British Soldiers

The British Military

Seeing the title of this blog you may wonder why exactly I’m writing about the British military since I’m an American.  To be honest, this all came down to a video game for me.  It’s a game called Company of Heroes.  It’s a fairly graphic World War II military simulation thing where you control squads of men as they run around killing each other.  So what does this have to do with the British military?  Ok, where to begin?

In this video game American soldiers run around and shoot at the enemy.  They can use grenades and mortars and all kinds of things.  There are also British units you can use, but they operate differently in the game.  I played a short tutorial mission with a British unit and found out that they perform better and get a few bonuses if you create a Leftenant (Lieutenant) and assign it to the British unit.  As a veteran myself, this insults me!  Yes I’m an American veteran, but British soldiers aren’t just a bunch of back alley morons who won’t do their duty unless someone is keeping a close eye on them!

I realize (Realise? English folks spell things differently sometimes. *chuckle*) that this is just a video game and the “lieutenant” is just a part of the gameplay element, but it still seemed a bit insulting to me.  I mentioned this to an English friend of mine and he suggested I write a blog about it.  So being the diligent lad I sometimes like to be (sometimes I honestly need a leftenant to be behind me making sure I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, but aren’t we all like that sometimes?) I began to look into the real British military.  I wondered how it compared to the American military that I know.  Let’s take a look at what I found:

Boot camp.  What can you say about that?  To me those two words represent a huge amount of things.  British Army boot camp is 14 weeks long.  That’s if you’re going into a job other than infantry.  If you plan on being in the infantry and being an English infantry soldier your training will last 24 weeks.  That’s a good amount of time for training.  So what goes on in British Army boot camp?  Let’s take a look at the promotional video!

Let’s take a look at a US Army boot camp video.  Right away you’ll see quite a difference.

What the hell is with all of the loud music?  Is this boot camp or some rock and roll concert?  This video talks about the army’s “core values”.  It doesn’t tell you a whole lot of what kind of training you’ll get, it just says “you’ll do this” and “you’ll do that”.  There’s more to being a soldier than just firing a weapon.  Personally, the British military video looks better to me.  If you’re joining the American army for lots of excitement and loud music, you really don’t have your priorities straight.

Now before I continue, let’s take a look at Marines.  When we talk about training there will always be someone screaming about how US Marines are the best trained in the world.  The English have their Royal Marines.  Are they less well trained than the US guys?  I don’t think so.  But from what I’ve studied, US Marines and Royal Marines are two different animals, no pun intended.  Here is a Royal Marine video.  They go through 32 weeks of training and not everyone makes it through.

British Royal Marines go through 32 weeks of training.  Conversely US Marines go through a 12 week boot camp.  Are the English better trained?  Honestly, I don’t know, but 32 weeks is a long time!  Another difference is that in American boot camp, be it Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine, we’re always being yelled at.  There always seems to be some psychotic drill instructor, or training instructor, or whatever you want to call them screaming like a maniac.  The English don’t appear to yell as much.  In some training videos I watched you can tell that they don’t have to scream as much to get through to their soldiers.  Yelling isn’t always the best option.  In America, we’re used to yelling.  It’s common place to have some idiot yelling as loud as he can in your direction, so I guess that’s why we incorporate it into our military training.

Don’t think that because the English don’t yell and scream as much in their military training that they aren’t as well trained.  Screaming and yelling doesn’t necessarily make for the best training environment.  Yes, you have to learn to work under pressure if you’re going to be a soldier in a war zone, but screaming doesn’t have to represent pressure.  I saw one comment on the British military where a lad wasn’t happy because he didn’t have enough “free time”.  Sorry kiddo, when you’re military your life belongs to them.  They aren’t required to give you time off for some billiards and pints down at the local pub.  If you think joining the military is like getting any other job in the civilian world, you’re dead wrong!

