I have a hard time even thinking about it. After the victorious return of the Marines to al-Asad following weeks of sustained and brutal hand-to-hand combat, and right before we were supposed to head back to our ships to go home, we lost more Marines in one day than on any other day in the Iraq War.
I learned a lot during that deployment, and I finally felt like a Marine—not a female Marine. I felt like a Marine.
I took a risk for that assignment. In 2001, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. To be fit for duty with the 31st MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit), I had to stop taking my medication, because the shots I had to give myself had to be refrigerated, and Iraq was a hot, austere environment. Ironically, considering all of the crap we were burning in pits and burn barrels in Iraq, my disease probably had something to do with how the military disposed of waste when I was a kid.
I grew up about six miles from Aberdeen Proving Ground, and there are bad chemicals in the air and soil there. During World War I and World War II, the government manufactured and tested toxic chemicals, including mustard gas, at the ranges on the installation. In the years since, the Environmental Protection Agency has found napalm, white phosphorus, and chemical agents in the ground and water. When scientists conducted groundwater testing, they detected significant levels of heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, and chemical weapons. Not good.
No one knows what causes MS, but I can tell you that drinking that kind of water can't be healthy. As kids, we don't worry about drinking water, but I began to wonder about it when the media showed up at my high school my senior year because base personnel had found containers full of mustard gas buried in the ground. As an adult, I started reading about another site like that, in Spring Valley, a neighborhood near American University in Washington, DC. Spring Valley is a million-dollar residential community now, but it was once where the military tested weapons during World War I. Scientists have found chemicals in the water—lewisite, mustard, arsenic trichloride. Bad, bad stuff. It's the first military Superfund site in a residential area where the Army is still looking for old chemical weapons buried in the ground.
My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer after I was diagnosed with MS, and I always thought I was a one-off because I didn't know anyone else in the family who had MS. But when Mom got sick the first time, we started to put dots on the neighborhood map for people who had gotten cancer. The lady across the street died from a brain tumor. The lady kitty-corner from our house? Brain tumor. Another neighbor, whose driveway lined up with ours, had cancer.
Right before my mom died, my dad, Joe, and I were with my mom in her room at Johns Hopkins. During his rounds, the oncologist asked my dad about her medical history. My dad said, “She has MS.” I stared at him. “No shit?” I thought, but I never talked with him about it, because it was too painful. After she died, it was too hard. She had never told me she had MS, too, because she was afraid I would worry about her.
When my mom was first diagnosed with breast cancer, she didn't tell me that, either. Joe and I were stationed in Japan at the time. She waited to call me until she had her double mastectomy. She wanted to know it was going to be okay before she spoke to me about it. I flew home immediately, and it devastated me and my family. Mom was always super-independent and lively and fit and busy, and after her surgery, she slowed down.
A few years shy of her five-years-clean mark, she felt exhausted and had a weird pain in her side. She went to the doctor for an appointment and took my dad with her. As the doctor examined her, he assured her that it was probably just a pulled muscle because she had finally felt well enough to work in the yard. But my dad told me that as soon as the doctor touched her stomach and side, his expression changed. Mom and Dad both knew the news was catastrophic. We lost her two months later. Just before she died, she was so disoriented because of a buildup of calcium in her system that she kept sending me garbled text messages. It was like she was trying so hard to tell me something, but by the time I was able to fly home from California, she couldn't even talk. She couldn't eat—and she was so tiny. All through my life, she had showed by example that no boundaries should exist for me on account of my sex. All through my life, she stayed strong to show me I could also be strong.
All through my life, she had high expectations of me.
When she was alive, I swore I would never let her down. When she died, it became even more important to make her, Joe, and my dad proud. I wasn't going to let MS or anything else keep me from challenging myself.
It wasn't until I started to take on more responsibility that I realized how few women make up the Marine Corps. Only 4 percent of Marine Corps officers are women. By the time you hit major, the numbers begin to drop off dramatically. In 2016, 208 female majors served in the Marine Corps. There were 3,667 male majors. That puts us at about 5 percent of the Marine Corps majors. At lieutenant colonel, I was one of sixty-three women—or about 3 percent of Marine Corps lieutenant colonels. General? Yeah. One out of eighty-three. Seeing a female
