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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The short(ish) version of this is, yes.
It was our job to put recruits in higher pressure situations.
The vast majority of recruits I got in were barely out of high school, had never been away from home.
Imagine trying to take a kid, essentially, and prep him/her to go overseas in under a year. Every day counts, every rep counts. Their window for learning is incredibly short for what they need to learn and a lot of times, training schedules got truncated. Which, of course, only added more pressure.
Throughout my career, I ran into a few Privates that I’d trained, all of them loved catching up. I’ll never know what happened to all of them, but I know I did the best I could to prepare them.
And, yes. This was the short(ish) version.
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