So, that stood out.
She was a college-educated officer in charge of Marines serving as drill instructors at boot camp, and she cried in front of her peers over having to describe what she had read.
Beyond that, the problems between her and her first sergeant were immediate and constant. Every day, all day, for three months, they hen-pecked and defied each other and behaved like children. I finally said, “You can't do this anymore.”
But they continued to squabble.
One day, the company commander came into my office and demanded to quit. And then her first sergeant went into the regimental sergeant major's office and demanded to quit.
I bet you were under the impression that you can't quit the Marine Corps.
Once again, Parris Island proved to be different from anywhere else in the Marine Corps. In the rest of the service, having command is considered the greatest privilege there is. You would never, ever hear of a commander marching into her CO's office and demanding reassignment. It was unheard-of.
And just to clear things up: They didn't want to quit because of me. They wanted to quit because they couldn't get along with each other.
The company commander and several of my drill instructors told me and my sergeant major that the first sergeant actively plotted against the CO: “Don't listen to her,” she would allegedly tell her DIs. “I know what we should be doing.”
I think I mentioned that when I arrived at Fourth Battalion, I discovered that many of the enlisted Marines believed they ran the show. And my predecessor's sergeant major had been pushed out for essentially trying to, as the most senior enlisted Marine in the battalion, usurp authority from the battalion commander. November's first sergeant definitely fell into the the-enlisted-should-run-the-show camp.
The CO was so weak that she never seemed to step in and say, “Bullshit. I'm the person in charge. I have command responsibility.” While she was happy to complain about her drill sergeants, it was easier for her to sit back and not do anything—to just let them run the show.
It seemed like she should have had enough experience at that point to assert herself, but, as I said earlier, the DIs can be intimidating. They get special-duty pay for it.
We started meeting the second time she said she wanted to quit. She was crying and saying things like, “I can't take it anymore.” I was sincerely concerned for her.
I decided to take her under my wing. To me, that's what good leaders do. I said, “Look, for thirty days straight, we're going to meet and talk through leadership challenges, read articles on leadership, and discuss philosophy, because I want you to be successful.”
We plotted out her day to make sure she properly supervised her Marines, as well as to make sure she was visible to them. We developed her command philosophy to make it more positive—to make sure her Marines felt appreciated.
But it felt like she came into every meeting kicking and screaming.
I get it. You don't want your boss all up in your business, micromanaging you. But if you're not doing your job, there should be an expectation that your boss will, in fact, be all up in your business. My hope was that we could do this face-to-face mentoring for a little bit, and then she would learn from it and be able to mentor her own Marines in a similar way in the future. In the immediate future, I hoped she would be a better company commander.
At first, that seemed to be happening. For about three weeks, she implemented strategies we talked about, and I started to see the morale in her company change for the better.
But then she stopped doing the things we agreed she should do. When she faced her first major command challenge, she acted like a five-year-old child being made to eat broccoli: She stuffed my directions in her cheek and then spit them out when I wasn't looking.
It happened when one of her DIs stepped over the line after the Marine Corps birthday ball. Rather than seeing a proud tradition to further celebrate unit cohesion, we saw a blatant example of a Marine left to fend for herself.
Every year, the Marine Corps has birthday celebrations on or around November 10, which is considered the birthday of the Corps. If you aren't deployed or in the field on a training exercise, the celebrations are pretty elaborate affairs with fancy outfits and food and lots of booze, and it's a chance to schmooze with your co-workers and celebrate your bond as teammates.
Well, on her way home from the ball, one of the CO's Marines got a DUI. Any time a service member gets in trouble with the law, his or her company commander finds out about it, and then the company commander can impose a punishment, such as extra duty or a reduction in rank. But getting in trouble can also be a sign of bad morale; generally, Marines who care about their careers don't risk them, and leaders who pay attention to their Marines can usually figure out if a problem is brewing before it happens. And certainly, before the ball, everyone gets a talking-to (a “safety briefing”) about the consequences of drinking and driving, as well as a plea to be safe. We don't want to lose any Marines on the battlefield, and we certainly don't want to lose them behind the wheel.
When I asked the CO about the DUI and what might have been going on with the Marine, she basically fell apart. When I continued to probe about how she had briefed her Marines about drinking and driving prior to the event, she dug in her heels and refused to have a conversation. Later in the discussion, when I said it appeared that she was no longer applying the changes we had
