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RIT
WOMEN AND THE MILITARY
JANUARY 28, 2004
7:39 PM

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>> Welcome, please pick up outlines at the top of the auditorium if you haven't picked up an outline for each of the speakers.
Let's say we are going to arbitrarily -- not "arbitrarily," we are going to begin in about two minutes.
Is the captioning ready to go?
I don't see the captions ...
okay.
>> MARK PRICE: All right.
We are going to begin.
Welcome.
Good evening.
I'm professor Mark Price and as chair of the Common Novel Committee of the Department of Language, Literature and Foreign Languages in the College of liberal arts, it's my pleasure to welcome you to the second of three winter quarter lecture, Anthony Swofford historical memoir, "Jarhead."
Our interpreters will be Colleen Freeman and Kathy Derrick.

If you happened to have missed last week's lecture, Dr. Nabil Kaylani gave you the historical events around the wars.
Past video stream lectures are available on the website and at the library.

On February 4, one week from tonight, at the same time and place, Anthony Swofford himself will be here to speak about his work.
Before his 7:30 talk, Mr. Swofford will meet with students from 6:30 to 7:15, directly outside the Webb Auditorium, and he will be happy to autograph your copy of "Jarhead."
The plan for our forum tonight, which is entitled "Women Gender in Military" is for each panelist to speak for approximately ten minutes.
After all the panelists have presented, there will then be an interaction and response between them.
After the discussion amongst themselves, the panel will entertain questions from the audience.
I will serve tonight as moderator.

Allow me to provide a brief introduction of the panelisties.
Gail Gilberg, Jennifer Gates and Mary Chao.
I taught in this department for 34 years. My chief interests are film and poetry.
I'm active in RIT governance, a member of the academic Senate and antiques are my chief hobby.
Jennifer Gates worked in the College of Liberal Arts as an administrator.
She has been in the military for over 13 years as a reservist.
Before reclassifying, she was a drill sergeant and worked in such jobs as combat engineer bridge crewman, personnel action specialist and journalist.
She has also completed instructor training and professional development courses.
In 1999, she was assigned to the US military academy at West Point, where she taught a one credit intersession course to first year cadets on troop leading procedures and land navigation.
She received an outstanding instructor award for that mission.
Jennifer has two AAS degrees and one BS degree from RIT.
She is working on an MS in information technology.
She as has a miniature Schnauzer that keeps her busy.
Gail Gilberg is an adjunct professor in the language and literature department at RIT.
She is a writer and author of the memoir "Snake Daughter, The Roads In and Out of War."
Her essays and poetry have appeared in newspapers and journals.
There was a special mention in the 2002 "Push Cart Prize Mythology,"
And last year her poetry list was a second winner.
Gail enjoys guilting and, of course, writing.
Mary Chao is the business reporter at the Rochester Democrat and Chronical and she teaches a news writing class every other quarter at RIT.
She is the mother of a two-year-old daughter.
Her husband, Matthew Nathis, is a reservist who was called to duty last year for 9 months.
He served as director of the East Asian Region where he handled diplomatic relations.
He was company commander of the 8th tank division.
He was a lawyer from 1993 to 1996 in California, before moving to Rochester, where he is presently an assistant district attorney for Monroe County.
As moderator, I wish to open the discussion by offering some very quick remarks of my own on "Jarhead."
Anthony Swofford's historical memoir of the '91 Gulf War is a crafted piece of writing.
Brutally honest in the depiction of his family life, military life in general, and specifically the arena of actual war and combat.
To read "Jarhead" is to understand some of the main reasons which attracted him to the Marine Corps.
His emerging male identity, textured against the larger American culture, which defines American masculinity, his family tradition of males who served in previous conflicts, and the desire to find in the military a family structure to replace the eroding family unit he observed at home.
His accounting of his personal life, the daily routines in the Marine Corps and the battle scenes themselves, which he describes in detail, gives us a picture that can only be captured by one who lived through the events.
