But here she was, in my office the day after it was supposed to have been scheduled, just wanting to chat.
I let her know I was not happy about it, and, remarkably, as I was talking, she held out her hand, palm to my face, as in, “Talk to it.”
Wow.
She's a captain. I'm a lieutenant colonel. She gave me the hand.
Before I could quite comprehend what had happened, she walked out of my office. She decided she needed to do some pull-ups before she could face me again. She did come back later to apologize to me, and we did have a fairly level relationship after that because I gave her the opportunity to excel in her job and provided regular feedback to her on her performance, good and bad. But, at the time, it was absolutely my prerogative to chew her ass for not doing what she had been tasked to do.
She told me that was the first time anyone had, in fact, held her accountable at Fourth Battalion. My coming to Fourth Battalion and making normal requests of Marines and then holding them to those expectation was the kind of practice that would be normal anywhere else in the Marine Corps. But she said it upset her that I confronted her about it. We were able to have a conversation about it and then function as we should afterward. And, because I knew her a bit better after that conversation, I adjusted the way I worked with her in the future. Rather than confronting her about having not done something, I might go at it a bit sideways: “Can you give me the status on this by tomorrow morning?” or “How's the progress on that thing I asked you to do by Wednesday?”
It was the beginning of the tenuous process of walking on eggshells so as not to offend my Marines as I tried to move the battalion in the right direction.
In any case, we did manage to get the briefing scheduled.
I started the briefing by talking about how important it was to take care of each other.
And then I talked about one of the strongest women I could think of: Margaret Thatcher, who said, “Being powerful is like being a lady: If you have to tell people you are, you aren't.” I think Britain's first female prime minister would have made an amazing Marine.
Then I talked about Army Private Lynndie England, of Abu Ghraib notoriety, who for the rest of her life will be known for leading a naked Iraqi detainee on a leash like a dog, among other atrocious behaviors.
In describing to the investigators what the reasons behind her actions were, she said, “They [her peers] were being very persistent about it, so I was like, ‘Okay, whatever.’”1
England was convicted for maltreatment of detainees and committing indecent acts. Her mother had abused her when she was a child, and she had a speech impediment that affected her self-esteem. In the Washington Post, Richard Cohen wrote, “She is the sort of woman who is used by others. Powerless everywhere in life except on her end of a leash.”2
I told my Marines that the hazing at Abu Ghraib was the same as the hazing at Fourth Battalion: an abuse of power. I told them it did not promote team-building, and Marines can't function without teams. We went through the investigations for Abu Ghraib and the two most recent abuse cases in the battalion, and I explained that abuse could be physical, verbal, or psychological, and that even something as seemingly harmless as calling new drill instructors a “NIC” was a way to express power, to make someone feel inferior. Citing the findings of the investigations, I said not allowing DIs or recruits to drink water or to use the bathroom, or pouring hot sauce on a recruit's food or making hard corrections—for example, jerking a recruit's face to the proper position during a drill—all qualified as physical abuse. Slapping, pinching, and cursing at recruits? Obvious abuse of power. All of these behaviors happened regularly at Fourth Battalion.
“The bottom line is that probably none of the individuals involved in these incidents woke up with the deliberate intention of causing their subordinates physical, verbal, or mental pain,” I told them. “Instead, they most likely became desensitized because they believe that such conduct was ‘normal,’ and therefore acceptable.”
To people outside of the culture at Fourth Battalion, this explanation for abuse might sound strange, but I believed the abuse we were seeing had become so institutionalized that many of the women thought that was what was expected of them and didn't question it. This is what they experienced when they went through boot camp as recruits themselves. When they came back to Fourth Battalion as new DIs, it was still that way; and, as a result, it was how they thought they were supposed to act.
They felt powerless to change the system.
To me, there was nothing I could imagine more horrible than one of my recruits being mentally or physically injured—unless it was the possibility of a woman not living up to her potential because someone in my command treated her poorly.
I told them that true leaders were confident and had high self-esteem—there was no need to abuse someone else to feel worthwhile themselves. I also told them that there would be consequences for those who violated the Recruit Training Order and my guidance on how recruits should be treated. I wasn't joking about accountability.
Some of the drill instructors of course interpreted this to mean that I was soft on recruits.
My sergeant major and I then had to make it clear that there would
