Frosted Windows, Shower Signs: What It Took to Get the Marines' San Diego Boot Camp Ready for Female Recruits
22 May 2021
Military.com | By Hope Hodge Seck
MCRD San Diego -- When Marine leaders defend the Corps' historic resistance to further gender integration of recruit training, they often bring up infrastructure as a major challenge. The two Marine Corps boot camps, built in the 1910s, are simply not built to accommodate companies integrated by gender.
Gen. David Berger, commandant of the Marine Corps, even suggested last year that the service would have to close down its existing training bases and build new ones to carry out a congressional integration mandate.
"Nothing, the way we're organized right now, lends itself to integrated recruit training," he said in September 2020. "If that's our start point -- and it is -- we have to get to a place on both coasts, or at a third location or whatever we end up with, that ... there are male and female recruits around."
But when the Marine Corps changed course and allowed an integrated recruit company to train at its previously all-male San Diego boot camp earlier this year, preparation -- at least when it came to living quarters -- was surprisingly simple.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/05/22/frosted-windows-shower-signs-what-it-took-get-marines-san-diego-boot-camp-ready-female-recruits.html
