Isegoria

Ronald D. Moore answers veterans’ questions about how he got Battlestar Galactica so right:

Erich Simmers: You mentioned your study of history and your time in the Navy ROTC. Many of the questions I got were focused on your eye for military culture — specifically the people, not just the technology or battles and dates, but that very specific culture that the U. S. military has. They asked, “How did you get it so right?” Can you elaborate more on your experiences and your study of history that enabled you to tap into that culture?

Ronald D. Moore: My personal experiences were fairly limited, but I had an ear for picking up on dialogue and culture and tradition in the environments I was in. My first midshipman’s cruise was aboard the USS W. S. Sims out of Mayport, Florida freshman year. I spent about a month aboard the frigate. There were just a lot of things about living aboard a Navy ship for a month that I picked up on — the way people talked to one another, the style, the cultures going around me. When I was writing the episodes, I tapped into a lot of that.

Colonel Tigh on Battlestar — the XO on the Sims was sort of a hardass, and the crew knew he was a hardass. It was part of his job to protect the image of the captain as the kindly old man. The XO’s job was to be a tougher man than him and take all the flack, and I always remembered that. It was an interesting, deliberate choice that the man had made to run the ship that way.

Then there were little things like the announcements going over the PA. In the Battlestar miniseries, there’s an announcement that I wrote in in the background where you hear somebody say, “Attention aboard the Galactica, EVA in progress. Do not rotate or irradiate any electronic equipment while men are working outside the ship.” I remember those announcements going through the Sims everyday: “Do not rotate or irradiate any electronic equipment while men are working aloft.” Little things like that stuck in my head, and I would reach back and put into the show periodically.

Then, I just loved military history and read a lot of books through the years on World War II — in particular, carrier operations and the way the fat carriers worked in the Pacific, how the squadrons were organized, the culture of the ready room and the pilots, the ways they talked to one another, and how they planned operations. I was always fascinated with that world, so I brought my knowledge of that over.

ES: Did any part of you ever wonder what would have happened if you would have followed a Naval career rather than the path you took?

RM: Oh yeah, all the time. It’s one of those things in my past that I look back on with regret and relief at the same time, because I made the realization that while I was fascinated with it, I wasn’t really part of it. I didn’t fit well into the military. It wasn’t natural to me; I was a much better observer and journalist of it, as it were, to talk about it, study it, and fictionalize it. I didn’t function that well in it. I didn’t particularly like taking orders; I didn’t particularly like getting up early in the morning. I hated learning to write the reports — even the most basic stuff we did in ROTC of filling out reports and typing in those forms and readiness reports. Just mindless paperwork and the bureaucratic nature of the military drove me kinda batshit. [laughs] I was like, “Really?” So there were aspects of it that I just didn’t mesh completely well with. I was always somewhat apart from the rest of my unit, and I never really felt part of it. But there was a part of me that wanted to. That really wanted to be a naval officer. That really wanted to do that.

I’ll never forget, many years later, when I was on Star Trek, I was invited to go aboard the USS Constellation for a long weekend, so I flew out with a bunch of people going for a weekend cruise. We flew out off the coast of San Diego and went up to the flag bridge to watch air operations that night. When we went up to the flag bridge and looked down onto the deck, there were F/A-18s coming in and landing in this amber glow of the lights on the deck and there was just utter blackness out beyond. The planes would come out of nowhere and land on the deck and others were being catapulted off, and I had this enormous wave of emotion and feeling. There was a part of me that just so desperately wished that I was part of this — that I was doing this and I was down on that deck or I was in that aircraft or this was my job. It was the first time that it really grabbed me since I left ROTC that there was this part of me that really wanted to belong to this.

The only thing we learn from history, George Bernard Shaw quipped, is that we learn nothing from history.

Cyril Kornbluth, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge, wrote his science-fiction tale, The Only Thing We Learn, soon after that war ended and not long before he died.

