So What's With All The Boot Camps In Military Fiction?

I’m reading Brad Torgerson’s The Chaplain’s War right now, which is currently half of a helluva book.
The opening half had a start that dragged me right in – huge, mechano-mantis creatures had effortlessly destroyed our invading armada, and a handful of prisoners were trapped on an alien planet.  The chaplain’s assistant, who is not particularly religious but is the only man left to comfort these POWs after the chaplain was killed in battle, is approached by one of the mantis-overlords: they’ve decided to exterminate humanity, but first they want to try to understand this foolish concept humans have called “God.”
Problem is, the chaplain’s assistant isn’t quite sure he understands it.  But he does understand that teaching them something is the only hope humanity has.
Things don’t go quite where you expected from there.
The problem is that this narrative has serious drive – the stakes are great, there’s huge battles, there’s desperate moves from needy people on both sides.  I can’t wait to see what happens next…
…but unfortunately, at least thus far in the book (I’m about a quarter of the way through), every other chapter is a flashback to the chaplain at bootcamp.
There’s a lot of bootcamp narratives in military fiction.  And I feel, at this point, like I’ve seen most of them.  The recruit arrives at the boot camp as saggy sack of potatoes.  The upper echelons insult them gratuitously, give them impossible tasks and then punish them for not doing it.  Because we can’t demean the officers, there is of course a local villain – either a slacker who’s going to take other good soldiers out with him, or a nasty piece of work who has it in for Our Hero, or both.  And eventually, Our Hero learns more responsibility and camaraderie and becomes tougher than he’s ever been before.
It’s a lot like the Cop Narrative, in that I feel I’ve seen it too many times to get excited about it.  And I love it when there are twists – I think Ender’s Game did a great job in twisting it so that the boot camp created isolation and not brotherhood, I think Old Man’s War had the joy of seeing elderly people given new genetically engineered bodies lusting for a second life, and The Forever War had a boot camp in icy space that was almost more fatal than the war.
Yet I keep seeing that boot camp narrative show up in novels without much of a twist, and I wonder: what’s appealing about it?
I thought initially it was that soldiers love to relive that time period and will read anything that triggers that experience, and maybe it is, but I posted a status update yesterday and three ex-military friends of mine expressed the same bafflement.  I suspect I may be friended to outliers, but still.
And I myself am an outlier myself in that I don’t comfort-read.  I know there are people who read, say, romances merely because they’re predictable, taking comfort in hearing all the narrative tropes click into place, and I’m not one of them.  (People keep saying my novel Flex is wildly unpredictable, and that’s because if I got bored when I was writing it I tore up that chapter and wrote something weirder.)  So maybe it’s that military fiction readers like having variants on the same story, and they’d get itchy if the boot camp didn’t make its obligatory appearance.
And Brad’s a smart writer.  By alternating boot camp with ZOMG MANTIS WARS, he’s telling me implicitly that the audience he’s trying to court would find both halves equally compelling.  I don’t.  For me, it’s kind of like “These chapters are about an eight-year-old boy trying to fight off his murderous stepfather with a steak knife, and these alternating chapters are about his friend’s struggle to fix his ant farm.” I’m all like WTF MANTIS and find myself skimming the boot camp chapters like blazes to GET TO THE BUGS.
And maybe the boot camp pays off.  It may be a narrative choice to have something with the boot camp resound firmly down the pike – again, Brad’s smart, I wouldn’t put that off of him.  But I’ve seen so many fictional boot camps that don’t really pay off at this stage that I find myself wondering where the appeal of boot camp in general stems from.  There’s nothing wrong with it, I’m just trying to figure it out.
Any ideas?

So What Universal Human Experiences Were You Missing Without Realizing It?

So Xuenay posted a really excellent comment the other day, linking me to this essay “What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?” Which, if you look to the comments, lists common human feelings that people didn’t realize they lacked.
The best example is from someone who had no sense of smell, yet because of social conditioning mocked her sister’s stinky feet and held her nose when she ate Brussels sprouts, just because she was supposed to.  It took this person years to realize that people actually smelled things.
Then there are other weirdies of “Wait, other people are not like me at all”:

• Realizing that some people actually like their jobs;
• Realizing that yes, some people actually get so physically stressed that it affects their emotions;
• Realizing that “not getting pumped up by being among big crowds of excited people” makes them an outlier;
• Realizing that some people really do care about the taste of food, and aren’t just ordering fancy meals to show off.

