He went into a ten-minute tirade, all the while denying he had said anything of the sort and essentially implying that the company commander had lied. To try to smooth things over, I invited him to lunch to talk about it. I didn't want to have lunch with him. I didn't like him.
But I didn't want to just hang up and leave the situation unresolved, either.
“I've got to go,” he said. “Have a nice f—ing day.”
And then he hung up on me.
He was the acting regimental commander, and he had just yelled at me and hung up.
I thought for a bit about what to do to remedy the situation. The goal wasn't to antagonize him: The goal was to get some respect for my Marines and build a bridge with one of my peers.
So, I sent him an email saying something like, “Gosh. I don't know what happened. I think we got disconnected?” And I repeated my lunch invitation.
He never got back to me.
I didn't say anything about the disagreement to Colonel Haas. I'm a big girl—I can handle such conversations. I figured that if Kissoon was a rational person, he would figure it out and would want to have a good relationship with all of his peers, including me.
This was in September, which was also when I had my first run-in with Colonel Haas. I hadn't said anything to him about the phone call with Josh, but apparently Kissoon had. During his lecture about the emails I was sending to the recruiting-station commanders, Haas said, “People think you can't get along with anyone.” My internal reaction was, What the hell? I've been getting along with everyone on the depot. Everyone except Kissoon.
I have always been known as a direct person, a quality that male officers were applauded for having. If there was ever an issue, I'd pick up the phone, or I would go see the involved parties in person to try to massage things. Some people see that as confrontational, but how else do you get things done? Last I checked, that was what collaboration was about—open communication.
But Colonel Haas's perception seemed to be that Kissoon was easier to get along with, so if Kissoon said I was “abrasive” and couldn't get along with anyone, then that's what Colonel Haas believed.
The battalion commanders were all privy to any drill-instructor misconduct that was going on in the depot, because we got together once a month with the regimental staff, Marine Corps Community Services, and a psychologist to talk about what we were doing to mitigate potential misconduct and mental-health issues with at-risk Marines in our battalions. The perception was that the problems with the male battalions were not immediately assumed to be related to people not getting along; rather, the problems were perceived as being related to financial stressors, post-traumatic stress, or family issues. These were the root causes of misconduct and mental-health problems everywhere in the Marine Corps. But for the women of Fourth Battalion, problems were blamed on personality issues, gossiping, and whining because women can't get along.
A male DI abuses a recruit? Boys will be boys. A male battalion commander yells a profanity and hangs up on his female peer? He was just mad. A female battalion commander rolls her eyes in front of her Marines or peers? She's mean and can't get along with anyone.
From our weekly regimental staff meetings, it was apparent to everyone on that depot that Third Battalion had a recruit-abuse problem. It was common knowledge that Third Battalion drill instructors prided themselves on using force against recruits to make them tougher. The regulations say that training staff can't come within an arm's length of a recruit, ever, unless he or she is doing it to make a correction to the recruit's position or uniform, or to prevent accident or injury. So, if someone is holding her weapon wrong, you can gently guide the recruit's rifle into the right position.
But Kissoon's DIs were notorious for making hard corrections. I saw such behaviors, at first, with my own DIs. The female recruits were marching, and the DI yelled, “Eyes right!”—which means you smartly snap your head to the right. If a recruit didn't move quickly enough, a DI would yank the recruit's chin to the right. That's totally inappropriate and wrong, and I eliminated those types of violations after I took command. But in Kissoon's battalion, this type of conduct was encouraged and was disguised as incentive training.
Incentive training, or the use of physical exercise to reprimand a recruit for poor performance, only authorized specific exercises to be performed by recruits. Additionally, the DI supervising the incentive-training session was required to limit—and record—the time for each event and possess a card listing the only permissible exercises. For example, you can make a recruit do push-ups, but during their first weeks at Parris Island, you can't make them do more than twenty push-ups at a time. You can then move on to another exercise, such as jumping jacks, but no more than fifty at a time during the first few weeks of training. You also can't push them past the point of physical exertion; you must make sure that they are safe; and you must make sure that they have enough water and are not suffering from heat exhaustion. After the recruit from Third Battalion died in March 2016, investigations revealed that drill instructors often conducted illegal incentive training for extended periods of time in places where officers couldn't see it happening. These sessions also involved the drill instructors slapping and choking recruits, and slamming them against walls.4
According to Marine Corps Times, one drill instructor is alleged to have poked holes in a recruit's face with a pen; a drill instructor allegedly forced a recruit to do the DI's college homework for him; a drill instructor forced a recruit to
