Weird Things Hollywood Just Can’t Get Right About The Military

Sometimes it pays to hire a military advisor for your movie. Sometimes you don't get your money's worth.

1) When we end our service, we don’t walk home with a duffle bag.

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You don't typically spend 4-20 years never coming home. This is (most likely) not their first time home as it is so often portrayed.

Since “First Blood” and “The Deer Hunter” both take place before the dawn of the internet, let’s keep it simple: they still had phones. They knew well in advance they were ending their service and returning to the “home” of their choosing. In “Deer Hunter” we see that Michael has friends and family planning a welcome home party for him. One person seriously couldn’t be bothered to pick the guy up from a bus station or something?

Contrary to what these “homecoming” scenes imply, we do get paid for the duration of our service. Enough to afford a car. Additionally, one of the nice things the military does is pay for your one-way trip home. It’s not like they just throw separation papers at us and tell us to hit the bricks. They buy you a plane ticket and everything.

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On that note, no one forces us to live out of a single duffle bag. We’re, you know, adults who get paid for working full time, plus benefits. We often acquire things over the course of a four-year enlistment, such as clothing, laptops, books, TVs, etc. In addition to those sweet all-expense paid trips home, the military will also pay for all your stuff to get shipped to the residence of your choosing. So no, we don’t have to whittle down all of our worldly goods into only what we can carry. For the record, we can all carry more than one duffle bag anyway, so the “special forces guy walking home from the ‘war’ with a single duffle bag” thing is just ridiculous.

Dwayne Johnson’s Sgt. Chris Vaughn in “Walking Tall” would in fact own things. Things that necessitate more than one bag. And a car. And a cell phone. That movie came out in 2004 for Christ sakes, I think most dudes in the army had cell phones. I feel confident experienced special forces operator could successfully get himself back to his own house without having to resort to hiking without any resources.

2) “I’m 101st Airborne out of Kandahar”

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I assume that's the look Oliver Queen gave Diggle when he realized how ridiculous they both are.

Unless the character saying this is on R&R from an active deployment, or the character is saying this while in said deployed country, it’s BS.

There are no units permanently based out of forward-deployed zones, hence why we call them deployments. They’re temporary. Unless you die on your first deployment, no one spends their entire military career forward deployed. Units are based out of camps and forts (and myriad other military installations) in the U.S., or scattered throughout allied nations in Europe, Japan and US territories in the Pacific. Not active combat zones.

In fact, if someone ever introduces themselves as a former special forces operator based out of Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria/Libya/whatever, you can bet that the a-hole is lying.

Guilty of this is “Arrow’s” John Diggle. That is almost the exact phrasing of how he introduces himself to Oliver Queen. I almost gave up on the show before I even started.

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There’s also “Grey’s Anatomy’s” Dr. Owen Hunt, who shows up in season 5 in his cammies (with a sweet ginger beard that is not remotely authorized for an army doctor). Within two minutes he confirms that he worked at a hospital in Maryland, then turns down a job because he has to “go back to the sandpit and finish [his] tour.” Wait, what? Is this guy actively deployed or what? According to the show, it was possible for him to have been deployed (and on R&R), returned to Iraq, saw his entire platoon killed, and then quietly discharged and sent home in the space of two months.

No, discharges don’t happen like that. You might get lucky with a 2 month turnaround if you aren’t actively deployed and coming to the end of your contract anyway. Getting discharged for personal, legal or medical reasons is a whole different can of worms. And you don’t get discharged while on deployment.

Being an army surgeon does not mean you spend four years in Iraq. That’s not a “tour.” A tour is a deployment. That’s temporary. He was not based out of Iraq, as the timeline of events would suggest.

Deployment schedules typically look something like this: 6 months on deployment, 12 months off. Or 12 months on deployment (with a 2 week R&R trip in the middle to you know, HOME) and 24 months off.

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This is the face of a man who never came off deployment.

Even during World War 2, units didn’t deploy to war in 1941 and not come back until the Germans surrendered (“Saving Private Ryan,” I’m looking at you).

3) Military = advanced technical skill with weapons and explosives, regardless of background.

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I’m not sure I’ll ever forget seeing “Battle: Los Angeles” in theaters. Not because it was a great movie-going experience (not by a long shot), but because the moment Michelle Rodriguez’s character, an Air Force intelligence specialist, picked up an AT-4 (a fancy rocket launcher) and fired it accurately, without any hesitation or false starts.

Assuming that the average Marine gets more trigger time on any weapon than the average airman does (not counting special forces), it’s safe to say that this is a woman who has most likely never even seen that weapon before, let alone handled one often enough to be able to comfortably fire it in a combat situation. I laughed out loud at that scene. Do you know how much time the average Marine spends training on that weapon? We fire it once in our 4-week combat training. That’s it. Unless you are combat arms in any branch, the DoD is not investing large amounts of time and money into training you to fire weapons you will never see or use.

No, Hollywood, being a service member does not mean we all get advanced weapons, demolition, computer hacking, infantry tactics or any other crazy-ass skill you all seem to think we get in boot camp.

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That is not how the teach facepainting in boot camp, Marine.

“Haywire” is another one that brought the lulz. Throughout the movie, they reference the fact that Gina Carano’s character was a Marine. That’s great, but to date there are no females in the infantry or special forces. None. They use this as some sort of explanation for why she’s such a good killer, but the truth is the only killing skill she would have gained as a female Marine is how to shoot a rifle. Maybe a pistol, too, if her command let her.

Most Marines spend a grand total of one week a year firing a weapon on a range. That’s it. If they’re extra motivated, they might spend a few months a year doing our terrible martial arts program. Some Marines have specialties that would give them demolitions skills, but not most. Some have specialties that make them well-suited to rewire electronics, fix radios, etc, but again, that’s not most.

Simply being a Marine is not an explanation. Ever. For anything other than being a drunk who loses fights a lot.

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When John Winchester sold his soul to a demon, I'll bet he had no idea hell would be this movie.

“Red Dawn” and “Battlestar Galactica” (god bless it, I love that show anyway) both feature pilots leading ground combat assaults like it’s their job. Here’s a pro tip: it’s not their job. At all. The mental image of handing your average Harrier pilot an M4 and telling him/her to lead an assault on a town, is laughable. Especially when you take into account that in both of these examples, there are ground combat experts with significant experience in their teams, but for some reason those guys can’t be trusted to lead.

I love Starbuck. She’s one of the greatest things to ever happen for women in sci-fi. But damnit, if there’s a building that needs to be cleared of enemy troops and there’s a choice between letting Starbuck – a pilot – lead the assault, or letting an infantry platoon sergeant with countless identical operations under his belt, why the hell do they keep choosing the pilots?

Did I miss any weird Hollywood misconceptions about the military? Did I misrepresent any of these movies? I have a job and can't watch them all (or rewatch for a refresher) so I rely on my memory and the kindness of Buzzfeed commenters to let me know.