Boot Camp Softens Its Image

Recruits who stepped out of line at the Navy’s boot camp here used to find the reaction swift and rough: a good tongue-lashing from the instructor, lots and lots of push-ups and occasionally a special humiliation, such as a lap around the base with a pair of undershorts flapping from their heads.

But that’s not what Travis Bullard found when the Navy recently decided he needed some extra motivation. He was packed off to a “personal applied skills” class, where he was offered emotional support, instructed on deep breathing and stress reduction and given a chance to explore his feelings by pasting cut-out magazine photos on a piece of cardboard.

“These instructors, it turns out they’re really nice guys,” said Bullard, a gentle, gangling 20-year-old from tiny Hackett, Ark.

Welcome to the boot camp of the ‘90s. As memories of Cold War foes and foxholes fade, the military is stripping away the sharp edges and hard knocks from this fabled test of manhood.

Profanity, rough handling and embarrassment of recruits are strictly forbidden; confidence-building, teamwork and mutual support are the order of the day. Marches with heavy packs and hand-to-hand combat training are giving way to instruction on personal values, rape prevention and technical training.

No longer do instructors follow the time-honored doctrine of using fear and intimidation to break down recruits and rebuild them to provide unquestioning obedience. Now, as Army regulations put it, the goal is to honor “the dignity and respect of the individual.”

Troops are encouraged to question authority--up to a point, anyway--in keeping with a philosophy that may owe as much to corporate employee-training guides as to the Napoleonic field manual.

The Pentagon believes that the new approach is the best way to turn a balky, rarely spanked generation into volunteer “warrior technicians” who may well need to know more about complex electronic equipment than foxhole survival.

The military brass insists that boot camp is just as challenging as ever, but in different ways. Physical demands may be lighter, but mental requirements are far greater. Recruits are taught how to think and solve problems, and how to deal with the emotional problems that in the past drove recruits away or, in rare cases, to suicide.

The physical demands have been changed, military leaders say, to avoid injuries, and because the military’s physiologists believe that too much workout in the relatively brief span of a boot camp will punish recruits’ bodies without really making them stronger.

Officers also point out that boot camp is only the first stop in the troops’ training, and is followed by more advanced instruction in physical and technical skills.

But critics--including some senior officers, old-school noncommissioned officers and even some of the recruits themselves--wonder if “boot camp lite” is preparing the troops for the ugly, old-style combat that may still spoil the nation’s end-of-century idyll.

Some critics believe that a major reason for the change is a desire to attract and keep more women--an assertion the brass denies. And some traditionalists see the revisions as part of a broader and dangerous drift toward a more comfy, civilianized military culture at a moment when the armed forces don’t face the imminent threat of war but are under pressure to attract and keep volunteers.

Advocate of Tough Training

“The training ought to be tough, so if we send kids to Bosnia they can take anything,” said Staff Sgt. Daniel Jackson, a drill instructor at Ft. Knox, Ky., home of the Army’s armored forces. “I’m not sure all the kids I send to graduation should be crossing that stage.”

The issue has stirred enough debate that a congressional panel is looking into it. Even the Army’s house organ, Soldiers magazine, recently asked: “Has basic training gone soft?”

The changes have come on gradually but have gained momentum in the past two years.

A turning point of the overhaul was a tough new set of rules to rein in boot camp’s most influential figure, the drill instructor. They were imposed by a military that had been buffeted by years of bad publicity about drill instructors’ mistreatment of recruits--both men and women.

In the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, instructors who could once rough up day-dreaming recruits can now touch them only to correct a mistake or demonstrate a task. In the Air Force, instructors are forbidden to touch recruits at all.

They can no longer dream up novel punishments, or try to shame them in front of their peers to bring them in line.

At the Great Lakes Naval Training Center, DIs carry laminated plastic wallet cards reminding them not to order any action “in a manner which will cause undue embarrassment.”

Push-up Regimen Undergoes Change

In the old days, drill instructors would sometimes order recruits to drop for push-ups, then stroll away to another assignment--leaving the recruit to grind on and on until he could lift himself no longer.

