Female recruits train on Parris Island to become Marines The

Oct. 6--A breathtaking bolt of lightning spreads across the dark sky over Parris Island like an electric spider web, illuminating the marshes and how the water's reflection of an overcast sky is disturbed by a steady drizzle. The display would be an ominous opening to any journey.

And maybe the female recruits of Platoon 4034 would consider that if they were able to see the lightning or had time to think, but instead, as ordered, they have their heads jammed into the seats in front of them as charter buses and vans drive them onto Parris Island.

Most likely, the natural beauty of the island that's home to the only training camp in the world for enlisted female Marines will be lost on these young women during their three-month stay here.

Armed with designer purses and donning disheveled pony tails, they have left the only homes and families they've known to join the nation's elite warrior force. Soon, these recruits will carry M-16 rifles and sport immaculate buns -- and struggle to find a family with each other.

To become Marines, they'll have to be stripped of all their baggage -- physical, emotional and even grammatical -- and be able to prove their mettle in an overwhelmingly male military force. And though individual achievement is stressed, to accomplish this daunting mission, they'll have to work together.

"'I, me, my' are no longer part of your vocabulary," drill instructors in campaign hats bark at the recruits as dozens pile out onto the pavement.

The recruits stand as straight as they can muster after more than a day's travel in their sneakers and jeans. They're so close together that their fronts brush the backs of the person before them, and the majority don't stand on the legendary yellow foot prints of the recruit depot because of the lightning storm that lingers.

Separation anxiety

Tonight, July 24, about 100 of the total 300 expected recruits are female. Their smaller numbers make their girlish "Aye, ma'ams" and "Yes, sirs" even more feeble compared with their male counterparts as they're herded into a red-brick building by two male and two female drill instructors.

The gender-divided lines mark one of the few times they'll be within arm's length of the opposite sex for the next three months. Though they'll see each other in passing and at major training events, the Marine Corps is the only branch of the military that maintains a strict policy of gender segregation during basic training, for the sake of maintaining recruit focus.

Women make up slightly more than 6 percent of the Marine Corps, with about 9,000 enlisted Marines and 900 officers.

Male recruits who enlist east of the Mississippi River generally train at Parris Island, and men west of the Mississippi train at the recruit depot in San Diego. However, all of the 2,400 women who enlist in the Marine Corps each year train at Parris Island.

Therefore, some of the women this July night have had long journeys. Most met up at regional recruiting spots for final weigh-ins and initial tests and then spent a night in a hotel before being awakened pre-dawn to begin the bus or plane journey to Parris Island.

In a room just inside from the rain -- where the dingy tiles will never be scrubbed clean of the smell of sweaty feet released from socks as recruits step up on a lighted box to have their feet examined by drill instructors -- lines of recruits stare at a row of phones. On the phones are scripted the dialogue for the only guaranteed phone call of their training, a 20-second monologue telling whoever picks up the phone that they arrived safely, they'll be writing in the next few days with an address but to not send any big packages. "Thank you for your support. Goodbye for now."

The recruits are allowed to say nothing else, not even "I love you."

Confusion reigns as they dial upon order, some recruits fumble to comprehend they don't need to dial 1 before their home number or to figure out who else to call if no one picks up there.

Oddly, Lisa Panichi pulls an address book from her cumbersome grey tote. Her family is at a wedding out of town, so she has to call her grandmother, and then her great-grandmother, to get ahold of someone, and she hasn't memorized the numbers. She's one of the first to pick up a phone and one of the last to hang it up, and when she does, her eyes are welling with tears that threaten to dampen her freckled face.

"I heard her start to cry, and that made me want to cry," says Panichi, an 18-year-old from Tucson, Ariz, who looks as if she just graduated middle rather than high school.

Tonight, the drill instructors' harsh voices rattle the recruits less than the kind voices of a loved one over the phone as they perceive a finality in severing ties with their families back home.

Crystal Dolejsi's big brown eyes redden as she leaves the phone, her neat blond ponytail and athletic pants giving her more the air of a defeated soccer player than a Marine recruit whose one phone call ended up being to her fiance's sister rather than her fiance.

"I told him I would call," the 20-year-old from Topeka, Kan., says mournfully. "I'm glad he didn't answer," she adds unconvincingly. "Then I could hear him but couldn't say anything."

Dolejsi cheers up a little when the subject turns to the Marine Corps. She'd been working three jobs and no longer was in school when she enlisted.

"It's the pride you get from it," she says, adding that she knows she'll miss long showers. "It's belonging to something bigger than yourself."

Though Dolejsi will prove to have incredible drive, a chronic bronchitis infection will challenge her determination to continue.

Shock treatment

For these young women, losing their civilian persona means relinquishing all the stuff of femininity, a concept they won't regain until after they're born again as Marines.

