The "Band of Brothers" cast had a truly authentic experience while prepping to film the ten-part mini-series. The cast was perpetually face to face with screaming drill instructors who belittled and broke them down before building them back up in typical boot camp fashion. The group was pushed to exhaustion, fed terrible rations day after day, and had to soldier on in near-constant sunless weather. To top it off, the group had to train in original 1940s boot camp gear.
"When boot camp started, we had none of our personal possessions," explained David Schwimmer, who portrayed Captain Herbert Sobel in the story, "So we don't have jogging shoes. They just gave us brand new authentic or reproduction boots, which were incredibly hard leather. And these guys, I mean, I cant, it's amazing that this is what they trained in because we were up at four, five in the morning, and there was often no stretching, and there was often freezing cold, and we would train running on cement or on hard ground in these boots that were not broken in."
