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Drill Sergeants Research Paper

Decent Essays

Drill Sergeant

Adapting to a military lifestyle/ culture is quite an experience. The military culture itself differs greatly from the culture that most of us know as the norm. Those who teach us the new way of life are very influential, even if it don’t feel like it during training. Drill Sergeants are the foundation of the Army, they are the select few, the top 10% in their MOS, who have been chosen to breakdown, build up, form, and train the new Army soldiers. Drill Sergeants have a tendency to be misconstrued, and have a bad impression in most people’s opinions. Before beginning basic combat training, for the most part, I had the same misconception about them too. While at basic combat training, I had one Drill Sergeant that left a huge …show more content…

While moving our bags to our new “home” for the next nine weeks, there was not as much yelling as expected from our Drill Sergeants, especially since our platoon could not even put on jerseys in numerical order while we stood in alphabetical order, the jerseys were even already in order, but people could not just grab the top one. While all the other platoons were just getting screamed at, which I found rather entertaining. Back at the battery (the building where we stayed at and lived), we were introduced to all of the Drill Sergeants and some of their backgrounds in the military. Drill Sergeant Hank had showed us all how to conduct the Physical Training (PT) exercises, step by step, truly making sure that we understood how to correctly do an exercise, to get the best stretch possible. Drill Sergeant Hank and the other Drill Sergeants were not what I was expecting, but rather a more patient, and very insightful …show more content…

He said that the Army’s Physical Fitness Test (APFT) doesn’t really judge a person’s fitness, just certain parts of fitness. He is hoping that the Army does away with its testing, and adapts some form of CrossFit as it is an all-encompassing measure of fitness. He personally helped me when I was struggling at passing my APFT 2-mile run. He told me that running is not very hard, but requires constant effort and just takes practice and practice to pass if you are not a runner in the first place. It was little conversations like this that I would have with Drill Sergeant Hank that made him different than the other Drill Sergeants. He would talk to me not as a private, but as a friend who would lend a helping hand and be a person who would listen to you and give the best advice from his personal experience or go find out somehow. He was a person who is very relatable person to us, which was a bit odd since he was almost twice our age. For another example, we would get weekends off during basic combat training, and on those Sundays he would come in while we were cleaning, and he would make announcements on how the sports teams were doing whether it be at the college or professional levels. This is the one time of the week that all the soldiers looked forward too, as well as cleaning the latrine every

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