Drill Instructors Quotes

My father was a strange combination of drill instructor and Alice’s white rabbit: he always had someplace important to go and enjoyed bossing everyone else around.

Why didn’t I listen to my drill instructor from boot camp? He told us flat out, ‘Don’t EVER volunteer for anything! If you’re picked you go, but don’t EVER volunteer your worthless lives!’ Words to live by.

You’re their CO. You have to inspire and command their respect. I’m their drill instructor. I get to be their worst nightmare.

If you can link something hard to a choice you care about, it makes the task easier, Quintanilla's drill instructors had told him. That's why they asked each other questions starting with "why." Make a chore into a meaningful decision, and self-motivation will emerge.

It’s not intentions that matter. It’s actions. My drill instructor used to say that all the time. We are what we do and say, not what we intend to. I

Any Marine veteran can reach back thirty or forty years and summon the names of his drill instructors. Flying in a Marine jet over Parris Island, Brig. Gen. Randy West looks down on the swampy land and simply says , “I was born there.

Mamaw Bonnie herself was so terrifying that, many decades later, a Marine Corps recruiter would tell me that I’d find boot camp easier than living at home. “Those drill instructors are mean,” he said. “But not like that grandma of yours.

Saul Alinsky, the radical organizer and mentor of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, used to ask his new followers why they wanted to become community organizers. They would respond with idealistic claims that they wanted to help the poor and oppressed. Then Alinsky would scream at them like a Marine Corps drill instructor, “No! You want to organize for power!” That’s the way the SDS radicals at the University of Texas approached the abortion issue—as a means to power, or, in Margaret Sanger’s words, to remake the world. As a writer in the 1960s radical SDS publication New Left Notes put it, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.

Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart. Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives.

Every time the drill instructor screamed at me and I stood proudly; every time I thought I’d fall behind during a run and kept up; every time I learned to do something I thought impossible, like climb the rope, I came a little closer to believing in myself. Psychologists call it “learned helplessness” when a person believes, as I did during my youth, that the choices I made had no effect on the outcomes in my life. From Middletown’s world of small expectations to the constant chaos of our home, life had taught me that I had no control. Mamaw and Papaw had saved me from succumbing entirely to that notion, and the Marine Corps broke new ground. If I had learned helplessness at home, the Marines were teaching learned willfulness. The

Still, boot camp methods often seem extreme, a platform for drill instructor sadism. The unrelenting prohibition against microscopic deviations seems punitive. The non-stop screaming gets old. The demeaning methods take advantage of malleable seventeen- and eighteen-year-old kids, who are ill-equipped to resist. And while even the most naïve didn’t expect boot camp to be a holiday excursion in the Caribbean, a lack of basic human decency that makes recruits feel small or worthless prevails, an excessiveness that seems to serve no purpose other than an ostentatious showcase of domination.

Overall, Zinni’s rules read like an updating of how to apply the Marine Corps culture to today’s conflicts: Stay loose. Stay focused. Keep it simple. And be honest. Similar messages can be heard in many parts of the Corps, wherever there are good officers willing to seize the initiative—that is, who care more about their mission and their Marines than they do about their careers. This is how Major Davis at the Drill Instructors School summarizes the Marine Corps way of doing business: “Concentrate on doing a single task as simply as you can, execute it flawlessly, take care of your people, and go home.”That doesn’t leave a lot of room for the “doctrine”that the Army so loves to write and cite. But those four steps offer an efficient way to run any organization.

Cadets saavdhan,” our Squadron drill instructor shouted at us, and we all came to attention. “Saab, inka drill accha nahi hai. Poora 102 course kaamchor hai, inko khub ragda do,” he said (their drill movements are pathetic, entire 102 course is a shammer, roger them nicely). Then moving towards one of us in the second file, he shouted, “Ye tumhaari belt hai ki ghaagre ka naada?” Apparently, one of us had a loose belt. In fact, it was probably just fine but ideally, the belt was supposed to be as tight as physically possible. “Saab,” D-Lo said to our Squadron instructor, grabbing the cadet from his belt from the front and shaking his entire body from the middle. “Poora ka poora Squadron, to Zero-point,” he said angrily (send the entire Squadron to Zero-point). Saying that, he moved ahead to attack the next Squadron. “Zero-point poora course,” our Squadron instructor screamed at all of us, and we sprinted towards this not-so-coveted place, with him following us.

Do you want to get over this?” This is her contract that will be used over and over again to remind her that SHE wanted to change and she was willing to pay the price. There is great power in the victim identity. Instructors and other students go out of their way to be accommodating and gentle. The survivor can often get out of any drill or derail the entire class by admitting her discomfort. This sentence allows the instructor to point it out when this happens, to point out that the benefits of victim status must be given up to outgrow the victim status. This is hard, but critical. The subtle power in the victim status often seems like the only good thing and the only survival tool to come out of the event. Many are reluctant, very reluctant, to give up a useful “victim identity” for a possible stronger self.

