Employing a ‘follow me’ approach, Palmer soldier earns U.S. Army Drill Sergeant of the Year honor

The more Staff Sgt. Samuel Matlock experienced in the armed services, the more he realized it was the life for him.

Matlock, who is from Palmer, enlisted in the Alaska National Guard before switching to active duty and eventually becoming a drill sergeant.

And after winning the active-duty U.S. Army Drill Sergeant of the Year award last month, Matlock is taking on an even greater leadership role.

Matlock was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri but has been reassigned to Fort Eustis, Virginia, where he’ll work as an adviser to the command team for the Center for Military Training as well as Training and Doctrine Command.

“Military, and the Army especially, has been an incredible experience for me,” he said. “I started off just wanting an opportunity to serve and it just kind of grew into, this is going to become a career for me.”

Matlock, 30, went to Mat-Su Career & Tech and graduated in 2012. He enlisted in January 2013 and served for five years in the 297th Military Police Company.

Once on active duty, Matlock became a drill sergeant — one of nearly 4,000 in the Army — and started by training military police. Army basic training is a 10-week course and sometimes runs concurrently with forms of advanced training.

For some, the image of a drill sergeant is what has been popularized in popular culture over decades — a seething sergeant shouting orders just inches away from a stoic soldier.

Matlock admits there’s some yelling but mostly as a practical measure. With classes of 240 soldiers, being loud is often the only way to communicate with larger groups. But he said the Army has evolved from the “shark attack,” the clamorous introduction for recruits that was used during the draft era.

“Obviously, times have changed since then, and we’ve adopted what’s called the First 100 Yards,” he said. “They basically show up to the unit and get a block of instruction on basic standards and expectations. The idea is the drill sergeants are showing the trainees what right looks like. It’s a ‘follow me’ approach.”

He said the role of a drill sergeant is much more mentor than domineer, and the early stages of training are used for developing trust and expectations.

“It really starts off with establishing that early trust with your trainees,” Matlock said. “That’s where you’re going to get the most out of them. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t enforce standards and discipline, which is obviously a humongous part of basic training. But that’s going to set the precedent for the rest of their training cycle, and that’s going to affect what they expect from their leaders as they go on throughout their career.”

Matlock had participated in a number of competitions during his service and in July, he won the Drill Sergeant of the Year competition at Fort Leonard Wood, which trains more than 80,000 military and civilians each year.

The Army competition included plenty of physical tests, including an obstacle course, land navigation, range competition and Army combat fitness test. But the four-day competition also included an emphasis on mental challenges. The Army has over 30 training modules, which Matlock needed to commit to memory before being tested on details. It also included four essays on topics like problem solving, training improvements and history.

“It was very mentally rigorous,” he said.

He said drill sergeants who worked with him in basic and advanced training allowed him to get an expectation of what his role would be once he graduated to the operational force. Now Matlock’s role includes helping set those standards for the entire Army.

“They definitely gave me a good foundation of what kind of person I wanted to be as a soldier, as a noncommissioned officer and as a drill sergeant at the end,” he said.