Here Wing Commander Arris realizes his forces — defending Earth — are doomed, as the ramshackle rebel fleet attacking them doesn’t crumble on contact with a “proper” fleet:

Lunar relay flickered out as overloaded fuses flashed into vapor. Arris distractedly paced back to the dark corner and sank into a chair.

“I’m sorry,” said the voice of Glen next to him, sounding quite sincere. “No doubt it was quite a shock to you.”

“Not to you?” asked Arris bitterly.

“Not to me.”

“Then how did they do it?” the wing commander asked the civilian in a low, desperate whisper. “They don’t even wear .45′s. Intelligence says their enlisted men have hit their officers and got away with it. They elect ship captains! Glen, what does it all mean?”

“It means,” said the fat little man with a timbre of doom in his voice, “that they’ve returned. They always have. They always will. You see, commander, there is always somewhere a wealthy, powerful city, or nation, or world. In it are those whose blood is not right for a wealthy, powerful place. They must seek danger and overcome it. So they go out — on the marshes, in the desert, on the tundra, the planets, or the stars. Being strong, they grow stronger by fighting the tundra, the planets, or the stars. They — they change. They sing new songs. They know new heroes. And then, one day, they return to their old home.

“They return to the wealthy, powerful city, or nation or world. They fight its guardians as they fought the tundra, the planets, or the stars — a way that strikes terror to the heart. Then they sack the city, nation, or world and sing great, ringing sagas of their deeds. They always have. Doubtless they always will.”

“But what shall we do?”

“We shall cower, I suppose, beneath the bombs they drop on us, and we shall die, some bravely, some not, defending the palace within a very few hours. But you will have your revenge.”

“How?” asked the wing commander, with haunted eyes.

The fat little man giggled and whispered in the officer’s ear. Arris irritably shrugged it off as a bad joke. He didn’t believe it. As he died, drilled through the chest a few hours later by one of Algan’s gunfighters, he believed it even less.

World War I represented everything Tolkien hated, Nancy Marie Ott notes — the destruction of nature, the deadly application of technology, the abuse and corruption of authority, and the triumph of industrialization — and this colored his own image of the War of the Rings:

The parallels between the landscapes of No-Man’s Land and Tolkien’s landscapes of nightmare are striking. Mordor is a dry, gasping land pocked by pits that are very much like shell craters. Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins even hide in one of these pits when escaping from an Orc band, much as a soldier might have hidden in a shell hole while trying to evade an enemy patrol. Like No-Man’s Land, Mordor is empty of all life except the soldiers of the Enemy. Almost nothing grows there or lives there. The natural world has been almost annihilated by Sauron’s power, much as modern weaponry almost annihilated the natural world on the Western Front.

The desolation before the gates of Mordor is another savage landscape inspired by the Western Front. It is full of pits and heaps of torn earth and ash, some with an oily sump at the bottom. It is the product of centuries of destructive activity by Sauron’s slaves, a destruction that Tolkien stated would endure long after Sauron was vanquished.

Dreadful as the Dead Marshes had been, and the arid moors of the Noman-lands, more loathsome by far was the country that the crawling day now slowly unveiled to his shrinking eyes.… Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails on the lands about.

— The Two Towers, Book IV, Chapter 2: “The Passage of the Marshes”

The sickly white and grey mud mentioned in this passage is very like the terrain of No-Man’s Land on the Somme, where the underlying chalk bedrock was churned up by artillery bombardment and turned the ground grey and white.

[...]

The landscape of the Dead Marshes is also inspired by the Western Front. As Frodo, Sam, and their guide Gollum cross the Marshes, they see the ghostly, rotting forms of the dead soldiers of a war that had swept across the region thousands of years before. As Frodo tells Sam and Gollum,

“They lie in all the pools, pale faces, deep deep under the dark water. I saw them: grim faces and evil, noble faces and sad. Many faces proud and fair, with weeds in their silver hair. But all foul, all rotting, all dead.”

