On Sun, 21 Feb 1999, Presley H. Cannady wrote:

The anti-militarist lacks either the experience, the 
knowledge, or both; he attempts to mitigate the ignorance 
he arrogantly flaunts with rambling, nonsensical attacks
on writers who take the time and effort to understand
the statics and dynamics of armed service.  With that,
I open the thread to the rest of the FFML.  Good luck.

You're engaging in the same sort of broad condemnation of people who
dislike the detailed approach to military stories that you condemn them
for expressing.

Some people like stories which make heavy use of technical details, be it
in the field of science fiction, military fiction, espionage, or whatever.
To those who are NOT familiar with such details, the story becomes
impossible to read.  It all depends on what audience you're going to
target, and whether or not you actually explain what anything means.  

I also think you've jammed two distinct, and not necessarily related
problems together.  There's a heavy distinction between a story which
focuses on people in the military, and a story which makes heavy use of
regulations, jargon, and equipment which is obscure to most other people.
Compare 'Saving Private Ryan' to Haig's 'The Third World War' for example.  

But mostly it comes down to a matter of taste.  I don't want to have to
spend two years studying espionage, military hardware, and military
regulations in order to understand a story.  For those who do enjoy such
things, they add to an air of realism.  To those who don't, it renders the
story as incomprehensible as if you had written it in heiroglyphs.



John Walter Biles :  MA-History, Ph.D Wannabe at U. Kansas         
ranma@falcon.cc.ukans.edu       
rhea@tass.org              http://www.tass.org/~rhea/falcon.html
rhea@maison-otaku.net      http://www.maison-otaku.net/~rhea/

"Put Strom Thurmond in a headlock, and he'll listen to reason!"  Governor
Jesse Ventura of Minnesota to President Clinton in the February 6, 1999
Imagination Workshop