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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It depends on the service you’re joining, and even then it depends on what *part* of said service you’re joining, but the answer is a combination of “yes and no.”
For example, if you join the Marines or any of the Army’s combat arms jobs, it’s going to be a *lot* like it is in the movies. Same with some of the military academies.
The reason for this is two-fold: to “break you down” and build you back up as someone who can actually *take* being screamed at, and to induce stress you aren’t prepared for.
For “breaking you down,” it isn’t to break your spirit as a human being, but it *is* to transform your mindset from “unique individual” to Soldier/Sailor/Marine. In the field an awful lot of extra niceties are stripped out of language, because nobody has time for that. You don’t have time to observe social graces when you need to move you ass as quickly as possible in order to keep from getting it separated from body by enemy fire. People aren’t going to say “please” when they need you to dig a hole, they’re just going to tell you to dig the fucking hole, and probably call you a fuckstick in the process. Your average civilian will take offense at that, and rightly so; it’s fucking rude. But raw communication isn’t even going to register on the nicety meter for your average troop. In fact, most troops would think that someone doesn’t like them if they don’t call them something derogatory on a regular basis.
For the stress part, let me put it this way: everything you do, no matter what your job is, result in dead people. You a medic? You’re patching up the guys who go out and kill people so they can go out and kill more people. You a cook? You’re keeping the guys who kill people nice and strong so they can go out and kill people. You a finance clerk? Cool, you’re making sure the people who go out and kill people are getting paid so they don’t have to worry about it, keeping their focus on killing people.
And coming to that realization is *stressful as hell*, as well as the realization that there are people who are trying their dead-level best to kill *you*, in return. The human body can’t accept that level of stress right off the bat; you need to build up a resistance to it, learn how to cope with it (without drugs), and how to channel it into something productive. That’s something that begins when you get to boot camp and are told “you have five seconds to get off this bus and you’ve already wasted three!”
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