Ho-boy.
SO!
I'm writing a trilogy of young adult hard-sci fi military fiction books!
(Or, as I call it, triYAHSFmilifi!)
The first novel is over and done with and I'm now heading straight into the second one. Our heroine has come home from the war with five fewer fingers, the medal of honor, and a serious case of guilt.
See, the climax of the first novel has our MC being the highest ranked soldier at the front lines. She's facing an overwhelming enemy force, and she gets the orders to use Sandcasters. They're essentially the terror weapon of orbital conflict...it's like a mix between an IED, machine gun, and permanent landmine, and it's very very illegal due to the fact that it's indiscriminate and causes nigh irreparable pollution of our orbit. Which is bad.
So, she makes a choice: She tells her CO no, she won't follow an illegal order. The end result?
She loses the battle, but wins the war. The cost to her troops - all her friends - is staggeringly high, but at the end of the day, reinforcements arrive and she finds that keeping the sandcasters offline kept the orbital routes clear and, thus, have secured supply lines back to the Earth.
She gets to go home. Most of her friends don't.
Now, the second book is mostly about her trying to recover and understand this loss and this guilt - as well as getting caught up in her formal CO's court-martial (For, ya know, trying to use illegal weapons) - and so a big part of the novel is about guilt and where the responsibility of orders falls.
I have a pivotal scene in mind, where my MC gets a serious dressing down from an older soldier who tells her, in effect, that her accepting ALL the guilt for her friends deaths is...well, insulting as hell to her friends. Her friends, her comrades, followed her orders because they respected her and because they knew she was right. They did what good soldiers do: put their lives on the line to save others.
This scene is important, because it begins my MC's path toward figuring herself out, figuring out what it means to be a soldier and all that junk.
So, uh...
Those of you who are actually soldiers and actually know what it's LIKE...is this all a load of bullshit?
SO!
I'm writing a trilogy of young adult hard-sci fi military fiction books!
(Or, as I call it, triYAHSFmilifi!)
The first novel is over and done with and I'm now heading straight into the second one. Our heroine has come home from the war with five fewer fingers, the medal of honor, and a serious case of guilt.
See, the climax of the first novel has our MC being the highest ranked soldier at the front lines. She's facing an overwhelming enemy force, and she gets the orders to use Sandcasters. They're essentially the terror weapon of orbital conflict...it's like a mix between an IED, machine gun, and permanent landmine, and it's very very illegal due to the fact that it's indiscriminate and causes nigh irreparable pollution of our orbit. Which is bad.
So, she makes a choice: She tells her CO no, she won't follow an illegal order. The end result?
She loses the battle, but wins the war. The cost to her troops - all her friends - is staggeringly high, but at the end of the day, reinforcements arrive and she finds that keeping the sandcasters offline kept the orbital routes clear and, thus, have secured supply lines back to the Earth.
She gets to go home. Most of her friends don't.
Now, the second book is mostly about her trying to recover and understand this loss and this guilt - as well as getting caught up in her formal CO's court-martial (For, ya know, trying to use illegal weapons) - and so a big part of the novel is about guilt and where the responsibility of orders falls.
I have a pivotal scene in mind, where my MC gets a serious dressing down from an older soldier who tells her, in effect, that her accepting ALL the guilt for her friends deaths is...well, insulting as hell to her friends. Her friends, her comrades, followed her orders because they respected her and because they knew she was right. They did what good soldiers do: put their lives on the line to save others.
This scene is important, because it begins my MC's path toward figuring herself out, figuring out what it means to be a soldier and all that junk.
So, uh...
Those of you who are actually soldiers and actually know what it's LIKE...is this all a load of bullshit?
