When everybody started working together then it became a team. That was the method to the madness. That, of course, as it turns out at the end of our 12 weeks of recruit training when we were standing on the parade field all smart and sharp and everything that we did it together. It was a team effort.
So, yes, the military is a great place to learn not just necessarily to do a single job but skills for life. Not only leadership, but also diversity. You know, you learn to work with people from many different backgrounds.
The military just put it all there being able to work with people: the teamwork, being able to stay focused on goals, being able to finish goals.
After several days what I realized was that, wait a minute, there are 72 other guys in the same situation that I'm in. Some handled it better than others but it was there that I saw that the leadership qualities in certain individuals started to come out. Some stepped forward to encourage others and that encouraged me to do well, to not let the team down. That was probably one of the biggest pressures in the military. It wasn't the running; it wasn't the hand-to-hand combat; it wasn't all the different things that we had to do. It was: I didn't want to let the team down.
