Military Fiction

[Margaret Note Spelling]

Who doesn't love things that go boom in pretty colors?

 

[DLCroix]

Who doesn't love things that go boom in pretty colors?

Don't believe it, because it is anything but pretty. My brother was on leave for about a month with a bruised rib and deaf in one ear just because a recruit exploded a noise grenade (like the ones used in attacks against terrorists) in the truck where they were going. Only the shock wave threw the twenty guys into the air and even the truck driver touched part, smashed the rear window; such that if they had gone near a ravine the story could have been very different. Or the same story of the test to win the tankist's beret: the caterpillar of the tank that they use for that test is half a meter wide; the Leopard's caterpillar is one meter, and it's a six meter long beast! He tells me all these things as a joke; but later he discovers that I am the one who begins to drink the Jack faster, and that is that you die just imagining the things he tells.

 

[Margaret Note Spelling]

I know, sorry. It was a bit of dark humor. Explosives are definitely horrific when there's actual people involved. Or, as my grandmother used to say to her roughhousing children: "Watch out, somebody's going to start crying." Yeah, I shouldn't have made light of explosives.

 

[Joshua Jones]

You guys are great. I really, really appreciate this. And that's a really cool detail, @DLCroix--I hadn't even gotten to the whole issue of weapons and technology detail, and I know I'm going to have to! (Now I'm curious about why they don't have all rifles with grooves to the left, so I'm definitely going to look that up to see why.) @Joshua Jones, as always you are amazing. Between the three of you, I know I can have a lot more confidence about the things I'll be able to do with this book.

Now, weapons and technology is definitely in my purview... I have experience utilizing everything from firearms to polearms, and have a pretty solid understanding of weapon roles from fireteam to battalion. So, when you get to this part, feel free to ask!

 

[Matchu]

"Make it up" is fine for small, I'll do what I want publishers. This doesn't work for those who want mass market exposure, Do the research. 90% of any good fiction book is research. Where I work, we have an in-house library with hundreds of books that were used to add authenticity to fictional stories.

"Make it up," and then you polish. First draft is all vibrancy and zest [for me] with big errors. Then I link up the clauses for lucidity, and rejection.

...and research a lidl for the guns & procedure & authenticity.

There's also the tribe of getting all your bricks in line before you even write the first word. But for me that is a different pastime, the different tribe [hew].

 

[Don Coyote]

You guys are great. I really, really appreciate this. And that's a really cool detail, @DLCroix--I hadn't even gotten to the whole issue of weapons and technology detail, and I know I'm going to have to! (Now I'm curious about why they don't have all rifles with grooves to the left, so I'm definitely going to look that up to see why.) @Joshua Jones, as always you are amazing. Between the three of you, I know I can have a lot more confidence about the things I'll be able to do with this book.

Not all rifles have L/H rifling because it doesn't matter. Spin drift from a R/H twist pushes bullets to the right. Spin drift from a L/H twist pushes the bullet to the left. American rifles are traditionally R/H twist. I believe this has to do with humans being predominantly right handed.

Many British rifle makers chose a L/H twist in the belief the leftward bullet drift compensates for the tendency of right-handed shooters to pull the shot right when pulling the trigger. However, good shooters don't pull their shots. If a shooter does pull their shot, there's no way to predict if it'll be left, right, up or down.

Spin drift doesn't become a practical concern until about 500 yards and more.

If you want a good glimpse into U.S. military life, watch the CBS show SEAL Team. Military life doesn't just affect military members. It also impacts their dependents- spouses and children. Military wives and children live in a different world with different experiences and unique challenges. (There are military husbands, but nearly all are military members themselves, not dependents.) Military life can be very hard on families.

Another show that has a good feel for military life at the squad level is Rough Neck Chronicles. It's the animated spin off of Starship Troopers. The interactions between characters feels authentic.

Full Metal Jacket has the best depiction of boot camp of any movie. My father, a former Marine, was asleep in his armchair when Full Metal Jacket came on the TV. When R. Lee Ermy started barking at the new recruits, my father popped awake and came to attention. It had been several decades since Dad separated from the Corps and even longer since he went to boot camp at Parris Island.

In the US, soldiers are in the Army. Members of the Marine Corps are Marines. They are sailors in the Navy and Airmen in the Air Force. The closest I could find as an official title for the Coast Guard is "Coast Guardsman".

Soldiers are also called Dogfaces, Doggies, Grunt. Infantryman are called Eleven Bang-Bangs, Footsloggers

Marines are called Devil Dogs, Jarheads, Leathernecks, Crayon Eaters The Corps is called Uncle Sam's Misguided Children

Sailors are called Anchor Clankers, Swabbies, Deck Apes, Squids

Airmen are called Bus Drivers, Zoomies, Flyboys. The Air Force is called Chair Force

Coast Guardsmen are called Coasties, Puddle Pirate. Coast Guard is called Shallow Water Navy. Currently, the Coast Guard is officially part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Some are terms of endearment. Some are derogatory.

Soldiers, Sailors, Marines and Airmen are all G.I.s (Government Issue).

