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Keeping your cool while people are trying to kill you - now that's a skill worth learning in these dark, devolving times. Steve McQueen's movie characters had it. Pretty soon, I suspect, my youngest daughter will have it, too.

Carollan Ehn, I'm proud to note, is in her second week of Marine boot camp at Parris Island. Because she's mostly out of touch with the outside world and is otherwise occupied, I believe I can say these things without frosting her - yet.

In any case, I think her decision was gutsy. She's a young woman who, while athletic, could be studying indescribably complicated physics at a university of her choice. Instead, she's getting screamed at by talented and cunning drill instructors, who are doing their utmost to induce combat-style stress in their recruits, the better to teach them to do their jobs in spite of it. I'll bet that about now a freshman English lit class never sounded so good. God bless them all.

By coincidence - or not - I've been looking into a question that has gnawed on me lately. How do the young British guards at Buckingham Palace learn to keep straight faces, when people are deliberately trying to rattle them with jokes, taunts, pleadings, threats and crueler tactics, some of which involve shedding one's clothes?

It hasn't been easy to find out. Probably, the guards would prefer that people don't know. There's something called "composure training," to which guards are subjected so they don't crack. The highly formal U.S. sentinels at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery take composure training, too - though I imagine there's less harassment to deal with in that solemn environment.

From what I understand so far, the training looks like this. A guard is made to stand in a corner, while fellow-guards get in his face and try to break him using various strategems, few of them nice. Guards who crack are punished with everything from pushups to ejection from the unit. Unit discipline is so fierce that guards can use their fear of punishment to steel themselves, at least until they gain the confidence to make their poker faces second nature.

Composure training doesn't look different to me from regular military training, such as the yelling at Marine boot camp. It may just be a little more focused. Indeed, the guards are regular soldiers, too.

As U.S. military psychologist Lt. Col. Dave Grossman notes, the threat of inter-human aggression is the one, deep phobia shared by nearly all humans except psychopaths. Violence, even open hostility, naturally reduces people to Jell-O. You've got to train yourself out of it. And that's what military recruits do, along with other professionals who regularly contend with aggression.

You can see how this sort of training makes sense for military men and women. But you also can see that it's a hard lesson - a form of sacrifice these young men and women embrace so the rest of us needn't.

To me, the training looks tough enough. I can't imagine anyone gratuitously adding to the stress.