In fact, in 2017, Time Person of the Year was awarded to the silence breakers of the #MeToo movement—women who had bravely stepped into the public view to share their stories of sexual harassment and assault in order to draw attention to the enormity of the problem and promote change.
We are finally recognizing and demanding in America that men need to behave better. “Throwing like a girl” should no longer be an insult, nor should we accept the attitude that “boys will be boys.”
I understood that, to make improvements, we weren't going to get any help from the regiment. We were on our own.
Fortunately, we had enough strong, stubborn women at Fourth Battalion to figure out the best way to improve the performance of the female recruits.
Most of my drill instructors didn't need to be convinced to face new challenges head-on, and, man, their enthusiasm kept me coming to work every morning excited about the day.
When we began focusing on improving the performance of our recruits, we started with the rifle range because “Every Marine Is a Rifleman.” It's our motto. And we didn't want our new Marines checking in at Marine Combat Training (MCT) wearing pizza boxes on their Service Alpha uniforms. We wanted them to show up to their new units feeling confident and proud, and we wanted the brand-new male Marines to have a high opinion of the female Marines from the start.
For decades, women at Parris Island qualified at a rate of about 67 percent to 72 percent, compared to the male rate of 85 percent to 93 percent. The men had more experts and sharpshooters, too.
First, I gathered the Marines: Talk to me about why we're not qualifying at the same rate as the men are.
They told me what they had been told as new recruits:
“You're too short to fire well.”
“Your bodies aren't proportioned right for a rifle. You can't reach the trigger.”
“Women fail under stress.”
“Women aren't used to being around guns.”
After a while, we start to believe what we're told.
And it's nonsense. I was convinced that male drill instructors were not telling short infantrymen that they wouldn't be able to shoot as well. I was convinced that male drill instructors weren't telling their city kids that they wouldn't get used to a rifle.
Worse, when I arrived at Parris Island, the female DIs had a history of hazing the recruits so hard at the rifle range that they peed their pants. Once again, instead of focusing on shooting fundamentals, the female DIs seemed interested only in outdoing each other in toughness and cruelty.
That can't have helped with the recruits’ controlled-breathing exercises.
Our Recruit Training Order explicitly states no yelling and screaming on the rifle range. Beyond the obvious effects on a recruit's shooting, you don't necessarily want a recruit with a loaded rifle to be angry at her drill instructor and pushed to the point of snapping.
When we talked to the coaches at the range to further understand their impression of the female drill instructors, they said, “Yeah. They're terrifying.”
I remember calling Joe in maybe September of that year. He shoots competitively in club matches with the International Defensive Pistol Association and does cowboy-action shooting at Single Action Shooting Society matches—he's pretty good. But when I told him about how poorly our women were shooting, he was flabbergasted. Women beat him on the range all the time. No one freaked out about some biological reason for why women shouldn't be able to best a dude: He told me they just said, “Good job!”
My sergeant major and I came up with a plan—incorporating what our Marines had told us—and then we asked for help.
The weapons field-training battalion was waiting for us.
Once again, I met with Colonel Leonard. I'm positive that if he had been my commanding officer, rather than Colonel Haas, I'd still be at the regiment and performance and morale at Fourth Battalion would be incredible. He was amazing.
Colonel Leonard and I sat down in July and started just spit-balling and brainstorming and thinking about how we could test the different theories that had been presented over the years to justify why women at Parris Island couldn't shoot above marksman. As we came up with ideas, I would take them back to my Marines. We started crossing barriers off the list as we came up with solutions.
The shooting coaches, 99 percent of whom were men, had become conditioned to believe that women couldn't shoot; and they passed on those opinions to the female recruits. So, we had to deal with some language-expectancy issues first.
Our coaches said things like, “Well, you guys will do okay. Women normally don't do well, but we just need you to qualify.” That translated directly into the results we got at the range: Our recruits assumed they'd be lucky to qualify.
But all of the excuses from the coaches fell to the wayside in the summer of 2014 when two rifle-range coaches from San Diego came to Parris Island for a visit. Colonel Leonard wanted to find out how much bias came into play with his coaches, so he asked two coaches from the West Coast who had not been exposed to the gender bias on Parris Island to coach two platoons of women on the range. These guys were used to dealing with male recruits and had no experience coaching women, so they had no preconceived notions about what women could or couldn't do. They came in; they focused on the fundamentals; and they taught our recruits how to focus on their rifle sights, breathe, and gently squeeze the trigger.
Holy crap.
No one shot herself in the foot. Nobody broke down. No one needed assistance reaching the trigger. We qualified at record levels.
And it caused the Parris Island coaches to believe that they had to do better to compete with the West Coast coaches.
Colonel Leonard went with it. He went to his rifle coaches