Throughout the next three to five days, the recruits will fill out piles of paperwork and undergo a series of exams and issuing of gear.

And at the moment, it's the job of Gunnery Sgt. Laurie Gavigan to start stripping them of everything non-military and help ready them to meet their permanent drill instructors in a few days. She starts by confiscating all the "contraband" the female recruits brought with them and places them in brown paper bags in a room just off the telephone area. For anything valuable, such as jewelry and expensive makeup, they receive plastic bags. The recruits will be able to pick up the bags in three months as they leave.

The paper bags fill with an assortment of hair brushes, shampoo, fancy face creams, nail polish and even curling irons -- as if they'd have time to perfect their 'do and their nails on the way to the rifle range.

In front of the recruits, Gavigan sneers and cracks condescending jokes at the weary recruits and their civilian luxuries, but out of earshot of them she says that it's not always their fault they bring what may seem a ridiculous amount of items to boot camp. As the vast majority of recruiters are male, they often don't know how to communicate to the female recruits what they should bring.

Back inside the room, Gavigan, who is on her second tour of duty as a drill instructor, puts on her wry, no-nonsense act in front of the recruits.

"What are you crying about?" she asks bleary-eyed 18-year-old Cindy Juarez from Long Island, N.Y., who has been unable to maintain composure since a phone call to her mother. Her inconsolable tears and disconsolate manner border on an attitude problem. "Ain't nothing happened to you yet," and after a pause, Gavigan adds, "and ain't nothing going happen to you."

"I have to pee," Juarez offers quietly in total civilian-speak, ignoring earlier instructions to use "this recruit" to refer to herself and "head" for the bathroom.

"Make a head call," Gavigan responds, pursing her lips. Juarez stands up but freezes, unsure what to do. Not only is she unaware where this "head" is, but most excruciatingly, her tampons have been confiscated and dumped into a paper bag along with everyone else's "contraband" sanitary products. In their permanent rooms, recruits' bathrooms will be stocked with Marine Corps-issued tampons and sanitary pads.

After an awkward whispered exchange with Gavigan, she retrieves a tampon from the bag, and another recruit leads her out to the rest room.

In a couple of weeks, Juarez won't dare to refer to herself in first-person, even if given permission to do so.

To cope in this harsh alien world, some recruits are already fast friends. Armanda Beale and Lakisha Ellis, both 18 and fresh high school graduates, were the only two women who left from their recruiting station in Richmond, Va., and after one night at a hotel, have become inseparable.

"It helped make it be more fun," Beale said with an unusually bright smile for 1:30 a.m. "She helps me out. They were teaching us how to secure bags, and she was helping me."

However, the whirlwind friendship won't stay strong as it undergoes the test of Ellis' ascension to a leadership role and subsequent fall from grace when she's caught stealing.

Lauren Aluise hasn't found a quick confidence in another recruit this first night and struggles as she enters almost 24 hours of being awake and more than 18 more before she's allowed to sleep. Recruits are kept awake through their first night on Parris Island as disorientation and to put the women from four different time zones on the same schedule -- the Marine's cure for jet lag.

The 18-year-old from Pittsburgh is learning how to put on her freshly pressed "camies" at about 1 a.m., after hours of being issued stuff, including sifting through a personal items bag to sort out the jock straps and choose the proper size of sports bra.

Aluise has been up since 4 a.m. the previous day, and the day before she had left her mother without even hugging her goodbye because they don't always have the best relationship. That caused her to cry during her call home when she couldn't tell her mom she loved her.

Talking animatedly out of exhaustion and boredom, Aluise shares in a voice hoarse from shouting responses that she feels already "kinda screwed" because she still has her contacts in when she was supposed to take them out during contraband collection. Recruits are told to bring their glasses, which will be used to fashion them active wear glasses that actually have an unfashionable Coke bottle lens look.

"I can't think right now. This is so overwhelming," says Aluise, who joined the Corps not so much out of the conviction so many others have that it will turn her life around, but because she was recruited to play the clarinet in a Marine marching band. "That's a really scary voice," she says, suddenly distracted by a male drill instructor yelling downstairs. "They say it's not personal, like they hate recruits, say that we're trash, but I think it is."

Gavigan, one of the ones calling the recruits "trash," would probably disagree.

"It's amazing to see these baby Marine recruits who can't walk straight," she says, her face becoming less angular and intimidating as her pursed lips turn into a wide smile, something the recruits will never see. "In three months, they'll look like 100 percent different people. It feels good to have that much effect."

Welcome to Fourth Battalion

By Friday, the 65 women of Platoon 4034 and the equally large sister platoon in Oscar Company, Platoon 4035, will have moved into their permanent squad bays, or large hostel-like rooms, in the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion building.

