Are there any military veterans that lurk on this forum? If so, what are some commonly held misconceptions in civilian written fiction about the military?
A curse of character limits in the titles. I had to trim it down (which included editing out the word “military”) or else it wouldn’t fit.
Sorry - I'm on one. I'm the complete opposite of a soldier but I had a friend I knew online for 15+ years turn from the most open minded, talking on your level sort of guy to the most condescending, sort of 'one up' in statements regarding his real life situation to the point he stole an account I worked hundreds of hours on when confronted. I think many people feel inferior to soldiers or assume that those serving feel superior to the average civillian, or it could just be a moticum of respect, in my 20s, anyways. I find the egotism is more prevalent in younger people serving (though there are many service people my age who respect those pursuing lives completely opposite to theirs) and ex/serving aged 30+ seem to be more grounded and almost feel the inverse when talking to a weakling like me. Everybody's different, it depends on the agenda of the author/screenwriter and the differing realities of those often misrepresented... There's just often a mutual unspoken understanding that can be gauged looking into peoples eyes who have danced with death and faced trauma I guess. There's the spectrum ranging from American Sniper - Hurt Locker/Deer Hunter/Full Metal Jacket - Jarhead/Apocalypse Now and more. I'd be personally interested to hear what the most accurate depictions are. Sorry I'm not exactly what you asked for but it is something i've always been tentative about narrating - in a sense of write what you know.
I'm a veteran of the U.S. Army. There are many misconceptions about the military in books, but each author brings his or her own misconceptions to the table. I can't think of a single one that I would label as "common."
Platoon was one of the first to go for accuracy. Oliver Stone is a Vietnam vet and it's pretty much his story. He was disillusioned by the Hollywood depictions of war. Chris is a proxy for Stone, and despite being a fictional plot, many of the moments are based on his experiences, with Barnes and Elias based on several real people. I think it was the first film to use the boot camp method of giving actors some authenticity in how they held weapons, fired, and moved.
Thank you. I will add it to my OCD external, I struggle to find anything worth watching anymore. There's another film I intended upon watching awhile back... it was a foreign film about a lone kid returning to his village burned out or something along those lines. It had a cult following and it was the actor's debut, kid was really young. I remember scenes of him wading through mud or something and actual gunshots were fired/blanks around him. It daunted me like the idea of watching Men Behind the Sun, though. Can't remember the title.
I just noticed—this is from the 1st comment, pinned under that trailer: Might be something you'd like?
Definitely, in the right state of mind. At least these sorts of movies aren't as disturbing as watching the news. Reality is worse than the entire horror genre.
The Einsatzgruppen were the furthest thing from regular soldiers imaginable though. They were the (IIRC) SS units in charge of carrying out the Holocaust in the east. The psychological stress of having mass murder (machine-gunning civilians) as their "day job" was part of what led to the creation of the extermination camps (vernichtungslager) in which the murders could be carried out at more of a remove through the use of gas chambers. Full Metal Jacket is a very accurate movie for the first half. I'm a Marine, can't speak to the second half of the movie, but the boot camp training was spot on for the time and very little had changed between 67-68 and 1989 when I went through. DIs weren't allowed to physically hit recruits anymore, the weapons had changed, but other than that it was pretty perfect. I think the biggest misconception that I see is that soldiers/sailors/Marines are somehow a breed apart all the time. A lot of the lower ranks are just kids, basically. I turned 18 during boot camp. When I was with my regular unit, we spent lunch hours playing Nintendo and had an active RPG group in the evenings. We bitched about our working hours and went to town to try and pick up girls on the weekends, just like any other group of 18-25s. If you're on FB or Instagram, check out a guy going by "Terminal Lance." He writes a webcomic and has published a couple of graphic novels, one of which was a NYT bestseller, that cover the lives of junior enlisted in the US Marines. They're a bunch of goofy kids. Until they need to not be. What the military gives you is an alternate frame of mind that you ideally can click into instantly, a mind that's very aware of everything that's going on around you and constantly calculating risks and benefits of possible actions. Not to say that everyone is equally successful in that, but you can almost hear the discipline switch coming on when it does. But I'm old and that switch was never very sharp with me, so I rest on past glories that were never that glorious. I'm in this video, but I ain't saying where:
I actually wrote an article on here a few months ago mainly on this very subject. Not trying to self-advertise, but I just don't want to re-state what I already wrote in my article on this link. But as far as misconceptions...well...it's mostly that people don't understand the culture that militaries usually generate. It isn't simply a combination of other cultures meeting in one place, though it often looks like it is, but there are a lot of core attributes that contribute to how they function. The US Marine Corps is an extreme example of it because of the intense training and pride that tends to come out from it. I've also tended to be a fan of the unfiltered rage that can come out of the culture as well. Case and point, Gunny Walgren's John Glenn speech before the assault on Marjah. Firing up Marines in a way that only fits their cultural values.
I hate how women in the military characters are always these one-sided, super-tough, butch chicks who talk a lot of smack. Sure, we have that side that we portray around our male battle buddies...but we are still women underneath. That tough chick attitude is just one side of how we women veterans are.
A lot of female Marines were just like that on default and we never got to see another side of them. We just came to believe that was their personality because we literally never saw anything different from them. There were a few that displayed slightly different attitudes, but it was rare, and like anyone else in the Marine Corps not going full on alpha mentality, they usually got ran over by larger personalities. That was at least my experience there. Edit: Minus the butch part. Not too many like that from where I was. But they ramped up the smack talking tenfold to any male.
People who don't realise that different militarys have their own ranks (and cultures)... i was reading a book set in the Falkland conflict and the (American) writer has got people in the parachute regiment with ranks like PFC and Spec4 and has British officers referring to their unit commanders as 'six' ... there's also the moment in which he refers to a colonel as being a 'full bird' (in the Uk a Full Colonel's rank insignia is two pips and a crown... not Eagles)
Sounds & atmosphere. Specifically the noise that's never represented in Hollywood and seldom portrayed in writing. My father lost partial hearing in his right ear to carbines, so did a friend of mine I game together with. Neither of them served active field duty; the former was an officer peacekeeping as part of a UN force, the latter a reservist / trainee. There's a lot of care given to vets with regards to hearing loss and it's far more prevalent than it's supposed to be.
Extend this to aircraft especially. Anyone working on aircraft has perpetual ringing in their ears from the sheer volume over long periods. I used to have to scream full volume in anyone's ear to have them hear me. We had to do that everyday, since not everything is possible through hand and arm signals. Forget hearing protection, the engine noise just cuts through you physically. Especially with jump jets.
It reminds me its a part of my life every time I go to sleep. I'm a lucky one though. A lot of us were partially deaf at 25.
I can't even imagine. I remember the airshows at Quonset Air National Guard Base when I was a kid, and those were fucking deafening. And the A10 warthogs used to fly low and slow over our neighborhood growing up. That was loud too. Of course, we were weaned on 80s action movies and thought it was the coolest thing ever.
for us it was flashcrash grenades (what civilians call a thunderflash) we used them a lot in house raids (and in training for house raids) and those things make a hell of a bang... it always makes me laugh when you see them on TV and the characters are all walking around talking normally a few minutes later... in reality if you're in a room where one goes off you're not going to be hearing normally for at least an hour