Dennis Tueller, a Salt Lake City police officer and firearms instructor (since retired), asked just this question.  Uniformed officers are routinely faced with impact weapon bearing suspects.  So it’s natural for Tueller to wonder how far away a suspect can be and still use an impact weapon against an officer before he could defend himself. To answer his question, Tueller ran a bunch of empirical studies.  Which is just a fancy way of saying he ran a bunch of students through the exercise that would later become the Tueller Drill. Tueller learned that most officers can get a service pistol out of a holster and engage a threat with center-mass hits within 1.5 seconds.  So the question then becomes, how much distance can a bad guy cross in 1.5 seconds?  Timing a great many students running from a standing start, Tueller learned that someone can go about 21 feet in 1.5 seconds.  So 21 feet became the “Tueller distance,” or the maximum distance from a police officer a person can use an impact weapon against the officer before the officer can shoot them.  The Tueller Drill is often referred to as the “21 foot rule,” or the “7 yard rule.”  This really obscures the real take-home message of the Tueller Drill.  The value is not some particular distance.  What matters is your “Tueller distance.” People’s draw speeds vary.  Your Tueller distance will be greater or less than 21 feet depending on your ability to get the gun unholstered and pointed center-mass. The real lesson of the Tueller Drill is that someone armed with an impact weapon has the opportunity to use it at a far greater distance than most think—and certainly much greater distances than a juror might have otherwise thought.  If you imagine the length of typical American parking space, and add another three paces, you’ll be right about at 21 feet.

Men talk about fair fights,” her Drill Instructor had thundered. For various reasons, new recruits at Boot Camp and the first year of the Slaughterhouse were segregated by sex. “Men are fools and morons who cannot remember that the purpose of war is to win. You are not being trained to fight a fair fight; you are being trained to defeat the enemies of the Empire! The best chance to give your enemy is none at all. A fair fight is a losing fight. Shoot him in the back, kick him in the balls, play dead till he has his pants around his ankles and then give him hell!

I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role.

The distinguished delegate from Obregon had even wanted to allocate funds to develop a new non drill sergeant–based boot camp, replacing the fundamental training overseer since time immemorial with a new kind of instructor called a “military lifestyle and career coach.

I hand out a number of compliments, and all of them are designed to be unexpected,” said Sergeant Dennis Joy, a thoroughly intimidating drill instructor who showed me around the Recruit Depot one day. “You’ll never get rewarded for doing what’s easy for you. If you’re an athlete, I’ll never compliment you on a good run. Only the small guy gets congratulated for running fast. Only the shy guy gets recognized for stepping into a leadership role. We praise people for doing things that are hard. That’s how they learn to believe they can do them.

mean to.” “It’s not intentions that matter. It’s actions. My drill instructor used to say that all the time. We are what we do and say, not what we intend to.

Mamaw could spew venom like a Marine Corps drill instructor, but what she saw in our community didn’t just piss her off. It broke her heart. Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives. You’d see it in how the mother would grin but never really smile, or in the jokes that the teenage girl told about her mother “smacking the shit out of her.” I knew what awkward humor like this was meant to conceal because I’d used it in the past. Grin and bear it, says the adage. If anyone appreciated this, Mamaw did.

Without thinking, Aaron went into the wide-legged, two-handed firing stance he had been drilled in. He could hear Eliahu’s voice, and perfectly remember the old instructor’s slow but stern words: “If they are not ready, fire. If they are ready, fire. If they have hostages, fire. If there is more than one target, fire. Two shots each, two. Do not think—fire.

I hear the drill instructors in my sleep yelling “pivot, align to the right, cover, don’t close up, and don’t rush it!” We drill for hours on end it seems like. I feel like I am marching in my sleep. Antwon Carlton actually did march in his sleep. Tyler was on Firewatch duty night before last and Carlton came marching by in his sleep. Tyler called out “Pivot, back to the rack recruit!” It worked, and big bad Carlton marched back to his bunk. Tyler had everyone laughing about it-you know he didn’t keep it to himself.

Our Marine drill sergeant was the most professional looking soldier I have ever seen. His uniform was so perfectly pressed and starched that he looked like one of those full-size cardboard Marines propped up in the window of the Marine Corps Recruiting Centers. Our instructor was African-American but wasn’t the least bit intimidated by this unruly and disrespectful group of white guys. He was accustomed to training officer candidates who had no official rank, but instructing a class of commissioned officers who all out-ranked him didn’t seem to soften his techniques. He was extremely serious and barked out all of his commands, which got the attention of even the most disruptive members of our group. He knew we were all officers on paper and that his job was to make us start looking and acting like officers." (page 137)

Her tactical instructor at the police academy had liked taunting them during early morning drills.

After working my way through three security guards and a busy but very dignified outer office, I was finally handed off to a gray-haired woman at an enormous desk of steel and walnut. She looked like a member of MENSA who had been a supermodel in her youth before moving on to a career as a Marine Corps drill instructor. She looked me over with a steely, unflinching eye, and then nodded, stood up, and led me to the end of a hall, where a massive door stood open. She waved a hand to indicate that I might have the great boon of passing through the portal and into the Presence. I bowed to her formally and stepped into a large office, and found Frank Kraunauer standing by the window looking down at the beach. The window was actually a floor-to-ceiling wall of thick and tinted glass, but in spite of the huge expanse of window I didn’t think he could see very much detail from this high up. Still, the light from the window lit him with what looked like a full-body halo, the perfect effect for the Attorney Messiah. I wondered whether it was on purpose.

Greetings,” he said.  His tone admitted of no weakness whatsoever.  “I am Drill Instructor (Slaughterhouse) Larry Southard.  For my sins, I have been placed in charge of the latest intake of prospective marines.  With

marksmanship on the rifle range was not as good as his drill instructors expected. Some called his work “sloppy.” When

Here, inmates would spend seven days and six nights being drilled on vacation etiquette. For example, they’d be taught how to read speed-limit signs; how to park within the parallel lines of a parking space; how to drink and dispose of alcohol; how to vomit inconspicuously; how to steer a Jet Ski and chew gum at the same time.… The drill instructors would be selected from an elite pool of former Highway Patrol troopers, ex–Navy SEALs, and retired tour guides from Epcot.