Military Life v. Civilian Life

A very short time ago I put a story on my ‘Facebook’ wall involving a difference in phrasing and communication between an Army officer and a Royal Air Force SNCO (Senior Non-Commissioned Officer).

The officer did not, in spite of his advanced rank and time served in the Army, have any cognisance of the RAF rank system.

We are all guilty of that—those of us in the military, that is.

Many of us do not understand the rank structure of other branches of the services and yet we knock into them on a fairly frequent basis.

Working with foreign military is even more confusing. The LuftWaffe ‘Oberfeldwebel’ and ‘Stabsfeldwebel’ are, more or less, defined by the British military as Flight Sergeant and Chief Technician and that translates in WO2 and Staff Sergeant in the Army. 'Adjutante Premiere' (Warrant Officer First Class) is less well known.

More or less. I do not propose to get into a debate about it.

Then there are the Americans who have OR (Other Rank) numbers. Seems that I, a Chief Technician, was OR7 and so was permitted into the Officer’s transit accommodation. Such unbridled luxury. It was luxurious in that the TV worked! Not that there was anything worth watching on it.

Twenty seven years of loyalty and dedication. At the end the life became intolerable, it was time to go, to seek pastures anew in civilian life.

Things became complex.

There was much I did not understand.

In the first place was this absurd idea that people leaving the military cannot expect to be paid as much as they received in the Forces.

Why?

I argued that if I were leaving one civilian job for another job it would be termed a ‘career move’. Surely that was what I was doing?

One prospective employer told me that such expectations were naive. Good. I was naive, then.

Naturally, companies—especially large corporations, lied. They said that the pay scale requested would be no problem; they said this often, loudly and with a straight face. When the job offer came through it was for a derisory salary. They were surprised when I turned their offer down.

One of the main things that take a lot of getting accustomed to is the way people give you work to do.

In the military nobody ever says, “Can you do this?” they say, “Do this.”

You are expected to get on with it. People who give you tasks are, by and large, familiar with what your capabilities and limitations are.

In the commercial world nobody wears badges to tell others what their level in the company is. There is no clue as to what their job or position is within the company.

So the boss comes to me and says, “Are you able to do...?”

To which I say, “Yes,” and get on with it. Makes life so much easier like that.

From the point of view of writing stories, it is much easier (for me) to write stories that are based on a military mind-set because, quite honestly, I still do not really understand the way civilians think.

I suspect that if you are in a crowded environment and shout, “DUCK!” all the military and ex-service people will immediately drop and all the civilians will look around, frowning, asking 'where is it?'

How do you convey that mental condition and imagery into words?

This is difficult to accomplish. Just recently I had to write a story that developed from two previous stories but it needed to explain what had been going on previously. Now I had to describe a growing mindset of androids that had no specific mindset other than that with which they had been pre-programmed; but the programming was becoming unravelled.

Equally, one of my American friends wrote a comment to which I responded normally. She replied by saying, “My sarcasm didn’t come across too well there.”

You can’t write feelings unless you say, or indicate, what those feelings and emotions are.

We do try, don’t we?