When I got to my first unit in Twentynine Palms, California, it turned out that low expectations for women Marines were even more pervasive. When I went to my first physical-fitness training session, this reality hit me in the face. As we prepared to go on a group run, we lined up in formation (kind of like Beyoncé at the Super Bowl, but with less snazzy costumes). We formed our square in the battalion parking lot. All of the enlisted Marines lined up in four rows, with the battalion commander in the front to set the pace. When I took my place with the other battalion officers in the rear of the formation, the executive officer, a grizzled, old sucker asked me in front of everyone, “You're not going to fall out, are you?”
Now, I may not be blessed intellectually, but I have a strong body. I can keep the pace. I can set the pace. I can leave men behind. As we started to sing cadence, I groused inside my head: How dare he? But about a block into our run—which was more of a slow shuffle—Marines started to pop out of formation. Let me clarify: women began to pop out of formation.
C'mon, ladies.
At that point, I understood why Major Mackey had asked the question.
Because he had seen it time and time again, he assumed it was the norm. I proved him wrong, so I didn't fit the paradigm. As a result, I sought out challenges. I realized I needed to prove him wrong—I enjoyed it. I wanted to be the exception. Hell, I loved being able to prove myself. Soon, I found myself volunteering for the toughest jobs, my challenges at TBS forgotten.
But I also had some incredible bosses who, unlike some other male officers I had encountered, treated me like all of their other Marines.
I had my best experience in the Marine Corps when I deployed to Iraq in 2004 with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit during the second battle for Fallujah. As the adjutant, I had to track our deaths and casualties, and ensure notification messages went out correctly and quickly so the families could be notified. It was horrible. I knew somebody had to do it, and I was glad to take the weight off of someone else's shoulders, but it sucked. I don't think I even realized how badly it stressed me out, but that daily processing of casualty messages hit hard, and tallying the numbers to brief my boss, Colonel Walt Miller, every morning drained me. I know it wasn't comparable to what the guys on the ground faced, but that daily grind of sending messages about Marines with catastrophic injuries or those who had died in combat just hurt. I didn't know the injured or killed Marines, but it overwhelmed me to process the reports and then try to work through a useless headquarters back in Okinawa to get combat replacements for them.
Despite his heavy burden of command in combat, Colonel Miller recognized that I struggled with that task, so he started giving me all of this other stuff to do. I had so much respect for him—he was the one who realized the military needed to up-armor Humvees to better protect Marines against IEDs—improvised explosive devices, or roadside bombs. In 2004, when the Marines first deployed to Anbar Province, the threat of IEDs did not yet exist. When my husband was with the 1st Marine Division for the initial invasion in 2003, everyone drove Humvees that had soft-skin doors, like an old Jeep, and floors that a blast would instantly tear apart. Even then, Marines sandbagged their vehicles’ floors and hoods to protect themselves from mines, bullets, and rocket-propelled grenades. Soon, our guys were getting slaughtered because the insurgents hid explosives in creative ways, like inside the carcasses of dead donkeys on the side of the road, and because the IEDs grew large enough to destroy a thirty-ton armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle (BFV). Deadly explosively formed penetrators (EFPs)—aerodynamically stable rounds that could tear through armor after being shot from long distances—came in from Iran and other places, and began to appear on the battlefield. Because Colonel Miller knew we had to continue to patrol our area of operations, he directed his Marines to hammer plywood and weld scrap metal to the outside of the vehicles and continue to cover the floor with sandbags. We used to call it “hillbilly armor.”
Even as he bore the burden of an impossible mission, Colonel Miller cared enough about me to try to take my mind off of those daily casualty logs. To keep me focused, he let me be on the retrograde cell, to plan our return movement back to our ship when we left al-Asad. He also took me with him when he went to visit his forward-deployed Marines. I felt like such a part of the team, and I loved meeting the people we were supporting. We flew all over Iraq, and I was also allowed to participate in a civil-affairs mission in which we delivered supplies to a school for little girls.
After the second battle for Fallujah ended, the uninjured Marines from the battalion landing team returned to al-Asad to get a little bit of R & R, which was great. Some of them had been wounded in combat, but they returned to their platoons after they recovered. After just a few weeks of recovery time, in January 2005, we were tasked to support the first democratic elections in Iraq by providing security at the polling sites. In the middle of the night, one platoon of Marines loaded up into a CH-53E Super Stallion troop-transport helicopter to head out to the polls near the Jordan border.