Not now. No more than 15 push-ups at a time in the first two weeks of training, no more than 25 in Weeks 3 through 5. No push-ups on a hot sidewalk, in snow or mud or before or after a meal.

Instructors who find they still can’t get trainees to behave now send them to higher-ups, like schoolteachers sending rascals to the principal.

Not long ago, the recruit asking why he had been ordered to perform some task would be told, fortissimo: “Because I said so!” Now instructors are to explain the rationale behind each order so recruits learn to think and understand and carry on willingly.

“They’ve always got a question,” sighed Chief Petty Officer 1st Class Garry McClure. “Whatever it is, they want to discuss it and discuss it some more.”

Not surprisingly, some drill instructors are chafing.

“The DIs feel almost handcuffed, like they can’t do anything,” said Command Sgt. Maj. William H. Brooks Jr., who oversees dozens of drill instructors at Ft. Knox.

“There used to be no limits,” said Chief Petty Officer Brinley Billings, a 17-year veteran from Huntington Beach who instructs recruits at Great Lakes. “Now it’s all limits.”

The Great Lakes boot camp commander, Capt. Cory D. Whitehead, sent 31 instructors packing last year because she didn’t think they were properly adjusting to the new order. Now officers at the boot camp roam the base watching for DIs’ infractions. To curtail possible mistreatment or sexual harassment--a major problem in the military today--drill instructors work in glass-windowed offices so their behavior can be observed.

The DI of the ‘90s serves as counselor as much as disciplinarian--talking to recruits about military issues, careers and matters of the heart. Navy boot camp instructors say they spend hours each day dispensing advice to the curious, confused, homesick and lovelorn.

Requests to chat are always heaviest after dinner, says McClure, a 13-year veteran from Roxbury, Mass., “because that’s when they get the letters from home--and they want somebody to talk to.”

New Techniques to Relieve Stress

That’s only one way boot camp tries to cut the strains on the recruits.

Army basic training units develop special “stress reduction” programs. The Navy does the same, and tries to contain anxieties from the moment the recruits arrive.

Not long ago, Navy trainees who arrived at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport en route to boot camp often hung around much of the night waiting for a bus to the training center. Once taken to the base, they would sleeplessly fill out paperwork and gather Navy clothes and gear.

Now recruits are met within 45 minutes, packed off on a comfortable bus and shown a video to motivate and reassure them. One message: The instructors who seem so scary are in fact “the ones that care about you the most,” Whitehead said.

The Navy used to frighten recruits on arrival day with bold-lettered signs threatening that they could be jailed for up to five years and fined up to $10,000 if they didn’t disclose past behavior that might disqualify them for service. The signs are gone.

Now the Navy and the Air Force give recruits a special “Recruit Bill of Rights” card assuring them of the organization’s concern for their well-being, and telling them who to complain to if they feel they’ve been a target of sexual harassment, discrimination or other mistreatment.

Efforts to Keep Problem Recruits

Once the military has them, it does its best to hang onto even those recruits who aren’t adjusting.

In the Navy, trainees who can’t follow orders, control their temper or get along with people of different sex or race are sent to the one-week “personal applied skills” program. The course, developed by a corporate consultant, has handled about 600 recruits since it began a year ago, and 99% of them were funneled back to finish boot camp.

The physical demands at those camps are also not what they used to be. Uncomfortable combat boots and stiff uniforms have given way to athletic shoes and light cotton sweat clothes.

At Ft. Knox, recruits once marched in formation from spot to spot but now pile on buses to be carried between training locations. Hand-to-hand combat training has been scaled back to a single four-hour class in which soldiers simulate martial-arts moves, rather than land blows that might injure their colleagues.

At Navy boot camps, the grinding regimen of marching, push-ups and rifle drills is gone. The heavy rifles were packed away last year, marching has been cut to four miles a day and the workout routine is three half-hour outings each week.

