In other words, he didn't want to deal with any turbulence. He just wanted everyone to get along.
That stuck with me.
The same month, I had my first conversation with Brigadier General Loretta Reynolds, who was, at the time, the commanding general of the depot. She was the first woman to fill that position.
I wrote down what she said, too: “Go with your gut, and never back down if you think something is right.”
They gave me two perspectives completely at odds regarding how I should go into this command tour. If I had chosen the first, there would be no story to tell.
That first month, I chose to take Reynolds's advice and go with my gut.
There would be no mercy at Fourth Battalion.
And that applied first and foremost to the cockroaches—they were everywhere. I would grind the filthy, no-good cockroaches into the ground! When the recruits marched along the catwalks, you could hear the cockroaches crunch under their feet. Ugh. And they flew! The barracks were clean, but headquarters was a mess, including my office. I even found cockroaches under that damned rug.
As we sent the cockroaches scurrying back to their hovels, I started working with my Marines on what else needed to be fixed. Everything was subpar for the women. Everything. Their living quarters. Their standards. Their training. And it led to lower scores for female recruits across the board: academics, physical fitness, shooting, drill—everything. They didn't have room to train; because of the physical setup of Fourth Battalion within the regiment, female Marines received less fitness training; maintenance was last on the priority list for our living quarters; and because the women were set apart from the men, they seemed to be forgotten.
It felt intentional.
Many of the female recruits were not able to or were barely able to meet the standard on basic Marine skills. They fell out of hikes and runs. They shot marksman—the lowest passing qualification—at the range. They injured themselves because they hadn't been properly trained to prevent such injuries. How much respect could female Marines possibly earn from male Marines if we female drill instructors and staff had such low expectations of ourselves? After their separate boot camps, the men and women would train together at Marine Combat Training school, where they would hike and go through obstacle courses and learn how to respond to attacks. The men would see that the majority of the women could not meet the required standards, let alone keep up. (That's different from the other service branches. In the Army, Air Force, and Navy, men and women train together at all stages of their military careers, and they go straight from basic training or boot camp to their job-training schools—to learn to be cooks, clerks, cops, or infantrymen.)
To me, it was crucial to improve the female Marines’ skills, knowledge, and leadership. It wasn't only a matter of competing with the men or proving women's abilities. It was a moral imperative.
I remember calling Joe one night and saying, “We're sending women to combat. We've been doing this for fifteen years, and for fifteen years, we've been sending women who can't shoot as well as they should.”
These women serve as military police officers out on patrol. They serve as truck drivers on roads that have faced constant attack. They serve as convoy leaders, as members of small teams that go out into communities to provide services, as translators, and as medics.
Many of them aren't even comfortable pulling their weapon apart to clean it—because they don't know how to put it back together.
Let me fall back and say that there have been many female Marines who are and have been capable of all of those skills, and more.
All female Marines should be.
This was something I had to work on myself—as I'll talk about later—but as an officer, I did not go through boot camp at Fourth Battalion. Male and female officers do, in fact, train together, and I fired expert during my initial training.
But, at Fourth Battalion, the foundational level of training, the female recruits were expected to fail. The slowest member of the platoons set the running pace for everybody else during physical training. Trainers told them that their arms were too short to fire weapons properly and that girls couldn't shoot. They didn't even hike the same distance for the Crucible—the proud culmination of a recruit's training—as did the men, because the drill instructors hadn't measured the course properly. From the moment I arrived, it was obvious that the Marine Corps was locked in an era of tight girdles and smelling salts.
I'm not exaggerating. By graduation, female Marines had been performing push-ups, running for miles, hiking with packs, shooting rifles, and generally sweating their asses off for thirteen weeks. Often, the recruits were covered in mud, mosquito bites, and sunburn. But at the Marine emblem ceremony following the Crucible hike, a row of chairs provided a safety net behind the newly minted female Marines. Why? In case any of them felt faint.
The men did not get chairs.
I changed that immediately.
No, the men did not get chairs.
It sounds ridiculous, and it is. Nobody wants lowered standards for their Marines, but, paradoxically, that's exactly what we have. The paradigm requires someone at the policy level and at the implementation level to say, to acknowledge, “Why, yes, we have been holding women to lower standards, but now we're going to change that.” I think that's important.
As we worked to improve rifle scores, reduce injuries, and build strength, we encountered similarly dated ideas. While men were allowed to eat what they liked, women were not allowed to have sweets. They were told that if they used stretch bands and foam rollers after exercise, they were “weak.” And they were told they were a “distraction” on