— “The Passage of the Marshes”, The Two Towers

The dead lying in pools of mud is a powerful image of trench warfare on the Western Front, and is something that Tolkien would have undoubtably seen during his wartime service. As the autumn rains fell, the battlefield of the Somme turned into a stinking mire seeded with the rotting corpses of men and animals. The dead men that Frodo and Sam see are not physically present — only their ghostly shapes have been preserved —  but their forms inspire horror and pity.

The landscape of Ithilien is in some ways like the landscape of rural France in the area behind the front lines. Although there is evidence of the nearby conflict — a few damaged buildings, some shell craters, and the general debris of war — the landscape is otherwise natural and unspoiled. It has not fallen fully under the dominion of war. So too is Ithilien, the deserted province of Gondor that had recently fallen under the dominion of Sauron. Although Sauron’s Orcs have been at work, Ithilien retains some of its natural beauty. Sam and Frodo’s feelings rise when they reach Ithilien, much as the spirits of soldiers rose when they were relieved of their tours in the trenches and could return to the comforts of the rear areas.

Another similarity between Ithilien and the rear areas in France is their close proximity to areas of deadly danger — either to the front or to the frontiers of Mordor. Behind the lines, the sounds of the bombardment were never far off. On the horizon the flashes of gunfire and the smoke and dust thrown up by the explosions might appear like a mountainous wall — similar to how Sam and Frodo see Mount Doom erupting in the lands beyond the Mountains of Shadow.

Sam and Frodo’s relationship harks back to Tolkien’s war-time experience, too:

Tolkien had a great deal of respect for the privates and NCOs (non-commissioned officers) with whom he served in France. Officers did not make friends among the enlisted men, of course; the system did not allow it and there was a wide gulf of class differences between them. Officers generally came from the upper and middle classes; enlisted men usually came from the lower classes. However, each officer was assigned a batman — a servant who looked after his belongings and took care of him.

Tolkien got to know several of his batmen very well. These men and other men in Tolkien’s battalion served as inspiration for the character Sam Gamgee. As Tolkien later wrote, “My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” Sam represents the courage, endurance and steadfastness of the British soldier, as well as his limited imagination and parochial viewpoint. Sam is stubbornly optimistic and refuses to give up, even when things seem hopeless. Indeed, the resiliency of Hobbits in general, their love of comfort, their sometimes hidden courage, and their conservative outlook owe much to Tolkien’s view of ordinary enlisted men. These traits enabled British soldiers not only to survive their tours of duty on the terrible battlefields of France, but to bravely attack and counter-attack the Germans.

The officer/batman paradigm also describes some aspects of Sam and Frodo’s relationship. It is clearly not a formal one in a military sense, but it goes beyond that of an ordinary, civilian master and servant. Their relationship encompasses the closeness of soldiers who have been in combat together and who have depended on their comrades for their lives. Sam is steadfastly loyal to Frodo. He looks after Frodo’s physical comfort — cooking, fetching water, and so forth — and helps Frodo on his quest as much as he possibly can, even carrying him up the slopes of Mount Doom when Frodo’s strength gives out. He loves Frodo although he does not completely understand him. Sam also defends Frodo from danger when he is attacked by Shelob and rescues him from the Tower of Cirith Ungol. Sam and Frodo had been through terror and were tested against the lure of the Ring together, and were closer than a master-servant relationship would imply.

The Lord of the Rings is about the passing of an age:

Most of Europe had known peace for over a generation before 1914. Europeans had made great strides in the sciences and the arts. Socialists preached the brotherhood of the working classes. Progress was considered to be proper and inevitable. Exciting new technologies would bring great benefit to people. World War I saw the destruction of this world. European society was wrenched into new patters as the war grew bloodier and the entire population became involved in the war effort. After the war, Europe never returned to what it was before. Science and technology had proved to be easily misused in the cause of war. Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary had fallen, their leaders unforgiven by the citizenry whose sons had been fed to the Moloch of the industrialized battlefield. Much that was beautiful in Europe lay in ruins. Millions of young men who would have contributed much to society were dead or maimed, their families and communities overwhelmed at dealing with this trauma. Noncombatants everywhere had suffered greatly. There was personal grief at the deaths of loved ones, and grief at the death of a way of life. In many ways, the new Modern age seemed a lesser one.

