Trailblazing female who became infantry Marine is getting kicked out for fraternization

Yeah luckily everyone involved was responsible enough to not take it that far, but there were a few times when physical altercation was imminent. The amount of pure tension in that place for months was crazy. It created alliances within the unit, well mostly everybody vs them, it created issues of trust among people, etc.

Neither one of their reputations ever recovered, this was a couple years ago mind you. The sad unfair part is that the married guy's reputation is fine, at least work wise. Everyone thinks he's a POS human being but he's good at his job so his reputation basically survived. The running joke/serious hallway talk is to just never leave that guy alone with your wife or girlfriend. But the woman, she got ruined. The talk even today is that she just flat out shouldn't be here. And A LOT of the guys are basically using her and that whole incident as ammo for their own belief that women just flat out shouldn't be here at all. "Yeah the guy is a POS but if she wasn't here then none of that would have happened".

I disagree with that, it's not the fact that she was a woman alone that caused that whole mess, it was the fact that she was a woman who just didn't stop it from happening that caused that whole mess. I mean a simple "hey guy you're married you probably shouldn't be flirting with me and grabbing my ass" would have diffused that whole situation from the beginning. She ain't the first female in our unit....

Sad/funny part is that she swears on everything that she honestly didn't know she was upsetting anybody and didn't "see" the same sexual advances married guy was making at her that everybody else so easily saw. That's the funny part. The sad part is that if you sit down and talk to her for awhile you might honestly believe that she is telling the truth as crazy as that might sound. Something isn't quite wired properly upstairs in her regard. So there is a very real possibility that her entire reputation has been ruined due to her own literal inability to comprehend that allowing a married guy to smack your butt is bad lol.

Some mid afternoon Soap Opera garbage. It really is situations like this that makes it sort of difficult to even fault a lot of the guys who think that having women around us is just more trouble than it's worth. I'm not in that camp but I mean hell they do sort of have a point...

 

I agree, however the crux of the whole debate boils down to is it worth it?

As you said, no law or reg can actually stop somebody from thinking what they want, and no law or reg can physically stop anybody from doing something either. This is human nature.

We have to take an objective non emotional risk vs reward analysis of this situation. Do the benefits of allowing women to serve in combat arms outweigh the issues that they WILL bring by their mere presence? The SHARP program is Army policy, fraternization is regulation, etc. But incidents WILL happen when women are introduced to combat units alongside the vast majority of their counterparts who are male.

Humans are gonna human. The first step in risk mitigation when dealing with machines is engineering. We build safety measures into the thing to ensure humans don't get their arm sucked into the wood chipper. After we engineer all of the safety measures we can into the machine then we move on to "training" which is further down the totem pole in the risk mitigation process. The military is a war machine. Humans are gonna human, SOMEBODY is gonna get their head crushed in a hydraulic press no matter how much training they receive on it which is why we have lock out tag out engineered into the machines to prevent it.

SOMEBODY is gonna try to have sex with the new infantry chick that just showed up to a unit full of men no matter how much SHARP training he received telling him not to do that. So we go back to the first step in this mitigation process and we engineer out his ability to even do that. How do we engineer a war machine to protect humans from being human? You don't bring the women there in the first place.

People are responsible for their own actions, keep it in your pants, control yourself you aren't a dog, etc. All of that is irrelevant when discussing this from a pure objectionable point of view devoid of any sort of emotions. That sort of thing is going to happen, period, and there is absolutely nothing anybody can do about it. And that's on the extreme end, simply introducing women into the squad creates a different climate.

So we must ask ourselves, not talking about progressiveness, not talking about women's rights, not talking about society, not talking about any of that. Purely talking about the US military war machine. Is it beneficial or detrimental to the war machine itself to allow women to serve in combat arms? That really is the only question that matters.

 

Thats a big problem that I have. A good friend of mine and coworker is a decorated Ranger who did 4 tours with the 75th before jumping over to our neck of the woods. His friend was one of the instructors at Ranger school when those first female Rangers graduated awhile back. Now granted I was obviously not there so I have no idea of the validity of anything I was told but the stories he was telling me made me sick.

Basically, again not sure how true, they had to tip toe around the female candidates. They were directed to not treat them as poorly as the male counterparts and were given a directive that at least one of them WILL pass this go around so do whatever you have to do to help make sure they do. According to him the higher ups were getting pressure to actually graduate a female ranger, so they were directed to do so.

No idea if that is true, hell I saw those two females they look like they could stand a chance in Ranger school. But that's what i was told. But if that is true then I have no respect for them nor anyone in politics who sent that directive down the pipeline. If none of that is true then I have all the respect for them in the world just like anyone else who completes Ranger school because like I tell my buddy all the time you couldn't pay me enough money to go through that. I'd look at the Day 0 schedule and get right back on the bus.

 

While I personally agree with the last statement I just don't see it as being a good idea. Perhaps my opinion is just skewed due to what I've personally seen throughout my career. I've been to a variety of duty stations in two different MOS's. Combat arms then Aviation. It didn't matter where I went, nor the age bracket, nor the type of unit, women being there always caused problems.

Who knows, I could be wrong and all of this integration may happen without a hitch. But me personally I think this is just a ticking time bomb and is going to destroy unit cohesion and create way more problems than it's worth. I saw battle lines get drawn in the sand within my own company with prior great friends hating each other and guys sitting up at night with their own "side" literally trying to come up with ways to physically hurt the other side without getting caught. People calling home telling their own wives to hate so and so's wife because they aren't friends anymore lol. The military ball we had upon redeployment was hilarious, we had to rewrite the table seating chart 5 times because we couldn't figure out who to sit with who because we literally couldn't find 5 people who all liked each other. We get there and only about half the people actually sat where they were assigned because the other half all got there and swapped their placards around because "he hates him, and he hates him" and we didn't know that.

All of that, over one woman. We were at war to fight ISIS and we went to war with ourselves and destroyed our own unit from within to the point where it still hasn't recovered. Not saying what happened to us will happen to any unit, but I have seen first hand the damage that can be caused if something does go terribly wrong and thats just not a risk that I believe is worth it.