It's on the last point that I wish to suggest a note of caution.
"Jarhead" has a ring of brutal truth.
But it's primarily Anthony Swofford's truth.
The use of the first person presents a privileged subjective "I" point of view, yet it's entirely possible that another individual in the same military, in the same military arena, could have another "Truth" to report, whether about daily military life or foreign policy speculations on why the United States became involved in this conflict.
I encourage you to enjoy your experience with "Jarhead," but with that parting caveat.
Our first speaker now will be Jennifer Gates.
>> JENNIFER GATES: Thank you.
Mark.
Mark asked me to talk a bit about women in military and my reactions to the book "Jarhead."
So I wanted to first talk a bit about my background in the military.
And actually before I start that, I was curious if we had any prior service or reservists or guards, ROTC, anyone in the audience who is in military or has been in the military?
Great.
When I first joined military, I was in high school.
I was actually a senior in high school, in 1988.
So I joined about the same time that Anthony Swofford did.
I joined the reserves.
And I wanted to talk a bit about why I joined, compared to what Anthony was going through at that time.
I think we both really wanted to serve our country.
We both were attracted to the military as far as a disciplined lifestyle, or to join to have more of a family tie with people.
But my interest was not to kill or to go to war or anything like that. I was kind of more interested in education, learning anything that the Army could teach me, which I know you can kind of draw from that, was it because I'm a female and he was male that he was more attracted to war, to killing, that kind of thing?
I don't know if I'd really go that far.
I think it's just an individual thing.
When I went to basic training, I went to an all female basic training in the Army.
That's the way it was set up at the time.
So it was a bit different than the male perspective that Anthony gave.
At the time I went through it, the drill sergeants were not allowed to touch the privates at all.
You weren't -- they weren't allowed to even help us if we were sick or falling down or anything like that, which is drastically different from Anthony's perspective of being actually hurt, hit by his drill sergeants.
My experience was that the drill sergeants were somebody to be respected and not necessarily feared.
The only fear I had was in doing something wrong and losing their respect for me, not doing what I was supposed to do. I definitely looked up to the drill sergeants and not because I was afraid of them, but because of their knowledge and their skill and what they could teach me.
When I first went into the military, I was interested in being a journalist.
So, I wanted to kind of talk a bit about the differences between people who go into military who are going into a career that is more -- less physical than what Anthony described as being a grunt, and more of an intellectual job.
There is definitely a difference, once you get into military, as to what you're classified as.
They call it an MLS, Military Occupational Skills.
And there are different tests that you take to determine which job you can have and what you can't have.
Based on that job, your training can be drastically different.
An example would be when I went through my training as a journalist, there was another company that was -- they were actually admin clerks, which doesn't require as high of a what they call as ASVAB score. My training was 9 to 5.
We learned how to do journalistic tasks and at night we had to do our homework.
Their training was all day and most of the evenings.
They never had free time.
They didn't have homework, they just trained straight through.
They were not given the responsibility or the opportunity to do other things. So, I think it makes a difference what job you're in as far as how you view military.
Obviously going in as a journalist is a lot less focused on violence as Anthony said that a grunt or an infantryman would have.
And again, the job that you're in definitely has a different approach to how much physical activity you're doing, versus intellectual.
And that can come into play as far as what a female soldier will be tasked to, versus a male.
Some of the things I noted from reading Anthony's book was different mind-sets as to what it meant to be in the military, what it meant to be a soldier, a marine.
And what -- how I wanted to portray myself versus some of the things that Anthony did that portrayed himself.
Going to military, I always wanted to, you know, represent the country and represent the uniform in the best light possible.
I always wanted to do the right thing and do my best at whatever I did.
And I think Anthony's perspective was more fitting in, fitting in with the guys, doing what meant -- not necessarily what was the right thing to do, but what was the peer pressure thing to do at the time.
The last topic I was going to talk about was the interactions between males and females, which is obviously different from whoever's perspective you're looking at.
