They actually showed us the first half of FMJ in Squad Leaders’ Course, as an example of what *not *to do. The way we saw it, if one of your men shoots you and then himself, there were probably a few red flags you could have spotted ahead of time.
I’m not sure I agree with this, unless you define running a marathon as “a very slow 26.2 mile hike over an entire day”
I would agree that most reasonably fit and healthy people could run 5 miles, by ignoring all of the body’s signals.
But a marathon is an entirely different beast. I have probably run 15,000 miles over the past years, some of that at half-marathon distances. But I have never run a marathon, and likely never will–it takes a huge amount of preparation for that, time I don’t want to invest.
Once you hit the wall, no amount of mental ignoring of signals is going to get you moving faster than a slow painful stroll. It is truly humbling when you walk for a few hundreds of yards, think “Ok…I’ll start a slow jog, just for this last mile” only to come to a halt after fifty steps. The intense training for a marathon pushes that wall further down the road.
I don’t think you can even call that “boot camp”. Isn’t “boot camp” the general 16 week or so training that every soldier, seaman, airman and Marine has to go through for their particular service in their particular nation’s military? Delta, SAS, SEAL, etc camp is, as you say, specialized training for elite soldiers who have already passed boot camp.
Remember even that fatbody Private Pyle passed Marine boot camp.
Is the marathon “wall” different from the wall that fat coach potatoes experience trying to run a 5k with no training?
During my basic training they removed a guy who should not have made it through the screening process. He wasn’t going to shoot anyone on purpose but there was a damn good chance someone would die if he ever got live ammo. He was sent home before we got to the range. That was during peacetime. I suspect during that period of the Vietnam war there was pressure to push people through.
Likely. I think the marathon wall happens when the body runs out of glycogen. I can’t say what running out of glycogen as a result of exercise feels like but as a result of dieting, it feels like a combination of a bad flu and a hangover. The brain has to switch to ketones and it doesn’t like the transition.
Full disclosure, I am NOT elite, and no one would ever call my “boot camp” experience the most difficult (well, not as planned anyway, sexual assault made it slightly more challenging, but that’s a different discussion) BUT… since I started back at the gym (in a CrossFit-style place), the head coach has repeatedly said she loves how I am more than willing to embrace being “uncomfortable”. That is really what so much of it is about. The difference between pain and injury and being willing to embrace “the suck” and still get your job done.
In short - never give up. Never quit, especially when you are being “beasted”. Never.
Nah, it was a joke there too. I went through in 1996. I’m sure it’s even easier now. When I went through the Instructors had to ask your permission to touch you, and they also gave you a card you were supposed to pull out if you got too stressed or something. (I threw mine out about five minutes later.) When they handed them out I was like, “So, can I wave this around in combat?”
It was basically (heh) two months of “Do exactly what I say or I’m going to yell about it.” Granted, strength of will is somewhat of a strong point with me, but I expected it to be a lot tougher and was actually disappointed that it wasn’t.
The worst part, by far, for me was not getting enough sleep. I love sleep.
I think the red flags were pretty obvious in FMJ. But the implication was that the Marine Corps didn’t care. It was just about getting bodies cycled through boot camp and out into the shit as quickly as possible. If a couple freak out and kill themselves and a few others, well, they might have died by enemy fire too. All part of the risk/reward calculations of war.
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Another thing; the recruits that don’t quit will be a combination of mentally tough individuals and those who have thoroughly prepared themselves for what may happen, and have a plan in place for such occasions to deal with it effectively. Both traits are desirable in the military, and many other jobs.
Full disclosure, I am NOT elite, and no one would ever call my “boot camp” experience the most difficult (well, not as planned anyway, sexual assault made it slightly more challenging, but that’s a different discussion) BUT… since I started back at the gym (in a CrossFit-style place), the head coach has repeatedly said she loves how I am more than willing to embrace being “uncomfortable”. That is really what so much of it is about. The difference between pain and injury and being willing to embrace “the suck” and still get your job done.
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I think, like most things, it’s a combination of actual physical fitness and psychological. A few years back, I signed up for one of those Spartan obstacle course races with a group of coworkers. Of the 20 or so who were on board with the “concept” of actually doing it, only 4 of us actually participated. So actually just showing up weeds out like 99% of the population for anything.
A lot of people who actually participated had to overcome their own individual fears of things like heights, fire, being wet, torn to shreds on concertina wire, having an extra from 300 throwing javelins at them, feeling foolish because they don’t look like an extra from 300, etc.
Then there is there is the actually pushing through the hiking up and down a ski mountain, carrying logs and rocks, crawling through concertina wire over a muddy, rock strewn hill the length of a city block while your wife cheerfully tosses mud at you from the sidelines.
