You'll never guess what happened when I went up my chain of command for help.
Yeah, nada.
No one was willing to take apart the issues and say, “This is why we need more people.”
Why? Because it's “all that drama” at Fourth Battalion.
Not only are the women separated but they're also treated like children who can't handle basic Marine Corps requirements, such as going on a real hike, correctly adjusting their gear, running an obstacle course, and standing up for longer than five minutes at a time.
Or, you know, eating.
All of it came down to how we were situated apart from the rest of the regiment. The three male battalions ate together, went to class together, and saw each other as they marched and trained.
The women in Fourth Battalion had their own chow hall, a tailor, and a beauty salon. When it was built, it was like, “We'll just make it self-sufficient so the women never have to leave—and we never have to see them.”
Fourth Battalion was essentially two squares with courtyard areas in the middle of each. There was a catwalk that connected the command post—or headquarters building—and the chow hall, classrooms, gymnasium, and support offices. The squad bays, beauty salon, recruit store, and medical offices were in the square next door.
Did I mention that the chow hall smelled terrible? It seeped into the squad bays.
But God bless Mr. Terry. Mr. Terry was the chow-hall manager. Nicest guy. After each Crucible (a new recruit's crowning achievement near the end of boot camp), Mister Terry would order up a warrior breakfast and bake a beautiful cake because it was the first time the new female Marines could have sweets.
The female recruit diet was different from the men's because they weren't allowed as many calories. There was no salt and no sugar and no sweets. The men got cookies in their chow hall, but there was none of that for the women.
These were grown women, but rather than teaching them good eating habits, we just made sure there was nothing there to test their discipline—at the same time we were supposed to be teaching them to be disciplined. Because the physical training was not very challenging for many of the women and many showed up to recruit training at their maximum weights by regulation, many recruits lost muscle mass and gained weight in training. Rather than holding recruiters accountable for sending us women who were fit and trim, and rather than making the physical-fitness training at boot camp challenging, we said, “You can't handle the treats!”
So the recruits were supervised in a way that didn't teach them how to take care of themselves after they left boot camp.
Worse, when I got to the Fourth Battalion, the DIs used breakfast, lunch, and dinner as opportunities to harass the recruits.
The drill instructors are not supposed to yell while recruits are eating.
The recruits go in. It's supposed to be silent. They are supposed to get twenty uninterrupted and peaceful minutes to eat, from the time they put their trays on their tables.
The silence? It's so they don't choke. I can't tell you how often recruits had to be given the Heimlich maneuver because they choked on their grub after a DI got up in their faces and forced them to shovel food into their mouths until they simply couldn't breathe. Most of them aren't used to being screamed at by adults while they eat. (Further, this behavior obviously has no training benefit.)
When I arrived, there was very little supervision by the officers. Officers were supposed to walk around making sure the NCOs followed the rules.
The standards were different for the basic daily functions of female recruits, as well as for how they were treated as humans.
They weren't held to the same standards by their recruiters, and then they were shipped to boot camp with the men, who had been forced to show that they can do the work and make improvements to their physical fitness.
In their journey to boot camp at Parris Island, everybody—men and women—is loaded on a bus. Everyone is equally terrified, but the male recruits have been better prepared mentally and physically by their recruiters, so they tend to know more about what's to come. As they sit on the bus, they're dead silent. They all have the same expression on their faces: fear. They're waiting for the DIs to get on the bus and for the yelling to begin.
And begin it does, and it doesn't let up again until after the first phase of training—unless you were in Fourth Battalion, where the screaming never stopped.
When the recruits got off the bus—correction: when they ran off the bus trying not to trip over themselves as the DIs yelled “Move! Move! Move!”—they saw a formation of yellow footprints painted on the asphalt, and they were ordered to plant their feet in them.
When I was at Parris Island, the drill instructors would order the male recruits to run to the front of the formation, while the female recruits were directed to the rear of the formation.
Immediately after that, after the men saw the women ordered to stand in the back of the formation, the DIs whisked the women away to Fourth Battalion, where they were mysteriously made into Marines.
It's no wonder that there's a lack of respect between male Marines and female Marines that has spanned generations. We cheat the female Marines out of the actual boot-camp experience because we don't