 Anyway, getting back to the subject I was supposed to be writing about in the first place, I was looking into the British Army.  (Or I was writing about some video game or something? I don’t remember.)  Going to the British Army web site, you can see some of the jobs you can get when you join up.  One of the career fields in the British Army that drew quite a bit of interest from me was the Intelligence Corp.  While in the US Air Force I was a Communications Analyst.  My job was pretty much an office job.  At the end of my fabulous 4 year military career I was stationed at Kelly Air Force Base in Texas and was in a “mobile unit”.  I never actually went mobile, and most of my time was still spent in an office.  Considering I was also Air force, my job would differ a bit from an army job.  Anyway, a British Army Intelligence Analyst does way more than I was ever trained to do!

Starting out, British Intelligence Corp folks go through 2 years of training.  Yes, I said two years.  They are taught another language and are in part not only analysts, but also translators.  They’re also kept up on how to be regular soldiers.  That’s a lot of training for these young boys and girls!  If you want a nice white collar job with computers and communications though, I don’t think there’s a better career path than being in the British Intelligence Corp.  And since you get so much training, you might even think about staying in the military until you retire.  But after all your training and your four year enlistment let me tell you there’s no better feeling than applying for some position at a company and being able to say, “Yes, I was in the military and served in the Signal Corp.”  (Trust me, don’t tell civilians you dealt with “intelligence”, it just draws too many questions.  *chuckle*)  Take a look at this:

Have I promoted the British military enough yet?  *chuckle*  And all of this came out of a video game.  So I guess to end this long, ranting blog I’ll just say that I really don’t think British soldiers need a leftenant to keep them in line.  Company of Heroes is still a really fun game, don’t get me wrong.  I just disagree with how they presented the English soldiers.  And of course before I go I’ll show a bit of Company of Heroes.  Here’s the tutorial for playing the British Army.  I have nothing against real life British Lieutenants (Leftentants?), but I do think a British unit should be able to work just as well without one.  Enjoy this video, but beware; parts can be a bit graphic when fighting is shown.  After all, it’s World War II.

Accrington Stanley

FIFA 15 at its best!

I didn’t grow up with soccer.  As an American I grew up watching baseball and American football and really never knew much about soccer. I never really learned much about the sport until I was up in the later years of my life.  But now that I’ve learned quite a bit, I love it!  I’m actually a bit sad that I can’t watch some of the lower league matches on tv!

What I can do though is play them out in a video game.  When I was a kid video game soccer looked like this:

Now what can I really learn from this?  Not much.  But that was years ago.  In the past couple of years I’ve been learning more and more about English football, transfers, player loans, and things like that.  Now I’m by no means an expert, but I think I could run a team with a reasonable amount of success.  I’m sure every sports fan thinks that though, don’t they?  Walk into any pub in England and I’m sure you can find a group of people who will tell you exactly why their favorite team isn’t run correctly.

And so we come to the video game FIFA 15. This game gives you a chance to play with not only English football teams, but teams in leagues all over the world!  But of course I wanted to try playing in the English leagues.  My first choice for a team was Port Vale.  They earned promotion not long ago and moved up into “League 1” from “League 2”.  They have a bit of money, and it was fun trying to manage them for a few games, but I was curious about more.  I tried managing teams like the Tottingham Spurs and Manchester City.  Both have a lot of really good players (Both are also top teams in the Barkely’s Premiere Leage or BPL.  That’s the top English football league.) and money to spend on transferring in any players you might like to add to your squad, but this seemed a bit easy.

I wondered who was the bottom of the English leagues.  Who was the one team that was just struggling to survive.  I went into league two and found a small team called Accrington Stanley.  Feel free to click on the name and check out the real life team.  I figured I can take control of them in FIFA 15 and move them right to the top of the English leagues no problem at all.  I looked them up on YouTube and found a few really nice videos about them.  Their motto is “The team that wouldn’t die.”  I like that!  And so I started my career as Accrington Stanley manager.

