder of the year. In early December, three weeks before the year's contracts expired, and one week before the next year's contracts were to be signed, the old man died and Eleftherios was allowed a week of bereavement leave to transport his father back to the rest of the Constin family.
Eleftherios' younger brother had been married since the last time he had visited, and his mother finally looked old. The family had changed housing seven years prior, so even the comfort of returning to a familiar room were gone. The already somber nature of the homecoming was further clouded by the realization that he really had no sense of belonging anymore. Toughened and coarsened by a decade of labor among the less genteel segment of humanity, Elf could no longer connect with either his mother, brother, sister-in-law, or- least of all, his niece. These feelings of alienation resulted in Elf spending most of the week away from the rest of his family, wasting time in the city. At some point during that week, the street was taken by a parade, celebrating a milestone in the long-ago Operation Shattered Crab.
After a few hours talking with and having a drink bought for him by a pair of the CMC recruiters, Elf was almost certain enlisting would be his choice. The pay was much better, and instead of doing a job that had been intended for convicts, he'd be part of something that had parades thrown for it. With his father dead, and without any ability to connect with his remaining family, all that remained was to finish his last two weeks of contracted work for the mining operation, opt not to renew his contract, and enlist. The recruiter had said the next transport to Basic Training would leave with the first of the new year.
His mother didn't understand the choice to enlist, but didn't protest either. Eleftherios always suspected that she still remembered him as a sweet, skinny fifteen year old, and couldn't reconcile her memories of him with the foul mouthed man who she would meet in later years, but the old woman still came out (and brought the family with her) to see him off on January first. Enlisting was not what he'd expected, but that's true for most people. The nine weeks of Basic Training were brutal. Elf had thought he'd breeze through by being bigger, tougher, and meaner than his fellow recruits, but that was not how things played out. The first four weeks began the process of burning out all the bad habits he'd built up over the prior ten years: cussing within earshot of a drill sergeant was punished. Insulting the teenagers he had enlisted with was punished. Making crass comments to the female enlistees was punished. Everything about how Eletherios saw the world was being challenged and broken down.
By the end of the nine weeks, Elf knew there were other recruits smarter than he, and he even suspected several of the kids were tougher than he. But the most valuable lesson he took away from Basic was that he was part of a team that depended on him, and on whom he needed to depend in kind. AIT was met with initial disappointment, as Elf had hoped to be assigned to Demolitions or intensive Squad Automatic Weapon training (Because bombs and machine guns still struck him as the best reasons to be a marine at that point), but the CMC didn't have a shortage of those; it did have a shortage of Military Police, and so Elf spent fifty days learning the bare basics of military law.
To his great surprise, the assignment agreed with him. Elf had grown up with the feeling that rules were these abstract commandments handed down from above that only ever came up when a shift foreman, or corporate inspector was angry at him. Though he had never before shown much interest in books or studies, the wish to understand the intent of law at it's core sparked the interest. He'll never be a legal specialist, but as he took the Oath of Service, for the first time Eleftherios wasn't simply resigned to his lot in life, he was proud of it.
The spartan lifestyle he had grown up with (less kind colleagues call him miserly) was habit by this point, so during his service, Elf didn't spend much money. A portion was sent back home to his family- who, with the efficient military system of communication, began writing and speaking to him regularly. A portion of his money was spent on women and drink, but that still left him a surprising amount at the end of every month. This is both why he gambles so heavily, and why it doesn't bother him when he loses. He doesn't need to buy food, or pay rent. The money he sends home is already more than the combined wage he and his father had sent back every month from the mines, and- perhaps most importantly, gambling provides him with a structured framework for social interaction with his fellows. Outside of this, and his well-defined role when 'on-duty', Elf still has problems interacting with others socially, a lingering effect of his isolated transition into adulthood.
He resumed the old hobby of boxing and between this, the regular card games, and the occasional night of drinking, the next four years were actually rather pleasant for Elf. Service in the CMC was something he thought of as his future for a long time to come. Warday was a surprise, as it was to everyone. Whereas five years earlier, the news that his homeworld and family were in all likelihood gone would have been met with an almost sociopathic detachment, Elf was sincerely broken up by the news and like many others, he became fixated on his job as a means of not thinking about it.