Whoa.
Suddenly we were qualifying at a rate of 95 percent.
We didn't tell the recruits shooting would be hard because they were women, and we focused the coaches on eliminating any negative comments in their instruction to the recruits. This was about teaching them shooting fundamentals and expecting excellence. And the women delivered excellence.
As Colonel Leonard worked to change the culture at the range, I focused on the mind-set of the drill instructors and the company commanders to make sure they understood they were responsible for reinforcing weapons-handling safety and shooting fundamentals in the squad bays. The range training would no longer end after the women returned to the barracks. Instead, we encouraged the recruits to use their hour of free time to prepare to shoot as experts on the range. Back in the squad bays after evening chow, they would focus on weapons safety and remedial action, practice getting into shooting positions, and get so used to handling their weapons that there would be no stress on the range.
We wanted the drill instructors and recruits to be calm. And in fact, at night, walking through the barracks, you'd see the recruits lying on their backs on the deck (floor) and working on breathing techniques while their drill instructors led them through stress-reduction drills. The first time my sergeant major walked into the squad bay and saw this, she stopped cold. “If I had seen this ten years ago, I would have had a heart attack,” she told me. Between my yogi drill instructors and my deep-breathing recruits, we could have started an ashram.
Okay, that's probably a stretch.
But we wanted them to understand trigger control and the impact of deep breathing on stress control, and we were thinking outside of the box to do it. What we'd been doing before clearly hadn't worked.
I wasn't the first one to push this idea. About a year before I got there, Colonel Leonard brought in a master sergeant who was the top female shooter in the entire Marine Corps, Julia Watson. In 2014, she became the fourth female Marine to become distinguished in both the rifle and the pistol at the Competition-in-Arms Program Western Divisional marksmanship competition on Fort Pendleton in California. She also happened to teach shooting.
At the time, there wasn't a whole lot of buy-in from Fourth Battalion.
But after I arrived, he had it.
Once again, we started talking about how we could have her inspire our women on a regular basis. Well, how about making a video of women hitting the targets like it was no big deal? And how about we play it in the squad bays during free time so the recruits would see it day in and day out and become conditioned to it?
And, just for fun, how about we hang targets in the squad bay so the recruits better understand the scoring system? We brought in shooting barrels, so they could practice focusing in on the targets. The metal barrels had different-sized pictures of the targets painted on them to simulate what the targets would look like at different range distances, so the recruits could practice focusing in on the targets in the different shooting positions.
By the time they got to the range, it was all second nature.
In Fiscal Year 2015, we achieved a 92 percent female initial qualification average.
Boom!
Did you see the heavens open up and hear the angels start to sing? Even though it seemed so obvious, it felt like a miracle to have tangible results.
We had a couple of classes that didn't shoot well. The platoons that didn't shoot well were led by drill instructors who did not buy into the changes we were trying to make. Generally speaking, the problems came from November Company.
But I wasn't about to let them hold back everybody else. It was the first time in the history of the Marine Corps that the female recruits were competitive with the men on the rifle range. And it happened just as the Marine Corps worked to prove women should not serve in the infantry because, among other incorrect assumptions, they couldn't shoot. I thought the Marine Corps leadership would be happy about what we were doing to make our recruits tougher and better shots. I should have known better.
Next, we looked at the physical-training playbook, which contained the PT plan for every single day of boot camp. This was our opportunity to improve scores on the physical-fitness test, as well as to decrease injuries. The bulk of the fitness training at boot camp occurs in the first four weeks, and then the recruits move on to other things, like hikes, the rife range, and field exercises. The subsequent four weeks, they're on the rifle range and they're out in the field.
We knew if we didn't improve their fitness during those first four weeks, we would essentially lose the opportunity to build them up for the rest of their training.
So we looked at the playbook to try to figure out how we could get them into better shape faster without breaking them. We instituted some obvious solutions: We split them into ability groups. The fastest recruits ran with the fastest drill instructors, which made the entire group faster. But the same was true of the other groups. If we needed to couch-potato the slowest group to get them to a point where they could keep up without losing a lung, we could do that without slowing down the fast women.
And good runners cross-train and sprint and go fast or do slow recovery runs or do interval training. We could do all of those things.
So we did. And it worked.
We also started tracking lower-extremity injury rates because I wanted to know how we could improve training to avoid these issues. The stronger you are, the less likely you are to have a lower-extremity injury.
But that's not what the
