02-15-2013, 11:00 PM | #11 |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Earth, mostly
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
If removal of tattoos is simple and relatively painless, I'd make it necessary for every recruit to have such identifying marks removed. ("You do not belong to your clan, maggot! You do not have a family! The Marines are your family now! And you will receive Marine markings when you have earned them!")
They could, of course, always be replaced if/when the individual musters out, should said individual desire them. (The Nahal in your example might elect to have his tattoos back, assuming he musters out on his homeworld; then again, if he's been tattooed by the Corps, he may regard those tats as being of greater significance than those provided locally.)
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02-15-2013, 11:47 PM | #12 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
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Nearly all Imperial Marines recruits must perforce be dealing with culture shock; it is very likely taken into account by the psychoengineers who devise the boot camp experience when they adjust the degree of stress to produce an optimum trade-off between resocialisation, brutalisation, resentment, and neurotic breakdown. I'm just wondering whether perhaps erasing a reb's tattoos would be too stressful, produce too much resentment, and perhaps even produce a counter-productive subconscious feeling that the recruit is a strey* who ought to be diffident and passive. Nahalese have it deeply ingrained that a person without tattoos who takes up arms is a dastard. What about this: at the Imperial Marines boot camp that collects recruits from Nahal (and perhaps all), recruits have all their tattoos erased, but they get a class number temporarily tattooed onto their right chest and their left and right hands temp-tattooed red and cyan "so that they poor dumb muddyfeet can learn to tell left from right". These belittling tattoos are replaced (with, say, name on the right chest, marines crest on the left at the end of basic training (16 weeks). Designated tattoos are added after Infantry School and Commando School; when the recruit takes solemn vows and gets his or her bionic reinforcement installed her or she is free to wear whatever tattoos he or she chooses, but it is common (at that camp) to add, say, a large regimental back piece. Perhaps each regiment that has passed through that sector has a cohort of members, recruited while it was there and of corresponding seniority, among whom the distinctive tattoos remain common for decades.
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02-16-2013, 12:13 AM | #13 | |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
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02-16-2013, 02:10 AM | #14 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
Location: Earth, mostly
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
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In USAF basic training we had a process whereby we were "pickled", or issued our unmarked OG-507 green fatigues, during the first week of training. (To that point, we were "rainbows", in civilian clothing, and even freshly pickled trainees were entitled to look down on us.) Once we made it to the third week, we were "canned pickles" - given authorization to affix nametags and USAF tags to the uniforms. (Airman Basic, the rank of every recruit at least until he/she clears basic training, has no rank insignia.) The terminology has probably changed since, as even the AF has adopted a camo fatigue design, but I have no doubt the traditions remain the same.
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If you break the laws of Man, you go to prison. If you break the laws of God, you go to Hell. If you break the laws of Physics, you go to Sweden and receive a Nobel Prize. |
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02-16-2013, 03:26 AM | #15 | ||
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
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If this custom were applied to all recruits in the marines recruit training program at Cetus Division on Eden III, then parochial Nahalese rebs and everyone they trained with would be treated the same way, but the characteristic tattoos would still be shared only by those 4–5% of marines initially recruited in Cetus Sector. The other 21 boot camps would presumably have other peculiarities adopted as adaptations to their queer local circumstances. Marines regiments are slowly rotated through different sectors. Ideally they ought to spend fifteen years in each sector before being rotated to the next, and there is a 345-year cycle of deployments. In practice, of course, deployments in response to operational exigencies make the actual movements of regiments irregular and unpredictable. Anyway, a regiment spends about fifteen years in a sector receiving replacements from the corresponding division's replacement depot. Then it moves on. So a regiment tends to consist of up to about four or five cohorts of marines, each recruited and trained in a given sector in a given ~15-year period and with corresponding seniority. The regiments that were in Cetus longest ago will have a few very senior marines who still have their Eden III tattoos. Regiments that are still there now have young marines of up to fifteen years' experience with Eden III tattoos: their older and more senior veterans were recruited in other sectors, before their regiments came to Cetus, and they went through boot training in different divisional boot camps. Quote:
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02-16-2013, 04:22 AM | #16 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
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02-16-2013, 04:31 AM | #17 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
Quote:
Males from those planets are used to being recognized and acknowledged as males because they have those tattoos and carry a pistol at the belt. They've grown up in such a culture. That's how they see the world. They don't note gender based on body shape or facial structure, but on the presence or absence of tattoos and a sidearm. So what you do, when using your proposal, is you strip away those gender markers, and then you put the sole person from that culture in among a bunch of recruits all of whom are from other cultures. And then this sole recruit has a success experience of being recognized as being the gender he needs to be acknowledged as in spite of the absence of the traditional gender markers of his culture. (Note that we don't know whether it's the male or the female gender that has tattoos and carries a sidearm at all times. Or even if it is reasonable to use terms like "male" and "female" for that culture. But presumably it is very important, on the psychological level, for members of both genders to be acknowledges as the gender that they are.) |
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02-16-2013, 04:49 AM | #18 | |
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
Quote:
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Decay is inherent in all composite things. Nod head. Get treat. |
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02-16-2013, 07:23 AM | #19 | |
Banned
Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Europe
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
Quote:
That's exactly why it moight be possible to turn things around if he's placed among a lot of men who recognize him as male because of what he has between his legs. It helps him get over the silliness of the tattoo tradition. (Of course, if he is a she who still needs or wants to be recognized as male, it'd be more problematic.) |
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02-16-2013, 05:56 PM | #20 | |
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Louisville, Ky
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Re: Resocialisation in interstellar marines' basic training
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Tags |
basic training, flat black, military sf, space marines, tattoo |
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