On May 9, 2015, we planned to do an integrated Crucible hike with one of the battalions. The majority of the hikes had gone well, and it was still a point of pride for me that we had fought for integration and then proved ourselves successful.
I walked with my Marines—it was Papa Company and a company from Third Battalion that day—and almost as soon as the hike started, it became evident that the company commander and her first sergeant had not coordinated properly with their male counterparts. This was about two weeks before the change of command for the company commander, and I could tell she had completely mentally checked out by that point: She did not do anything beyond what she had to do. We ended up finishing about a mile and a half behind the male battalion.
Papa's CO let the guys get away with shuttling us to the back of the formation, but part of the delay was because the female DIs took too long on breaks and no leaders from the company or series staffs did anything to stay on schedule. I'm not just saying they needed to go faster; they actually were supposed to take a twenty-minute break at the halfway point so the recruits could eat some fruit and drink some Gatorade before getting on the road again. But that day, the company took much longer to start the second half of the hike, and then Third Battalion took off like lightning, seemingly to prevent the female formation from catching up. We walked with GPS, and it was clear that they hiked at a pace much faster than three miles per hour, which was the doctrinal hike pace.
Having them speed out ahead of us was the norm when we hiked with Thumpin’ Third. We knew that before the hike, and we should have formed up our recruits and quickly gotten back on the road after the break so Third Battalion couldn't shoot out ahead of us.
Several times, I had talked to my Marines about stressing to their male counterparts during the planning for the Crucible that we expected them to follow the rules when it came to the conduct of the integrated hikes. I had also talked to the CO about this because she hadn't read the previous after-action review in which I had clearly stated that we need to make sure we don't let the guys undermine our integration efforts during the hikes. That we shouldn't undermine our own efforts seemed obvious.
A couple of days after that, on May 11, one of my drill instructors in Papa Company requested mast because she felt that she was being mistreated as a new drill instructor by her peers in her platoon. Like a lot of new drill instructors, she quickly became sick after her first few weeks, because of the strain of the duty and being exposed to recruit germs. (Sixty people in one room leads to a lot of germs.) The new DI's leadership had denied her request to go to Medical, and to her, that was the last straw after weeks of new-instructor hazing. She knew they were not acting in accordance with my command philosophy, so she brought her complaints to me.
By that time, I had already spoken to the hard-as-nails first sergeant and her disengaged CO several times about the command-climate issues in the company, but to no avail.
Because I had worked hard to eliminate any type of recruit and drill-instructor mistreatment and increase the transparency in the battalion, I thought it would be important to speak to the company about what had happened on the hike and about the request mast, so I had an all-hands meeting with Papa Company. We talked about the poor results of the hike and the request mast complaints, and I stressed the need for the drill instructors to treat each other with respect and common decency. At one point, the company commander tried to explain herself and why she didn't work harder to integrate the hike, and I cut her off. I didn't want to hear her excuses, and I needed her to set the standard for her Marines.
I talked to the company about holding each other accountable, and I related it back to the anonymous complaints in the command-climate survey about me. I told them I needed for them to understand the difference between feeling bad because you've been reprimanded and confusing that with the leadership being mean. I clarified that being reprimanded because you've done something incorrectly should be an expected outcome, no different from what we would expect anywhere else in the Marine Corps. This is a matter of feeling versus fact. And I'm much happier to talk with them about what a great job they've done. I wanted them to understand that we can't teach the recruits personal responsibility if we're not taking responsibility for our own actions.
But I was also angry about the request mast—not at the drill instructor, but that it had gotten to that point. The drill instructor's issues should have been handled immediately at the series- and company-commander level. That's what small-unit leadership and conflict resolution are for. I was irritated that the request mast was necessary because, in a properly functioning company, the problems would not have occurred in the first place.
The command-climate survey just added to the perception that there was “all that drama” in Fourth Battalion—women who couldn't sort out their issues because they're “too emotional,” and yet, the company leadership was doing nothing to ensure their Marines were taken care of when they were sick, that they were being trained and mentored, and that we pushed back when Third Battalion tried to make us look like we couldn't keep up on hikes.
Then, Colonel Haas gave me my worst performance-evaluation ranking ever,
