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military infection By Joseph SI Jin. Training full metal jacket is probably the defining piece of media for how military training is supposed to run. You have an old man who seems to have made grumpiness into a superpower and has been given a large hat. And he spends most of his time screaming at young men, insulting their mothers and, in general, making everyone feel pretty bad about life. Unfortunately, I feel that's where most writers get their thoughts for how training works in the military. While there are absolutely elements of truth to that, it's not all screaming. And it's certainly not all montages, though that was sure his health save me some time. I wanted to break this down and offer a bit more of a realistic perspective on training in the military and how you might integrate those principles into realistic fiction. So here are three points on how to deal with training in your military one. No one man in the military can win the war. This ties in with some other M I F articles I have written in the past, but everyone has their own speciality and everyone needs to train for it. Once you start training to be an infantryman, for example, you're not gonna end up is James Bond the secret agent? Unless you trained for it? An effective fighting force is generated by having different specialties, working together and having the broadly experienced officers who know how to get them to do it with maximum efficiency. So if you're writing a novel about a bunch of warrior majors, maybe it makes sense to split them into elemental effectiveness. Have one guy who is a master water magician and another who's really good at magically knitting sweaters. Hey, the battlefield gets cold, right? But most importantly, you need to make sure that your military structure allows for that kind of cross training. There's nothing more irritating to me as a reader. Well, someone poking me in the eye with a fish hook might rank higher than toe have that suddenly experienced in all things individual. Just because someone can play the piano doesn't mean they can conduct an orchestra to military training is not like a driver's license. What I mean by this is that you don't go through months of boot camp, get issued your military badge and then told that you're ready for anything. This does, in fact, happen. It happened an awful lot during the Vietnam War, but boot camps only job is to change you from a civilian to a soldier. After that, you have to learn the skills and techniques necessary to do your job. Otherwise, you're just a dude with a gun in a uniform that knows when to say Yes, sir, and no, sir. In fact, you'll find out that some military careers are 90% training and 10% utilization the next time you run into a military pilot asked them how many hours they spend in simulators versus how many hours they spend shooting down MiGs over Moscow. Think of it like a firefighter. What the **** did they do when they're not fighting fires? They don't go in start fires or anything, so they're left with working out, taking shirtless pictures for calendars, cooking steak and training for the next fire in your novel. Do you have someone go from civilian to Demi God and two months? I'm not sure about that. Are they spending all the time between wars carousing and bars? That's totally fine, as long as you acknowledge that their army will suffer As a result. Three training is not all screaming and yelling and throwing yourself off buildings. There's some of that. Yes, I had a guy across the hall for me throw himself off the wrong side of the building, the side that was only 12 feet off the ground rather than 40 due to a raise walking area and land in the branches of a tree rather than the ground anyway. So that stuff does happen. But the purpose of boot camp is not just about weeding out the weak. I had the incredible privilege to serve for two short periods of time as a drill sergeant for a group of civilians making that transition toe airman. So I've seen this situation from both sides while we had our fun and screamed some absolutely hilarious things that 18 year olds. The goal wasn't to get them to leave or cry or feel bad about themselves. It was conditioning them to be able to respond to stress, to be able to summon information quickly and effectively to think on their feet. It was about showing them the limits of their body and mind and then showing them that they could go far past what they thought possible to this date. Those were some of the most rewarding times of my military career. All right, about them. Another time, though. The point here is that your training needs toe have a purpose. Hazing is not training. It's a power complex. Now. Can you have characters in positions of power in a training situation who have power complexes? Well, yes, you can. I've seen them myself, and they make interesting characters. But remember that all actions have consequences. What kind of army are you going to breed if all of your drill instructors air like that? Case study Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein. I'll have to admit that I'm a late comer to the Starship Troopers world. To be honest, I saw the movie when I was younger, and I thought, This is awful, really, really awful. Why would I ever want to read the book? But when Joshua Vilmos of Jabberwocky Literary Agency recommended it to me as we were browsing books at a convention, I picked it up and filed it away in my to read pile. I still didn't get to it for about a year, but when I did, I found it to be one of the best military books ever written. I could use Starship Troopers as the case study for almost every single MF article I've written, but I'm choosing to use it as the study for training because the vast majority of the book talks about going from civilian to soldier. The great part about the book is that, like I said, above it reflects 90% training and 10% utilization. That might not seem to make for an interesting story line, but in this case it definitely works. You get to experience the lead characters. Transition from civilian to soldier read about how it changes is perspectives read about how his training forms bonds with those who trained him and those who trained with him. It wasn't until after I got done with the book that I realized that nothing wore, like had really happened at least until the end. And that's surprisingly, I didn't care. So that's it for training. Remember the goal these articles isn't to prescribe, but to make aware that there are elements of military fiction that you might not have thought of your goal is a writer isn't always to make it accurate. It's to make it believable. Happy writing jump for more military in fiction articles or to check out some of my writing, visit my website at www dot joseph xe gia that z e j dot com.