Today I started reading a story on another site. In the first sentence, the author placed a gunny sergeant in the rangers. For those that are not familiar, a gunny sergeant is a US Marine. Rangers are US Army. The marines have their own special forces named Force Recon. It's a small thing, but I stopped reading after the first sentence because of it.
At one time, research was a pain in the ass. Thirty years ago, for a novella for a creative writing course in college, I spent hours on the microfiche machine in the university library culling through and reading New York Times articles about killer, Albert Fish. Today, I would just go to Wikipedia. So research is infinitely easier than it once was and yet some writers cannot be bothered. But details matter; at least to me.
In one of the stories that I am working on, the main character was once assigned to the 504th Military Intelligence XXXX. The reason I use XXXX is because I was unsure of what to use. A hundred or so years ago, I was assigned to this unit. I could swear that back then it was called the 504th Military Intelligence Group, III Army Corp. I did a quick Google search for the sake of accuracy and only found references to 504th MI Brigade. So was I mis-remembering things? I then went to Wikipedia (because, duh) and found that for seven years, the unit was in fact designated as the 504th MI Group. I was assigned to the unit during those seven years.
It did not affect the story either way, and both Group and Brigade were correct, but I made the decision to use Brigade since the time frame for the story was after the designation had changed to Brigade.
So, my question to the one or two people that might stumble upon this blog, does accuracy in stories matter to you?