End of the “Shark Attack”: Infantry School Goes Civilized

“The will to meet and destroy the enemy in hand-to-hand combat is the spirit of the bayonet. It springs from the fighter’s confidence, courage, and grim determination, and is the result of vigorous training. Through training, the fighting instinct of the individual soldier is developed to the highest point.” – Command Sgt. Maj. Robert K. Fortenberry, senior enlisted leader,

Infantry School ends traditional ‘shark attack,’ adopts new way of instilling warrior ethos in recruits

By Franklin Fisher

Generations of Army veterans are familiar with what’s known as the “shark attack,” that shock-and-awe pile-on of shouting and in-your-face personalized commentary visited by bull-necked drill sergeants on new recruits fresh off the bus for basic training.

But as far as the U.S. Army Infantry School here is concerned, the shark attack has had its day.

The Infantry School trains Soldiers for service in the Infantry branch, and has come up with an entirely new approach to the first formative hours of turning civilians into proud members of the Infantry force.

Called “The First 100 Yards,” it’s done on the first day the recruits report to the units they’ve been assigned to for Infantry One-Station Unit Training, also known as Infantry OSUT. It was developed earlier this year by the Infantry School and senior noncommissioned officers at the 198th Infantry Brigade. The brigade is one of the Infantry School’s units that conduct Infantry OSUT at Fort Benning.

The First 100 Yards uses a series of training activities to instill – on the first impressionable day of a recruit’s training – the Infantry’s core warrior values and attitudes, and to foster pride in the Infantry, partly by drawing on its battlefield history.

Details of The First 100 Yards are outlined in a video narrated by the Infantry School’s senior enlisted leader, Command Sgt. Maj. Robert K. Fortenberry, himself a veteran Infantry Soldier.

“We’ve taken a close look at how we instill the ‘spirit of the bayonet,’ and the spirit of the Infantry, from the first moment our Soldiers arrive here as their initial training event on day one,” Fortenberry says in the video.

They include a mock battlefield re-supply mission in which trainees must pull together on the fly and figure out how to most efficiently move a load of supplies from one place to another, just as they might have to in an actual combat zone.

There are also physical training events based on the new Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT, which next month becomes the official fitness test of record for Soldiers Army-wide. For the trainees, AFCT events in The First 100 Yards will include, among others, as many repetitions as possible of the test’s leg tuck, hand-release push-up and standing power throw.

At the start, trainees are given facts to memorize for a later quiz. The questions cover key specifics about the Infantry and their new training units at Fort Benning – names and positions of unit leaders, the unit’s history, including its mottos.

There is also an exercise in which they have to pick out their baggage from that of others and move it from there to another location. That event is designed to foster a teamwork mindset and to start forming the habits of paying attention to detail and carrying out tasks with urgency and timeliness.

In another phase of The First 100 Yards, the drill sergeants and other training cadre formally introduce themselves to the trainees, who then get to watch an Infantry Demonstration Squad showcase some of the skills and methods the Infantry uses in combat.

The squad is composed of Soldiers in full combat gear who have completed the very Infantry OSUT training the recruits are about to go through. A narrator on the field will highlight some of those items, accompanied by use of pyrotechnics used in training to mimic the noise and certain other effects of combat.

The demonstration is intended to “inspire the trainees to stay the course and complete the last 100 yards of training,” Fortenberry says during the video, “and shows them what they can achieve through hard work and commitment to the Infantry way of life … The narration highlights the equipment that they will become familiar with and the training events they will be participating in.”

The video was developed for viewing during MCoE’s 2020 Virtual Maneuver Warfighter Conference. It ran Sept. 9 and 10 and because of the COVID-19 pandemic, was online. This year’s conference focused on lethality and leadership, and was formally titled “Delivering Lethality and World-Class Leaders.”

It featured some of the Army’s leading military experts, including some of its top leaders, among them the Chief of Staff of the Army and the Sgt. Maj. of the Army.

Participants were able to view the conference’s sessions, which were streamed live, and could also watch a set of “Warrior Corner” videos, in which military experts discuss various topics related to maneuver warfare. The videos included “The First 100 Yards” narrated by Fortenberry.