Instead of breaking the recruits into ability groups for PT so that each group would be challenged to run faster, we lumped everyone into one category. Instead of getting faster, the track stars ended up getting slower, and the slow recruits never had any incentive to improve. It was a mess.
The fast recruits? We should have encouraged them to outrun the men, but instead they were segregated with no competition.
There's nothing I love more than the smell of kicking a guy's ass in a training run in the morning. (Just ask my husband.) When I was on recruiting and would regularly participate in poolee (ahem, new enlistee) PT sessions, the new male recruits would hear me running up behind them, and they would freak. All of a sudden, they would start sprinting, just so a woman—much less a middle-aged woman—wouldn't beat them. It was hilarious.
It's silly, when you think about it: We group people based on their intelligence and their innate abilities into appropriate jobs. Cool. If you're super-smart, we're going to develop that. Let's see, Sorting Hat says “engineer.” But if you were fast or strong, as a woman at Parris Island, you were stuck with the rest of the pack.
The hikes. Good lord, the hikes. My company commanders weren't clocking GPS properly for the routes that we hiked, so they were too short. They weren't weighing the packs to make sure they were properly loaded, so the women weren't properly prepared for the weight of packs and the length of hikes they would do with men in their future units.
And, even so, they were still falling out of hikes that weren't as long as they were supposed to be. Or, they were so overloaded with gear—because no one checked their load—in packs that had not been properly fitted, that they broke.
As I mapped out all of this data and tried to come up with a plan, I would stop and stare at a board that hung on the wall in my office. It listed the names and dates of every previous commander of Fourth Battalion. You don't head up Fourth Battalion if you're not a top performer compared to your peer group. I could go down the list and recite where they were now: General officer. General officer. Senior Executive Service, which is as senior as you can get as a civilian federal employee.
After a while, I started to wonder about their accomplishments, especially in light of what I had seen in the statistics.
I found that commanders at least back to the late 1990s did the same things over and over again, never changing the training to achieve better results.
You can't say you're a good leader and ignore the data. You can't say you're a good leader and ignore that one of your Marines has been on duty for seventy-something days in a row. You can't be a good leader and know that your Marines have sent their kids away so they can do this duty. I just can't reconcile that. You are not a good leader if you ignore the fact that you are sending women who have never been able to shoot their rifles to units that go to Iraq and Afghanistan.
In my mind, it is not okay to know that your Marines are failing and your recruits are failing, and just ignore it.
My approach has always been that I go to my units and I find things to fix. I'll tell you that a lot of women on that list are the exceptions. They've been treated like exceptions the entire time they've been in, because they're a fast runner or knowledgeable about their jobs; and they go to Parris Island because they know that's the next step to move up the ladder.
But the realities of going to war and supporting their fellow Marines make the training all the more important.
My sergeant major and I talked about that reality constantly. We didn't want to get our Marines—or anyone else—killed.
Before I could do anything, I had to address my own deep secret.
Well, I guess it's not a secret if you wear two badges on your chest proclaiming your inadequacy:
Marksman.
Yeah, I had low scores on the shooting range with my rifle and pistol. In the Marine Corps, we call them “pizza boxes” because the marksman badge is a metal square with three concentric circles inside—pizza in a box.
Badges of shame.
The last badge is marksman. If you shoot below marksman, you don't qualify.
I didn't start out sporting cheese-and-pepperoni. The first time I qualified at the rifle range, I shot expert.
That first time, at the Basic School, I felt great. There was never any expectation that we wouldn't or shouldn't do well.
But my next time at the rifle range, I qualified only as a marksman.
See, my first duty station was with an administrative unit in Twentynine Palms, California, and many admin units in the Marines are exempt from having to qualify. This was during the lull between the Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq. I guess during that time frame, the leadership figured that the only thing admin Marines would fire in combat was a typewriter. Why waste bullets on admin pogues if the grunts really needed them? So, I didn't qualify with the rifle again until six years later. By that time, I'd forgotten all the fundamentals.
And, you know, I was in Okinawa; it was windy; I had a hard time adjusting my windage…and I completely lacked confidence. So, yeah, I shot marksman.
I went from shooting expert to having to wear a pizza box for my rifle-qualification badge, and, after that, because I was assigned to exempt units, I never had the opportunity to shoot on the rifle range again. At about the same time, I was promoted to major. When you advance to major, you no longer qualify with the rifle—you qualify only with the pistol; so I never got
