1. Francis de Aguilar

    Francis de Aguilar Contributor Contributor

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    Info on about being in the army, Iraq.

    Discussion in 'Research' started by Francis de Aguilar, Dec 28, 2017.

    I am about to write a scene where my MC is asked about his time in the army.

    He served in Iraq. Though he only joined up to get away from his violent controlling father.

    He is not a fan of the government and will be critical of the war and the reasons behind it, not least of what he sees as the lies told about WMD. He has a great deal of sympathy with the Iraqi people. Notwithstanding all this he did his job well, and the loss of those he served with is felt keenly. He will, to some extent, be traumatised by his experience.

    What I do not know a thing about is what it is like to be a soldier, to live with soldiers. To be a strong confident individual and yet accept subordination to officers.

    Can anyone give me any tips or guidance, point me in the direction of some reference material. Or indeed agree to read the passage when it is written. I expect it to be no more that 1500 words.
     
  2. Trish

    Trish Damned if I do and damned if I don't Contributor

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    I don't know what it's like to be in the military, but my father was a tank commander in Vietnam, and had similar feelings to what you describe for your character. He did not enjoy taking orders, but then they don't really give you much of a choice. The repercussions are swift and severe. He viewed as a job, one where the stakes are life and death more than just a paycheck. I have, posted in the memoir section, my view of when he died, and there is some mention of his views of his time at war. It maybe won't help, but it's there if you're interested. I know there are a few Vets and military folks here and I'm sure they'll be more helpful than I am. Good luck :)
     
  3. Francis de Aguilar

    Francis de Aguilar Contributor Contributor

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    I will read your post. Thanks for that. I have just crashed out a few paragraph since posting. They are a bit of a rant by the MC. I will let them cure for a bit, review them and then post them here.
     
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  4. Privateer

    Privateer Senior Member

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    What's it like to be a soldier?

    That's a big question. It's hard to explain. You have all these people around you that you work with all the time and you live with. You've all done the same training (up to a point) and shared a lot of similar experiences- both triumphs and hardships- so you get very close to them, even the ones you don't necessarily like all that much.

    As an officer there's also the added weight of responsibility for the people under you. It isn't like in the films: you don't just tell them what to do, you're responsible for their entire lives. You pick up where their parents left off and that can include guys twenty years older than you, a mere 20-something sprog who's got a pip but can't even grow a decent moustache yet.

    I never had any problem taking or giving orders. You're strong and confident, yes, but you also have to have confidence in the people around you, including the people further up the chain whose job is to get orders, turn those into a plan, then pass that plan on to you as more orders.

    It never felt to me that I was 'lower' than the people giving me orders, not in anything more than a purely organisational sense, or that my individuality was being compromised. I was never any more a 'cog in a machine' than is a taxi driver, airline pilot or sales rep or whatever.

    My boss had a job to do and his job was to come up with a plan to achieve a certain outcome. My job was to enact one specific part of that plan, usually by getting the people who worked for me to follow a plan I came up with. Everyone was important- one section getting bogged down could delay a whole platoon in achieving its objective, which in turn could hold up an entire company and so on. Hell, a poorly made plan by a platoon commander or a fuck up by a sloppy corporal could potentially unravel an entire operation.

    The Iraq thing was a sickening mess. The Army told the government that the American plan was not a good one and that we had been too badly hit by cutbacks to jump straight in to something like that, but they didn't listen.

    I'd joined at the end of the '90s when the Army was basically all about wandering around warzones in blue hats and giving threatening looks to anyone who looked as though they were up to no good or else doing disaster relief or going in to places like Kosovo or Sierra Leone and giving some genuinely bad people a bit of a kicking.

    Then it all changed and in a couple of years we'd actually invaded two countries- one long overdue for international intervention and the other a clearly marked can of the very worst kind of worms.

    There was pretty wide-spread feeling that the invasion of Iraq was bullshit, especially after the fact when it became pretty obvious that, bastard though Hussein may have been, the war had just made everything even worse. The mush-headed concept of 'De-Ba'athification' in particular ensured that pretty much no position in the entire country was occupied by anyone who had the faintest idea of how to do his fucking job.

    There was anger, frustration and disillusionment, particularly among those who had joined partly to stop people doing things like marching into other countries on ridiculous pretexts and because the army had been sent in without the proper preparation to do a job it shouldn't be doing at all. Nonetheless, as a professional soldier your problems with the politics behind the war have to stay private, so it just sort of sits and festers in there. A lot of people left the army in disgust afterwards.

    The thing that bothers me most, though, is that I took a leg injury- I always refer to it as 'an arrow to the knee'- that put me out of action completely for six months (it also stopped me running for over a year and still makes me walk with a limp when I'm tired or stressed more than a decade later) and had to leave my unit to do their thing without me.

    The sense of failure and self-loathing that results from being safe at home while there's a war on has healed rather more slowly and less completely than my leg.

    I don't know if that is even in the slightest bit helpful.
     
  5. Francis de Aguilar

    Francis de Aguilar Contributor Contributor

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    It is massively helpful. It is also very generous and moving. I am going to post what I had written before I read this. It seems to me that I have intuited some of it, having just read your reply. I would be very interested to get your thoughts on it. Once again, thank you.
     
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