This paper attempts to undertake an analysis of state power in Turkey from a rather distinctive perspective. Inspired by Foucauldian analysis of disciplinary power and anthropological approaches to the state, it shifts the attention away from the peaks of institutional hierarchies and state/society, military/civilian dichotomies, and focuses on two institutional practices, military conscription and the gendarmerie, where those very distinctions become blurred. Military conscription, an obligation for all male citizens of Turkey, also constitutes the primary source of manpower for the gendarmerie, one of the prominent state apparatus for maintaining order and discipline in the countryside. Using interview material collected during filed work in Turkey in 2004-2005, the paper follows on the footsteps of the conscripts, first, as targets of various disciplinary techniques within the barracks, and then, as gendarmes, as they go on to embody and transmit state power over civilians in the countryside. As such, the paper tries to highlight the continuities between the workings of state power both within and outside the barracks and to illustrate how the so-called civilians themselves at times become willing culprits in reproducing power relations that engulf them in their civilian lives.