One thing that I noticed, and I think came out very clearly in Anthony's book, was the use of language and actual foul language.
I have to admit that when I'm at training, my language does become a bit more foul, a lot more Cuss words.
But I think the basis of that isn't as sexual as it is in "Jarhead." I think the male perspective, or at least his perspective, there was so much related to the degradation of women and more related to sexual acts, whereas from a female point of view, even though I may swear, it's not so graphic sexually.
Just a different perspective on that.
And related to that, I've known -- I've been through many trainings where I was the only female, there were only a few females in the class or the training.
And it's interesting to see how the males reacted to that.
I could see maybe a group of them just standing around talking, and as soon as I joined that conversation the conversation totally changed as far as the way that they were talking about things or even what they were talking about.
Which in a way is tough to be the only female or to be a female in that situation, because you can't -- you feel like you're not part of the group, even though you want to be and you can do whatever it is they're doing.
Once they change the way that they're talking, you feel that immediately.
There is also the way that the males act towards females.
Sometimes they want to actually protect you.
And you see that in classes where, you know, you're trying to do something and they're there trying to help you and make sure that you're doing it right.
And even though you may not feel you need their help, they're going to be there to do that.
And I can definitely see that happening in battle, where they're going to, you know, feel that they have to protect the female.
Sometimes they actually want to discourage you.
They don't feel that females should be in the military, so they are there to be an obstacle to you.
And to be honest, I haven't had that very often in my career.
But I have seen it happen; just not to me.
Definitely, especially when I was going through basic training, to see the males on posts, there was the aspect to impress or attract the female, so that definitely comes into play when you're training or working together.
There is a bit of a conflict of males, or females for that matter, aren't concentrating on what they're doing because they are more interested in the opposite sex and what that person is doing, or dating that person or whatever.
And the last point I put was sometimes they actually treat you as an equal, which is hopefully what we're going towards.
Recently, the Army switched from a basic training -- switched to Co-Ed training from segregated training.
I'm not sure how I feel about that.
I think that when I went through it, it was much easier to go through basic with just females.
There weren't the distractions. I could just focus on what I needed to do and compete with people of the same caliber and strength and so on. But on the other hand, I think it's important that when you join the military, from day one, you realize that males and females need to be equal as far as completing the mission.
You may not do the exact same thing the same way, but you need to realize that you're going to be working together and everyone has to contribute equally to the mission.
I think that's it.
>> MARK PRICE: Thank you very much, Jennifer.
Gail?
Gail Gilberg.
>> GAIL GILBERG: Good evening.
I come to Swofford's book as a writer, a writer of memoir, a witness to war.
I never carried a weapon.
Unlike Jennifer, I never joined the military.
I never fought in the war, but I've known the war nonetheless.
I've seen the demolished buildings of World War II in Europe.
I have seen the beggars, one-armed men, the soldiers drunk at the dining room table, telling war stories late into the night.
I saw what war did between my parents.
I know about that gigantic Rift between the sexes that war creates.
It's been said that since women are presumed to be absent from war, that they have no story to tell. Having grown up in a military family, I know that the makers of war are not its only victims.
The idea of soldiers as the chief victims of war permeates the literature of war and the meaning it shapes of war.
Typically, the soldier has been the mouth piece for war.
But the truth is that war wrecks havoc on women, children, animals and bridges.
In essence, the entire fabric of family, social and civilized life.
The popular fantasy is that war can be contained when we designate it to an out of the way chunk of the globe we then label as a war zone.
Meaning that if you want war, you go there to get it.
Even the memoir itself attempts to limit the place of war.
The writing of memoir tries to frame the war inside the covers of a book, therefore limiting it to a place and time.
As Swofford said about "Jarhead," this book is a jar in which he stuffed the war.
The problem remains, though, that war cannot be contained.
As Joan Diddian, the author of "Slouching Toward Bethlehem," said, "the war is never over, it just comes home."