The Lord of the Rings is suffused with a similar sense of grief and sorrow. It too is about the end of an era. The age of the Elves is finished and the time of the dominion of Men is at hand. After the War of the Ring, the last of the Noldor or High Elves return across the sundering seas to the Blessed Land of Valinor. The passing of the High Elves represents the loss of the highest traits of humanity: artistry, craftsmanship, nobility, splendor. All outcomes of the war are fraught with sorrow. If the One Ring is found, Sauron wins and will cover Middle-earth in a new darkness. If the One Ring is destroyed, Sauron is vanquished but the Elves will suffer great loss. Though necessary to defeat evil, the destruction of the One Ring will cause the three Elven Rings to fail because their power is based on it. As Galadriel says to Frodo,

“Do you not see how your coming to us is as the footsteps of Doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the Enemy. Yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished and Lothlorien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away.”

— “The Mirror of Galadriel,” The Fellowship of the Ring

After Sauron’s defeat, the Elves will fade and pass into the West, the Dwarves will eventually dwindle, and much knowledge and beauty will be lost. Aragorn as King of Gondor will be left holding the pieces in an attempt to preserve what he can of the era that has ended and pave the way for the coming dominance of Men in Middle-earth. There is grief at the passing of the Elves and grief at the end of a way of life that had existed for thousands of years. The new Fourth Age of Middle-earth will be a lesser one.

Today it’s accepted that fiction can describe war in a realistic fashion, but that wasn’t always the case, David Drake notes:

Stories aren’t required to be realistic, but they’re permitted to be. Until quite recently, that wasn’t the case. (I remember very vividly being called a pornographer of violence by Analog because I was trying to describe war as I’d seen it from the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia.) That may be part of the reason why very few WW II veterans wrote Military SF.

How had Drake seen war from the loader’s hatch of a tank in Cambodia? Like this:

The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the Blackhorse, was the spearpoint of the Cambodian Incursion of May-June, 1970 (the legal invasion, as distinguished from the bombing and black operations which had been going on for years). It was — we were — a crack unit, as fine a combat force as there was in Southeast Asia. The Regimental Commander, Colonel Donn Starry, was in the first vehicle across the border.

The North Vietnamese Army responded by running as fast as it could, but quite early in the operation an NVA soldier was spotted ducking into a bunker. Colonel Starry, with the Regimental Sergeant Major and the regiment’s chief interpreter, decided to talk the enemy soldier into surrendering.

Things seemed to be going well, but the NVA threw a grenade when the Colonel stood up. The blast injured all three friendlies involved in the negotiations as well as the Regimental Operations Officer, Fred Franks, who had just arrived by helicopter. (Despite losing his left leg, Franks went on to command the (coalition) VII Corps in the Second Gulf War.)

According to his award citation, Colonel Starry was wounded in the stomach. According to the medic who worked on him before the dust-off bird — the medical evacuation helicopter — arrived, his most serious wounds were well south of the stomach.

The Colonel was evacuated to Japan. We troopers laughed our collective head off when we heard that the Army had flown his wife there to meet him. To us it was an amazingly cruel joke — and the Army itself had perpetrated it.

You don’t find spit and polish in a real combat unit. You don’t find reverence either. Remember that point.

What happened to that brave NVA soldier? The platoon sergeant rolled his tank up to the bunker and put a round into the opening from as close as he could get the muzzle of his 90 mm main gun. It’s what he would have done first off if the Colonel hadn’t decided to look for a medal. In the Blackhorse we laughed at a lot of things that civilians don’t find funny, but we had no sense of humor toward people shooting at us.

Drake highly recommends Keith Bennett’s The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears as an early example of military science-fiction that captures the unrelenting grind of continuous combat operations.