 

[W Collier]

If I may comment on this, I would draw attention to two elements, the most important of which was mentioned earlier: There is absolutely no single definitive military experience. I had mine, as a Naval officer, which was wholly different from my sister's as an enlisted Coastie (and by Coast Guard, I mean twenty-day stretches aboard a cutter facing down Iranian fast boast in the Gulf, from behind a .50-cal), which was utterly and completely different from my cousin's experience as an Army photographer and journalist (an enlisted Army soldier, but his job was to document his fellow soldiers' accomplishments and lives for an Army periodical). Heck, my experience was wholly different from other Navy pilots, much less Marine and Air Force pilots. Have you seen an Air Force base? There's some truth to the legend that they build the golf course first, the O-club second, and then come back and ask for more money to do the runways. The Navy definitely doesn't operate that way, I can tell you.

So, based on that, you would really, really need to decide what specific military story you're trying to tell. If it's a personal story about military characters, and you want to tell the truth, you need to find people who do those particular jobs, in those particular services, and get them to tell you their stories. Build your story out of reassembled pieces of theirs.

And as for the nature and character of military men and women, that varies just as greatly as their jobs. Plenty are honorable. Plenty are a-holes. A few are downright criminal, and a few would be heroes. More than a few would be dumb heroes and get themselves killed bravely but ineffectively. (I can give you open source accounts of recent examples of that.) More than a few would be cowards. And most--MOST--would be unequal to the task of articulating the moral structures underpinning their work. Some know in their hearts that it's right, but they couldn't tell you philosophically why. Others are just as jaded as any anti-war protestor--but a lot of those do their jobs anyway. I've met a couple of people who joined the military to save lives! Didn't have the heart to set 'em straight.

And, as to point two: all of the above you only need to worry about if you have some particular need to make your rendering faithful and accurate. For the most part, ain't nobody gonna know if your story is full of beans. If you wrote a story about an Army infantry unit, I wouldn't know if what you're describing is technically accurate. Most of what you see in the movies that seem to be carefully researched and reverently produced is BS, and I suspect the same goes for most military fiction. Meanwhile, read something written by a vet--or try. My God, it's mostly terrible. If I had to pick between reading bad but well-informed writing by a vet or good but mostly wrong fiction by someone who didn't know squat but could spin a good yarn, I'd take the latter all day long.

***
P.S.... what was that show about the Marines during the GW2 ground campaign? ... Generation Kill!

That show is awesome. Still gotta take a lot of it with a grain of salt, but, man, you want something that does capture a lot of the, ah, thematic realities of the job? That one. So much that one.

JTACs love things that go boom in pretty colors. Bonus points for that little tinge of red. After all, the standard is "warheads on forehead," not "warheads in the vague direction of the other guy." Or, to quote a Marine I worked with, "Man, I loved gunfights. There's nothing more fun than a good gunfight. Scary as ****, but so much fun." It's a very layered business.
***
P.P.S.: The old addage "Write what you know" is not a recommendation, it's a statement of man's capability. You can only write what you know. Our imaginations are systems which rework the elements of our experience into new combinations to create new stories. The imagination can only work with stuff that's already in your head. This is why the most successful writers allow their experiences to inspire them; it's the stuff they've experienced personally which wrings most true in their work, and it's the stuff that rings true which grabs the reader. The second most successful writer is the writer who is good at research (as long as he or she is the kind who can, again, spin a good yarn without getting bogged down in the research). When in doubt, don't try to force yourself over to a story about things which are alien to you when you could let who you are inspire in you that story which only you, by virtue of your experience, can tell.

 

[sknox]

>There's some truth to the legend ...
laughed out loud at this one. Nobody holds one branch of the military in more contempt than another branch of the military! (they also get in the best digs ... my favorite is something about how the guy couldn't be a Navy Seal because he never learned to take selfies <g>)

Adding to Collier's excellent advice, the military experience also varies by time and place. The nineteenth century isn't the 21st, and neither is the twelfth. Some elements remain constant, but the interest lies in the variations. And those are also what will trip you up. Similarly, the Russian military (pick a century) isn't the American, which isn't the Bolivian.

 

[W Collier]

Two more good points from sknox, there. Even relatively similar cultures have different military cultures. There are some stark differences between our military and the British, for instance, and stark differences between how Americans treat their military and how the British civilian population treats theirs. A military as foreign to us as the Russians might as well be of another planet. And likewise with time. You talk about the 19th century vs the 21st, but man, even getting down to something as narrow as Naval Aviation, and within that further, say, the Navy jet community (fighter pilots), the modern Navy fighter community would feel completely foreign to a Navy fighter pilot of as recently as the 1990s. (And definitely not all for the better.)

(You're not wrong about the SEALs. Same goes for Navy rescue swimmers. Except the rescue swimmers will take their selfies pool-side while tanning.)

 

[tinkerdan]

It is all about research and balance, a person who doesn't need to do the research will have the most problem with balance until they research how to write a novel.

