Respectfully,
SSgt Moffett, Latoya [one of my former DIs]
Platoon Sergeant, 2nd Platoon
If the Marine Corps was a haven of cultish behavior, and Parris Island had a subculture that pushed that cult to the extreme, then Fourth Battalion was like Lord of the Flies, with women.
Nobody wants to see that movie.
I officially took over on June 10, 2014. I had spent the week prior talking with the previous commander and learning more about the inner workings of the battalion. I expected “left-seat, right-seat” training, where she would show me the ropes and then observe and advise: Here's my daily routine; this woman's your go-to for getting things done; don't eat the potato salad in the chow hall.
I would have a battalion made up of four companies: three for training—November, Oscar, and Papa—and one for administration, headquarters company. Each company had a company commander and a team of officers and enlisted noncommissioned officers—NCOS—to assist them. Fourth Battalion is the only place in the Marine Corps where enlisted women go to boot camp.
Fourth Battalion fell under the Recruit Training Regiment, which included three other training battalions—boot camp for male recruits—a support battalion, and the Drill Instructor School. My new boss was in charge of the regiment.
I wanted to hear about my predecessor's successes, and I hoped there was a plan to move forward from the ground she had gained.
No ground had been gained.
Instead, she told me about the things she had hoped to accomplish, but had not. When I first met with her, she told me that she wished she had been more engaged with her officers. She wished she had spent more face time with her Marines. She had hoped to spend more time in the squad bays with the recruits, but did not. All of these are normal Marine Corps functions for leaders, but in hindsight she realized she hadn't done enough.
As my predecessor kept talking, I had a hard time believing what I was hearing: She had thought about installing security cameras in her office because she believed her Marines sneaked in in the middle of the night and read documents they should not have. It struck me that she wasn't worried more about transparency. I decided to keep the personnel files in the admin office and leave my office door unlocked. Let the Marines know you trust them, and they should trust you.
I suspect she was really telling me that the job—and the people—had made her paranoid.
She feared the Marines were colluding against her, and against each other. She had had several Marines request masts—help from someone above their commanding officer—because they believed they were being mistreated. She believed that her Marines were setting her up to fail.
She had reason to believe it: Her sergeant major had been pushed from her position for essentially running a shadow command and trying to undermine her.
These were all things I would come to believe, too, but at the time, I thought that what she was telling me was nuts, and I told Joe Fourth Battalion was like Bizzaro World. You know that episode on Seinfeld in which everything is exactly the opposite of real life? To have a battalion commander say she didn't feel comfortable walking around in her own squad bays, and that she constantly worried about what her Marines thought of her? Well, who's in charge?
She said she got no help from higher command. She warned me that Colonel Daniel Haas, the regimental commander and my new boss, didn't want anyone to rock the boat. She seemed, rightfully, certain that any trouble would lead to what she referred to as his “tomato face,” as she described his habit of pursing his lips and turning bright red when he was angry.
“You need to be careful here,” she told me. “It's not like the rest of the Marine Corps.”
I guarantee you there's not a single male battalion commander in the entire Marine Corps who's ever said these things to his replacement. But that was normal for Fourth Battalion.
Fourth Battalion seemed to embrace its “Fourth Dimension” nickname, this idea that it was a different world from the rest of the Marine Corps and not necessarily a better one. Unless there was a VIP visit and the regiment wanted a dog and pony show, no one from the outside paid any attention to the battalion or the female recruits. The male battalions already considered the women an afterthought, and, physically, we were almost invisible. Men and women didn't eat together or train together or generally even see each other because our buildings were separated by time and space.
The leadership didn't visit because, “Oh, Lord, what if I walk into a squad bay and the women are undressed?” The female drill instructors were allowed to do whatever they wanted, however they wanted, because no one checked in and no one cared about standards. The women did not focus on making war-fighters. They were too busy abusing each other and being cruel to the recruits, their subordinates. Nowhere else in the Marine Corps would that kind of behavior be tolerated.
The Marine Corps didn't take ownership of this issue: This was just how women were expected to behave. To me, it was immediately apparent that women were seen as “other,” and therefore as a problem.
First, we were segregated. The Marine Corps is the only military branch that trains women separately from men in their boot camp or basic training. The leadership liked to say that the training requirements were identical to those for male recruits, and, yes, the training for women was thirteen weeks long just