And I’m curious as to when y’all had that moment of realization of “Huh.  People really are that way, and I’m not.”
Here, I’ll share mine: I was in my mid-twenties when I realized that, bizarrely, putting the words “I feel” in front of sentences actually affected people’s reactions to an opinion.  Until then, it was super-obvious to me that everything I said was my opinion, it came out of my mouth, it’s created by a potentially-flawed brain, why should I have to put “I feel” in front of it to remind people that this opinion is an opinion?  To me, it’s like prefacing every sentence you speak with “I say that,” because shit, it’s that obvious.
But no.  Around my mid-twenties, I came to realize that merely shimming two words – “I feel” – in front of the exact same sentence radically changed how people reacted to my speech.  Which is something I still have issues with today, if you’ve seen my writings.  It’s something I struggle with, this idea that people feel that what they say is objectively correct until they specifically flip a switch otherwise.
So.  When did you have your moment of “Wait, I’m different from most people,” and what is the thing that sets you apart?
 

You Might Cure Depression, But You Can't Cure Stupidity

I know people mean to be helpful with their advice. They do.  But if humanity has one sin nestled at its heart, it’s this:
People can’t truly imagine that someone else is different than they are.
So what you see, over and over again, is this strange process where someone who has a horrifically fucked-up life finally finds a way out.  It doesn’t matter how their life was fucked up – maybe they’re a depressive who found a therapy that worked.  Maybe they’re a drug-abuser who found a good way to get clean.  Maybe they had food allergies, and found a better way to cook meals.  Maybe they felt lost, and they found religion.  Maybe they felt tense all the time, and they found BDSM.
Doesn’t matter.  What matters is that for them, we have sadness + cure = happiness.
And that’s good!  As annoying as the people with these micro-savior complexes are, let us take this moment to celebrate the fact that they found something that worked for them – even if it’s a transient cure!  Happiness is mighty thin on the ground, my friends, and if you find a flickering source of pure-D joy, then you curl up beside that thrill for as long as you can.
Yet what then so often happens next is wretched: they see other people with problems like theirs.  Or, at least, from their perspective, sort of like theirs, because as mentioned most people don’t actually see other people.  They look out across this great country and they see not a million unique specimens of humanity, but a million vague clones of them.
Oh, they recognize that “people are different,” but that’s a sort of muddy background wash that fades away when they start making decisions.  They know, in their heart of hearts, that everyone feels the same emotions that they do.  That’s why anyone of the opposite political stripe is so often portrayed as evil – hey, those other guys know deep down just all of the harm they’re doing, and they’re choosing to do it anyway, so they must be actively wanting to fuck people over.  What monsters!  They can’t possibly be acting in good faith!
Likewise, anyone of an alternative sexuality is doing something that’s purposely creepy, because they can’t possibly have genuine feelings for something that repels you as much as it does.  Unless, of course, you’re comfortable with alternative sexualities, in which case anyone who feels the slightest bit uncomfortable must be a raging bigot because God, look how easy it is for me to be okay with all of these concepts I’ve dealt with for years, the fact that you can’t instantly come to acceptance means you’re a monster.
Nobody’s an individual, sadly.  They’re all just warped reflections of you.  And if they have any differences, it must be because they know better and yet have chosen to do the wrong thing, not that they actually have entirely different experiences and conclusions.  (Perhaps wrong and harmful conclusions, true, but it’s possible to come to a wrong conclusion through the best of intentions.)
Which means that when one person finds something that brings them happiness, they are convinced they’ve found the cure for everyone.  And when they see someone who has problems superficially similar to the issues they had, they automatically go “Well, that looks like my problem, so it is my problem,” and set about barraging people with This Cure They Found!  It works!
And here’s the thing: the cure does work, for some people.   Because the world is large; cast your net wide enough, and you will find a few people similar to you.  So they get just enough evidence to see that this is a fine cure, a beautiful cure.
Then they become accidental dicks.
Because this isn’t a possible cure – it’s the cure, and if you’re not happy after trying it, well, you didn’t do the cure properly.  Hey, you were depressed and medications didn’t work for you?  You just didn’t find the right medications.  You were sad and religion didn’t cheer you up?  You just didn’t have enough faith.  You felt sick all the time and this new diet didn’t work for you?  You must have cheated on this diet.
And slowly, the cure becomes a weapon.
And slowly, people start to feel even worse because they have so-called friends who are hammering on them with cures, and these cures aren’t working, and that means there’s something wrong with them.
And no.
There’s nothing wrong with you if a cure doesn’t work.  The world is big, and problems are complicated, and even problems that seem similar can have wildly different root causes.  The whole point of life is to try as many damn things as you can, because solutions come from odd areas, and the more you can explore the better a chance you’ll have of finding the fix that gets you the serenity you deserve.
But there is no one cure.  There’s a million specific cures, each targeted at the millions of people who are legitimately different, and while there are people who genuinely don’t view other folks as extensions of themselves, most do.  Which means that they’ll be very firm about fixing you in the same way they’d fix themselves, and they’ll be aghast and skeptical when the cure that brought them to happiness doesn’t work on you.  They’ll think you didn’t clap hard enough to save Tinkerbelle.  They’ll think you did something wrong.
And maybe you did do something wrong.  That’s a possibility.  But it’s also a possibility that you are not them, and your cure for depression or sickness or panic is something different entirely.
I hope you find it.
And I hope when you find it, you remember that not everyone’s like you.

