I just love to hear people saying that our BEAST was easy because we didn't really get dropped or smoked... My >300 APFT score at the end of BEAST really demonstrates how the lack of smoking didn't prepare me physically.
Here's the deal - they didn't drop us. Okay... we had other sorts of punishment. The cadre had to actually think how to make new cadets who needed discipline obey them rather than just dropping them.
Other argument about the importance of "smoking" new cadets: they teach the new cadets that they can actually handle much more than they thought. Well, guess what - I didn't need to get FORCED to push myself above and beyond what I thought I could do. I forced MYSELF to do it. And wow, did I learn about myself. Not having done any running sports during H.S., it felt a little weird to be on the fastest running group during BEAST. We ran, and we ran... and a lot of people kept falling out. (If you couldn't keep up, you were simply transferred to the next slower running group.
With every single step I took, I thought to myself: "I can just, you know, slow down. Nothing is gonna happen to me, and my life can just suck less. All I gotta do is... slow down..."
But I never stopped. My father once told me: "when you feel exhausted, when you feel like you can't move anymore, when you think you've reached your max... you've only given 70% of yourself: there's still 30% to go."
And if there's anything that BEAST taught me it was that my mind has the power over my body, and I have the strength to control it - I was never forced to learn this... I learned this by myself, and this made BEAST memorable to me.
Unfortunately, there are people here who would choose to have it easy just because they could, just because nothing would happen to them, just because they wouldn't get smoked... in my opinion, if the person thinks that way and does not learn the lesson I've learned during BEAST, he or she shouldn't even be here.
I am not saying "smoking" shouldn't happen at all. It does have a point, which I think got blurred with all the "anti-hazing" story. But I am of the opinion that BEAST is more about the CADRE than it is about the New Cadets. If the CADRE can motivate the New Cadets without all the corrective physical punishment of the previous classes... congratulations: you are a true leader. The upperclassmen can make a plebe's life as miserable as they want... maybe not physically, but through other means... it's all up to them. If my BEAST was easy because they couldn't make us do many pushups, well, the cadre should've come up with better ways to make our BEAST hard (and by hard I mean a challenge... not unnecessarily hard like making us do 100s of pushups, but try to instill that lesson that "smoking" develops - whatever it is - through other means).
On a related note:
"If they went through basic in 1950, that was the last period of hard basic training. If they went through in 1975, that was the last hard class. If they graduated in 1999, that was right before basic began to get 'wimpy.'"
http://usmilitary.about.com/od/armyjoin/a/basicinterview.htm
BOTTOM LINE: It's not how hard you are pushed. It how hard you push yourself. And if you are not willing to push yourself beyond what you already know you can handle, then you should reconsider your decision to come here.