It's the larger perimeter of war, the one that includes home as well as the battle field, that interests me.
And I think it's what Swofford is trying to tell us between the lines, as much as he is trying to tell us about the combat itself.
You cannot contain war in one place, any more than returning soldiers can leave everything they have seen behind them.
The war that men waged overtly against each other is now waged covertly against women.
Joan Diddian in her book "A book of common prayer" said we cannot disentangle men in war from men in bed.
There is an increasing recognition of the war monger in the male intimate, father, husband, lover, brother or friend. And John Vabadin writes at the end of one of his poems, "after our war, how will love speak?"
He knows, as women have always known, that the soldier does not return the same person, and love is never the same.
Rebecca West in her story "The return of the soldier" writes that a soldier cannot commit himself to a woman until after he has lost all memory of war.
So, in essence, there remains a connection between this radical separation of men from women and children, and the release of mental and physical impulses of pure destruction.
This is a suspicion that women writers of war find impossible to dismiss.
Kim O'Brien's book "The Things They Carried" is a forerunner of "Jarhead."
They both said the individual who goes to war carries the physical and spiritual burdens of that war back home.
Swofford on page 22 speaks about the burdens of history in his rucksack.
"Our rucksacks are heavy with equipment and ammunition, but even heavier with the burdens of history. And each step we take, the burdens increase.
The sky is a dead gray from the oil fires billowing to the north.
We hump and hump and look at one another with blank amazed faces.
Is this what we have done?
What will I tell my mother?"
Swofford carries with him the bad news of war, and this is why we don't like him.
He doesn't write so we will like him.
In fact, he makes it nearly impossible.
He is the Antithisis of the cable news.
Instead, his news aims to wake us up.
And what is the bad news?
The nature of war itself?
The seductive pull towards the myths of war, which serve to justify the horrible sacrifices made and the destruction of the innocent?
None of us can get away from it.
He wants us to know, like Tim O'Brien does, that good men come home talking dirty, and he isn't just referring to language.
If soldiers are not carrying the invisible home with them, why do we read recently in the Toledo blade newspaper about the Atrocities done by the forces in Vietnam.
The men coming forward to confess 36 years after the crime.
There was a panel called the Working War Crimes Group formed back in the early '70s to investigate the rumors of war crimes.
But the panel never met.
The information reached the White House but still nothing was done.
This is a violation of military law and the 1949 Geneva convention.
The Army was reluctant because of publicity. As one platoon leader said: Yes, there has been wrong done here, but it's not in the interest of our country to pursue.
And when John Dean left the White House in 1973, he said: The government doesn't like ugly stories; it would have been embarrassing.
We are quick to point out the war crimes of other countries, we are quick to sweep our own under the rug.
We are quick to say we are different.
We are quick to remain innocent.
Bob Shacoch, author of "The Immaculate Invasion" once said that Americans can no longer afford to be innocent.
If we insist on remaining innocent, it will destroy us in the end.
It's natural to look away from the horrors of war and certainly women have been encouraged to look away. But the writer Joan Diddian who covered the war in el Salvador said that the desire not to see anything does not lead to extinction.
As long as we insist on the myths of war, we will turn the lives into manipulation and the inhumaneness of war into heroic ideal.
Swofford said that the brutalization that happened in the tiger force is possible even with the men we love.
I think of him as another modern day Dante who has gone to the inferno and has come back to tell us.
He attempts to tell us that we must pay attention to the losses of dreams.
He attempts to tell us what women have always known: That we are all involved; that we must listen.
Otherwise, as Plato said, only the dead have seen the end of war.
His memoir is about just one life deceivingly, but the memoir is nothing if it remains with the singular.
To work, and I think his memoir does work, the memoir must lift us to the broader view, the universal, the patterns in human existence.
The sound from the memoir must echo throughout the world.
And we as witnesses, as listeners, as readers, must guard against our own innocence.
Otherwise, it will in the end render us blind and callous.
