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There But For the Grace of Grunts Go I. . .

I enlisted into the Navy right out of high school.

I graduated early and everything so I could make it to boot camp.

My dad was the one who took me to the recruiter’s offices on base. He let me get a feel for each of the branches of the military by letting me ask intermittent questions.

There was something about the Marine recruiter’s look that put me off. The Army guy was fine, but they only had openings for infantry. The Navy guy, though, made me take notice. Navy was looking to recruit for Intelligence Specialists, and with my ASVAB scores I qualified.

My natural pessimism helped prepare me for the awfulness of boot camp in Orlando, Florida during the height of summer. Other recruits seemed bitter because their recruiters lied to them, or let them believe it would be different, which isn’t that much different than lying. I made it through boot camp, and was sent to Dam Neck, Virginia for my “A” School.

That’s where some of the trouble began for me.

Without getting too far into it, the reason my dad insisted the military was the way for me was because he’d joined way back when and gotten a college education out of it. So, whenever I was asked, I was honest.

“I joined because of the GI Bill,” I’d say with a shrug.

Now, what had been a deciding factor for me joining the Navy specifically was reading Tom Clancy novels. I remember tearing through The Hunt for Red October in a couple days, and wanting more of Clancy’s books.

Thing is, I found out later that Clancy never joined the military; he’d based a lot of his technical knowledge on his access to Jane’s military manuals. Great research, but his lack of any military experience sort of shone through whenever he included any enlisted personnel in the story.

Clancy’s enlisted personnel were never shown to be doing basic cleaning or anything other than their main one, and were they ever chipper about that. I often wondered how happy I’d be too if I wasn’t stripping, waxing and machine-buffing the same stretch of passageway several times a week.

It’s been quite a while since those days, and I also understand the Navy may have changed since I was at my billet on an aircraft carrier. . . but I doubt it’s changed so much that some low-level grunt isn’t busy cleaning their division’s spaces every night.

And in my very limited reading of military sci-fi, I’ve only really read one book that rang true to me: The Forever War. In it, Haldeman nails some of the feel of enlisted life–the long stretches where you’re battling boredom in order to be ready for instructions from command; the pessimism that sets in when you’re finally sent on mission with shoddy equipment.

As an aside, if there’s a fantasy series that I felt pulled off the same trick, it’s Glen Cook’s Black Company series (at least the first three. . . I’ve not read the rest). What I’d give to see a panel with Haldeman and Cook talk about their respective works

I’m the first to admit to not being the most comprehensive reader of military sci-fi, but again that’s because fair or not, I believe the majority of it follows the mold of “Tom Clancy in Space” and not something quite as critical. I have read some of the more popular titles already, and haven’t been too dissuaded from my opinion.

I’m aware that Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series takes a turn towards being more critical in later books, but his initial one felt a little too much like Starship Troopers than Forever War. I felt that it attempted to defend a war of aggression, something that humanity seems to already have decided is indefensible. As a result, I’ve never read any of the other books in the series, which I may decide to remedy at some point.

The reason I find this distinction important is because many of the stories we get these days focus on officers and other staff further up the chain of command. . . and I get why a writer gravitates towards that! Officers are generally more in control or have a better range of knowledge of things, therefore they have more agency as characters. However, enlisted troops do all the grunt work for the brass, and they’re also the ones to suffer the most from whatever dumb idea someone with a bird on their epaulets has.

This isn’t to say I suffered any battle-related trauma or anything, but it’s important to have those stories, too. Of course, I understand that some reader who doesn’t have much control over how they do their job is more interested in reading for the escapism, but that may come at the cost of solidarity with others in their same position. By concentrating on the officers, who give the orders, the costs of empire (our real world one, or the many imaginary ones sprawled across the stars we like to read about) are never really examined.

On either side of the barrel.