Manuel Mendoza

Private Manuel Mendoza was an infantryman in the UNSC Marine Corps and a member of Fire Team Charlie. He participated in the Battle of Installation 04 in September 2552.

Biography

Crash Landing on Halo

""Look sharp! Covenant dropship on approach! I could use some help over here!""

— Mendoza, warning the other Marines of the approaching Spirits

Manuel Mendoza was one of the Marines stationed on the UNSC Pillar of Autumn when it was attacked by the Covenant, marking the beginning of the Battle of Installation 04.

After boarding a lifeboat, he survived the crash landing on Installation 04, becoming the infantryman at the receiving end of most of the then-Staff Sergeant Johnson's shouting and yelling. During the events of the crash landing, he fought alongside the Master Chief, until he was evacuated by Echo 419.

Encounter with the Flood

"I have a bad feeling about this..."

— Private Mendoza, before the Flood outbreak.

Later on, he was part of Fire Team Charlie, which was led by Captain Jacob Keyes and Sergeant Johnson, to find a supposed Covenant weapons cache that a captured Sangheili, 'Qualomee, had uncovered and disclosed to them in passing.

Instead, the "cache" turned out to be a Flood containment facility. Fire Team Charlie was immediately ambushed and, save for Sergeant Johnson, was assimilated into the Flood and turned into Flood combat forms. Though Mendoza held off the Flood infection forms for a while, unlike his comrades, he was also later assimilated into a combat form. Shortly before he was infected, he attempted to flee the area, against Keyes' and Johnson's orders.

A few hours after infection, John-117 found Mendoza in the structure and attempted to communicate with the Marine, unknown that his consciousness was already taken over by the Infection form, which is because John-117 hadn't seen a human Flood combat form until then. The infected Mendoza attacked the Spartan and took three entire shells from the Master Chief's Shotgun to halt him, with the results both "spectacular and disgusting". As the corpse-like horror came apart, the Spartan saw that one of the small, spherical creatures had taken up residence inside the Marine's chest cavity and seemed to have extended its tentacles into other parts of what used to be Mendoza's body.

Trivia

• Mendoza disliked Flip Music, a genre of music which Sergeant Johnson greatly enjoyed, much to the chagrin of his squad.
• In the campaign level 343 Guilty Spark, there is an glitch that allows the player to get back on board the Pelican by repeatedly throwing grenades out of the Pelican. Once the Pelican lands, the player may run around the perimeter of the level, where Private Mendoza stands alone. If stuck with a plasma grenade, his body is thrown surprisingly high and far (almost comparable to when the Sputnik Skull is activated in Halo 2). Joseph Staten explained that he wanted Mendoza's model to load before the cutscene that he later appears in; Staten thus coded Mendoza to load early in the level, and simply used the area outside of the level as a storage area. Mendoza, unarmed, can be shot and killed, just like any other Marine.
• Mendoza's line "I have a bad feeling about this," may be a reference to the iconic line in the movie Aliens, soon before the marines are ambushed by xenomorphs. However, the line is also used as an iconic line in Star Wars.
• Mendoza's line "I have a bad feeling about this" was referenced in the Halo 2 campaign level The Oracle by a Grunt, who said the exact same line. The Grunt is a reference to Mendoza, as both of them were the player's allies and both of them were attacked by the Flood.

List of appearances

• Halo: Combat Evolved (First appearance)
• Halo: The Flood