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Brig. Gen. Lori Reynolds made Marine Corps history last year when she became the first woman to take command of the service's fabled recruit training facility at Parris Island, S.C., a defining moment in a career that began in the 1980s at the U.S. Naval Academy, where she studied political scienceand played basketball for the Midshipmen.
Her ascent from second lieutenant to trailblazing one-star, coupled with her tenure on the basketball court, was recognized in June when she was named one of the country's most influential female athletes of the past 40 years to impact American society. Today, Reynolds has the awesome responsibility of overseeing the Corps' East Coast boot camp, where all female recruits learn to become Marines alongside male recruits hailing from east of the Mississippi River. Additionally, she leads the Corps' Eastern Recruiting Region, which includes about 1,500 recruiters at two dozen recruiting stations.
This high-profile assignment coincides with a number of groundbreaking gender-related changes taking place within the Corps. Several new career opportunities recently opened to female Marines in select ground combat units, in jobs previously available only to men. Also, officials continue to seek female volunteers for infantry officer training as part of ongoing research aimed at evaluating whether more jobs should be opened to women.
Marine Corps Times caught up with Reynolds June 21 at the JW Marriott hotel in Washington, where she was honored alongside a number of celebrities, who also played college or high school sports, to mark 40 years since Congress enacted Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972. The law requires institutions receiving federal funding to provide equal opportunity to women and men. That includes access to academic and extracurricular activities.
Excerpts of the interview, edited for space and clarity:
Q. What message do you hope being recognized as an influential leader sends to other female Marines?
A. I think for me it's the same answer I have when people ask me what it's like to be a brigadier general. I think it just speaks to the opportunities that are available to you if you apply hard work and do your best. You hope that somebody will take notice and that, if they are watching, you set the right example and good things happen.
Q. What women do you most greatly value as role models in your life and why?
A. Since my career started at the Naval Academy, it was the women that graduated in the class of 1980. By the time I got there six years later, I didn't feel like a pioneer anymore. If they hadn't gone and done what they did, I couldn't have been able to do what I did. It was very brave of them.
Maj. Gen. [Angela] Salinas has always been a good mentor to me. There are all kinds of people who have helped me along the way.
Q. Did Maj. Gen. Salinas, who commanded Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego from 2006 to 2009, have any advice for you about this particular assignment?
A. Back when she was a colonel, she took an interest in my career because I was selected to be a recruiting station commander, and it had been some years since other women had been selected for that. So when I was sent out there, she looked out for me and told me what was going to happen. She has been a very good mentor and friend.
Q. What's the best piece of advice she gave you?
A. She told me exactly what was going to happen with recruiting duty. And it's a different job — it's different from the operating forces, so any amount of heads up that you can get about the way recruiters think and the kind of leadership they need is helpful. The things she told me there were absolutely spot-on. She walked the ground with me at Parris Island and told me what to do. She's been there and done that, so she's been very, very generous to share everything she's learned.
Q. How does it feel to see women being able to volunteer for the Infantry Officers Course?
A. I think it's good. The Marine Corps is going to take a very deliberate and very measured approach. The bottom line is that we're a war-fighting organization. And we have to be combat-ready. Our infantry battalions need to be ready to train to win our nation's battles. I think the commandant wants to learn as much as he can about physical preparedness for IOC and our females. It will take volunteers to do that because it will be difficult for them.
Q. Do you think if the course had been open to you, you would've volunteered?
A. I like to think that I would have. I've been in 26 years, and we've opened more and more [military occupational specialties] to women every year I've been in — and we're filling them.
I think I would've loved to do the things our female engagement teams did. I would've loved to have the opportunity to serve on a [Marine Expeditionary Unit]. When I came in, you couldn't do that. There have been so many opportunities opened up.
All I wanted to do was lead Marines. That's how I ended up as a communications officer. All I wanted to do coming out of [The Basic School] was be a platoon commander, so it didn't matter to me what job I had. And I hope that our women have the same approach. I hope that they just want to be good Marines, no matter what they do.
Q. Are you surprised that no women have volunteered for IOC yet?
A. No, not necessarily. It will be physically arduous for them — it's physically arduous for the men.
I would like to think that our female lieutenants just want to contribute where they can best contribute to the Marine Corps. And I think that's what we should be focused on. If it's in the infantry, OK. If it's not, then let's figure that out because this should be about what is going to make the Marine Corps better.
This is why I'm such a big fan of the FET. We do need women doing that kind of stuff. We need them to be physically fit enough to be with the infantry and to walk the ground with them. But there's a distinctly female reason why we have them there.
So it's not about civil rights, it's about what's best for the Marine Corps. We should never lose sight of that.
Q. How do these new opportunities for women in the Corps change things for female recruits arriving at Parris Island?
A. I think they can see that the sky is the limit for them. At Parris Island, we give them the same program of instruction that we give the men, we just do it in a segregated environment, for I think all of the right reasons. But the sky is the limit for them.
If they are physically fit and they want to have the heart of a Marine, they want to have the desire to go out and do good things, the Marine Corps can change lives. I've got 1,500 recruiters up and down the East Coast and they're changing lives every day. You've got to believe in that.
Q. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., recently said that the Marine Corps could be forced to close one of its recruit depots because of defense budget cuts. Are you concerned about that being a possibility?
A. No. I have not heard anyone in uniform talk at all about doing away with either one of the recruit depots. Quite frankly, neither one of either the West Coast or East Coast depots are big enough to take care of the total requirement. So I'm not really concerned about that.
Q. Marine Corps Times recently published a cover story about the process for medically separating injured or sick recruits who can't return to boot camp, and how the process can take a long time for some. The two recruits referenced in the story were on the island for a year and a half. Would you like to see any changes to that process?
A. The process that I think you're referring to is the Integrated Disability Evaluation System process. Now we send most of the kids through the legacy program because it's a little bit faster. That process doesn't begin until we have a medical diagnosis. In the case of the kids that [story] referenced, we didn't have a medical diagnosis. So we spent a lot of time and energy trying to get that right, because we don't want to send them home until we know if we broke them — because if we broke them, then we should fix them. If we didn't break them, then we need to know that, too. But that takes time.
Each case is different, but I can tell you that every week, we have an entire team that sits down and they go name by name by name, [to understand]: What's going on with this kid? What are we doing with him?
One of the things that our commandant tells us to do is return better citizens to America, even if they don't get the opportunity to wear the eagle, globe and anchor. So while they're there trying to rehabilitate or to get the proper diagnosis, we try to give them jobs, we try to give them meaningful work, and sometimes that takes longer than we want. I have no incentive to keep those kids any longer on that island. I would very much love to get them back home as quickly as possible.