As difficult as it is, we must locate ourselves inside Swofford's deep pessimism.
Finally, Swofford, like Tim O'Brien, like Joan Diddian asked us to listen and not look away.
"Nobody gives a Fuck about that war" Swofford said to his buddy at a California bar.
I suppose that's why I never spoke about my father's wars for years, never spoke about his death in Vietnam or of his medal of honor when I sat around the table with my friends, who insisted on the colors of black and white to describe war.
Soldiers on this side, civilians on that side.
War is this.
War is not that.
But like Swofford, I got tired of the silence.
I wanted the world to know about that larger perimeter of war, the one that encircles a far bigger piece of land than the battle field.
I was tired of not being included in part of a war story.
I was tired of listening to people who thought they knew exactly who my father was, who any soldier is.

Swofford said his father was part of the population rarely depicted in the literature and films of Vietnam, and I could say the same about my own father.
So I wrote "Snake's Daughter" in hopes that readers would recognize that there is a family for each one of those bodies zipped inside a black rubber bag.
I needed to be a female mouthpiece about war to militarize our memories of war.
To write a book about such things, I had to look at war in a noninstitutionalized way.
I had to find an entrance into a so-called man's world.
I had to dismiss my female privilege of not looking at war; to leave the neutral ground in order to come forth and speak.
I had to become a writer.
In the end, Swofford's experience of war turned him into a writer.
Maybe his book is his response to his father, who asked him on page 211 not to be a hero.
Is this book then written under the auspices of this promise to his father?
Is the most heroic thing a writer about war can do is the refusal to be a hero?
Or does the writer demonstrate the under side of what classally a hero is, bad news?
>> MARK PRICE: Thank you, Gail. Thank you.
Mary Chao.
>> MARY CHAO: That's a hard act to follow.
I don't have anything formally prepared.
I'm here just to talk about my experiences as a military wife.
My husband, Matthew Nathis, joined the Marine Corps, signed up for the Marine Corps while he was in law school. He attended Fordham University law school.
And, no, they did not promise to pay for his law school.
He really wanted to be a Marine.
He is ambitious and thought a military background would help him, especially if you are to decide on policies in the military.
And he joined the Marine Corps over the other forces, services, because the Marines do not care if you're a professional.
They don't care if you have a law degree.
You are a Marine first.
They make you go to boot camp like everybody else.
If you're a lawyer in any of the other services, you have to just go through a two week salute school, where you learn the commands and what the different insignias stand for and you can go on and be a lawyer within the services.
But with the Marine Corps, you are a Marine first.
And I dated him while he was doing the Marine Corps boot camp, and when it was finally time for him to go on to active duty, he somehow convinced me that 29 Palms California is near LA.
We were both students in New York University.
We made the trek across country to land in 29 Palms, California, which is every bit as blique as Swofford described it.
It's a small desert town with not much else.
The Hollywood stars like to go there for retreats, but that's about it.
There is nothing going on in 29 Palms, California, so I was in for quite a culture shock.
We didn't live on base.
It wasn't something I wanted to do.
I'm probably a stereotypical New York City liberal, so I really wanted nothing to do with military base living.
We ended up renting a house in Yucca Valley, California, which was in between 29 Palms and Palm Springs.
I was fortunate enough to be able to go on with my own life and was able to continue with my career.
I was able to get a job as a television news producer in Palm Springs. While my husband's life was in 29 Palm Springs as a lawyer, my life was in Palm Springs, which is a lot more populated and just a lot more exciting than 29 Palms.
And my friends and my life was in Palm Springs, California.
Now, my husband also tried to keep me away from the military as much as he can, because he knew I was apt to speak my mind.
And in the military women are almost like accessories.
If you're an officer's wife, you are just supposed to be seen and not heard from.
And many occasions at that time, gays in the military was a hot topic. There were a lot of homophobes in the Marine Corps and I couldn't help speak out against the homophobia.
