In American media, Drill Sergeants are often portrayed as mean and shouty. Yelling at recruits / treating them like garbage.
The only thing I could think of is that they’re going for a “military service is hard so I’m going to make this as unpleasant for you as possible because life is hard” kind of thing, but couldn’t discipline be instilled in soldiers without the yelling and humiliation? Why is this the only way?
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USAF basic training ~2015. They were just coming off a pretty huge sexual assault scandal, so there were a lot of rules about the drill sergeants not being allowed to be alone in a room with just one other person (we had “wingmen” we were required to bring everywhere). I’m also fairly certain they’d been told to cut back on cursing because it didn’t happen often and when it did my drill sergeant would always have this “oh fuck, oops” look. That said, I had one that was just like in the movies and once shouted at us that we were all disappointments to our families and worthless in life, and a second drill sergeant who very much took on the “disappointed father” role.
The way it was explained to me was that it was meant to train you to follow orders. If you’re scared of your drill sergeant, you’ll do what they tell you without question. Later on you kinda learn “oh, okay, I follow these orders to maintain discipline”…or whatever.
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