Two Kinds

It's been almost a week since I came to Reception Battalion, and I have seen quite a few Drill Sergeants. A pattern has developed - most of them are highly professional trainers. They certainly know how to yell when the situation calls for it, and they LOVE having their recruits do pushups. Still, you can see that the "bad-ass" is a job skill for them, and that they are generally good people. Some of them get us laughing at appropriate times. However, there are a few who do the job in order to wield power over others - you can see in their eyes, and in how they interact with their peers, that they derive satisfaction from telling people, who can't talk back, what to do. For example, two sergeants "tag-teamed" one of the slower recruits, giving him conflicting orders just to see what he would do. When he made his choice which sergeant to obey, the other one punished him. We ship to BCT - Basic Combat Training - tomorrow. There, we get our Drill Sergeants.