Disclaimer: Tolkien invented Uruk-Hai, Isengard, and Sauruman
Recollections of an Uruk-Hai: A personal account on my training
Chapter One: I am Born
There was a great row of swamp-growing underground mud trees each spaced about a quarter of a mile apart. They bore fruit once a month, except in Summer when they were dormant, and the fruit were sentient beings called Uruk-Hai. I vaguely the feeling of being a "bulb", but it wasn't that comfortable, as nothing was in those days. Then one fell day, I popped up, through a bubble of tough mud, a living, breathing, thinking, battle-hungry being.
The first person I set eyes on was Sauruman, and I felt a kind of awed hatred for him, but back then everything was hatred as if that was all we were programmed to feel. There was no pleasure, only exhilaration. Our first lesson (there were 19 others in my "litter" and we trained by "litter") was to obey Sauruman, and only him. He wanted us to help with his plan, to rise to the top of all evil and rule Middle Earth, the first step being to help Sauron rise to power, all the while working to gain advantage over him. I didn't have a name then, just a number. We had to earn our names by reaching high positions. I was 342-18, being the eighteenth in the three hundred forty second "litter".
We worked hard in archery, sword fighting, tracking and hunting, torturing, withstanding torture, and many other such tactics. They weren't your usual knights work, we practiced sword fighting each other at first, the loser being penalized by having to "learn" how to withstand torture. After a few months of that, we started to practice against prisoners (within a field that they couldn't cross) and the penalty of losing there was death. Archery was practiced in the same manner, starting with trying to hit a bag of swamp muck, then moving prisoners, then moving armed prisoners (the penalty being death if shot). Tracking and hunting were hard for our gangly size, yet I was skilled at it and was able to sneak up on many a captive. Torturing was almost as a reward in the system of work. When an Uruk-hai did well, he got a chance to discover the "pleasures" of torturing a prisoner. If you killed the prisoner, though, the first strike got you a day in the torture chamber, the second a week, and the third, death.