If you only know Commander Wolffe from The Clone Wars and Rebels, it feels like his missing eye is just part of his design. He shows up with a scar carved across his face, a metal implant in place of his right eye, and no one in the show ever stops to explain what happened.
So where did he actually lose it? And who was responsible for the injury that changed Wolffe’s face for the rest of his life?
Wolffe Lost His Eye Fighting Asajj Ventress
The show never shows it on screen, but canon is pretty clear about when Wolffe loses his eye.
During the Clone Wars, Wolffe and the Wolfpack take part in a Republic assault on the icy world of Khorm. Separatist forces are dug in, and Asajj Ventress is there leading the defense. At some point in that battle, things get close and personal. Wolffe and Ventress clash at short range, and she comes out of it having carved a line straight across his face and through his right eye.
We don’t see that duel in the show, but the official Star Wars Databank quietly fills in the gap. In Wolffe’s biography, it describes him as a detail-focused clone commander “who’d lost an eye in a close encounter with Asajj Ventress,” tying his injury directly to her and to a specific moment on the battlefield rather than some vague “war wound.”
From then on, every time we see him he’s carrying the result of that moment: the long scar over his eye and the metal implant that replaces it, first in The Clone Wars and later in Rebels.
From there, the real question is: what kind of fight was brutal enough to cost Wolffe his eye in the first place? That’s where the off-screen story of the Battle of Khorm comes in.
The Battle of Khorm: The Off-Screen Mission That Took His Eye
The fight that costs Wolffe his eye doesn’t happen in the show. It plays out in the comic arc The Clone Wars: In Service of the Republic, which covers the Battle of Khorm on an icy Separatist-held world.
In that story, Jedi Masters Plo Koon and Kit Fisto lead a strike force of clone commandos to free the enslaved Khormai people and destroy a Separatist mountain fortress. The planet’s valuable agrocite mineral has turned it into a target for both sides, and the Separatists are using the locals as slave labor to mine it.
Nothing about the mission goes smoothly. A brutal snowstorm limits Republic air support, and a glory-chasing Republic officer, Captain Kendal Ozzel, makes things worse instead of better. In the middle of all that, Asajj Ventress arrives with her own elite commandos to make sure the Republic doesn’t walk away with Khorm.
Wolffe is on the ground with the Wolfpack, pushing through snow and entrenched droids toward the fortress. When the Republic forces finally come up against Ventress herself, the fight turns into close-quarters chaos instead of a clean duel. Wolffe moves in to block her escape and ends up directly in her path. Ventress lashes out with her blades, cutting a line across his helmet and face and taking his right eye in the process.
The Republic still wins on Khorm: the fortress falls, the Khormai are freed, and Ventress slips away to fight another day. But Wolffe walks out of that battle permanently changed.