Fact Finding

OK, so. For yet more of the stories I'm writing, I want to do a bit from the perspective not of the principal who's protected, but from the perspective of the bodyguard/executive protection team.

The problem is, I can find nothing on how bodyguarding by the Secret Service, or their equivalents in the UK/Israel/etc, actually works...

Anybody know of any good books, preferably in a Kindle format?

So. For a story I'm writing, one of the primary characters is an MD from Israel.

Problem: I'm trying to figure out how old the character should be, and running into the problem that I have no idea how long post-med-school training takes (I know med school is 6 years at most Israeli universities (except when its 4, what the heck?) and starts with 3 years of undergrad coursework, thanks to some googling, though) or even if it is a thing outside of the US.

To illustrate what I mean, a US MD would (to my knowledge) do:

4 years undergrad (lets figure 18-22)
4 years med school (22-26)
residency in whatever specialty for a few years (3-5?) (27-30?)
fellowship leading to board certification. (I have no idea.)

And then the number of potential paths branches off into infinity so I don't track that when trying to age a character.

I don't have the faintest clue though what "medical education after med school" looks like for docs outside the US or if it's even a thing that exists. Double the confusion with Israel given the presence of conscription and stuff.

What I googled: ""medical education" Israel" ""medical residency" Israel" ""medical specialties" Israel" and similar searches with Europe in place of Israel.

So, I have another character being drawn up (by another player) for the same game for which I posted highly detailed questions about Israel (admittedly probably too detailed) - only he's playing Russia, and he's trying to draw up a character who served in the Soviet Army as an officer semi-realistically. (It's *after* the character's military career that everything goes interesting.)

I want to write him a summary of the Soviet Army officer's career path, what service branches are available, etc., but nothing I can find tells me the basic stuff. It's all focused on generals and stuff. (Looked on Wiki, looked on Google, neither helped. I found a monograph on dtic.mil that was from 1975 and provided *some* detail, but expected me the reader to know more than I do to make sense of stuff.)

To quote his draft summary: "(1) Early life.  Born in 1959, he follows a similar course to Putin (joining the military instead, but attached as an "adviser" to one of the Soviet Bloc countries after a tour in Afghanistan which gave him a scar on his upper right arm from a Taliban attack).  He resigned with a TBD officer's rank in the middle of the 1991 coup attempt (a la Putin; he's simply younger) rather than join in the attempt (which he percieved as doomed)."

He's trying to figure it out in more detail than that, but the problem is that he (the player) and I (the GM, one of two, responsible for helping him draw up his character - he does the important work of figuring out policies and stuff, the meat of gameplay, himself) can't find anything much about anything re the company-grade and field-grade officers of the Soviet Army and how they were trained, or how their careers progressed, or anything.

In specific:

1. As the character was born in 1959, presume he enters officer training from civilian life sometime around 1977. How long is his officer training, and how is it decided whether he goes, say, infantry or airborne troops?

2. What's the career path like from initial officer training (including "what rank does he enter service at?" - the materials I can find state "Lieutenant", but the Soviet Army has 3 Lieutenant ranks!) to, say, battalion command?

3. What additional school-type training would he undergo during that career path, and at what times during his career? (I can help the player figure out good tour-of-duty mixes once I have that information.)

4. What service arms existed in the Soviet Army? I often hear of officers referred to as a "Colonel of Infantry", "Colonel of Air Defense", "Colonel of Strategic Rocket Forces" - but what are the possible options for the "of x" formula?

5. Were ordinary officers even assigned as "advisors" to Warsaw Pact forces, or only Political Officers?

I know these are really detailed questions in some regard. I'm trying to keep them general, but even the general stuff is hard to figure out. My objectives for this are:

A. Figure out what rank, highest, would have been plausible for what I'm currently thinking is a fairly obscure-ish Russian serving as a Soviet Army Officer from 1977-1991 - if the player wants lower, cool, but I as GM need to have a clue what's "too high".

B. Figure out what his career would have looked like - where would he have served, at what levels, doing what? (Especially key to figure out when he would have served in Afghanistan.)

C. Figure out if the early life posited is *plausible*.

I thus don't need to know deep details (at least not until a player requests a detailed bio of their Russian adversary from their intel people, at which point I may be back...), but only be able to work out a summary. I can do the hard part of the work myself and with the player, but I need help figuring out the foundational stuff before I begin that.

(Edited to add: Link to something Google *did* dredge up for me, and my note that what I was sent was a draft summary of the character, not a full bio. We'll be working on the full bio once we have the summary agreed to.)

OK, so...There's a game I'm helping restart (after a ten year break) called World Alliances and Rivalries. (Yes the website is bad, we drew it up a few days ago in the middle of the night fueled by coffee and insomnia.) We're not sure yet when we're doing as a Point of Divergence (except that we know it'll be after 7/1/2017, because the whole reason we're restarting it is partly because Trump gives us an opening...and partly to heal from Trump-caused trauma...), but I got drafted to play Israel (on the grounds of "Look, you didn't suck at playing a tiny country last time, you do research real well, and we need someone in the Middle East").

So I'm doing my research and trying to figure out a scenario to make my character PM as the game needs...The problem is, I don't read or speak Hebrew at all (neither does anybody else who plays!), and the English translations of key materials (IE, the English translation of the Basic Law on the Government) seem to literally be missing a few lines with no indication as to what should be there or how important it is. (We are talking the English translation on the Knesset website. I cried in frustration when I figured this fact out, because ugh.)