By contrast, recruits spend more than 40 hours some weeks in lecture-hall settings, and many more hours in hands-on training in such areas as firefighting and basic nautical skills.

Army basic training has a “confidence course” that includes a soaring 30-foot tower with a series of platforms that recruits try to scale with the help of others in their team. Nobody is forced to get over any obstacle, and recruits are held back for another try later only if they refuse to try at all.

If this makes them less rugged than their predecessors, the leadership says that the challenges they will face are far different from those of recruits in years past.

To illustrate: On the older generation of Navy destroyers, 40% of the crew was devoted to grinding labor. They needed to be obedient and brawny, but their jobs didn’t require a lot of initiative. On the latest ships, only about 10% carry out this kind of labor; the remainder have more mentally demanding tasks.

“That’s a very different requirement,” said Rear Adm. Kevin P. Green, commander of the Great Lakes Naval Training Center.

Training officials also point out that boot camp is not the end, but the beginning, of the recruit’s military education. Troops get a lot more technical training in advanced courses, and those who are likely to go into combat are prepared with instruction to sharpen their fighting skill and endurance.

In designing the boot camp curriculum, the Pentagon also is keenly aware of the challenge involved in bringing in and keeping troops for an all-volunteer military in a time of peace.

The Navy, for instance, has brought the attrition rate from 15% to 13.5% in the past two years, and wants to do better--although that is particularly tough with a roaring economy luring young people into civilian jobs.

Even so, some of the services have toughened their programs.

The Marines, who had changed their boot camp only slightly, last year added a grueling 54-hour final exercise in which recruits carry out battlefield exercises during a 40-mile hike. In July, the Navy added a final exercise in which recruits spend a night crossing obstacle courses and handling simulated shipboard crises to test their teamwork and resourcefulness.

For their part, many recruits say they find the new boot camp plenty stressful.

But in recent interviews at Great Lakes and Ft. Knox, a majority said they found the most stressful part to be the mental work and the separation from family and friends. The physical demands were easier than many recruits expected.

“When you think boot camp, you think blood, sweat and tears,” said Navy recruit Eric Mayne, 18, of Arlington, Texas. “But this was laid back.”

Jackson, the Ft. Knox drill instructor, said he asks each platoon at the end of their basic training whether they would like a more demanding program. “Three-fourths of them always raise their hands,” he said.

Some in Congress have been registering a similar concern.

Rep. Stephen E. Buyer (R-Ind.), chairman of the House National Security Committee’s personnel subcommittee, has pushed Congress to investigate the question more closely after a tour of training centers this year in which he found a “loss of warrior spirit and esprit that was disappointing to me.”

Military officials say there’s been no higher post-training washout rate or other indication that boot camp hasn’t prepared recruits properly. But some critics say the shortcomings might not be apparent until a later, critical moment.

“I would trust my life to people who were trained the old way,” said Billings, the Great Lakes instructor. “But we won’t know how the new system works for years, until these kids are out in the fleet.”

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Polishing Up Boot Camp

Here are some differences between the boot camp of old and the modern version:

Old: Drill instructors used fear and intimidation, along with a steady diet of push-ups and forced marches, to tear down the civilian personality and replace it with a military character.

New: Drill instructors can’t use profanity or humiliation, must follow strict limits on punishments, and seek to preserve the recruits’ dignity.

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Old: Recruits worked out in fatigues and stiff combat boots.

New: Comfortable cotton workout clothes and athletic shoes are the norm.

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Old: Physical conditioning was built around a grinding regimen of marching and push-ups.

New: Recruits spend less time on marching and endurance exercises. Physical training is built around a workout program that increases in length as boot camp continues.

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Old: Recruits were forced to scale walls at obstacle courses.

New: Recruits are urged, but not forced, to scale obstacles and to work as teams in what are now called “confidence courses.”

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Old: Instructors sought to instill fear in recruits to produce unquestioning obedience.

New: Instructors try to reduce recruits’ stress, explain the rationale behind each task and seek to develop initiative in the trainees.