But you're not supposed to do that to someone whose ranking is higher than your husband's.
So I learned.
So, basically, I just led my own life and he had his military life.
And I couldn't relate to the officer's wives club.
They called me several times.
I didn't have any children.
I wasn't into crafting.
They had special nights where you learned how to knit, sew, make your own sweatshirts, things that I wasn't very good at.
And so I could never really bond with the military women.
But I do respect them in a sense, because they are there carrying on the torch while the husband is away.
And you very much have to take a back seat to their husband.
And there is also a lot of insecurity being a military wife.
An officer's wife, a lot of them tend to wear their husband's rank, bask in their husband's glory. My husband is a Lieutenant Cornell, he did this, he did that, he is in charge of so many people.
And a lot of them I'm sure were educated and gave up their own careers and their own ambitions to follow their husband. So, that is pretty much my experience at 29 Palms.
I also couldn't relate to really the military life because of the caste system.
When you're an officer, you are not allowed to be friends with enlisted people, which I just found absurd.
I have a -- as a journalist, I deal with the public affairs office at 29 Palms.
And I became friends with a couple who was our age.
But he was an enlisted guy, therefore my husband ordered me not to invite them to our parties.
We are not allowed to fraternize with enlisted people.
For those of you who don't know officers, the difference between officers and enlisted, officers, basically, you went to college, you have a degree and you're in a managerial position.
And there are 11 enlisted people to every officer, I've been told.
And it's almost against what America stands for.
If you start off as an enlisted person, you really can't move to the officer rank.
Basically, if you didn't go to college, you can never be an officer.
You can be a high ranking enlisted person, but you can never really be a general.
And that bothered my sense of justice.
Another reason why I kept my own life within the military.
And when I was just even on base, the disparity between how officers lived and how enlisted people lived was really astonishing. Because there are so many more enlisted people, the services are greater for enlisted people, and yet when you go to the enlisted club, the pool would be a crowd of children and women.
I could barely get into the pool.
The officers club, you go to the officer's club, the pool was empty with maybe one or two occupants.
It didn't make sense.

I think you would offer more services for the enlisted, because there are more enlisted people.
But the officers are the privileged class and any time you drive on to base, if you have an officer's sticker, people with lower ranks have to salute you.
Salute the car.
So when I'm driving in my car, people were just constantly saluting me.
Those are just -- that's just my experience as a military wife.
We got out after one Tour, which is 3 years.
My husband really never intended to stay forever in the military.
The same reason he entered the Marine Corps is the same reason he got out.
Marines do not care if you're a lawyer.
And many of the lawyers who stayed on were sent to God awful places to do God awful things that are not within their professional realm, such as going to recruit in Kansas or, you know, becoming a tank officer, which my husband ended up eventually doing.
He stayed with the reserves after he got out of the Marine Corps.
We moved to Rochester.
He was a company commander of the 8th tank unit here in Chilai.
He was in charge of 200 Marines and the Marines looked favorably upon for promotion if you were actually a warrior.
Marines like warriors.
For a while my husband was a tank officer.
He is a warrior.
Marines look favorably upon that, even as a reservist.
His Tour was up.
With the military, you have to switch jobs every 3 or 4 years, even as a reservist.
And a position became available as a foreign affairs officer in Honolulu, Hawaii just as the 8th tank was being called to go to Iraq.
My husband's Tour of duty was up in Rochester.
So, fortunately, he escaped Iraq.
But he was called to active duty, not bad, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

You should feel bad for me, I'm stuck in Rochester with a baby to care for and working and taking care of a big house.
But he was stationed in Honolulu, Hawaii, for nine months.
And he traveled all over Asia.
He was the director of the east Asia region, which meant he handled diplomatic particular afairs.
He was the diplomatic face of the United States Marine Corps.
He traveled to Taiwan, to Korea, and to Tokyo, Mongolia, being wined and dined by the foreign dignitaries.
Not a bad job.
I could do it.

