How do you role play military people?, HOW DO ROLE PLAY!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?! Options

[Wounded Ronin]

From a role playing perspective, how can someone who has never served in a military portray a military character who is living and working in the military (as opposed to being off duty) in a way which is, if not realistic, at least not blatantly wrong?

In the past some friends of mine and myself have thought to run military style campaigns for SR. We all had fun enjoying the tactical and objective based style of gaming but I think that most of us didn't really have a good idea of how we should act in terms of character interactions, lingo, and even group attitudes and outlooks.

The thing is I've read several Vietnam War memoirs and I've absorbed certain ideas from them but I don't feel like I had enough info on boring day to day details to pick up on the things that the memoir writers didn't feel was worth mentioning. In other words, I learned certain striking or interesting things, like how during the Vietnam War the majority of the officers seemed insecure and abusive (which lead me to wonder if the military chose officers by some perverse process which was more likely to find bad leaders), but I think I missed the bigger picture on things like how, say, a sergant or a lieutenant acts differently (or not) from the other men in an ideal situation where he's an effective leader and NOT an insecure weirdo. The memoir writers generally conveyed the most interesting or unusual dialogue between personnel but not enough volume of mundane conversation to know for what passes for a normal conversation and a normal concentration of lingo in a military setting.

So, for those of you who know stuff about the military: if you had to tell someone who has never been in the military how to pretend to be in the military for a day, what would you tell them?