Marine Corps recruits arrive for the Emblem Ceremony on Parris Island, South Carolina — the event near the end of boot camp where they officially become Marines — mosquito-bitten and sunburned, sand wedged under their fingernails and dug into their scalps.
After 10 weeks of gruelling training, they have had to complete a nine-mile (14.4km) hike carrying 50 pounds (22.6kg) of gear — plus a nine-pound rifle — through woods and swamps to the Iwo Jima sculpture that represents everything important to Marines. Hungry, hurting and smelly, they struggle to straighten one another’s uniforms, squaring their shoulders. To a person, they’re bawling. It’s gorgeous.
But when I arrived at Parris Island in June 2014 to command Fourth Battalion — the only training unit for enlisted female recruits in the Marine Corps — I saw something that shocked me. Lined up behind the female formation stood a conspicuous row of chairs. I was told that if any of these women who were about to join the few and the proud felt tired or lightheaded, she was invited to sit. Men had no such luxury.
At that moment, I realised new Marines were taught that the corps had lower expectations for women.
One of my first actions with Fourth Battalion was to remove those chairs. But over the course of my command, I learnt there were bigger obstacles to gender equality in the Marine Corps, the most male-dominated of the services in United States. First and foremost, the corps was and remains the only military branch that largely separates men from women in basic training.
But almost as important, when I reviewed performance records at Parris Island, I realised that women hadn’t performed better than men in almost any category since records had been kept. That included academics, attrition and injury rates, marksmanship, even marching. Yet, no one had questioned why or demanded improvements. No one believed the women could do better.
I was determined to change that. But that meant fighting many decades of opposition to having women in front-line combat roles. This was especially true in the Marine Corps, where we say, “Every Marine a rifleman”. Those riflemen are the infantry troops who put themselves in the paths of bullets and bombs while carrying heavy rucksacks, who jump out of planes and otherwise subject their bodies to extreme wear and tear.
Until recently, women had been officially excluded from the infantry, even as they unofficially served in combat jobs — going on patrols as military police or medics, or getting caught in ambushes while driving in convoys. This all changed when the US Defence Department required that by 2016, all military occupations, including the infantry, be opened to women.
The Marines were the only service to request a waiver to not integrate women into some combat positions. The Pentagon rejected that request, but statistics suggest the corps has dragged its feet. About 500 Army women serve in combat jobs, 10 have graduated from the elite Ranger school, and 74 have graduated from the infantry or armour basic leader’s course. They have met the same exacting standards — for push-ups, speed and the weight they carry in their packs — as the men. But only 11 female Marines have made it into the infantry. And only one woman has made it through the punishing Marine infantry officer course.
The Marine Corps has taken some steps. It recently introduced women to Marine Combat Training at Camp Pendleton, California, which had been all male, and brought in male drill instructors to train female recruits at Parris Island. The Marine Corps says that where schedules permit, men and women sometimes train side by side in boot camp. But that is a far cry from full integration, where men and women compete against each other, work through problems together and learn to respect each other as teammates — all the things that happen in combat.
In the Marine Corps, the perception that women can’t do some things as well as men quickly becomes a reality, because of how we conduct entry-level training. For officers, it starts with little comments at the Basic School for new officers (which is gender integrated). At my own training, I heard comments like “Stay with your teams — make sure the females make it over the walls in the obstacle course.” And “We’re running fast this morning, so the women will be falling out.”
I went to Parris Island feeling like we could change the dynamic for women. That’s the funny thing about recruits: They don’t know any better. If you teach them — that shooting is all about breathing, that running fast is all about training, that ruck marches are all about mindset — that’s what they’ll do.
At Fourth Battalion, I heard the shooting coaches tell women that their arms were too short to shoot well. The slowest woman in the platoon set the pace for runs. I mapped out the hikes and discovered that they had been improperly measured, which meant that women hiked fewer miles than they were supposed to. They weren’t being taught to stretch properly or were trained to build up their strength to avoid injuries. Those were fixable problems.
Before I arrived, between 67 per cent and 78 per cent of Fourth Battalion had qualified in marksmanship during their initial tests on the rifle range. The male units qualified at between 85 per cent and 93 per cent. The following year, we raised the women’s weapons qualification rate to 92 per cent. Our injury rate for women went down to a rate comparable with the men’s when we instituted better strength training. And women ran faster when we placed them in groups based on ability.
But the Marine Corps didn’t seem interested in building on what I had learnt. I wrote an article for Marine Corps Gazette in 2015 outlining our changes and our success. It was killed after I was pushed out for my “toxic” leadership. I felt that my immediate boss thought I was changing the status quo and, frankly, simply didn’t like me. There was no mentoring. I was never written up for not following an order.
The things I saw in the Marine Corps predicted the #MeToo movement. If a female Marine is seen as a weak link, based on stereotypes first bred at boot camp, why would anyone believe her if she reported an assault? With so few women in the Marine Corps — about 8 per cent — what are the chances that someone in power will stop women from being pushed into clerical positions when they were trained to be medics, electricians or mechanics? If women start at a disadvantage because of segregated and unequal training, how can they catch up? And how will they escape the false double-binds of “I only got this job because I’m a woman” or “I have to act like a man to be respected”?
I want Congress to understand that there is still no such thing as separate but equal. And I desperately want female Marines to understand just how capable and competitive they can be. What might the possibilities be for the military if women were allowed to compete and lead?
If blatant sexism continues, we may never find out. Why would parents encourage a smart, talented daughter to join the Marine Corps if the first thing she would encounter is the message that she’s simply not good enough?
This must change, not only because the military services are struggling to fill slots since so few Americans are willing or fit enough to serve, but also because future generations will not stand for it. The definition of female strength continues to change, redefined by CrossFit gyms and extraordinary female endurance athletes. Yet, the Marine Corps continues to insist that women can’t train with men.
It’s silly. It’s insulting. It’s time to lead.
— New York Times News Service
Kate Germano spent 20 years in the Marine Corps, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. This essay is adapted from her forthcoming book, written with Kelly Kennedy, Fight Like a Girl: The Truth Behind How Female Marines Are Trained.