First off, they don’t have much money.  And even if they did have a lot of money, they’re part of League 2 which means that even if I could afford to buy some big time players, they won’t want to play for a small time team like this.  Ouch. So I’ll have to start out with some young players.  No problem though, I figured I could find a few 17 or 18 year olds and pick them up cheaply.  Then you just develop these guys and end up with a good team, right?  Right…?

Again, Accrington Stanley doesn’t have much money which means I can’t afford to buy any players with tons of potential.  Damn.  Maybe if I transfer a few of the older Accrington players I can get more money to buy the younger players?  That didn’t work out either because poor Accrington doesn’t have very many players.  I need everyone I have just to keep them playing!  I manage to transfer in two guys before I run short on money.  They are CB Stephen Best who is 17 and LM Fionn Reilly who is 18.  All these guys are real life soccer players too, which makes things interesting.

I do have a few other youngsters on the team and will have to make due.  So I divided my small team into two team sheets.  One with a lot of the younger players on it, and one with most of my older players.  I figured I could rotate them as I played matches and keep everyone fresh and rested.  Before my first “friendly” match one of my 18 year old players named Luke Greaves asks to play even though he’s not listed as a first team starter.  I do have him starting on the younger team sheet, so I’ll just play that team in the friendly.

We play a small club called Latina for our friendly.  Luke runs out happily onto the pitch ready for his big start!  The game begins and Luke Greaves ends up with a torn hip floxor within a few minutes of play.  He's now out for a few weeks.  That's not good.  I was a bit short handed to begin with and now I have to wait for this player to heal!  This isn't a very good start.

If you’re interested, here’s a look at some real life Luke Greaves highlights!

The team must move on!  And so after two more friendly matches we moved into regular league play.  Now I’ll admit I’m playing this game on “Amateur” setting.  So it’s not horribly hard, but it’s not the easiest thing to score either.  I thought at first I would be able to just steamroll other teams with this setting and get my small team some instant success, but things didn’t work out that way exactly.  I won a couple matches and then ended up with a draw with another bad team called Portsmouth.  I didn’t like the look of a draw, but their goal keeper seemed like a wall!  None of my shots seemed able to make it past him!  We moved on to the J. Paint Trophy Cup.  I figured maybe I would try something new.  I had a 17 year old striker just sitting on the bench named Max Hazeldine.  Why not give Max his shot and see what he could do?  So I put him in for one of the J. Paint matches.  He scored the one and only goal and always seemed to have the ball!  I love Max now!  He moved right up to starter after that performance! (I now follow the real Max Hazeldine on Twitter.  I hope he has the same success in real life!)  My next J. Paint Trophy Cup match will be against Port Vale.  They are a league higher and I'll really have to work to score against them and move on!  Now we're finding a challenge!

And so here we are.  I may keep writing in my blog about what happens with this Accrington Stanley progress.  I'm having a lot of fun seeing what I can do with this team.  I may end up back at Tottenham or one of the other big teams eventually, but for now I like the little guys.  And I may have to keep an eye on the real life Accrington Stanley team.  Win or lose, they've found a new supporter!

YouTube and You

YouTube and You

Have you ever thought about a career in film making?  I think most people have.  It would be so great to work at the dream factory called Hollywood, wouldn't it?  Well with today's technology you don't have to move to Hollywood to make it big in film making.  Or should I say video making?  But really what's the difference between a video and a film?  The length, maybe?  Let's forget the semantics and jump right into YouTube!

I have my own YouTube channel.  I can upload just about anything I want onto it and people all over the world can watch the videos I put up.  There are restrictions and you can't just post anything.  It is possible to get banned and have your channel removed.  My friend Chinstrap has had his channel removed.  You can't be a bad boy (or girl) and be putting up copyrighted stuff such as videos using copyrighted music!  Don't be posting a video of yourself dancing to Lady Gaga's latest hit and expect the video to stay up.  You don't own the music so you can't use it!  What a lot of people may not realize though, is that YouTube has a huge selection of music that you can download and use in your videos for free!  Just do a bit of research!  And don't post really offensive things.  The world doesn't need to see people getting their heads chopped off in an execution, or women being roasted over an open flame.  You may want to see that stuff, but it's offensive and will get you banned.  Don't post stuff like that.

