I showed my boss the numbers.
This was my first introduction to the perspective of the regimental leadership and higher-ups: They did not care.
I told Colonel Haas that resolving my staffing shortages was my top concern, and I asked him to help me get some relief from Headquarters Marine Corps, which controls all assignments for the service. I asked for either more female drill instructors or that the leadership reduce the number of duty requirements at the support battalion, the regiment, and the depot headquarters so that some of my women could go back to being drill instructors. He wasn't willing to do either.
So, I went directly to Headquarters Marine Corps. That's what we all do. If your orders for a next job aren't coming through or something's up with a promotion or you need help finding Marines to fill positions in your unit, you go through the monitor at headquarters. Every Marine has a monitor, or career counselor, assigned to him or her, and I figured the easiest way to get to ground zero on why we were so short-staffed was by talking to the man behind the curtain himself. After they figured out they couldn't rely on the regiment for support, my battalion-commander peers also began contacting Headquarters Marine Corps directly. We knew the regimental staff didn't give a hoot about supporting our needs.
I contacted the branch head at Headquarters Marine Corps to explain the battalion's predicament. The colonel was super helpful and explained that we were short in part because of how the depot personnel officer assigned women to units. Headquarters Marine Corps sent enough women to Parris Island to bring my staffing levels up to acceptable levels, he said. But after they checked into the depot, they were reassigned to other places on the base, which was exactly what I had seen. He recommended that I try to fix the problem by going through the depot manpower officer, and he said he would do his best to reinforce my effort.
Having Headquarters Marine Corps help me fix problems caused by the depot manpower officer made some people unhappy. So, of course, someone told Colonel Haas that I had contacted headquarters. And, naturally, Haas reprimanded me for going to the monitor, but he did nothing to help me fix my manpower challenges.
After being reprimanded, I worked on the personnel piece in-house the best I could.
“Look,” I told the drill instructors. “If you get pregnant, you will not receive special-duty pay, because you're not doing the duty you're supposed to do.” Special-duty pay accounts for jobs that entail extra hours or hardship, such as recruiting or drill field duty. It was about $375 a month—a lot of money for a young enlisted person.
I wrote an information paper explaining that pregnant drill instructors should be moved out of the battalion and assigned to jobs they could perform while pregnant. I also tried to implement a policy that stated that to earn the coveted drill-instructor ribbon at the end of a three-year assignment, they had to serve at least twenty-four months in an actual drill-instructor position. It seemed fair and logical to me and my sergeant major.
Colonel Haas refused to support both options.
He wouldn't help me fix my manpower shortages, nor would he allow me to implement solutions that would stop the bleeding.
It was absolutely maddening. If you had male drill instructors who had mental-health issues—and we did, because a lot of them were coming to Parris Island directly from combat tours—you would never have said, “I'm sorry. I'm not going to administratively send you back to the fleet because you're not physically or mentally ready for this duty. Instead, stay here and do the job.” But that's what we do with the pregnant women.
Colonel Haas later told investigators this was when our relationship began to go south.
To me, this was more than a pissing match with my boss. It was a safety issue for my recruits. I was afraid someone was going to get hurt or killed because the drill instructors were exhausted. So, my sergeant major and I tried to work on some issues internally. We created policies for sleep, stepped up the requirements for more eyes-on supervision by the officers to prevent accidents, and we increased the supervisory requirements of the support staff, such as the operations section, so they could help to relieve some of the pressure on the drill instructors.
My sergeant major and I also worked to address the stress levels in the battalion. I hired a yoga instructor to hold class at the battalion once a week on Tuesdays while the recruits were at lunch. It was absolutely hilarious to think about a bunch of hard-ass, scary DIs doing tree pose, but they loved it. The last thirty minutes of class, the yoga instructor would spend time teaching them deep-breathing exercises. But by the end of the class, they'd all be snoring.
It was awesome to see, and you could tell the DIs felt better when they left.
I couldn't convince anyone to pay for the classes, so I paid for them out of pocket.
At the same time, I worked to try to improve the caliber of recruit we got from the recruiting force. Two tours on recruiting duty had taught me that the Marine Corps had long recruited women to lower standards, and sure enough, we still had a large number of female recruits who absolutely could not pass the initial strength test.
To pass the initial strength test (IST), women must perform the flexed-arm hang for twelve seconds (just like you did in school for the presidential fitness test), do forty-four crunches in two minutes, and run one and a half miles in less than fifteen minutes.
By comparison, male recruits must perform three pull-ups, do the same amount of sit-ups, and run one and a half miles in less than thirteen minutes and thirty seconds.
The IST is supposed
