A writing buddy of mine asked, after I’d read my fifth or sixth book on the subject, “But how much research do you need to do to write a Navy SEAL romance?” If you’re me, turns out you need a lot. When I pitched the idea to Riptide to write WATCH POINT for their charity holiday bundle, I hadn’t written military romance before, much less US Navy SEAL romance.
The first thing I did was read some (heterosexual) Navy SEAL romances to get an idea of what was going on in the genre. Mostly I was disappointed by the lack of Navy SEAL content in these books, but this is often my gripe with romance novels, where the characters’ jobs are just a label applied to them. Their profession doesn’t actually provide a tapestry of rich details for their story to unfold on, and those stories always feel thin and half-finished to me.
If the heroine is a brain surgeon, I expect to learn something about what it’s actually like to be a brain surgeon and how being a surgeon, going through med school, etc… shaped her personality and her worldview. If the hero is a firefighter I expect to learn something about firefighting while reading the book–and he better run into a burning building at some point in the plot.
Ultimately, I found memoirs by Navy SEALs to be great for providing details and backdrop, especially Chris Kyle’s AMERICAN SNIPER, Marcus Luttrell’s LONE SURVIVOR, and Howard Wasdin’s SEAL TEAM SIX. I also learned a lot from BATTLE READY by Mark L. Donald and THE RED CIRCLE by Brandon Webb. I read them all cover to cover, but I still had other questions. For that I ended up delving into a lot of blogs and websites devoted to Navy SEALs, some of which are geared at men who might want to join the SEALs, while others are aimed at their families, or at guys who just want to be as strong, fast, or deadly as a SEAL without actually joining the Navy.
Among the questions that dogged me while I was writing WATCH POINT:
– what kind of shoes/boots do Navy SEALs wear?
– how many SEALs typically work together?
– what slang terms are specific to the SEALs (vs the rest of the Navy, US military in general)?
I wasn’t able to find answers to all my questions in the books and websites, but I hopefully built enough of a unique point of view for Eric, the hero and narrator of the book, that it comes across believable and immersive.
Of course, what’s “believable” in a romance novel can be debated: we expect the reader to suspend some disbelief in order to fully enjoy the thrill-ride of the book. So “believable” can be a moving target, and very much in the eye of the beholder. But here are links to a ton of the online resources I used while writing the book (and which I’ll return to if I ever write a sequel…!):
So here’s a pile of what I learned with links to the online resources:

SLANG

One thing I had read quite a while ago is that books often make the mistake of having Navy SEALs referred to as “soldiers” whether in the text or in dialogue, i.e. “Do you hear me, soldier?” and that this is wrong. SEALs should apparently never be referred to as soldiers, since they’re in the Navy, they’re Sailors. But since they’re a very specialized part of the Navy, not exactly serving on ships in the same way as someone “sailing,” I wondered if there was another term. The term SEALs seem to use for themselves is “operator.” When they go into the field (or water…) to do something it’s called an “operation” and the men are operators.