The sergeant major didn't read the entire article to the generals. Instead, he threw out points about how, for decades, women have underperformed and been held to a lower standard. And he talked about the great progress we've made. The sergeant major seemed to be completely onboard. He may not have known his boss, General Dunford, was not.
And that's when the wind changed and the weather sock began to point at me. I didn't know it at the time—the breeze takes a while to go from the Navy Yard in Washington, DC, to Beaufort, South Carolina.
The three- and four-stars were outraged. They did not create the ground-combat integration study just to learn that women were making progress elsewhere.
I'm positive, based on feedback that Joe and I received, that the commandant was alarmed with Fourth Battalion's results, especially on the rifle range. Those results would shoot holes in the multi-million-dollar study, the Marine Corps Gender Integration Task Force study, the study that showed that women couldn't perform infantry tasks as well as men.
I'm sure General Dunford wondered how much Fourth Battalion's success would affect the integrity of the study.
Our success weakened his argument against integrating women.
Fortunately for him, my XO said I rolled my eyes.2
So, by April 2015, I understood fully that Colonel Haas wanted me out.
You may have figured this out a few chapters back, but I didn't realize what was happening right under my nose until after the fact.
That's how mobbing works. It's insidious.
Still, I figured that Colonel Haas was leaving in July, and that was only a few more months away. I thought I could bide my time until then by avoiding contact with him, celebrating the good stuff, and practicing daily affirmations in the office mirror: “I like myself, and I can do this.”
And I had Joe, my sergeant major, and Mister Fitzwizzle, who wrapped himself around me the instant I got home each night like a furry security blanket.
In one way, it wasn't that difficult: Colonel Haas never showed up to observe any training. He never visited me, unless it was for the initial strength test and pick-up or end-of-cycle debriefs. He never came to see what we were doing out in the field, and he never, ever came to see what we were doing on the rifle range. I had never had a commander who spent less time with his subordinate commanders.
But my peers thought his leadership through neglect was awesome. They were away from the flagpole, doing what they wanted to do with no interference from the “boss.”
After our encounter in January at the confidence course, General Williams came to visit me on two more occasions to tell me he thought I was doing good things.
“Sir, I think I've got my finger on the pulse of this battalion,” I told him. “I know there's a disgruntled group of folks here, and I know that my problems will be mainly solved after two of them move on.”
And he encouraged me, telling me that he knew what was going on and that I just needed to wait it out.
So we kept on, working hard to improve the statistics, with me trying not to cross Colonel Haas's path. In February, I made the mistake of trying to talk to him about something that seemed obvious.
I sent him an email with our weekly training report.
“Improving the stats will be critical to improving the credibility of our female recruits,” I said, regarding the work we were doing to improve our PT, rifle range, and academic results.
He emailed back.
“I don't understand why you think this impacts credibility,” he said. “I'd be very interested in talking to you about it, so let me know when you're available.”
Uh-oh.
But, again, I decided to be positive about it. Maybe he was onboard.
I immediately emailed back and told him I would really love the opportunity to talk with him about why I thought improving the stats was so important. I asked for a meeting at his earliest availability.
He never got back to me.
Silence.
My takeaway? He didn't want to encourage change. He didn't want the friction that comes with forcing change. Organizational change is hard.
Still, how could he not understand how performance affects the credibility of the female recruits and DIs? I needed to explain it to him. It wasn't simply a matter of Kate proving a point to her boss: This man would likely move on to command other Marines—female Marines. He needed to understand.
Even though I didn't hear back from him, I continued to try to get through to him. But I hit a brick wall. I don't think that it was just a matter of him not liking me, although that was pretty apparent. I think that no matter who their commander was, he would not have been interested in how the female recruits were performing.
I was left with the sense that if I couldn't get from here to there with Colonel Haas, I needed to do something different.
That's when I wrote the article for the Marine Corps Gazette.
And, at that point, some things were going great for Fourth Battalion.
After November Company's first sergeant quit—for the second time—because she couldn't get along with her old company commander, we sent her home on terminal leave before she retired. When you're in the military, you get thirty days of leave—or vacation—a year, give or take, for special circumstances. If you don't use all of your leave, it adds up. So, when you leave the military, you can basically take vacation for the time up until your actual last day in the military. That vacation time is called “terminal leave.” She simply went home.
The new first sergeant came in and started changing things with the new CO. They were both amazing, and upbeat, and they
