I'll toss my two cents in.

Joining the side of 'not from the Capital Wasteland in any capacity' is...

Charlette Ketrian

A former NCR soldier, she enlisted in the army when she was fourteen, lying about her age to get away from her home, the crime-ridden (but Slaver-free!) Den. Her time as an NCR trooper took her to many locations, mostly on peacekeeping duty in the remote border towns, putting down raiders for that sense of sublime heroism one keeping the peace can feel.

Sharp in mind, though not formally educated, she spent much of her downtime when not on patrol or training to read, absorbing the knowledge of the past for the future of today. She served proudly in the NCR Army for many years, until her Company was assigned to the Mojave...

She thought she had seen real combat, facing down psychotic raiders and would-be pirate kings.

... She was wrong.

She tried desperately to do her part, to hold peace in the Mojave, but the chaos, true chaos, of a land that did not want her kind and the forces constantly fighting her, she was broken. Idealism often collapses when attacked by the full force of grim reality, and it dug the knife into Corporal Ketrian's heart and twisted it.

She had seen the Rangers hold off the Legion at Hoover Dam, but to sacrifice so many lives in the destruction of Boulder City, so many soldiers who bled for peace dying for a maneuver that was not completed... Sure, the Legion had been pushed back, but they hadn't been /finished/. Blood had been drawn, but the enemy had been allowed to draw back, to heal.

Her time in the border operations had taught her, to end a raider threat, the gang must be disbanded. The leaders must be driven to ground, hunted, destroyed. The remnants must be captured, scattered, eliminated.

But for this threat, this /true/ threat to be given a chance to heal, to come back with fury and vengeance... She quit. She gave up the life as a soldier, and tried, finally, to return home... But there was no longer anything there for her. She had been gone too long, and nostalgia and childhood memories rarely remain when the world you remember, bitter as it may be, has all but disappeared in the sands of time. With little to do, she turned to drink and mercenary work, trying her hand at putting her talents as a soldier to work in the private sector.

This of course held all kinds of available openings... Bounty hunter, mercenary, courier... Her knowledge of the border regions and the desert made her a perfect match for the Mojave Express, and things were starting to look up until a delivery order from the Primm office was handed to her...


As for why she's not all that and a bag of chips at level 1, it's not due to amnesia... But you try being beaten up badly, knocked unconscious, tied up, shot in the head, and then buried alive. She's lucky she's not drooling on herself and talking in animal gibberish. It takes time for wounds to heal.