I think it's fair to say that Military training is pretty much fixated on emergencies because guess what, when someone is shooting at you, you are likely to have an unscheduled exciting moment when it all goes quiet. In all that training, whether single engine or twin engine, the avoid curve is hammered home as a place to really; well avoid actually. Whatever the flight mode when the engine failure occurs, if you are in the unhappy part of the performance graph, stand by to be the first on the scene of the accident in a short space of time.
Just to reinforce the point made by several others, if commercial and military pilots only operate within the avoid curve due to absolute neccessity and fully understanding the risks involved, it's certainly one of life's mysteries why a PPL in a machine whose performance could best be described as "barely adequate" would dick around in that high risk envelope. It can only be a terminal lack of imagination or gross stupidity - or both of course.