: Re: Finding out about other countries' military day-to-day Where does one go to find out about the day-to-day of military life? In countries other than my own? I don't mean combat - I mean the

@Annie587

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I dated a cop who couldn't stand watching "police dramas" because he said they were so unrealistic they might as well be on Mars. Being a writer I tried to get at the essence of what his criticism was, and asking direct questions the best way he could explain it was the characters face dramas and fringe situations in every episode that most police would never encounter in their entire careers. That made sense, but it could easily be said for any fictional story – afterall we generally want stories about interesting people doing interesting things, not people who sleep for 8hrs and commute to work.

What I later observed from the few cop shows he actually thought were "realistic" generally had nothing to do with police drama. Instead they were just typical workplace situations that I didn't really think had anything to do with being a cop – and that was the point. He liked dumb misunderstandings between characters, and one character slacking off and the others mis-interpreting it as something else, so a chain reaction of (what I would call) silly workplace predicaments: someone makes a mistake, and so a boss sets a new rule to fix it, and that unleashes a chain of unrelated issues as everyone has to adapt to a new "rule" which is arbitrary for them. Some of the situations he described as being the most realistic, were to my eyes the most farcical and absurd and the least like a police-procedural drama.

He also reacted to the dialog. Cops sitting around discussing "crime" was totally unrealistic, but cops sitting around talking about their retirement and pension plans was extremely realistic – for me this was inane dialog that didn't tell me anything about the characters or their backstories or their philosophical differences, and again, I guess that is the whole point. Their common ground was actually very mundane and union employee-related. A cop doing their job is just suppose to follow procedure, not make value judgements about who is a good person. Those conversations just never came up, but conversations about doing each other's paperwork and double-checking with the resident "nerd" about procedure and protocol was normal.

Also, perhaps most important, the idea that union jobs will attract a small number of "gung ho" employees, but a majority of (low-tier) rank-and-file employees who have no control or authority, so the goal is to get the job done without any fireworks or improvising. The "status quo" is about not standing out, not doing more or less than expected, and essentially counting the days until retirement.

I have no idea how to get a feel for this, without sitting down with a bunch of military people and listening to the (for a writer) inane dialog and off-topic banter between them. However, that dialog is probably very universal. It isn't interesting for plot or drama, but it will ring true to the people who have been there.

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