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The book entitled The Kinder, Gentler Military by Stephanie Gutmann while offering some interesting insight into some of the legal and gender integration issues the military has had to deal with in the past decade or so, is so filled with half truths, misinformation, and outright lies that it could barely be called a work of non-fiction. Most of the information Mrs. Gutmann presents is either taken out of context or outright wrong. I will look at some of the statements Mrs. Gutmann makes and look at their credibility as compared to my experiences and official Army policies and procedures. One of the first glaring mistakes that Mrs. Gutmann makes involves the relaying of a conversation between a recruit and a drill sergeant. On pages 33 and 34, she reports that the recruit addressed the drill sergeant numerous times as “sir”. As anyone who has ever been through Army Basic Training can most certainly tell you, a drill sergeant is addressed only as “drill sergeant”. There are those that address them as sir on the first day of training, but that is the last day they will ever do it. Such a form of address is met immediately with corrective statements and physical measures. By the second day, no one would dare address them