Hey, Boston Folks! Need A Ride To See, Uh, Me?

So I’m signing in Boston this Saturday – or, as I’ve been calling it, Bostonish.  Because I wanted to support indie book stores, and as such I’m signing at Annie’s Book Stop, which is in Worcester, about half an hour away from Boston proper.
(I’m told. I never know where anything is. I just follow the GPS.)
ANyway, some folks have mentioned they don’t have a car, or don’t want to make that trip alone.  But never fear!  Because Annie’s is smart and proactive, they’ve created a ride-sharing thread where Ferrett-minded Boston people can gather together to figure out how to burrow out of your snow-caves and see a weasel.  So if you wanna compare notes or find someone to come on out, then that totally works.
Anyone who arrives at Annie’s, for all the trouble it’s worth, gets extra-big hugs from me.

I Wonder How Many People Hawkeye's Drinking Killed.

Gini and I have been watching reruns of MASH on Netflix, and holy God does this show hold up; there’s a lot of sitcoms from the 1970s that have become embarrassingly dated, but MASH deals with situations that are still actually shocking by modern standards. There’s a whole episode devoted to Hawkeye’s being unable to get it up because he’s so stressed about the war – and while it’s couched in 1970s network standards-and-practices censorship terminology, it’s still pretty explicit.
Yet I wonder how many people Hawkeye killed.
Thing is, it’s made clear in MASH that the choppers can drop off wounded men at the surgical unit at any time, often at the worst times, almost always without warning.  And there’s much hullaballoo made of the fact that it never ends.
Yet somehow, whenever Hawkeye and BJ go on a bender, getting laughing-drunk shitfaced, the choppers never come.
Oh, I know: the MASH 4077th is allowed to operate in this distinctly unmilitary fashion because they have a 97% survival rate, a fact that’s hammered home time and time again in the course of the show.  Which seems unrealistic – how good a surgeon is Hawkeye, to make up for Frank’s blatant and routine incompetence?  I mean, if 97 out of 100 wounded men who make it to the MASH unit survive, doesn’t that make Frank actually a brilliant surgeon, just not as good as Hawkeye and company?  Or is Frank entirely responsible for those 3% dead, and is Hawkeye’s moral duty to shoot Frank in the head so he can achieve a saintlike 100% survival?
And come on, man.  Benders take a while to recover from, and these guys are getting plastered.  Surely the choppers came in while Hawkeye was too soused to see.  Surely Hawkeye had to resect a perforated bowel while he was sweating bathtub gin, some poor bastard of a soldier dying because of bad timing, unconscious and unaware that Hawkeye’s hand-eye coordination with the scalpel deep in his guts has been obliterated due to booze.
I still like MASH.  But I wonder about these things.  I can’t not wonder.