The Fourth Recruit Training Battalion is the only unit in the world that trains enlisted female Marines and is housed in a cluster of burgundy brick buildings at the east end of the island. The complex was designed to have a "collegiate atmosphere," complete with courtyard, said Col. Cynthia Valentin, Fourth Battalion's commanding officer.

Wearing red lipstick and her chestnut colored hair in a feathered bob, Valentin's sheer energy radiates from her diminutive frame.

The complex is self-contained, lending itself to the Corps' gender segregation, and provides special services to its unique recruits.

Valentin is proudest of a women's clinic, where within the first week of training, all female recruits receive Pap smears, breast exams and testing for sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy -- types of evaluations some have never received before.

"It allows them not to have worries, so they can focus on training," Valentin said. "One reason for gender segregation is a (female recruit) can't really approach a drill instructor if it's a male" with problems like these.

Subsequent visits to the clinic include education on birth-control methods.

"I have to prepare them for going in a fleet where it's a candy store for them," Valentin said with a smile.

Women have different needs with general health also, with an injury rate twice of that as men, mostly to their lower bodies. One in 10 female recruits will seek medical help with injuries, and Valentin said the female training battalion has its own athletic trainer while the three male training battalions share.

Valentin said female recruits have a higher injury rate for two main reasons: They're more likely to report injuries and seek help, and the anatomy of a woman's pelvic area makes it more prone to injury during activities such as marching and running.

Upon arriving at Fourth Battalion, recruits start gaining chances to visit the mini PX to buy from a wider selection than standard-issue hair products, sanitary products, razors and even some snacks.

Female recruits aren't required to have their heads shaved upon arriving at training as males are, so a beauty shop is available in the battalion's complex for them to have their hair cut above collars or for black recruits to have their hair thinned or put in corn rows.

However, most with long hair choose to keep their long locks and are taught in their rooms during downtime by drill instructors or fellow recruits how to secure it in an amazingly tight bun at the nape of their necks. The secret is pulling a ponytail through a sock with the end cut off and securing the hair over the sock sleeve with rubber bands.

Even Fourth Battalion's chow hall, or cafeteria, is unique to the Department of Defense because it's the only one that provides a low-calorie menu.

Valentin said the chow hall was outfitted with a salad bar and reduced-calorie food options after studies showed female recruits gained weight while in training and should be eating only 1,400 to 1,600 calories a day to maintain weight. Physical training is rigorous, but not every day and much time is spent sitting in classrooms, Valentin explained. To help recruits make good choices, all food options are labeled with calorie content because drill instructors and commanders "never can tell a recruit what you can or can't eat," Valentin said.

Fourth Battalion's mess is the most popular on base. Drill instructors with the male battalions often eat there in order to partake in the salad, she added.

Valentin has headed up the battalion for two years, and as she enthusiastically gushed over the details of her unit and the services her recruits receive, she appeared more proud high school coach than military commander. She cherishes a tape a recently graduated platoon made of an a capella rendition of "Amazing Grace" led by two astonishing soloists. It's clear she loves her recruits and loves to learn from them -- and is amazed by them.

"We often get an idea those coming in are doing so because this is their last resort," Valentin said. "But the Marine Corps is very family-like. The war has touched each and every recruit in some way. They know what they're getting."

Needless to say, the recruits don't get the motivational guided tour by Valentin when they arrive at Fourth Battalion. They're greeted with a rough inspection of the squad bay -- anything from rifle security to hospital corners are scrutinized -- before their drill instructors lay eyes on them for the first time on Friday, four days after most arrived.

The real beginning

While recruits in Platoon 4034 sit cross-legged on the floor, their senior drill instructor walks briskly in from around the corner with her team of two enforcers, or junior drill instructors.

In this "forming" ceremony, these new recruits, often called "babies," are finally born and lay eyes on their Marine mother for the first time.

Tall with close-cropped hair, a dark complexion, angular face and an already hoarse voice, Gunnery Sgt. Brenda Chrismer exudes an almost masculine demeanor, making her intimidating at first sight. After all, such a manner was necessary when she was guarding detainees at a military prison in Iraq just a few months ago, which her recruits don't realize, though the knowledge may make her more intimidating to them.

The introduction she gives the recruits is standard, though this is her first time doing so because it's her first time as senior drill instructor, but they don't know that either.

She explains to them that her job is to instill in them discipline and spirit, "hallmarks of a Marine ... even if some of you have given up on yourselves."

If she isn't already in the coming weeks, Chrismer will become not only mother but God to these recruits, and they'll see her acts as a divine providence that either inspires them to exceed their limits or crushes their dreams. She'll be by their sides at every turn, training and encouraging, especially in the uncertainty of the opening weeks where recruits are most vulnerable in not believing in themselves.

Most importantly, she'll have to encourage these scared yet strong-willed individuals to come together as a team -- and as sisters.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Beaufort Gazette, S.C.

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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