Military Veterans here, what are some common misconceptions in fiction about the military?

I can only speak about the U.S. Army....but one of my pet peeves is how books (and movies) have people addressing officers. You will always address superior officers as "ma'am" or "sir". You will never hear anyone saying "Yes Captain". Ever. Some commanders I have worked with like to be referred to by their call sign, so if you are briefing and the commander is present you could say something like "At 0600 Havoc 6 will arrive on site, sir is that still correct?" The one oddity are officers. When addressing peers and below they will go by first names, but when addressing up they too default to the rule above.

The other misconception is that we are always shooting and training and going to war. The truth is there are long periods of nothing meaningful being placed on the training calendar. These gaps are generally filled with lawn maintenance, "police calls" , i.e. picking up trash and cigarette butts and countless hours in the motorpool lining up already lined up vehicles, cleaning up fluid stains on the cement and weeding cracks in the pavement with a screwdriver and any kind of other fun and games leadership dreams up. One of my favorites was being sent to another unit's field exercise as redundant redundancy in case their primary and backup systems failed. It was 30 days of no showers, eating nothing but MRE's and sleeping under a camo net because the unit failed to provide a tent. Other than being cold, wet and making sure our generators had fuel, we did nothing. Your American tax money hard at work. I have yet to read a book that accurately captures the mundane Army life.

 

This reminds of another misconception I heard veterans discussion about online. From my understanding, officers will almost never utter "that is an order" to their subordinates, as whatever they said to them should automatically be understood as one. Apparently, if the commander ever resorted to such phrases, then discipline has fallen apart in the unit.

 

It wouldbe condescending on the part of the officer, and respect would likely be lessened towards them. Marines tend to be reactionary as well, so if we ever heard that, we'd be more likely to forget or mess it up on purpose. There is a very large gap between enlisted culture and officer. It's not very often friendly.

 

That is completely true. If your commander tells you something it is already an order. If the commander has to tell a subordinate that something is an order, that commander's ability to lead, the subordinate's ability to follow, or both are in question.

 

It's funny watching shows and movies featuring police and military from before sometime in the 80's or (especially) the 90's. Back in those days movies and shows tended to be much looser and more fanciful, but by the mid 90's things had shifted toward gritty realism and shows started getting more rigorously researched, with advisors listed in the credits (often R Lee Ermey for Marine-related stuff). That doesn't make those earlier shows and movies bad per se, it's just that the society was very different then. Nobody expected extreme realism. Writers got their tropes from other writers, who often just made them up or based them on vague notions of how police and military worked. And a lot of it came from the really low-budget 50's stuff, where they didn't allow time for niceties like research, they just needed everything cranked out at an insane pace. A lot of tropes were born in those days that lasted through the 70's and some ways into the 80's.

 

And then there's the "Sir, yes Sir!" I guess that's when you really piss off a drill instructor?

 

My father was in the army twice: once in the occupation of Japan immediately after the war and once during Korea. Even though we were expected to say yes, sir and yes, ma'am to all other adults like good little southern children, he adamantly did not want us to address him as "sir" because it reminded him of the army.

 

I'm in this video, but I ain't saying where:

No fair. First you build up a fan base, then you let us down.

 

I’m not in the military, so I don’t know their cultural mindsets. However, isn’t the “that is an order” thing more akin to a teacher or parent trying to ring in unruly minors, then leading professional soldiers/marines?

 

Could be. We'd be happy to trade for Toronto.

 

Watch Kong: Skull Island if you want a dose of that absolute and utter sloppy bullshit nostalgic happy-go-lucky screenwriter stuff. I think I wrote an entire blog post about what was wrong with that giant monkey-turd of a movie, and it was mostly military. The costume people and the scriptwriters didn't even get together to decide what rank the characters were.

 

Would it be alright if you link that blog of yours, so I could read your tear downs on that movie?

 

If you are a good leader your soldiers know you care about them and they respect you for it, even if you are recommending them for punishment. If as a leader you have to get to a point where you are having to tell your soldiers you are in charge, you are not in charge. Sometimes you run across kids that show up to the unit and try to play like you are boys on the block. First, they generally get counseling, mostly a "stop this behavior accompanied by an inconvenient behavior-modifying activity, like having them stand at parade rest for all their peers. If they still don't take the hint, there are 146 articles and 12 sub-articles in the Uniform Code of Military justice and something will apply. If after that they really don't fix themselves, you do up a chapter packet and they go back to the house and tell mommy and daddy how terrible the Army is. But in 17 years of active duty, I have never resorted to "because I outrank you" or "because my position is higher". If they think they are up for the challenge, they can go ahead and try me but most don't.
To put it in civilian terms, do you work harder for the boss who sticks up for you and got you gets you a raise, and pulls you off to the side to correct you? Even if he had to write you up a couple of times? Or do you work harder for the guy who comes in wearing a tie yelling "I'M THE BOSS AND I SAID SO!" It's kind of the same concept. "That's an Order" in military terms comes out of the mouth of a toxic ineffective leader.

 

Here it is. It's done as a series of questions, some of which are pretty cryptic at this point. PM me if you want more details on any of them, I'll see what I can remember.

https://www.writingforums.org/entry/kong-skull-island-questions-possible-minor-spoilers.63780/

 

Oh man, I didn't even pay any attention to military stuff and all I noticed were problems with that piece of giant ape-dung. So many reboots and remakes and retreads, and still none of them stands up to the original.

 

Thanks for linking it me, I appreciate it.

When you sarcastically mentioned Polar Bears (the context was pointing out the inexplicable amount of firepower for just a civilian survey mission) in a passing sentence, it reminded me of a guy my dad knew. My dad told me that he knew some guy in the US military (don't know the specific branch) that got deployed to the Arctic. I'm not sure what the guy was doing in the arctic, but I think they were drilling for oil. But anyway, the workers had to have armed guards with heavy machine guns to protect them from the Polar Bears.

Polar Bears are opportunistic animals, and will kill whatever they can catch. To make matters worse, their habitats are extremely remote, and tend to be very sparsely inhabited. Thus they don't have any fear of humans, and often see them as just another potential prey item.

 

The polar bears was actually a reference to Lost, but yeah, they're some tough animals.

 

Only in the U.S. Marines, and I believe even in the Marines it's only in boot camp. In the Army, Air Force, and Navy, "Sir" (or "Ma'am") is reserved for addressing commissioned officers and warrant officers. Sergeants (of all grades) are non-commissioned officers. In the Army, we were expressly taught NEVER to address a non-com as "Sir."

I don't know what the Marines do once they graduate from boot camp.

 

Count sleeping bags, mostly.

But yeah, only officers and warrant officers get "sir" or "ma'am" outside of boot camp. You might have to "Sir, yes sir" if you were getting reamed by your captain or XO or something, but generally as long as you fit a "sir" in their somewhere when speaking to an officer you're okay.

 

Yeah, that sounds right. I think it happened in Full Metal Jacket in the boot camp part. R Lee Ermey told the maggots the first and last word out of their mouths will be Sir. I believe it also happened in Starship Troopers, and that was in the boot camp segment as well.