Word: drilling
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...well as one's mind, so athletic competitions loom large. ROTC squads from across the nation go head-to-head in a series of events at Military Excellence Competitions (MECs). "There are also volunteer activities which we're 'strongly encouraged' to do, like rifle pistol, color guard and drill team," Andrews says. Color guard, which is basically marching around carrying huge flags, takes the form of team competitions. Judges score teams based on the sharpness of their moves, their appearances and form. Sometimes they escape military confines to march for football games or the Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year...
...course the nights were mild and the days clear from that moment on. The coldest night of the year, down in the low teens? Our very first night in the woods, back in December. Yet now, for our last and most public act as Basic Trainees, the Big Drill Sergeant in the Sky was hiding us away inside, where hardly any display of marching - of training - was required. Weren't we sharp enough...
...much weeding out. Our platoon had lost only 9 out of 49, mostly due to injury or illness, and everyone who'd worked on themselves even a little was still around for the end. None of the portentous threats we'd heard all along, like the one about the drill sergeants axing some unsuspecting soul the day before graduation, were ever carried out, and our PT sluggards never lacked for second chances (or third or fourth or fifth ones) to clear the bar. Oh, the toothlessness of it all! I'd heard drill sergeants, nostalgic for the hard old days...
...found among the heaps of rules and procedures and training manuals that we waded through every day. Nor in the distant and anonymous warrior-bureaucracy. Rather, the virtuous were nearby and all had faces. Recruiters take note: It is a powerful selling point, to get to know these drill sergeants and lieutenant colonels and soldiers who patrol this encased little corner of the world. I bade them all farewell with real fondness, and I even hope to see some of them again, on some transport plane somewhere, bound for what here they always call "bigger and better things...
When President Clinton proposed giving $1.6 billion in military aid to fight drug lords in Colombia last week, he probably never thought of the U'Wa Indians. But the tribe is fighting off attempts by Occidental Petroleum to drill for an estimated 1.5 billion bbl. of oil on ancestral lands in the northeast of the country; hundreds of the U'Wa are currently involved in a tense standoff with Colombian troops trying to remove them from drilling sites...