What I mean by that is that someone who has gone through it all will tend to focus on the procedural boring time and drown the character out by all the procedure; then turn around for the seconds of action where suddenly the character become alive. What this looks like is through the boring section the character has practically no thoughts no use of the five senses and no internality. Then the action hits and when they need to be reacting and where their training has taught them to be reactive they suddenly waste pages on thoughts and the five senses that somehow now are jammed into each visible microsecond.

I recently read something that was well written, grammar-wise, and was just like that.

The characters were getting prepared to deploy and all the time and pages that could be devoted to getting close to the character and have them thinking about whether the people they were with were the ones they trained with or if they were a new person or outside person to the team and whether that made them nervous, uncertain about people having their back or for that matter whether they might be up to having those peoples back. Instead it goes on for pages with distance from the POV and a whole bunch of technical description about things that have very little impact on the mission other than getting them there and nothing about what might be going through the POV's head or the experience of their senses.

When the drop starts and the action hits the character begins to finally fill us in so we know that they might be an essential addition to this team who clearly are demonstrating competent action and her importance is enough that they're pretty much coddling this person all the way through the action. These things should have been going through the POV.s mind during the quiet time because the second involved in the drop to deploy were clearly not enough for all that internalized showing.

So basically if feels like we trade a realistic technical description for realistic character development. Just a little time closer to the character during the rather dull technical drivel would have made that more entertaining and might even have helped relate to the character when the action starts. instead of having to guess that this person is not part a normal integral part of the team, it could have been established through the closeness that is clearly missing in the earlier pages.

But that was the style or tone that the author had decided upon, and who knows, maybe that works for some readers.

I would guess, though, that if the author had had some of the first half technically off or wrong and had closer POV, that in many instances it wouldn't have made much difference to the overall story itself. It might have been a case of TMI.

 

[JohnM]

Guesswork is right out. Not only is researching life in the military helpful, but it adds to a knowledge base that will grow as you write more and research more. This notion of 'fire and forget' or 'write it and forget' is not helpful. If you write for yourself and don't know how to reach an audience, and don't care to find out, then publish whatever you want. If you want to make some money, then do the research, learn what makes for good writing - plot, character development and the difference between action-adventure and a slice of life in the military.

 

[C3nobite]

@Margaret Note Spelling , it depends on whether you want to depict combat or war. I second the previous recommendation for Keegan's Face of Battle, but also Rick Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy. Both accessible and both focused on the individual combat experience. To read more broadly, I also recommend Clausewitz' On War. Happy to give other suggestions if you DM me, depending on what you're writing. House to House, by David Bellavia, is a vivid, gritty account of a Marine in the second battle of Fallujah.

In general, I'm with the folks in favor of research. I never served, but I taught military operations and strategy to military officers for ten years. Find someone in the military and talk to them.

 

[sknox]

>Find someone in the military and talk to them.
I don't disagree, but I think there's more to be said (always is, with writers).

First, realize you're talking to an individual. I wouldn't go looking for "how it is in the military" so much as for anecdotes about how things were for that person. I talk to them as a writer, with an ear for story and an eye for details.

Second, and this is an observation disguised as a question: where do I go to interview a wizard? An alien? Is it really necessary for me to find a traditional brewer if my adventuring party stops at a brewery? Or to search out a duke?

In fantasy, and even in SF, there are all sorts of characters that are either wholly invented or differ in significant ways from their real-world counterpart. To keep on topic, at one extreme I might tell the Aspiring Writer to join the military, serve ten years, and *then* write the book. At the other extreme, I'd say just write the book and don't worry about it. There's a balance in there somewhere, but damn, people will keep moving the fulcrum.

 

[reiver33]

I have a long-held interest in military history, in respect of the decision-making process, from fire teams to operational strategy. I've read a lot of first-hand accounts and would recommend exposure (in whatever form) to gain a sense of how a particular level of military personnel operate; regardless of period, the guys at the sharp end tend to have similar concerns!

 

[Margaret Note Spelling]

Hey, just wanted to pop in and say thank you, guys, so very much! Everyone's got a great suggestion, and this has all helped me tremendously. I've still got so much to learn about the military, but I think I know it what places to look, thanks to you. I know I haven't been around much lately (usually I'll come on for a few minutes, read some threads, and then flit off like a ghost in the night!) but I do still come back, and I still love you guys and this place. I've simply got a lot of things going on in real life (most of it good, thankfully, and all of it interesting, at the very least) that try to keep my attention right now, and my preference is to put off writing any post until I can give it my full attention, and usually another hour for revision and response. I'll definitely come back for real one day, but for now, I expect to either lurk or throw in the odd post every now and then, like here.

Conclusion: I'm not gone, but you won't see me posting much, either. Regardless, I'm eternally grateful for everything you've all helped me with. I had ideas for two entire series I could write based on my discussions with all the lovely creative people here! But now I do actually need to buckle down and write them, and unfortunately the only person who can get that done is me.

Basically what I'm saying is--hi, and bye for now. I'll see you around, though!

(I'll post something similar to this in the Introductions thread, I think...is there a Re-Introductions thread? )