Now the big question is how do you get people to watch your videos?  Uploading them to YouTube just isn't enough to get views.  Once you have an established channel you might be able to just upload stuff and people will watch it, but that takes time and effort.  So what kind of videos will people watch?  Who the hell knows?  For instance I uploaded this video and it has 7 views.  So only 7 people watched it.

Is it a bad video?  Hell no, I think it's pretty good!  But apparently no one was interested in my reading a bit from one of my own books.  What is interesting then?  How about chicken?  Is chicken interesting?  Take a look at this video:

As of right now while I'm typing this blog the video has 705 views.  People want to know how I cook chicken in a microwave.  *chuckle*  So should I make cooking videos?  I don't want to do that mostly because I can't really cook that well.  That's why I cook chicken in a microwave!  But it comes out well and so I thought I would share that secret with people.  

How about video games?  They're pretty popular right now.  There are some guys who play video games and do commentary while they play.  The videos are called "Let's plays", or "Walkthrus".  Some of these commentators have millions of subscribers.  Yes, I said millions.  Take the guy named Theradbrad for example, he has over three million subscribers.  Here is one of his videos:

Brad is so popular that I guess once in a while a smart game developer will send him their game and allow him to play it and put up a video before the game is even released.  I say they're smart because having him play your game will get the game a lot of buzz and promotion.  Brad is good at what he does and believe me, what he does is not easy!  I've tried it a few times and haven't had the same level of success.  But then I don't stick with it.  One way to find success on YouTube is to keep a steady stream of videos uploading.  So to compare, here's a video I made of the same game.  My video only has 6 views.  But then I don't keep adding videos and finish the game.  

Believe it or not, there is more to this than just pointing a camera at your tv and recording the game.  You need specific equipment to record game footage.  I think I paid around $200 for the small thing I have.  It connects the game to my laptop computer and I can record the game footage with commentary if I want and then save it as a digital file.  Now these game walkthrus might not be easy to get views on, but sports games are a bit easier.  They take a LOT of editing, though!  Football is fun, but you need to cut out all the stuff in between the plays in order to make the video short enough.  Long videos are really nice, but they take forever to upload!  Shorter is better.  So here's me editing some football:

I really was going to keep up with this series, but my Playstation 3 died after a couple of videos and I wasn't able to make any more for a while.  Months and months had passed before I was able to make video game videos again and when I finally could, I had lost the saves I needed.  That sucked.  But this thing has 75 views right now!  So people love to watch football and see how you play!  I know I like watching it!

So let's get back to making videos.  What does it take to get a YouTube video channel?  Just sign up.  That's about it.  It's all part of Google.  Now YouTube can be more than just something to show videos to the world.  There's so much to it.  I don't even know half of what you can do with this stuff!  There are people who make "daily vlogs".  I follow two of these people.  One is in Orlando, Florida and is called TheTimTracker and the other one I follow is in England and is called WanderingDaz.  These husband and wife teams do videos every day about what they're doing, what's going on in their lives, or just whatever they're thinking about.  They upload videos every day!  I honestly think they're fun to watch.  For a while they barely had any views, but eventually after they had stuck with it, people found their channels.  And now they get more and more subscribers.  That's a lot of work to upload a video every day!  I love and respect what those people do!  

So even if you don't want to make videos yourself, check out YouTube.  It's a fun thing.  You can find anything at all you want.  There are literally videos on just about anything you want to search for!  Such as this:

This video is insanely funny!  Learning about a habanero pepper the hard way is always fun!  You can search how to build a computer, or how to change out a sink!  How to train your dog, or funny golf videos.  You can type in the name of any video game at all and find things!  YouTube is fun!  So help support a YouTuber today.  You don't need to give them any money or anything like that, just watch videos and then leave a comment, or click the thumbs up icon to leave a "like".