A Guardsman (Or Guard's-Woman.)

The Imperial Guard, The Astrum Militarum to use it's most formal name, are the 'inexhaustible armies' spoken of here-to-fore. From a million worlds and more they come, numbering into their hundreds of trillions, armed with the best...

OK, their weapons suck by the standards of the Imperium; armor too; and their training is nothing to write home about; but they typically outnumber their enemies a thousand to one, and to quote Joseph Stalin: "Quantity has a Quality all it's own."

Yet for all that they typically are a poorly trained, poorly equipped, hastily thrown together rabble, each and every man and woman of The Guard is a living, thinking, feeling human being, and there is nothing in all of space more tenacious and indomitable than the human spirit.

Orks and Tyranids may match them in numbers, Space Marines and their traitor counterparts out match them in individual prowess, Tau and Necrons have superior technology, the Adeptus Sororitatus have greater Faith, and the Eldar and their dark kin be ten times as subtle and cunning, but none of these foes can withstand the incomparable fusion of separate abilities which make The Guard the single greatest fighting in the galaxy.

You are one such warrior in humanities never ending battle for survival: taken from the world of your birth to fight and die in the eternal struggle of violent conflict by which the Imperium endures from day to day. There will be no letters from home, no boxes of cookies baked by your mother, no used underwear and nude pics from your girlfriend, no contact of any kind, because to ship such things from one planet to another is prohibitively difficult, and your lifespan once you reach the front lines is measured not in years, months, or even weeks; but HOURS. You will never return home, only if you are VERY lucky will you be part of a formation which is periodically reinforced with new men and/or women from your homeworld. Far more likely is that what starts out as a regulation Legion of 1,000,000 persons will be whittled down over decades of battle on dozens of worlds to a hard bitten core of a few hundred, half-insane, half-crippled, survivors at most before at last being granted settlement rights to some marginal world in the ass end of nowhere upon which you would be expected to make a your living with little more than a hatchet and a blanket. These facts are well known, in point of fact on most worlds Guardsmen are sent to their waiting troop transports not like a conquering army, but in a mass funeral procession, having when called for duty gotten to attend their own WAKE, viewed as 'dead' from the moment they were called to serve...