Is Army training too brutal for new recruits?

FURTHER to sadistic Army training NCOs (Letters), during my six weeks of Army training, a corporal smacked a rifle butt into my jaw simply because he felt I hadn’t been holding the weapon firmly enough. This wasn’t a great thing to do to someone who, a fortnight later, was joining the band of the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards as a trombonist.

ALTON DOUGLAS, Birmingham. I Believe tales of sadistic sergeant majors are cock-and-bull stories. As thousands of former boy soldiers like me can confirm, by the time soldiers reached the rank of sergeant-major they were respected gentlemen. most senior ranks involved in training young soldiers, while still teaching the rudiments of discipline, were sympathetic to their charges. At the end of training there was mutual respect on both sides. At a 50th joining up anniversary reunion later this year, a guest of honour will be a now well-retired sergeant-major, who turned young boys into professional soldiers.

LIONEL ANDERSON, Peniscola, Spain. IT’S outrageous to suggest that, in the British Army, any young soldier who fails to obey an order gets a beating from sadistic NCOs (Letters). I’m proud to have served in an infantry regiment where the training is regarded as among the toughest and most demanding in the world, and which has served this country with distinction over the years. Many young recruits have enjoyed a very soft life with little discipline and NCOs have to be uncompromising and harsh to produce effective soldiers tasked with sacrificing their own lives and those of others, if required. Neither I nor any of my fellow recruits can say we were ever subjected to brutality and we had the greatest respect for our seniors, who were, without exception, men of great integrity whom we would have followed into the jaws of Hell.

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