“I just had this horribly hostile counseling session with Colonel Haas and I think he was trying to bait me until he could fire me on the spot,” she said. “I wasn't biting. What do I do?”
“Why don't you go to your reviewing officer,” I said, meaning Williams. “He says you're doing good things—clearly, he has a sympathetic ear.” The whole point of having a reviewing officer in the chain of command is to resolve differences between you and your reporting senior; in Kate's case, her reporting senior was Haas.
I didn't know it then, but this was the worst advice I could have given her.
As soon as she contacted Williams, he folded. He hit the panic button and asked higher headquarters to launch an equal-opportunity investigation into Kate's behavior and then set his dog, the Headquarters battalion commander, on an investigative trail to dig up dirt on her. From what I could tell, it wasn't much of an investigation—it was more of a kangaroo court. Essentially this guy set out a shingle that read: If you've got a gripe about Germano, come see me. The investigation wasn't thorough. It didn't include many of the statements of Marines who supported Kate. He never interviewed Kate. He never followed up with questions to her statement. It was a complete shit show, in my opinion. In grad school, we called this “purposive research”—studies done to find enough “evidence” to support a preconceived conclusion.
I think Williams didn't want to hold Haas accountable, because that's hard. But the hard things need to be done. If not, the next thing you know, you'll have a big abuse scandal with recruits jumping off balconies, and it will be no surprise to anyone who knew what was going on at the depot at that time.
Having spent two years at the Corps’ boot camp in San Diego and served as the director of the Drill Instructor School there, I always saw the depot as this big machine made of muscle-bound DIs fueled by Red Bull, Copenhagen, and testosterone. The officers were supposed to serve as the governor on this powerful and wild-steam contraption spinning balls to the wall. When the officers failed to lead and supervise, bad things happened. Like Barnes said in the movie Platoon, “When the machine breaks down, we [all] break down.”5
When you are working as a leader in what psychologist Phil Zimbardo calls a total environment—ala the Stanford Prison Experiment, like the depot at Parris Island—you need to have a strong spine.6 You need to hold yourself and others accountable. You need to stand for something. When I worked at the depot, I read a lot about what Zimbardo and guys like Albert Bandura had to say about dehumanization and the potential for abuse, so I could identify symptoms. I also learned something important from Dr. John Steiner, whose ideas Zimbardo discussed and expanded upon in a conference: “In any given situation, the roles individuals play have margins of discretion within which they can exercise freedom of choice in how they carry out the function of their roles. We call this the capacity for free will. Those margins are expanded when people have a high degree of moral and social intelligence, and trust, but I add that, those margins are compressed when situations become total and powerful.”7
And that's the risk associated with putting young Marine leaders in positions of near total authority over recruits. Without firm, moral leadership like Kate's, bad things will happen and recruits will be abused, or worse.
Back to Williams and Haas and Kate. I had advised Kate to go to Williams for backing. I suppose her other option would have been to shut up and endure it, but that's not her style. She has never let anyone bully her, no matter the rank. She would always stand her ground and push back when it came to matters of principle.
Here's the other thing you need to know: By 2010, four years before Kate went to the depot, both of us had decided to get out of the Corps at the twenty-year mark. There was no question that we were going to retire by 2015 for me and 2016 for her. That decision had a single clarifying effect: When you don't care about making the next rank, the Corps has very little to hold over you when it comes to making hard decisions.
There's irony in that. The Marine Corps higher-ups put Kate at Parris Island because they were grooming her to become a colonel and a brigadier general. She had two successful tours on recruiting duty, had a solid tour in combat with the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, was selected for resident schools, and had been hand-picked to be an aide to the secretary of the Navy. The Corps was putting her in the right spots with the right visibility for advancement to top leadership. And, typically, you become a female general in the Marine Corps by doing a tour at Fourth Battalion. She went down to South Carolina with a clear conscious, a commitment to do the right thing, and the moral Kevlar armor that comes with not being beholden to any promotion board.
The Pentagon can be a morally nebulous place at times. When I started working there for the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Kate turned me on to this quote from Australian-born British intellectual Gilbert Murray, which I kept on the wall above my desk: “Be careful in dealing with a man who cares nothing for comfort or promotion, but is simply determined to do what he believes to be right. He is a dangerous uncomfortable enemy, because his body, which you can always conquer, gives you little purchase upon his soul.”8
That describes my Kate.
But that doesn't describe everyone in the Marine Corps—especially generals. The way to top leadership in the Corps isn't by rocking the boat. The fastest track is to fall in line and go
