In boot camp, the male recruits rarely saw female recruits in training, so it was rare for them to see the female recruits up close leading tasks, performing physical training, or speaking out in classes. At MCT, the male Marines saw the women refuse to train or consistently come in last during unit PT, obstacle courses, and, of course, hikes. Many of these women were senior in rank because they had been promoted to Private First Class with those fifteen college credits. Yet there they were, last in everything.
Rob also started sending me statistics showing how many female recruits were getting broken in training. There were a lot of injuries because the women were not prepared; they had no idea what they were getting into when they showed up at boot camp, and MCT was tougher. They did poorly on timed hikes and weren't strong enough to climb the ropes on the obstacle course with their gear on. They stressed out and dropped out for mental-health reasons.
At Fourth Battalion, our attrition—or discharge—rate was up to 50 percent higher than the men's, and discharges for mental-health reasons were the majority. Injuries comprised the second-largest group of discharges. Rob was seeing a mirror image for the female Marines of what I saw for female recruits.
The recruits fell out of hikes. They dropped back. They broke.
My sergeant major and I started digging deeper into the why of it, and things just got crazier.
We started working on the rifle range first, because, again, “Every Marine Is a Rifleman.” But the female recruits were told that it would be difficult for them to shoot well because the weapons were not built for a woman's body.
Isn't that funny? Consider this: Civilian professional shooters are taught that, because women have a lower center of gravity, they might actually be better shots. And men and women compete against each other all the time.
In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt toured the United States with Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper with more than three hundred confirmed kills during World War II, to promote the idea of women serving in the military. (The American media focused on whether Pavlichenko's uniform made her look fat. Really.)
And Annie Oakley brought in crowds during the nineteenth century as part of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.
But female Marines? Allegedly they were too short and their arms made it difficult to assume the right positions to ensure accurate shots.
You know, because men are all the same size. And every single woman is small.
Instead of promoting expert riflery, rifle coaches would tell female recruits that, in the past, women hadn't done well on the range, but the coaches would do the best they could with them. In other words, just pass and earn your marksman badge, and that is enough. So the rifle coaches didn't spend as much time coaching female Marines.
The same was true for the initial-strength-test failure rate. And no one thought about making the fast ones faster, or getting the middle group to do better. It was all just everyone plodding along together, at a pace set by the slowest in the group.
So the recruits who came to Parris Island and passed the initial strength test basically stayed at that same fitness level until the end of the course. They never got better, because, for eight weeks, everyone performed at the level of the lowest person—the one who came in unable to pass that initial strength test. The one who wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.
The first initial strength test is pretty simple, really. But if you've spent your life thus far watching a lot of TV and going to school in a district that wasn't big on gym and extracurricular activities, it could be tough.
To be able to ship to recruit training, the men had to be able to do three pull-ups, and women had to do the flexed-arm hang for twelve seconds. Men and women had to do forty-four sit-ups in two minutes. Then men had to run a mile and a half in about ten and a half minutes, and women had to run a mile in thirteen and a half minutes, which is horrible.
Before any poolee—male or female—ever ships to boot camp, his or her recruiters are supposed to monitor physical-fitness programs and ensure the recruits can pass the initial strength test. Lord knows, if they can't pass it at home when they are well-rested and happy, they're probably not going to pass it on the first day of boot camp.
So the new recruits did their initial processing—filled out the paperwork and so forth—at Parris Island, and then, the day before they were picked up by their drill instructors for training, they'd take the initial strength test. If they passed the test, they went on to training. If they didn't pass the test, company commanders could select some recruits to stay on and dismiss others. Some recruits were close, some showed potential, and some weren't really trying or looked as if they were struggling after three sit-ups. We had some leeway.
But when I got there, they were taking most of the woman who failed. There was no real assessment. All women were dropped straight into training, regardless of their performance or their weight—and with no remedial PT to build them up. This meant the women who failed the IST were at a disadvantage immediately. We knew they couldn't perform well, but we unceremoniously plopped them in with people who could perform well. And then they would break. We had them doing too much, too soon at Parris Island; this was in part because they—and their recruiters—hadn't used the delayed-entry program to prepare for boot camp.
I wasn't necessarily appalled by the new recruits. Instead, I was appalled by the physical-fitness program. The high-school track team stars who whistled as they ran past? They trudged along in formation with those who failed—the slow ones who didn't spark a breeze so much as they seemed
