Attachment 31111
August 2016
ABOARD A U.S. NAVY SHIP — A
Marine walks up to a pullup bar. She takes a deep breath; leaps up and grabs hold … one, two, three, four. She cranks out pullup after pullup … 18, 19, 20 … and when she can't do any more, she drops down and smoke seems to puff up from her Marine Corps-issued boots.
With 26 pullups,
Marine Corps
Cpl. Tori C. Best,
a combat engineer
13th Marine Expeditionary Unit,
**************
"Being an infantry Marine was something my recruiter
brought up the first time I went to see him,"
*("He saw I could do pull ups and asked me if I was interested
in going to Infantry Training Battalion
)*and it really sparked my interest."
After Marines finish boot camp, they are sent to the School of Infantry where they begin combat training either in Marine Combat Training or the Infantry Training Battalion. Best would be one of the first female volunteers to go through the Infantry Training Battalion at School of Infantry East. It wasn't until Fall 2013, that female Marines were given the opportunity to go through ITB.
"At the end of boot camp, our drill instructors sat us all down and gave us a brief [description of] going to ITB as a test subject. All those who didn't want to do it got up and left," she said. "And then there was a group of us left and we were excited because this is what we wanted to do from the beginning. We were all ready, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, to change history. And I think that's how we all went into it."
"I worked with these men for two months straight and that stigma fell apart," she said. "We were just men and women going through ITB with all the same goals of passing. We completely forgot that we wouldn't be going to the fleet with them. On graduation day we saw the same people we've worked day in and day out with graduating, while all of us -- just because we're female -- had to go off to our other [military occupational specialty], and that was difficult."
After graduating from the School of Infantry,
Best went on to become a combat engineer.
She was stationed at
Camp Pendleton, California,
Combat Logistics Battalion 13,
where she faced some of the same difficulties again.
"When I first joined the fleet, one of the biggest difficulties was once again dealing with that stigma," Best said. "At the end of my combat engineer school, not only had I gone through ITB, but as a female I still wasn't allowed to do a third of my [combat engineer] job. I was not allowed to go to the combat engineer battalion because it was still reserved for males."
Finding a Mentor
Best said she even had a hard time finding mentors because most of the senior engineers were from combat engineer battalions and had never mentored women.
"Instead of treating me like the guys, the more senior Marines always tried to mentor the guys more because that's all they knew," she said.
Luckily for Best, a mentor presented himself; Sgt. Kaleb Bill, a combat engineer with the 13th MEU, was from an engineering support battalion and had experience and expertise in mentoring both genders -- not only as engineers but as Marines.
"I remember we were all working and something didn't go as planned," she said. "He corrected us all -- all of us -- and it was great, and it sounds funny but we didn't have much direction at the time and here was this person who was putting in his time and effort and actually teaching us our [job]. And he treated me the exact same as he did my male counterparts."
Thanks to mentorship like this, Best kept growing as a Marine and a person. She continued to impress her leadership by taking charge and putting 100 percent effort into all she did. She left a lasting impression on her staff non-commissioned officer.
"My first impression of her was that she was very outgoing, mature and stood out as a sharp Marine," said Master Sgt. Rafael Ortiz, the logistics combat element operations chief and Best's SNCOIC. "We had a field operation at Fire Base Gloria. I heard a Marine barking orders to set up the command operations center, which is usually my job or one of my sergeants. At the time, she was a lance corporal, and she took the lead building up the COC! The way she was handling the situation looked like something I would do personally. She was running a battalion COC set up and that gave me a huge sense of pride. And in my head I said 'Yes she's going to be a good NCO.'"
After her initial difficulties Best found several other mentors, she said, and all have helped shape her to be the Marine she is now.
Beating New Standards
Best said she will continue to adapt and stay at the top of her game in order to stay competitive.
"With the physical fitness standards changing you can't have that mentality of 'I can't do a pullup because I'm a female.' You can't push aside physical fitness," she said.
As Best adapts to the changing standards, she has a few words of guidance for anyone looking to set new personal bests or overcoming a difficult challenge: "You just have to start and do it!"
-----------------------------------------------------
Pullups don't make a Marine Grunt...
Nowhere do they mention her MOS...
It's almost Jan 2017 and no mention yet of any women serving in the Grunts from the very first articles that came out..
Way to many unanswered questions..
FO...
Originally Posted by FoxtrotOscar
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Ghost Of Iwo Jima
04-04-24, 11:35 PM in Open Squad Bay