77th Combined Cohort

The 77th Combined Cohort was a combined-arms cohort of the Royal Army of the Golden Empire. It was constituted to serve as the home guard for Quadia, a lightly-populated Royal world with a history of oppression which was located near the Empire's southern border.

History
After the Liberation of Quadia in 88 ABY, the native Qua began a long, arduous process of rebuilding. Queen Rin Sakaros installed the 77th on Quadia some time after the Great Liberation to fulfill her promise to protect the Qua, her mother's people. For the first decades of its existence, the 77th did relatively little, running regular war games and occasionally contributing manpower and equipment to civil engineering projects. The 77th acquired a reputation as a cohort with ceremonial importance but little actual work.

During the Nightmare War in 149 ABY, the 77th was suddenly confronted with real and overwhelming danger during the Battle of Quadia, when nearly a million Skav troops invaded under the command of Voara Culee. Quadia called for aid from the Romasi Sector Fleet but, knowing the planetary shields would not hold until the Fleet's arrival, the 77th arrayed for battle. In the ensuing conflict, thousands of Royal Army soldiers died in a harrowing rearguard fight for every meter of ground, forcing the Skavik to buy their passage into Emoria over a mountain of their own dead. When Breek Zagrev arrived with the Fleet, she unleashed over a hundred thousand reinforcement troops and dozens of Centurions on the invaders, which eventually turned the tide.

The cohort was decimated in the battle, suffering 9,351 fatalities and over a thousand additional casualties which rendered soldiers hors de combat. In addition to the Sacrifice Medals awarded to nearly every member of the cohort—of the few thousand survivors, most of them were injured in some way—the cohort also saw the award of three Stars of Valor, eight Crosses of Keltrayu, and one Hero of the Golden Empire. Of the twelve awards, only one (a Star of Valor) was not posthumous.

After the war, Prime Legate Sorrik took the unusual action of awarding the Courageous Unit Ribbon to the entire cohort. Even more unusually, Queen Rin summoned the cohort's highest-ranking surviving officer and enlisted soldier—a captain and a staff sergeant, respectively—to the Sith Star to receive the decoration from her hand. Due to the cohort's sudden increase in prestige, applications for transfers poured in to Army High Command, and the cohort was back to full strength within a year.

Structure and Logistics
The 77th consisted of five infantry regiments, two armor regiments, two artillery regiments, and a support regiment composed of companies from the various support branches, plus a headquarters unit. It maintained a barracks just outside Emoria's city limits, and periodically conducted war games out in Quadia's parched wasteland.

The platoon of Royal Gendarmes assigned to Quadia could be incorporated into the 77th's command structure in case of emergency (and was in 149; every Gendarme on Quadia died in the battle).