Fight Like a Girl

with whom I never worked but who just send kind thoughts. While my outlook on life has improved with time, there are still days that are so bad that I need to go back to those messages for a mental pick-me-up. The day recruit Siddiqui died? That was a bad day.

I've gotten other bad news, too.

Remember the fitness report I wrote for the CO I fired? After sitting on that report for seven months, Colonel Haas finally completed it, but only after he had gotten rid of me for good. Even though Marine Corps regulation states that he was required to contact me for my input if I did not agree with his remarks, Colonel Haas non-concurred with my evaluation without talking to me, and then he wrote her up like she was the best thing since Tabasco sauce in a Meal-Ready-to-Eat. I know this because every Marine has a file of fitness reports he or she either received or wrote. When I reviewed those files to prepare for my IG complaint submission, I saw Colonel Haas's remarks.

Not surprisingly, Brigadier General Williams agreed with Haas's remarks, despite the stack of documentation that showed how poorly she had performed as a company commander. Williams's remarks were also in my file. So even though Colonel Haas gave me permission to fire her based on her performance, there will be no adverse remarks in her file to indicate that she was relieved for cause. Instead, her file will show that she was removed erroneously, because I was a bad commanding officer.

And what about that XO? The one who did not do her job and who caused incredible turbulence in my command by inviting my company commanders and subordinates into her office to gossip about me? I read in my fitness-report files that Colonel Haas and General Williams recommended her for command and promotion, as well as school. They non-concurred with my report for her, too, despite the reams of documentation I had provided them regarding her substandard performance. Get this: in his report comments in the file, Colonel Haas said that she was the glue that held the battalion together in an extremely stressful environment with bad leadership.

Lieutenant Colonel Kissoon, the CO of Third Battalion who protested against our integrated training hikes, was relieved after Recruit Siddiqui died and investigations uncovered a longstanding pattern of recruit abuse in his command.¹ So was Colonel Paul Cucinotta, who replaced Colonel Haas.² I had worked with Colonel Cucinotta briefly at the Pentagon before I went to Parris Island, and I respected him as a leader. I know what he inherited when he took over from Colonel Haas. He was the right leader in the wrong time.

There's been some nonsense among the positive messages, though. Occasionally I receive ridiculous emails, like this one from some old Vietnam-era dude (I'm quoting it exactly, including the misspelled words):

Ms. Germano,

After having the misfortune of reading your article I am unable to address you in any military terms. The assertions you make that gender bias and sexism is the reason why female Marines underperform, I find to be troublesome, especially coming from a person who has spent their last twenty years occuying a Marine Corps uniform. Your assertations and arguments are based on a logic that escapes reality and is a pretext to expouse your liberal femenist beliefs.

During my three years as a Marine, one of the years being 1968 was spend in Vietnam. I am not going to go into a disertation describing my combat experience, except for the fact I damn well experienced the taste of battle on numerous occasions. You know that no matter how hard you try to decieve or decept those who don't understand what you are trying to do or who have not tasted the battle, it does not work on me or my fellow Marines that have endured. You have betrayed the honor of Marine Corps and for what it stands for. The only difference between you and a Jane Fonda is the uniform you wear. God forbit if you are successful in what you are trying to do to the Marine Corps, because the blood on your hands will be the blood of Marines and not the blood of the enemy.

[Name Redacted], Sgt.

USMC 1967-70

While I respect his service, apparently this vet missed out on the intervening years between his service and today, when thousands of women have “tasted battle.”

And there have been some surprises. After I was relieved, I had champions both on the far left and on the far right. The response I received from the far left was as expected: If women can meet the standards, then—hell, yeah—they should be allowed in the infantry.

As it turns out, that's been a big argument from some of the more-conservative infantry guys, too: Don't let them in if they can't carry my ass out of the zone after I've been hit.

WeaponsMan is a blog about guns, and it's written by a former special forces soldier who doesn't exactly cater to the “Kum ba yah” crowd. While Joe and I were packing up my apartment in South Carolina, we saw that he had written a blog post about what had happened at Parris Island, and I cringed automatically, preparing for the worst.

But when the author saw how we had bumped the rifle-qualification scores, he said, “You can't argue with facts.”³

He quoted an officer who said I was hard-charging but fair, and that I expected people to do the right thing, and he acknowledged why some party-line followers would have a problem with that.

Further, he wrote that commanders should have known the limitations of the online command-climate survey that allowed the same people to take it multiple times or to “spread the word among critics” to take it.⁴

The author noted that I was working for true equality for women, and that, now that I had been relieved of command and would be retiring, the Marine Corps had just given me carte blanche to be loud about