Drill in the Movies

Many movies have been made over the years that are about a certain aspect of the military. But did you know that some movies have actually had a performing drill team in them?

In my book, Exhibition Drill for the Military Drill Team, Vol. II, I listed, after extensive research, all of the movies I could find that featured drill performances. You’ll have to get the book to find out all of the movies and also learn all of the great information in the book, but I wanted to expand on one of the movies I wrote about.

One of my favorite performances is from A Few Good Men (1992, filmed in October 1991) with Tom Cruise, Jack “You can’t handle the truth!” Nicholson, Demi Moore and Kevin Bacon. At the very beginning you see what looks to be the USMC Silent Drill Platoon, pictured below (from freerepublic.com).

But it’s not! Many of you already know that the team is actually the Fish Drill Team (FDT) from Texas A&M University of College Station, Texas, pictured below from a movie still found on YouTube.

The FDT does a great job, complete with a Yo, HUT! at the end of the performance. One of the cadets on the team that year was Jason Laymon who now owns his own structural engineering firm in Houston, TX. He was the “Nut” that year for the team. The Nut is the cadet that doesn’t fit into the block. If the block is made up of 12 cadets, he’s number 13. He had one of the close-ups in the movie and I mean CLOSE UP.

Below is a picture of the FDT while performing their exhibition drill routine at Tulane. As I started uploading the picture, I noticed that that’s me in the khakis and blue shirt in the background. Picture courtesy of the TAMU Times.

My thanks to Jason for his allowing me to indulge during my research!