William S. Lind :collection (merged thread)

[former_0302]

This is an interesting read from one of those female lieutenants who has failed IOC. She raises many of the points I've brought up earlier: insufficient training for females, different expectations of male and female performance, etc. The bottom line is that not all men are permitted to perform in combat roles if they cannot meet the standards - they are assessed individually; not assumed that they all will fail because some of them do fail. That same policy should hold true for women as well.

Yep. Read it the day it was published. She quit. I don't care why she quit. She quit.

If you aspire to lead people in combat, you don't quit. Period. And since the article didn't say anything about how she had to go to the emergency room to get care for heat stroke (which is something I've seen Marines push themselves to, even in training), I can only assume that she did, in fact, have something left in her tank when she quit.

Lost in her article is the fact that the men don't get any special preparation for IOC while at TBS either. The differing standards for men and women are, in fact, irrelevant in terms of the first event at IOC. The standards are actually exactly the same for all Marines at TBS in the stuff that matters as prep for IOC--the forced marches are the same and have the same requirement. All Marines have to do the double obstacle course and the E-course; I believe that the time standards for those are different between the sexes, but that's irrelevant; there's nothing stopping the women from trying to achieve a time on par with the men in those events. The PFT score differences are, as I previously stated, not a metric which really means anything in terms of IOC.

If you want to do well at IOC, you need to walk into the school mentally prepared to do without an awful lot that you'd really like to have for 13 weeks. Nobody gets prep for that at TBS. Most nights, you sleep in the equivalent of a dorm room, can eat and sleep quite a bit most of the time, and are generally not screwed around with too much.

Bottom line, she wasn't prepared to do without. If her male peers were better prepared for it, it wasn't because of what the Marine Corps had asked them to do for the previous six months.

Edited to add: At least, that's what it was like when I went through the two schools several years ago. I doubt things have changed substantively, but they may have.