Conversations with Great Teachers

9. Teaching the Protectors

Teaching the Protectors 9 “Everything you teach you have to take seriously. If you don’t, it could be someone’s life.” Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Fuson drill instructor, marine corps Daniel Fuson grew up in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and joined the Marine Corps in 1997. Currently stationed at Paris Island in South Carolina, he teaches the basic warrior training course to recruits, and he also trains other marines to be drill instructors. Paris Island gives marine recruits their first phase of training, after which they go on to further training at another site. I teach the basic warrior training package to recruits. It’s a twelve-week cycle. I teach one group for twelve weeks, and then another comes in. A drill instructor has to teach a recruit everything he or she needs to know about living in the field—first aid, how to wear the packs—the basics of what recruits need to know in combat. Everything they need to know—we will actually show that to them so they can see it through us first before they have to do it themselves. The final part of their training is the Crucible. That’s where everything comes together. [The Crucible is the fiftyfour -hour culmination of recruit training. It is a physically and mentally challenging event that involves food and sleep deprivation and the completion of various tests and obstacles throughout a forty-eight-mile course in which recruits carry forty-eight pounds in addition to their rifles.] So a lot of your teaching method is showing by example. I would say that is the biggest thing that we do. Absolutely. Of course, we also have the lecture method, so we teach some material in a classroom environment in a standard way. For example, one of the things I teach is first aid. We teach everything from head wounds, how to suck out chest wounds, abdominal wounds, and heatand cold-related illnesses. That will be lecture and also hands-on. I would think that a big challenge is to teach them in such a way that they can do it all in the field, when it’s not a training exercise but real. Even real combat. 202 | Conversations with Great Teachers Absolutely. One of the things we do is—during our PT [physical training] sessions, we’ll take one student out and say, “You’re going down today for heat exhaustion.” So as a simulation, he’ll go down, and the other students don’t know that this is a mockup. So the recruits will have to react as if it’s real. The other thing we do is that a lot of the marines who teach here have combat experience, so we’ll let them share those real-life experiences, and that helps out quite a bit. Do you ever have recruits who you think are not going to make it—or don’t make it? Most recruits who come here can make it, and the vast majority do make it through. But at the very beginning of training, they’re definitely taken by surprise . It’s that old analogy—you don’t know what a fire feels like until you touch it yourself. A lot of them come here and they really want to be a marine, but they get here and they start second-guessing themselves. So multiple times during the training cycle, you’ll have recruits come up to you and basically tell you they don’t want to be here. How do you combat that? For me, when I was a senior drill instructor, I would sit the recruit down man to man, human being to human being, and ask him what he came here for. I might call the recruiter and let him talk to his recruiter. At points I might let him talk to his mother and father on the phone. I’d let him talk to someone who had guided him through his life. Normally, that was pretty much all it took—a little more assurance that he did the right thing, reconfirming the fact of why he came in, why it’s a good thing, and that he can do it. It means a lot to recruits, and they’ll get re-motivated and continue on. The view that the public gets about marine training—through movies and so on—is that it’s really, really rough. Is there...