I was looking around, and two pews behind me sat one of those attractive women from the pool. And she was alone. My mental gears began to turn. I looked back again, and some dude was next to her. Damn. Foiled again.
After mass, I went to the base department store and flipped through CDs, enjoying my day off. And there she was again. Alone. Quickly thinking of something funny to say, I turned around, and she was gone. Damn.
Then I was driving home in my blue BMW 328 lieutenant-mobile. A black Honda Del Sol pulled up, and it was being driven by that same woman. I looked at her. She looked at me. Our eyes locked. She scowled and sped off. Damn.
I was transfixed. Like the Hardy Boys, I was obsessed with solving the Mystery of Bigfoot Riding a Unicorn, in other words, the Mystery of a Rare, Beautiful, Single, Female Marine at Twentynine Palms.
I thought, Okay, Plenzler, assuming she is an officer, there are only three or four places she could work on base. So I got up a little earlier on Monday, cruised the base, and found it—that black Honda Del Sol.
Yeah, I'm not ashamed of it.
So I went to the company office and asked a fellow lieutenant in my company, this big galoot named Justin Anderson, if he knew of any single female second lieutenants with red hair and a black Honda Del Sol on base.
It went like this:
Justin (thick Long Island accent): Kate Germano?
Me: Dude, if I knew her name, would I be asking?
Justin: Yeah, we went to TBS together.
Me: And. You. Didn't. Let. Us. Know. That?!?!?
Justin: Want me to set something up?
Me: Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Justin: OK. Wednesday at the golf club.
The rest of the story is that Kate and I went to lunch on Wednesday; out for coffee in Joshua Tree, California, on Thursday evening; and to Palm Springs for a date on Saturday—and we have been together ever since.
You'd think my peers would be happy for me, right? Nope.
We'd be out in the field, training for a week or two weeks, and the lieutenants in my all-male battalion would say, “We're going to someone's house to drink beer Friday night. Are you coming with us? No chicks.”
I'd respond with something like, “Man, the last thing I want to do after sweating my ass off in this godforsaken desert with you assholes all week is go to your dirty house and sit on your dilapidated couch and drink cheap beer. Nah, bro, I'll pass. I think I'm going to go to Palm Springs with my hot girlfriend.”
I swear I wasn't rubbing it in.
Maybe a little.
But most of them were jerks about it: “Oh, you're pussy-whipped,” they'd say. And they were clearly offended that I was choosing Kate over the tribe. Their jealous banter became boorish, so I just stopped going to unit social events.
I suppose they could have invited her. She was a Marine. She and they may have had Marine things to discuss, but the guys made it weird. Here's an example:
Every year on or about November 10, the Corps, every unit around the world, celebrates its birthday with huge, formal balls. They include full dress uniforms, formal gowns, a band, and all that pomp and circumstance.
Weirdly, the guys wanted to know what she was wearing to the ball.
I didn't know where this was going, so I said, “What in the hell do you care what Kate's wearing to the ball?”
“Well, she's not wearing her uniform, is she?”
“Yeah,” I said. “She is.”
“Well our dates are wearing dresses.”
“Yeah, but they don't have a piece of paper hanging on the wall, signed by the president, saying they're a commissioned second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps.”
Like I said, they were weird about it. But this attitude about women ran deep.
I hadn't yet realized how systemic this attitude was. With the benefit of hindsight, I now realized that sexism and misogyny in the Marine Corps are baked in. I don't think it's by nefarious design, but it's being suffered, in the legal sense of the term, and they don't take the proper steps to correct it.
In fact, they encourage it.
For instance, when I was at the Infantry Officer Course (IOC) in 1996, our instructors told us that the INDOC, now called the combat endurance test, was specifically designed to keep women out. The INDOC, short for “indoctrination,” is a day-long qualification course involving running, land navigation, military knowledge, martial-arts skills, swimming, and unknown events—all on unknown time limits designed to increase the stress.
Let me back up a second. The matriculation of a Marine Corps officer at Quantico involves about ten weeks at Officer Candidates School. If you pass that, you get commissioned as a second lieutenant and then spend six months at the Basic School (TBS), where you learn everything there is to know about being a provisional rifle platoon commander. In the Corps, every officer is expected to know basic infantry skills and tactics. Most lieutenants go on to other schools like flight school or intelligence school or, in Kate's case, administration school, but the grunts go to IOC.
At Quantico, IOC is shrouded in mystery. At TBS, we'd see those gaunt, sinewy, lieutenants in the shadows doing grunt officer training. They were the varsity and they never spoke to us. It was like Fight Club. Later, when I was attending IOC, we were ordered not to talk about IOC to anyone, ever.
Journalist Elliot Ackerman, who served as a Marine infantry officer from 2003 to 2011, recently was interviewed on a podcast talking about gender integration in ground-combat arms units, and listening to it brought back so many memories about IOC3.
OK. I'm going to break the first rule of Fight Club: On the podcast, Elliot talked about low attrition at IOC, and I realized I can't remember anyone getting kicked out of my IOC class for performance, including some guys we thought had no business
