Jack Skellington

On this year's Marine Corps Birthday, I'd like to write an elegy for the last outpost of female-segregated military training. The now-shuttered 4th Battallion. I earned the right to call myself a Marine at Parris Island, Papa Company, 4th Recruit Training Battalion, Platoon 4034, from August to October of 1999. Every year on November 10th, I think about what that place made me, and this year I find myself thinking less about the birthday and more about the fact that 4th Battalion no longer exists. For 74 years, every enlisted woman who became a Marine did it through the female training battalion at Parris Island. Over the decades the unit changed names, but the mission never changed. On November 1, 1986, it became 4th Recruit Training Battalion, and that’s the name it carried until the day it was deactivated in June of 2023. Somehow I missed that news. I didn't realize it until I saw footage circulating here on X of a female SDI welcoming a new platoon... with a male DI standing behind her. What fuckery is this, I asked. In 2020, Congress mandated gender-integrated training in the National Defense Authorization Act, and the Corps complied. Male recruits started training in 4th Battalion as early as 2019. By 2022, all recruit training at Parris Island was gender-integrated at the company level, and the battalion that had produced every female Marine was declared “unnecessary.” On June 15, 2023, they folded the colors in a ceremony packed with women Marines and veterans who traveled from all over the country to say goodbye to something they knew couldn’t be replaced. And though I found out late, I found myself so desperately sad. There is no other environment in American life that is simultaneously all-female, physically punishing, aggressively perfectionist, and organized around strict formal hierarchy. I’ve looked. I’ve been out of the Corps for 25 years now and I have never once found another institution that combines those things. That combination is what made 4th Battalion work, because it produced women who could compete with anyone while understanding (and never once apologizing for) the fact that we are physiologically, psychologically different from men. Women react to extreme physical stress differently than men do, and anyone who’s been on a training hike with both sexes knows it. I cried from exhaustion on a ten-mile hump, and I was far from the only one who did. Why do we do that? I genuinely have no idea. But we do, and men generally don’t, and in a co-ed training environment that moment of tears confirms every assumption the men around you already hold. It follows you. It becomes the thing they remember about you. In 4th Battalion, nobody laughed. My drill instructors and my platoon mates didn’t coddle me or tell me it was okay to stop. They kept my eye on the task: go ahead and cry, but you’re finishing this hike on your feet, not in the duty vehicle. That’s what sex-segregated training actually looked like. The women running that battalion held every recruit to the same standards as any other battalion on the island, and they understood that the path to making a female Marine wasn’t identical to the path for making a male one, even though the destination was exactly the same. The Marine Corps’ own leadership said this for years. They said segregated initial training gave women the chance to build confidence with female drill instructors as role models, that it minimized distractions and harassment, and that it better prepared women to compete once training later integrated. They were right. And then they gave it up because feminists in Congress who never served (and would never allow their daughters to serve) said so. Women make up roughly 9% of the Marine Corps, a number that has barely moved in decades. Integration has not changed that. Shutting down the one institution purpose-built to turn women into successful Marines did not, as it turns out, produce more female Marines. I joined specifically The Marine Corps specifically because training was segregated. Unlike the Air Force, which both of my parents had served in. I wanted to learn to be a Marine without men screaming at me or watching me fail at something I’d never done before. I wanted to get physically and mentally hard in an environment that understood my body and my psychology without requiring me to pretend they were something they aren’t. 4th Battalion gave me exactly that, as well as every other woman walked those catwalks for 74 years. Now it’s gone, making it just that much harder for women to serve their country AS WOMEN, not smaller, less capable men. The Marine Corps is now and always has been very much its own thing, and I'm proud to have been part of it. Proud to have served with the men and women I met along the way. And yeah, proud to be gifted a box of crayons from my Navy and Air Force friends. As far as I'm concerned, there's no higher honor. Happy birthday, Marines.