Every Marine Corps recruit will graduate bootcamp with an appreciation for 1. The Fundamentals of Marksmanship and 2. Paying attention to detail. The former is a gift. The latter is a curse. If you’ve decided to write about military themes, be sure to get the details correct. Even if you don’t think your audience will notice, I promise the military community will.
Whether it is snipping away “Irish Pennants” from your Service Alpha uniform, positioning the zippers of your warbag (backpack) at the 12 o’clock, or cleaning away every speck of dirt and carbon from your M16A2 service rifle, the Marine Corps is great at creating OCD robots.
You will be expected to maintain this attention to detail throughout your service. With rank comes privilege and every Devil Dog is already imagining that Gunnery Sergeant–or worse yet, officer–with their heinously rolled sleeves that no no one of a lower rank dares to call-out. Once your enlistment is up, you will either revert back to your nasty civilian ways in rebellion of the Corps’ high-strung rigidity, or you will continue flaunting that high-and-tight until the day you die.
I left as a mixture. My biggest concession is growing a beard and ditching the zero-to-ID-card-height haircuts. I’ve been out for over a decade. But I maintain physical and shooting standards in case my country should ever need my skills again. No matter how hard I try, attention to detail has stayed with me.
The Curse of Attention to Detail
I must admit, nothing will turn me off faster from a story/show/movie/video game than a lack of basic attention to detail. This is a subjective attention, as I am far from an expert on most things. The two biggest areas that I obsess over, are details about the military (particularly my beloved Corps) and firearms. The difference between liking and loving a storyline, generally revolves around how much effort the writer spent getting the details right.
The “Write” Details
When I think of mastering attention to detail, Andy Weir, and James S.A. Corey’s (Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) come to mind.
Mr. Weir brought us The Martian, Artemis, and Project Hail Mary. I love his books because he makes learning fun. I enjoy the fact that he provides the details about how coffee on the moon would suck because the boiling point is different and it would appear cooler than what we are used to on Earth (Artemis). Or how he created possibly the most realistic alien encounter in Project Hail Mary, where the species grew up in oppressive gravity with a toxic (to humans) atmosphere that caused them to evolve into crab-like beings with three digits per arm, and hence their number system is also based on their number of fingers, just like our math is based on ten because of counting fingers.
Why I Love The Expanse
If there was ever a series that checked all the boxes for Glenn Roush’s sci-fi enjoyment, The Expanse is it. The series is great and is paced splendidly. The main characters are average blue collar people. The stories involve the military and military themes without being too focused that average people can’t enjoy them. There’s an even blend between combat and relationships. The Expanse speaks of social issues, colonialism, and culture. Who can’t appreciate the detail of the Belter creole?
Like Mr. Weir, I also feel like I’m learning, particularly when it comes to constant acceleration drives. Space still adheres to physics (with exception to the ring gates). Gravity matters. Starships don’t have magic force fields. Lasers have not replaced bullets. And things break. A lot.
I have read The Expanse with the critical eye of a Marine, and kept waiting for mistakes to emerge. They didn’t. At one point I actually went on a search to see if either Mr. Abraham or Mr. Franck were military veterans, because they handled all the military minutiae in a way that few civilians could ever grasp. Bobby Draper is a Martian Marine–and I believe every word of her story.
The Misses
I don’t need to name names, but a very popular zombie show with eleven seasons (and several offshoots) has disappointed me in areas that should/could have been easily avoided. Never mind frustrating elements of plot. Or protagonists that you can’t wait to see bitten. The firearms misses are distracting to anyone who has ever relied on them for their life or livelihood. Don’t count the number of times someone will take an accurate shot from that standing at a moderate range with a rifle that doesn’t have any aiming system whatsoever. No iron sights. No scope. No red dot. Just a lonely top rail and another headshot. Come on!
I will never forget the episode where ammunition was scarce, and yet every shot was dispensed on full-auto. I get it, full-auto looks cool! Ask a combat veteran how many times they engaged the enemy with full-auto. Unless they were using a crew served weapon, they will probably just chuckle. Full-auto is for suppressing fire, aka, making the enemy keep their head down. It has a time and a place, but virtually never in an apocalypse where it can’t be readily replaced. I also have to laugh whenever these full-auto death bursts occur on screen. This show does not use functional prop guns, so the actions remain closed and you will never see any ejected brass despite the hail of CGI added muzzle flashes.
Civilians, Don’t Do This…
This is a basic list that is sure to set-off anyone that is trained in the firearm industry.
- The devices that hold ammunition are called magazines, not clips (unless it is an M1 garand or a few other old firearms).
- A sniper is a person (or a title), not a gun. People in the industry will refer to these firearms as “precision rifles.” You can call them a “sniper rifle” if you must, but please (I’m talking to the younger COD generation) stop calling the device a sniper. If I had to refer to my Senior Drill Instructor Sergeant Price by his complete title, every time I addressed him, it’s not killing anyone to tack the extra word onto the end of the identifier.
- It is OK to call a “gun” a “gun.” Some will argue that a gun is the massive cannon on a battleship, but this has become accepted terminology in the industry. For anyone that wants to have this debate with me (veterans included), I dare you to stop buying weapons from any business that has the word “gun” in their title to prove your point. As someone who has worked in multiple gun stores I promise you, it is proper to call firesticks guns.
- Military rank and awards and should fit the character. A show I really enjoy said someone had earned a Silver Star when it was clearly a Bronze Star hanging from the awards display. Both are achievement awards. But one is a lot more significant than the other, and it might make a difference in the character’s level of bad-assery. I also have to cringe whenever the uninitiated default their war heroes as Navy SEALs when they don’t need to be. SEALs are amazing. Their training is brutal and they have an historic reputation. They are not the only people in the military and it is OK to write characters that were “just” soldiers. I promise you plenty of army infantry have seen more brutal combat than people wearing the golden trident.
Write About What You Know
I tend to write about what I know. It’s a good rule of thumb for any author. Because of this, you won’t ever catch me writing legal/lawyer scenes because I’m not qualified expert on law. I have a decent amount of trauma knowledge, but not enough to tackle the intricacies of a surgery. I avoid these things because I know an actual expert will poke holes in my details just as I have on that one show’s gunplay.
Before I started writing Science Fiction, I didn’t know that much about space, physics, or distant planets. Since then, I’ve spent countless hours researching everything I can. If it has an impact on my world, I want to get it right (and understand that I’ll still miss in areas I didn’t even know I was missing at). A little research goes a long way. A lot of research goes even further, and the other attention to detail nuts out there will appreciate it.
-Glenn Roush