The entire time Kate was at Parris Island, we heard about investigations into complaints about leadership at Thumpin’ Third Battalion, the male battalion associated with being harsh and abusive. The battalion commander there was the favored son of Colonel Dan Haas, the regimental commander. We thought something would come of those investigations, and that would help Kate because everyone could then see the turmoil in the regiment was due in large part to Haas's weak, laissez-faire leadership style.
But nothing happened. It didn't make sense.
We found out later that as Kate was strictly enforcing regulations, drill instructors in Third Battalion were putting recruits in industrial clothes dryers and hazing them in an old barracks called the Dungeon. Nobody in the depot's leadership took the situation at Thumpin’ Third seriously until on March 18, 2016, Recruit Raheel Siddiqui allegedly shouted he would rather die than go on training and threw himself over a third-floor balcony rail to escape abusive drill instructors.9
I believe that the depot's leaders had to have known long before Siddiqui jumped off the balcony that there were problems with the regiment's leadership and the staff at Thumpin’ Third. If they didn't, they should have been fired for negligence. It's not that hard to supervise DIs—it just takes a lot of time and personal engagement. You have to care.
On the heels of Kate's mistreatment and Siddiqui's death, my low opinion of Brigadier General Williams persists. I still have a fairly robust network in the Corps, and people regularly report back to me about what's going on in the commandant's staff and elsewhere. Even after Kate was fired, one of my associates at the Pentagon told me that General Williams told him that he was “voluntold” by his boss to fire Kate. If these allegations are true, this tells me that he didn't have the moral courage to stand up to his superiors about their decision to fire Kate. I heard from another contact that Williams's boss indicated that if the choice is between believing a colonel and a lieutenant colonel, he would pick the colonel every time. That's just the way the Marine Corps is. When a more junior officer is outspoken and calls the Corps out on its bullshit, the higher-ups circle the wagons and eat the young. Colonels will be sacrificed to protect generals; and lieutenant colonels, for colonels. That's the way it is. The fact that I had a Pentagon source telling me that the commandant's staff was talking outcomes about Kate before any investigation was complete indicates to me that they wanted her out of the way at all costs. Despite her many successes in improving female performance, they saw her as the problem.
As I said, I had worked at the Pentagon for five years at the top of the Corps. I had five years to build relationships based on trust and mutual respect, a five-year record of superior performance, five years to develop my network. All to say I was wired-in, deep.
When the tide started turning against Kate, people who cared about me started tipping me off. In June 2015, I took my dad fishing in Michigan. One evening, about halfway through the month, I was standing on a dock when a Pentagon source called to tell me, “You need to get ready, because there's bad stuff coming your way.”
At first I didn't want to believe it. My thought was, “As soon as this issue reaches the first level of adult supervision, it will go away. Maybe at a three- or four-star level, but preferably the two-star.”
The two-star involved, General Williams's boss, and I had served together in Iraq in 2003 with First Marine Division. He failed to ensure Kate had a fair hearing and turned out to be a complete and utter disappointment. I was also hopeful that the commandant's lawyer, whom I personally medevacked in combat after he was wounded in action, would help, but he also turned out to be a complete and utter disappointment. That's the thing about the Corps: It's family business. When it goes south, it gets ugly quick.
I served with the Commandant, General Dunford, when he was the Regimental Combat Team Five commander back in 2003, then as his speechwriter in Afghanistan in 2013 for three months, and then again for the first five months of his commandancy. He too was no help.
It was pretty clear to me that General Dunford wanted to keep women out of the infantry at all costs. He was the only member of the joint chiefs (senior leaders of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and National Guard) to ask the secretary of defense for an exception to policy in September 2015 to keep women out of ground-combat arms jobs and units.10 That's one way of saying it. The other way is to say that he wanted to perpetuate the Marine Corps’ policy of discriminating against women for some jobs based on their sex alone—regardless of whether or not they could meet the standards. His request made a lot of headlines because it placed him in direct opposition to his bosses, the Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, who were pushing for all jobs to be open to any person, male or female, who could meet the standards. Even more disappointing, when Dunford didn't get his way, he skipped the secretary of defense's press conference on December 3, 2015, announcing the policy change.11 It's practically a Pentagon tradition for both the secretary and his top general, the chairman of the joint chiefs, to attend together any press conferences announcing major policy changes.
In retrospect, it makes sense that the commandant would do nothing to ensure Kate's complaint about systemic gender bias was properly addressed. It's pretty evident that every advancement Kate made with her Marines at Fourth Battalion stripped away justifications for keeping women out of ground-combat arms jobs and eroded claims that women don't shoot as well, don't run as fast, and can't