But I also had to spend several months prior prep running hills, stairs, lifting weights, doing burpees, and whatnot so as not to actually kill myself. Willing yourself to carry a 70lb Atlas ball without ever picking up a dumbbell is a good way to get badly injured.
But is there some reason that only happens with long distance runners, as opposed to just people trying to run further than they are in shape for? Like does an average runner’s legs get too tired to run before they can get to the whole “glycogen” thing?
You can learn a lot from sleep deprivation, though. I remember a minor epiphany I had from the third week of Basic Training: it was morning, we were running around, and due to a complicated set of circumstances involving a guard duty mix-up I had slept a grand total of an hour and a half the previous night, and not all at once. My thought process went something like this:
“OK, it’s seven AM and I’ve exhausted. There’s no way they’ll make me do everything today with everyone else., I’ll tell the sergeant, and he’ll cut me a break.”
Followed several seconds later by:
“No, he won’t. Nobody will. Nobody cares.”
Which was followed by:
“So I guess I’ll have to pull through. Let’s do this.”
It was one of the most important lessons I learned in my life.
Indeed, any boot camp that weeded out most recruits would clearly be a total failure. The point of basic training is to make civilians into trainable soldiers. Rudimentary requirements for fitness and mental stability should have already taken place; you’re trying to get a person to a point where they’re a BASIC soldier, hence the term “basic training” and can be sent on to whatever type of advanced training suits their skillset.
If boot camp was sending more of the recruits home, the armed services wouldn’t have enough soldiers. People do get hurt, or sick, or slip though the recruitment process and it turns out they’re antisocial or nuts or whatever, but that figure really shouldn’t be much - ten percent would be quite bad. Any reasonably healthy person can be a decent soldier. They won’t all be Audie Murphy but they don’t need to be.
Even during Vietnam, none of those recruits would have gotten right into the shit. All would have gone to more training; that’s what Gunnery Sergeant Hartman is assigning them to when he expresses his disgust that Joker’s going to journalism school. (“Oh-three hundred! Infantry!” That’s still the MOS number, actually.) Most of them are being sent to infantry school, a few to other specialties, though even they have to do some more infantry training before moving on to other types of training.
It IS true that in 1967 the length of training was reduced. However, while I’m not sure Kubrick cares about the timeline, Joker, Cowboy and Pyle must have joined in 1966, because we know Christmas happens while they’re in Basic and we know Joker survives the very first night of the Tet Offensive (30/1/68) and there’s no possible way they could have been in Basic in Christmas 1967 and been well esconsed in Vietnam by January 30 of 1968. (I note the Wikipedia article says they arrive at basic in 1967, but I cannot make that timeline work with the Christmas reference and the fact that when we meet Joker in Vietnam, he clearly has not just recently arrived - in fact, he’s already been made a corporal, which shouldn’t happen your first two or three weeks in country; when they run into Cowboy shortly after, he’s already a sergeant, which could happen fast but not THAT fast.)
Not sure. I really don’t understand what causes this sensation, but it is absolutely clear when it happens.
When I first started running, I would stop after a couple of miles when it got to hard to run, usually with a painful stitch in my side and gasping for breath. But that sensation isn’t anywhere near the feeling of “nope, no matter how much you try, you will not proceed any further” that I sometimes get toward the end of a long run.
To add to the problem of cardiovascular stamina imposed by such a reasonably-fit-person-runs-a-marathon scenario, such a person is very likely going to sustain injuries that they won’t be able to power on through (e.g. joint, muscle, tendon problems, stress fractures, and so on). Arguably, getting injured in the process might be part of the special forces ethos.
I am confident that any reasonably fit person can build up to a half marathon, over time; but the remaining miles are exponentially harder and begin to separate athletes who have physical advantages from the rest of the crowd.
I am also highly doubtful that any reasonably fit person who has not specifically trained for distance running could run a marathon.
I have also never run a full marathon (look at me, chiming in anyway), but I have run 4 half-marathons, some better prepared than others. There is a different level of pain when you are not prepared.
With most endurance events, it really is your mind you are training. I can’t tell you how many times during a long run, or doing the mind-numbing “battle rattle” march with full fighting order it has been my mind that I fight. The “okay, that’s enough of this, now” that you have to just keep pushing.
The “wall” is a different beast, because it’s confusing. If you watch athletes when they get to that point, there is a confused, disoriented look. It’s more than pain/exhaustion - their body just stops cooperating.
In my day they made us do multivariate calculus while running the one and a half mile sprint. Now, it’s nothing but a singular value decomposition of an MxM matrix. Really, the standards have just gone downhill.
I never was issued a sidearm, I was armed with a steel slide rule that with the right flick of the wrist and arm, you could snap a man’s larynx in half.