Because I knew I wouldn't be able to send it once I was relieved, I begged my sergeant major to make sure my Marines received the letter after I was relieved.
This was two weeks before Colonel Haas was supposed to have his change of command ceremony and leave Parris Island.
I packed up my belongings in my office, and then I waited.
It didn't take long.
Late that afternoon, Colonel Haas called me to say that I needed to be in the general's office the next morning. I told my sergeant major I thought I was going to be fired. At that point, she knew what side she needed to be on.
“Well, you know I've got two kids,” she told me. “I gotta make it out of here.”
In other words, she needed to make it until her retirement the next year and would do what she needed to do to survive. She was not going to fight for me or take my side publicly.
The next morning, I went into work, and she was nowhere to be found.
Later, I learned that she had been called into the depot sergeant major's office, where I suspect she was told something along the lines of, “You get in line, or you're not going to last either.”
After I was fired, I returned to my office, and she met me at the door. She had clearly been crying and looked awful; she expressed to me how sorry she was about how things had turned out, as she helped me to carry out my stuff to the car. But, emotionally, she was already gone.
I got in my car, and I drove home.
As Kate made her way up the East Coast toward home, I was already making some phone calls.
So was the Marine Corps.
Kate and I both worried that the Marine Corps’ leadership would try to come out ahead on this story. Typically, when an officer is relieved of command in the military under administrative reasons, the military releases a simple, generic statement with no details about its rationale for relieving an officer of his or her command.
It's only when an officer is found guilty at a court-martial—and these are typically for the most heinous things, like molesting children or accepting prostitutes as gifts in exchange for information—that the details are publicly released via the court proceedings.
But for political cases—when the military wants to make a point—the leadership will bend the rules, leak information, and use “cutouts” to pen op-eds in an attempt to control the message. In this case, we knew that the Marine Corps would not be thrilled about Kate having voiced concerns about systemic gender bias in the recruiting and training of women. It was pretty clear to me that she had been fired because (1) she was an outspoken, tough, aggressive woman; (2) Colonel Haas didn't like that; and (3) she was making too much progress in a direction that the senior leadership didn't want to go. She had shown that women can shoot well enough, run fast enough, and were tough enough to give the infantry a shot.
We were right.
Immediately after General Williams fired Kate, it's clear that the Marine Corps started leaking information to the press—in a complete violation of their own release-of-information policies.
I was able to prove this.
I pulled up all of the cases of commanders who were relieved between 2012 and 2016 to see what information the Corps released and if the Headquarters staff gave a copy of the investigations to the press. When you look up all of the initial articles in the media about the administrative reliefs of commanders, the Corps followed policy and released only the information absolutely required by the Department of the Navy's instructions (SECNAVINST 5720.44c).1 I am not surprised that policy was followed, because these were all male commanders. And because they were men, offenders were seen as damaged but still part of the tribe. In these cases, when the media asked about the reason for their reliefs, the Corps would respond, “Officer X was relieved of command of unit X due to a loss of confidence in his ability to lead.” When the press would ask for details, the Corps would say, “Because this relief was administrative in nature and not punitive, we are unable to release any further information.” Full stop.
Kate didn't receive the same professional courtesy. In fact, a reporter I knew from the Pentagon told me that a Marine Corps public affairs officer contacted her, emailed her a copy of the investigation, and made a comment that she understood to be an attack on Kate's character. It was pretty clear to me that the Marine Corps was taking active measures to damage Kate's reputation. That direction, I'm told, came from the Pentagon.
We had already seen from the command-climate survey that the basis for her relief was substantiated on individual uncorroborated testimonials: “Kate rolls her eyes at nonsense and yells when people don't do their jobs” had devolved into “Kate's mean and disrespectful to her Marines.”
This is the Marine Corps, for crying out loud! I took an ass-chewing from a brigadier general in 2003 during the invasion of Iraq, and that guy now serves as the White House Chief of Staff.
Make no mistake, the cultural double-standard over what is acceptable from male and female leaders in the Marine Corps is strong.
Here's an example: just before Kate was relieved, she attended a retirement ceremony for a colonel, and during the ceremony, General Williams went on and on about what a tough guy the colonel
