I was wondering about how to write characters whose ethnicity I don’t share. I have a character in my WiP novel Asteroid Gambit who is descended from African American forebears. On Mars a lot is different but that’s his history. He’s also a United Nations of Sol Marine. That gives him two sets of allegiances, sometimes conflicting. I was thinking about his Marine allegiance and it occurred to me that I see a lot of things written about military characters by people who’ve clearly never been there. I spent a career in the military but never saw combat so my own perspective is different from combat vets. Even so, I spent many years at the tip of the spear in a combat aircrew billet, a spear that in my case was fortunately never used.  Thinking about this made me remember a situation where I came close.