Or, you know, whatever.
Second, I personally interviewed all female applicants. It wasn't that I singled women out; it was that there were so few of them, and our attrition rate for women was 40 percent. I wanted to know why. And, if they wanted to be Marines, I wanted them to see me—to see the possibilities and to see that there are women in leadership roles. If they were there for other reasons—because they needed to escape abuse at home, for instance—I wanted to talk to them about why the Marine Corps might not be a good, safe zone for them. I knew that women who have been sexually assaulted are 70 percent more likely to be revictimized. Since the Marine Corps has the highest sexual harassment and assault rates of all of the services, I wanted to prevent these women from experiencing sexual trauma ever again. After all, I knew they would not be afforded any good resources for preventing future assaults if they did join. All they would get as Marines is the basic annual sexual assault training that everyone else received. This didn't mean that we didn't allow women with a history of abuse to join, but it did mean that we paid a whole lot more attention to their medical histories and their participation in training with their recruiters before we allowed them to go to recruit training.
I paid the same attention to my male applicants who had been sexually abused.
If a male recruit needed a waiver—for a criminal history or because he was overweight or because he didn't graduate from high school—I did the same thing. I brought him in for a face-to-face interview.
And then, out of spite, I sent them all to the Navy recruiter.
Just kidding.
It was just as important to me that these young adults made good decisions for themselves as it was that we got our attrition rates down. In some cases, these men and women were meant to be Marines, and I proudly sent them on their way. But there were times when, after talking with these kids one-on-one, I wasn't willing to risk their safety.
Third, I instituted a strong physical-fitness program, for both the recruiters and the recruits. There's a tendency for recruiters to lose that leatherneck physique when they're working eighty hours a week trying to make up for those attrition numbers. And there's a tendency for new recruits—particularly female recruits—to show up at boot camp unable to meet the minimum standards for upper-body strength, running, and sit-ups.
Standards for fitness and weight regulations should be no different for recruiting units than they are for anywhere else in the Marine Corps. If you're a military police officer or a clerk, you must be able to do a set number of pushups and run in a set amount of time. That doesn't go away when you become a recruiter. That also applies to recruits who haven't shipped to boot camp yet—or “poolees,” in Marine-speak. A Marine Corps regulation required Marines to work out together every week, to build esprit de corps and to ensure that all Marines are fit enough to do what the Corps needed them to do. Some of my Marines did, in fact, hold physical-fitness events for some of their applicants.
Volleyball, anyone?
Seriously. They prepared for the Marine Corps by playing volleyball once a week.
I put a stop to that. It was fine for team-building once in a while, but we needed to keep track and hold recruiters accountable for not just their own fitness but also that of the new recruits.
To make sure those changes were enacted, we modified how we evaluated the performance of my Marines. Rather than letting recruiters get away with saying, “We had an awesome PT session today!” I required them to show me how their fitness plan impacted performance. Give me data: New recruit Chandra Smith started as a new poolee running a seventeen-minute mile-and-a-half run; six months later, she can run the same distance in twelve minutes.
It wasn't rocket science, and when my Marines expressed frustration, my constant refrain was, “Train like you're going to war—like any other Marine Corps, non-recruiting unit.” It wasn't like I enjoyed always bearing bad news. It made life miserable. But I knew that to get to where I knew we were capable of going, we had to get through a rough patch. Change is always hard, but I was convinced that if I could get the recruiters to see the WIFM (What's In It For Me), they would eventually come around.
And I was willing to miss mission my first month at San Diego to show how serious I was. I wasn't going to let the recruiters hold me hostage as a commander. At midnight on the last day of the month, I elected not to enlist three applicants who required felony waivers, which meant we missed our mark. For a recruiting station that took pride in not missing mission for years prior to my arrival, it was a warning shot that resonated across the entire district. We never missed mission again.
I wasn't always great at motivating or inspiring people, and I had to learn some hard lessons about why my goals weren't everyone's goals; but, in the end, we were not just squeaking by to make our contracting and shipping missions each month. To improve the quality of life for my recruiters, we started planning our prospecting missions to allow us to