So he actually had a pretty good stint, whereas basically I had to work, take care of the baby, take care of the House and do all the menial things around the House.
And you don't have the support that you do at a military base.
At a military base, if your husband is called up to duty, everybody around you supports you.
I didn't really have any support.
There were bad winterydays back in February where my driveway was a sheet of ice and I slid carrying the baby and I had to chop up Ice by myself after I got home from a long day of work and put the baby to bed.
Not easy.
And with a military base, if you were on active duty, you'd get a lot more support and help with things like that.

Ten years later, after his first stint as an active duty Marine, I went to visit him in Hawaii. He was older, a little more mellow about my antimilitary stance.
And I had a child then.
Military life in Hawaii isn't bad, so I thought, as an officer's wife. Your husband makes a lot of money at that point, because you're a pretty high ranking officer.
You're making a six figure income.
Your housing is paid for, so there is no mortgage to pay for.
Everything is disposable income.
The only bad part is you don't get your husband around a lot of the time.
But there is a lot of support for families.
Marine Corps prides itself on family values.
There are a lot of activities for children.
And as an older person, I'm 37 now, ten years later, after 29 Palms, I could appreciate some of the amenities that the military has to offer.
>> MARK PRICE: Now, there is an opportunity now if any of you on the panel would like to exchange any ideas amongst yourselves.
It's certainly not mandatory, but it could very well be that while each of you were listening to the other's presentation, you'd like to make a comment. Is there anything along those lines that the panel would care to do?
Gail?
>> GAIL GILBERG: I was thinking with Jennifer, when you talked about being treated as an equal, in what way would you want to be treated as an equal and can you give examples of like when that happened?
>> JENNIFER GATES: Sure.
I guess one of the major ones is to feel like you fit in.
Like I said, conversations change or the way that the guys talk isn't conducive to a team environment.
You're not part of the team.
And so I think that's one major one is to feel like even though you're a female, they feel you can do your job.
You go through the same training.
We do the same tests at the end.

My personal experience is that I always felt that I had to go above and beyond to prove to them that I could do my job.
I couldn't just do my job adequately.
I had to go above and beyond.
To be treated equally, I think I would want to feel that they, right off the bat, believe that I could do what I needed to do or what needed to be done.
>> GAIL GILBERG: Do you think guys can do that, though?
Do you think they will be able to get to that point?
>> JENNIFER GATES: I think so.
I think -- I've seen over the course of, you know, a few years in the same unit, where those people that I've been serving with eventually get to the point where they, you know, make me feel like I fit in and trust that I can do what I need to do.
But then as you go to a new unit and they don't know you, you have to start all over again.
And I agree that anybody has to start fresh when you go to a new unit.
You have to prove yourself to the unit.
But I think that a female has to do it just a bit more.
>> MARK PRICE: Any other comments?
Well, I have a type of rather Bequiling question for Mary, if you choose to answer it.
It would seem just from what you outlined, one could surmise that you and your husband might have certain different ideological bases that you operate.
And I wonder how you navigate those different ideologies.
>> MARY CHAO: Well, we are tolerant of each other.
Most marines are very conservative, and he is not.
Having grown up in New York City, you can't be that conservative.
And I guess he understands where I'm coming from, but he also knows Marine Corps protocol, which is you don't argue with a higher up officer and you really don't speak out against a higher up officer, especially if you're just an officer's wife.
So ...
>> MARK PRICE: Now, there is an opportunity, if you wish, for any of you in the audience to ask questions of the panelists.
I think I have a Roving Mic coming down the stairs right now.
Do we just have one?
If you would stand up and use your own voice if you happen to have a question.
Just use your hand and I'll bring the Mic to you.
Any questions?
Okay.
Well, then we have none.
But I want to thank you all for attending.
It was a wonderful evening with wonderful different points of view.
And thank the three panelists very much.
( Applause.)
One week from tonight, Anthony Swofford, please be here.
(End of session.)

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This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
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