I can't think of anything more stressful than being a mom who has to send her children away for three years. Can you imagine? That's three years of missed birthdays and baseball games and first days of school. This was generally a pressure the male drill instructors couldn't begin to fathom, because most of them were married to non-Marine, stay-at-home moms. I quickly learned that many of my drill instructors suffered incredible feelings of guilt and regret because of the family sacrifices they made for the Corps. Imagine how it would weigh on you over time, and then couple this stress with a lack of sleep and you can see how bad things can happen.
Technically, you can turn down drill-instructor duty if you are selected, but it doesn't look good. First, it's an honor to be chosen. And, second, when duty calls, you man-up, so to speak. When you get picked for drill-instructor duty, you go.
Every man and woman in the military is required to create a “family plan” that designates exactly what will happen with the kiddos while Mom or Dad is on assignment, whether that's in Iraq or in South Carolina. Since this is a normal requirement everywhere else in the Marine Corps, we know that going in. But because women in the military are more frequently single parents, you can imagine the pressure they feel. They don't want to leave their kids, but they know that there is an expectation that they find a solution to be able to deploy or serve on special duties like the drill field. Otherwise, they wouldn't have the same promotion opportunities.
But my perspective was, “Hey, if there are easy ways around three years of misery—as well as around three years of kids having to live without their mothers—let's figure them out.” Otherwise, it feels almost as if someone wants you to fail.
By now you're probably dying to know why we had fewer women drill instructors.
First, the percentage of female Marines is low to begin with. Remember that women make up just under 9 percent of the Marine Corps.
Second, when upper leadership needs administrative positions filled on the recruit depot, they tend to choose women for the jobs.
You know, because “women are better typists.”
Most of my DIs had probably never assumed the guy who played on his Apple computer all day was any less capable on a keyboard than a woman. But this is an old tradition: Walk into any military orderly room, and you'll often find female service members who have been trained in fields like signal communications or Humvee mechanics sitting behind a desk, trying to process leave (military parlance for “vacation”) and promotion paperwork. Because the perception is they're better typists.
We're talking about filing and typing. I'm pretty sure the fellas had to learn their ABCs in kindergarten, too.
Worse, all of the drill instructors had jobs they'd been trained to do when they joined—admin, supply, intel—just because of the ratio of men to women on the depot, there were way more male Marines who had been trained in admin than there were women. It was sheer numbers. But the senior leaders would always pick the women to be the staff secretary, the protocol officer, or the adjutant. Everyone had signed up for drill-instructor duty, no matter what their job training had been, but, proportionately, more women were pulled for support duty than men were, and more men had been trained to do those jobs in the first place.
Because of this, our captains and drill instructors were frequently whisked away to process paperwork and do protocol tasks, leaving us with fewer people to train recruits and lead the drill instructors. The training battalions were also required to staff the drill-instructor billets for the support battalion. But those drill instructors still counted toward staffing in my battalion, even though they weren't doing the work for the battalion, because they were doing work elsewhere—so they couldn't be replaced.
And, third, when female drill instructors become pregnant, they no longer perform the duties of a drill instructor, but they continue to count against the battalion's personnel structure. That's nine months of pregnancy plus four months of postpartum recovery when no one is doing the drill-instructor duties assigned to that person. By pointing this out, I do not mean to suggest that female Marines should not become pregnant or should not receive adequate maternity leave; rather, I aim to demonstrate that there is an organizational problem with how the Marine Corps operates and accounts for (or, rather, doesn't account for) its pregnant Marines.
So, in attempting to square with these constraints, I tried to implement some common-sense changes to reduce the workload for my Marines. I immediately talked to my boss, Colonel Haas, about reducing the number of duty requirements we had, as well as increasing the number of female drill instructors and officers.
I wasn't asking for more than anybody else had.
I approached him with hard data. I showed him that we had a problem with drill instructors getting pregnant—which made sense, really. Three years is a long time to ask a young person to put off having a family. It's a stressful job, and asking to leave the position would hurt your career. But we also had drill instructors who just didn't want to do the work or be in Fourth Battalion. Getting pregnant was an easy way to be excused from training while still allowing a DI to earn special-duty-assignment pay and get her ribbon.
Instead of doing DI tasks, she would be assigned administrative responsibilities in the battalion. When we crunched the numbers, we found that between eight and ten drill instructors and officers got pregnant each year. These individuals were essentially not able to be assigned to recruit platoons for almost a third of their three-year assignment, but they still counted against my rolls. That meant everyone else had to work harder. It turned into this horrible cycle: There's too much work, so
