How horrifying is it that mentoring women in the military could be seen as renegade behavior? Why should it be brave to help women fight those battles?
These younger women are aware of our failures. Like other groups that have gone underground to seek help, they go online. They have secret Facebook groups in which they discuss things like dealing with a groping sergeant or a platoon leader who pushes women to the side in favor of men when it's time to get a job done. They talk about co-workers who call them names or hang offensive posters or form Facebook pages purely to talk about how women do not deserve to serve in the military.
And we, women in leadership positions, we stand to the side.
We violate their trust.
We talk about honor and esprit de corps and no man left behind.
But then we circle the wagons to protect the strong man—the true member of the tribe—and ostracize the woman.
Because senior women haven't spoken out, we've allowed lance corporals to bear the burden and be ashamed in silence. To me, that is the worst travesty of all.
We see it in war zones. You're already one woman out of one hundred men. You add the pressure that there's a chance that your hooch (shelter) won't lock. There are loud generators everywhere. No one can hear you yell. Your schedule is long, and your only opportunity for a shower is in the middle of the night, in a freestanding trailer among hundreds of other trailers.
When something bad does happen, you don't go for help. Why? Because the response may be worse than the assault. Will there be retaliation? Ridicule?
Or nothing?
It makes me so angry.
After writing an article about the problem, I got dozens of emails from captains and majors—lower-ranking officers—and I got an email from one of my recruits who is now a Marine in Okinawa—but I didn't hear from any colonels or general officers, except for one.
Marine Corps Colonel Cynthia Valentin, a previous commander of Fourth Battalion, told the Union-Tribune's Carl Prine that she had been harassed and degraded at every level of her career.4 But until I wrote that article, I had never heard a peep from her or any other senior woman in the Corps who acknowledged that she had experienced gender bias, sexual assault, or harassment.
I heard from another young woman after I wrote that piece for the Union-Tribune.
She called to tell me she was proud of me.
Yeah, that's not ego-tripping. She also told me she felt like I never took her seriously when she was one of my Marines at our recruiting unit. That's a crushing blow—when one of your best sergeants—male or female—feels like you let her down. She was the operations clerk, and she was great. She had it together, and we could always depend on her—and she was fabulous to be around. I loved and respected her.
But she had a problem with a master sergeant.
I was completely oblivious to it.
It wasn't even because he was such a swell Marine. I took him to court-martial for all kinds of fraud before I left San Diego, but until that point, I thought he was fine.
As it turns out, he had also been harassing her the whole time. She wanted to blow the whistle on him, but she didn't. Why? Because she thought that I should have seen it. She thought that she shouldn't have had to turn him in, because it was right in front of my face and I should have had her back. And I simply didn't see it.
When she was just about to turn him in, he came to me and said she was being disrespectful—a pretty classic move for someone who victimizes people. I went to her and said, “Hey. What's going on? How is it possible that you're my best sergeant, and you have all this incredible potential, but I'm being told that you're disrespectful?”
That was it. She shut down. She heard me saying that I believed him and I didn't believe her, and I truly regret that. She thought I should have seen that he was coming on to her and being inappropriate. Even if I didn't see it, I should have allowed her to feel like she could come to me with it—that I was a safe place.
Instead, I talked about the importance of being tough and being strong to, you know, fit into “this man's Marine Corps.” She interpreted that as, “It's a point of weakness if you allow yourself to be subjected to this.” I have no doubt that's what I conveyed.
Devastating.
My blindness to the problem didn't stop there. Just like General Dunwoody, I had experienced it myself and had still been blind to it.
I once had a boss who told me that he loved working with me because there was no sexual tension.
Wait. What?
He out-ranked me. Was I supposed to say I was disappointed? That I was, in fact, glad that he wasn't attracted to me? How about, “I'll bet you say that to all the girls?”
What would the appropriate response have been?
On recruiting duty, I heard from my peers that they didn't respect the work we were doing. Joe will tell you that I would go home and we used to have these conversations in which I would tell him about my inability to fit in with my peers—that they perceived me as being my boss's favorite. They thought we were winning awards because I was the favorite. I told Joe when I had trouble getting some of my male Marines to do what I was telling them to do. I told him about yelling at Marines for not doing their jobs and then learning that I was being called “bitchy.”
And I mentioned the cussing.
