The whole thing was murky, but when the lieutenant colonel was relieved, he followed the Marine Corps’ script and went quietly, stating that his relief was his colonel's prerogative and that he was not embarrassed by it.
And this I immediately knew to be bullshit.
So much of a Marine officer's identity is wrapped up in being a commander, and it is a life-changing event when one is relieved. It impacts everything, including your sense of self and your reputation among the tribe.
I'm not trying to accuse or defend this officer, but I'll tell you that I wasn't surprised when he reached out to Kate after she had been fired.
“My biggest regret in life,” he told her, “is not fighting back.”
By that time, Kate and I were already well down the warpath. We were committed to fighting back.
OK, let me back up for a second.
Kate saw her relief coming about five weeks before I did. She's always had this prescient gift. On recruiting duty, they called her the “Great Carnac,” after the old Johnny Carson skit, because of her incredible accuracy in predicting future events related to recruiting statistics. Kate always seems to be two steps ahead of everyone else and able to read people and react faster to events than most. As I mentioned earlier, when we were living in Southern California in the early 2000s, we saw an accident on the freeway ahead of us. It took me a few seconds to process all that just took place, and by the time I did, Kate had—once again—already shot out from behind the steering wheel and was going from car to car to check on people.
Let's just agree now that she has a gift for grasping the reality of situations before others do.
So, when I told her that all of the drama would go away when the issue reached the first level of adult supervision in the chain of command, she responded, “No, I'm fucked. They are going to screw me over.”
At that time, I was still optimistic and clung to a few shreds of faith that the senior leaders, many of whom I worked with from 2010 to 2015, would be fair.
Kate, on the other hand, was being coldly realistic. She wasn't being dramatic.
I knew she was right. It took me a day or so to finally accept that. And once I did, I did what I do best: I went into crisis planning.
I had been doing public relations for the Corps for nearly two decades. I served in the Pentagon for five and knew where many of the skeletons were buried. I had a lot of solid contacts in the press, relationships built on years of trust. And I also had contacts on Capitol Hill.
In anticipation of what was coming, I started reaching out to people I trusted and giving them the details of what was happening.
You see, there is an old PR trope attributed to Mark Twain, “The only reason god is good and the devil is evil is because god got to the press first.”
As a PR pro, I know this to be true. The race was on.
I suspected that the Corps’ leadership would try to drag her name and reputation through the mud, and I knew that if she had any shot, we had to beat them and be first to speak. After the story broke, it would live on the internet forever.
The Corps is used to being the 400-pound gorilla in the room and getting its way. It also has a PR machine that, as President Truman once said, was “almost equal to Stalin's.”5
Because of this, a commander's typical reaction to being relieved is to lie in the gutter and allow the institution to stomp on his head for a week and then slink off into oblivion, never to be seen again—just like the lieutenant colonel I described a few moments ago.
No. Fuck that.
It was pretty clear to me: Kate was right. Williams and Haas were wrong. And this wasn't about Kate. It was about the greater issue of gender equality and fairness.
It was about the fact that Kate was committed to doing the right thing and didn't give a whit about rank or promotion.
And it was absolutely about the fact that, for decades, the Corps had been recruiting women to lower standards, training them to lower expectations, and then sending them to combat—and everyone was cool with that.
Again, no. Fuck that.
Remember that Gilbert Murray quote I told you about? The one about being careful when dealing with a man who is committed only to doing what is right?
What I also forgot to tell you was that I was into punk rock in the ’80s—well before I was a Marine officer. That anti-authoritarian streak runs deep. It's in my DNA.
We weren't going to lie down. We were going to fight. Not just because it was personal, but because it was the right thing to do.
We didn't just do it for Kate. We needed every other Marine to understand that it's okay—and necessary—to fight back when you have an ethical, just cause. Kate likes to say, “It's either a matter of principle or it's not. If it's a matter of principle, then you need to act.”
But there's always a price to be paid. That's the thing nobody ever tells you as a young lieutenant at Quantico. It's easy for the instructors there to tell lieutenants to, “always do the right thing.” What they don't tell you is that if that right thing bucks the system, you have to be willing to pay that freight all the way to the end of the line—and that end of the line is most likely the end of your
