>Actually, I know that you are already aware of this, but for lurkers, the reason drill sergeants make their recruits miserable is because the purpose of the military basic training is to train soldiers to survive and to do their job no matter what without thinking about it. They put as much pretend stress on you as they possibly can to similate the stress on the battlefield or when working during wartime 36 hours straight with no breaks when lives are on the line. Everyone has to learn to be a soldier and to do basic soldiering skills without thinking about it. Even when they are too tired to think about it. Even when you are being shot at (especially then). Even when you think you can't go on. You learn to do things by rote so that in an emergency you will do what it takes to survive and to protect the soldier beside you.

Harsh and mindless training is one thing. Insults thrown at the soldiers are a part of the philosophy that says the soldier shouldn't have a personality, he/she is just a warm body in uniform. So a large part of the training is not aimed of building soldiers, it's aimed at breaking them first.

Amazingly, though, I have seen that during my own training: a local rugby club used our playground for practice on weekends. Had any officer tried to throw such language at us, as the coach did to his trainees, he'd have a mysterious encounter overnight, with a blanket over his head and a dozen boots trying to guess what's under the blanket.