Attitudes of Soldiers in your Campaign

I've never served in the military, neither in my native country England nor my adopted country Australia. However I do run role playing games that contain worlds with soldiers in them. I play those soldiers to the best of my ability without really knowing how they think or feel. Sure, I can look at the characterization of service people in the movies but I have no idea how one movie character or another compares to real people who have seen action in the military.

So when trying to get ideas for how to characterize a military NPC I searched around for a bit of inspiration and found that there is a new research paper from the Pew Research Center that takes a look at the attitudes and challenges of American veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It gives some simple statistics that, while interesting on their own, can give some inspiration for military characters. I'll present a few of my ideas to start you off from a few of the statistics there. I'm using the same subset that was presented in the freakanomics.com blog post where I first found about the paper. read on...