BOHICA Blues Downrange! (Patreon)

We griped and moaned about all kinds of inconveniences but sometimes I had to think a bit and put things in perspective. There were people in Iraq living in garbage dumps or scavenging for food, and begging for clean water while we complained if we ran out of varieties of ice cream.  And in between were our fellow troops who got "technically decent" food but unsatisfying by our established norms. 

In this one, my "Rock" character is portrayed as an E-5, or Sergeant, so while things were mostly nailed down as far as a look for the characters, some details continued to "float". 

The MP's were assigned increasingly "garrison" duties, which no one liked (not even the MPs themselves). But here we see the beginning look of a couple different characters-- the female MP, with the short black hair and severe look, is the beginnings of the characters SSG June Ransom, and SPC Wendy Two-Feathers. She was modeled after an actual female MP I saw one day in the chow hall.

I originally was going to make SSG Ransom the female MP, and have her working near the 213th Battalion to bring in some other types of humor from time to time. With that character, I was also going to leverage bringing in the Military Working Dogs. However, I also wanted a few more female soldiers in the 213th Battalion, since there were few females to begin with in a Combat Engineer Battalion, and I wanted to avoid what I always called "Princess Liea Syndrome", in which people are left with the idea that your prominent female character (in this case, Specialist Cecelia Glass) was the only woman in the universe. 

So I brought in Ransom as a Battalion clerk who had a lot of former experience in the 1991 Gulf War. I'd already invested in her as a Military Police trooper so I made that her former job, and clerk-typist her current job. To fill the void left for an MP character, I created Wendy Two-Feathers.

Now, ironically, Two-Feathers took the place of another undefined and unsatisfying female Native American character I had been using as a background character. On the rare occasion I gave her a name, I used "Wareagle" which even at the time, to me, sounded waaaayy too "Hollywood". I didn't like it, but I wanted to plonk something down on the page quick. The stereotype bugged me, so when I had the chance to trade in three half-assed female characters for two good ones with real stories I could get behind, the decision was easy.