For example, we've always done worse than the men in drill—marching and turning and moving our rifles in different positions. There's no reason why men should be better at turning left or right than women, and certainly no reason why they should better be able to stay in step. Seriously, if we had them out there line-dancing, whom do you think would win a competition?
But the men practice everywhere they go. Women do not.
The male recruits did not have dining facilities and classrooms on their battalion compounds. Instead, they had to march to the dining hall and to the consolidated academic facility for classes.
But at Fourth Battalion, there were narrow catwalks or passageways between the buildings in Fourth Battalion, so the women didn't have to go outside to get where they needed to go. It was essentially two blocks’ worth of buildings, with headquarters and the chow hall in one building, along with clothing and supply. Then there was a courtyard. The barracks were two stories high, with the classrooms upstairs. We had a beauty salon, a clinic, and the squad bays where the recruits slept.
Fourth Battalion's passageways were so narrow that the women couldn't do drill with their weapons as they marched in formation. They could basically walk forward at sling arms—rifle hanging straight down their backs with the strap over their right shoulders—and that's it. The catwalks were just wide enough for four recruits to march four abreast in formation. They couldn't march at port arms with their weapons carried diagonally in front of their chests—a staple of close-order drill, and because the classrooms were on the compound, they only had to walk about five hundred feet in any direction to get there.
The men carried their weapons all day long, practicing drill, and going through Tap, Rack, Bang and other weapons-handling drills as they walked to their classroom. (Tap, Rack, Bang is a drill for quickly figuring out why your weapon has malfunctioned.)
In addition to fine-tuning their drill movements, the difference in the battalion compounds played out in another fundamental way: By the time they went to the range, men were more familiar with their rifles than women were.
The male recruits had to march outside about a half a mile away, several times a day, to get to their classrooms at the consolidated academics facility. It doesn't seem like a long distance, but it was enough time to get a lot of extra practice working on precision movements at the command of the drill instructors, which is exactly what the close-order drill competition was about. My recruits only practiced close-order drill outside when there was time for it on the training schedule—once a week, at best.
Being able to drill on the way to class also helped the male recruits build their upper-body strength. An M16A2 service rifle weighs about nine pounds, and if you're constantly moving it around, you're going to get a workout—especially if the DI has you holding it out in front of you or using it for shoulder presses.
But if you carry it at sling arms while you march in tiny hallways, you're missing out on that upper-body strength training.
And if you're inside, you're not taking your recruits to the sand pit and giving them incentive training, also known as push-ups with sand in their noses.
I'm sure the female recruits didn't mind, but, as it turned out, those little things can make the difference between being first and being last.
All of that indoor marching also added to our invisibility. The making of a female Marine is shrouded in mystery, and I often wondered if the male recruits believed we spent our time knitting and learning to put on makeup (which was an actual class until recently). They definitely believed our training was less rigorous, and they were correct.
Further, we were small—barely noticeable, really. Our compound had been constructed in the 1960s, and I don't believe the male leaders in the Marine Corps thought women would ever comprise more than 6 to 9 percent of the entire service. Instead of thinking ahead and constructing a larger compound to accommodate a larger number of women who would want to serve in the future, they built the squad bays so small that they artificially limited the number of women who could be trained each year to about 3,200. To grow the number of women in the Marines, they needed more bunk beds, more staffing, and more offices, but the leadership has settled since at least the 1980s with what they have. There was no “If you build it, they will come” mentality.
But even though we had fewer recruits to train and supervise, we had to provide the same number of staff members for the same number of hours as did the male battalions.
We were particularly short staff sergeants (E-6s) and gunnery sergeants (E-7s), which was hard, because the only way a sergeant could run a platoon as a senior drill instructor was with the permission of the regimental commander. Our senior drill instructors needed to have maturity and experience both so they could supervise and so they could teach. The guys weren't as short-staffed. They had issues with having too many sergeants and not enough staff sergeants, or too many staff sergeants and not enough first sergeants, but they were much healthier in terms of their staffing than we were.
Between July and August, I decided to change the duty policy. I'd been there only a month, but it seemed like the most obvious thing to do as battalion commander if I couldn't get help from higher up—and my male peers were already doing it.
So I tried to solve the shortage issue in-house.
The battalion officer of the day had to be on duty for twenty-four hours. The
