A-1 was force integrated with the Class of '97 in 1993. I think that there were only two females and when I arrived in ‘94 only one was there as a Pisshead. She finished, but spent her Butt & Zip year on staff. I was always under the impression that the upperclassmen hated her, but she persevered. I heard a while back that she eventually ended up in the Marines.
When I was at my new student conference I went to the Corps recruiting night at the Corps Center. I had already chosen A-1 because of the ties to my hometown that many of the upperclassmen had. When cadets in the Corps Center asked me what outfit I was joining they would always respond with "you know that A-1 is integrated right?" To be honest I thought they were referring to race and not chicks.
My class, '98, started with 5 females and 31 males if I remember correctly. Female #1 had a full ride ROTC scholarship. She quit before FOW was over and actually left A&M immediately. Female #2, the cute one, quit about 5 weeks into school. Female #3, the cute one's friend, quit two weeks later. They both realized that it wasn't for them. Female #4 was a complete bag of crap that stayed for our entire freshman year. She refused to participate and even cried when we would force her to take her turn at blowing calls before formation. We did everything we could to remind her that she was pitiful and we wanted her out. Fortunately, she decided to not come back as a pisshead. Female #5 was actually pretty decent. She knew her stuff and was squared away. She had to leave the Corps as a junior due to personal issues unrelated to being a cadet.
In 1994 A-1 was over a 100 cadets strong. They were marching about 35 when I last saw them 2 years ago. In my opinion integration weakened the company in several ways.
- Increased scrutiny from The Trigon - When you have bulls galore making sure everyone is okay and no one is getting their feelings hurt on an almost daily basis you start to lose some of the toughness and pain that you can normally get away with.
- The rest of the Corps shuns you – Non-integrated units absolutely looked down on integrated units. This was extremely evident around Bonfire. We busted our ass at cut & stack and I always felt that we were denied perimeter pole due to integration. Just my opinion.
- Forced PC – When I was a Zip about 5% of the Corps was female. However, I believe that more than 20% of the leadership positions were filled by females. Keeping your comments PC is hard for a lot of us to do as well.
Personally, I’m not opposed to the concept integration. I will say that it wasn’t a success in the time I was in the Corps.
The standards have to be the same for everyone and it appears that the standards have been dropping for the Corps for the last 20 years. It definitely dropped between from 1994-1998.
Who’s to blame? Everyone I guess. The Trigon for forcing it, GVA for watering it down, cadets for not accepting it, some females for not being up to snuff and coasting through anyway.
Flame away.