In one of your fics you mentioned self harm (p sure it was Bravo?). Did any of the others use that as a coping mechanism during basic? Do they still? And if not how did they stop?
Is it still a fic if I’m the writer? I mean it is actual plot stuff so... And isn't fic strictly for fanfiction?
Anyway.
Yeah, Bravo was the one who did that. He doesn’t do it anymore which is good. The main thing that got him to stop cutting and all that other stuff was Charlie. Bravo was very good at hiding it and the only way that Charlie found out was that he literally walked in on Bravo cutting. (There’s something I posted somewhere with this exact scene written…)
But so Charlie, overtime, wore Bravo down into telling him why he cuts. Bravo explained it and Charlie called bullshit. He convinced Bravo to stop. (How I have no idea because I haven’t written this yet…)
And no none of the others used self-harm as a coping strategy. They did have other ways of coping though.
Charlie acted out. He would purposely mess up or lash out at, by yelling or actually attacking, the Instructors. Things like that, you know? One time he went on a hunger strike for a few weeks. The hunger strike was cut short when they force fed him until he puked. He stopped the rest of it through a lot of painful sessions with the Enforcers. Sessions he put himself in by lashing out in the first place.
Yankee stopped talking. This specifically happened the first time he was sent to an Enforcer. When he was laying in the infirmary with a couple of broken ribs and a busted face was the moment he realized that there was no point to talking about any of it. Telling the shrinks what went on didn’t make him feel better. It didn’t change anything.
Tango somehow convinced himself that nothing was actually happening. He became oddly happy and content with everything while this was going on. Nothing mattered because it wasn’t actually happening. He was dreaming. Or he was in a coma. One of the H.E.R.A.C.L.E.S. shrinks helped him stop by poking holes in the idea and forcing him to accept the horrific reality.
Fox tried to cope with the manipulation by building mental blocks. Hoping that if he built them strong enough they couldn’t brainwash him. That was his plan at least. And he tried anything he could think of to try to get their words out of his head. It didn’t really work because the Instructors and Enforcers were trained by psychologists on foolproof manipulation techniques.
And Whiskey coped by shutting down and creating a bullet-proof exterior so to speak. By turning off he didn’t have to think about anything; just had to do whatever it was. This worked really well, or not depending on how you look at it, when he had to kill people for the firearm training exam or whatever. That’s part of the reason they made him the Weapons person. He still does this when they go on assignments.
As for the other operatives I haven’t really thought about it that much because the comic really only focuses on Bravo Company.