This is going to be a bit scattershot of a post (I didn't want to put multiple posts up when it all seemed to boil down to a related set of issues). I've done my fair share of Googling and Wikipedia hunting, but there are questions those don't answer.

Questions on Israeli Government:

1. It's said in the British system that the Monarch has the powers "to encourage, to warn, and to be consulted" (and that they shouldn't really want any others). Israeli politics are at least partly based off of the Westminster System, so...Does that also apply to the President of Israel? Does he get updated on state affairs, does he get consulted by the PM?

2. Just how much power do Knesset committees have to conduct oversight of the government? Both theoretically and in real terms. It sounds like they have normal oversight powers, but maybe that's me drawing on experience with the US Congress or the UK Parliament that doesn't apply...

Questions on the IDF (numbering continues to make answering easier) - please note for reference, my current draft has this character born December 1977 and drafted somewhere around 1995-96, and I know the law has changed since:

3. Someone please explain to me the proliferation of Sayeret units. I realize they're mostly recon units in theory, but they're also special forces...So I'm eventually confused (aside from a few units) as to who does what. I made my character a Sayeret Matkal vet because, well, it seemed like an obvious choice for "Special forces vet", but now I'm realizing that that could be cliche...but I can't figure out what the other units do, so I'm confused.

4. Officers are drawn from conscripts and have a four month training course. Sayerets have an...18 month? training pipeline. Do officers do officer training and then unit training, or...? How does that all work? How are Sayeret *officers* recruited and trained? Not looking for deep details, just how long from "I got drafted today" to "I'm a fully qualified officer and out leading troops starting tomorrow" or something.

5. Are officers held to a conscript's 3 year term of service? Is it longer? (I presume it is, but how much longer?)

6. Presuming a guy just wants to serve his conscript term as an officer and then get out and start civilian life, given what I mention above, how long is he in for, what age is he getting out at, and what rank is he getting out at? What rank does said officer transition from "an officer" to "an officer who's going to make the IDF a career"?

7. Wikipedia is being confusing. It mentions stuff like Rifleman 01, Fighter 07, etc. when speaking about training. It sounds like stuff I should have a clue about to draw up a character. What is it talking about?

8. Reserve service: OK, when does a guy with that background (Sayeret unit, officer) stop being liable for reserve service; how frequently is he called up for said service, how long are the callups in non-emergency situations, and (because the internet doesn't give me too great a clue) what the heck do they do (besides, I presume, training of various sorts)?

9. Just what are the benefits post-service associated with service as a conscript, or what were they in the 1996-2000ish timeframe? Do they vary between officers and enlisted conscripts? (I looked this particular question up about 20 different ways on Google. I found plenty of mentions in English of benefits during service, or that benefits post-service exist, but no mention of what the post-service benefits (or in-service benefits) actually are or would have been at the time.)

Yes, I make my characters unusually detailed. No, that is not standard for the game it's for. It's how I learned to draw up characters and scenarios, regardless of the roleplay or the setting; it's worked so far, and in this game it enabled me to (last time) play a character otherwise completely unfamiliar to me with a good degree of clue and "I actually don't appear to suck at RPing this character".

Thanks in advance for anybody willing to help me not be dumb. :)

(Edited to remove questions that non-sleepy me found answers to in stuff I'd already looked at...)

So, following up on kate 's awesome effortpost in response to my last post here (asking about the organization of an ER department), I've got another question...it actually is in regard to the same character (my character's mom).

Just what is the career path for an ER dept nurse? Like, what's next?

Working assumptions:

1. The nurse has a BSN, but maybe is less-enamored of the shift-work lifestyle than she was. Is willing to get a graduate degree.

2. Nurse wants to continue with patient care, but also slowly move into management tasks (since I can only imagine ER nursing in an urban hospital is a high-adrenaline field that rewards youth and such things like reflexes or dexterity or stamina over more cerebral things the older folks can do) if the possibility opens itself up.

3. Nurse's husband? A SWAT team cop for the local PD. Meaning yeah, both parents (they have 2 kids - one is a supergenius at a space boarding school run by the government, the other is at home (and also a supergenius)) doing shift work can be crazy. Doable, but crazy.

I figure before I decide on a path, I should ask to see what the realistically potential paths are, presuming the character doesn't want to reboot their career entirely.

Sources searched:
Google ("emergency nurse" "career paths")
Wikipedia (the article on the MSN degree is not very helpful at describing what those with the degree do...)
discovernursing.com (actually semi-helpful, but still would like to know more)

OK, so. I can find, online, a summary of what the short form birth certificate in Ontario contains so far as fields/what info is on the thing.

However, the Ontario.ca website on the matter just says that the long form birth certificate is...longer. Not real helpful, guys!

Reason I'm asking:

For an RP I'm involved in (based off of "Ender's Game"), one of the students was raised by their dad. Who sucked at the whole "being a parent" thing in numerous ways. So my character had the bright idea (they have a crush on the target character to motivate them) of seeing about helping find their mom, who the target character never knew. The plot is largely "for the d'awwws", so to speak.

One of the *obvious* questions as we start this mini-plot is "What info would be on the character's birth certificate?"

Well, character was born in Toronto, neither of us IRL is Canadian, hence the question here. Also, since I'm the GM (of sorts) of this plot, I figured a handy GM trick would be to draw up a text copy of the full birth certificate.

Sources searched:

Google Ontario "birth certificates" "long form"

http://www.ontario.ca/government/birth-certificates