Sunday, November 24, 2013

Women Marines Break Barrier

Three women became the first to graduate from a grueling Marine infantry course Thursday, expanding the push for gender equality in the U.S. military and the possibility of integrating women into front-line combat units. 
However, the Marine Corps makes no promises women will be allowed to become infantry troops, saying it needs more time to assess the matter. 
The three enlisted Marines—Pfc. Julia Carroll, Pfc. Christina Fuentes Montenegro and Pfc. Katie Gorz —completed nearly two months of training that included a 12½-mile hike through the North Carolina woods lugging packs of roughly 80 pounds. They are the first women in the U.S. armed forces to undergo this kind of rigorous course.
"All the training was hard because we had to conform to the male standard," said Pfc. Fuentes Montenegro, 25 years old. "One of the things that kept us going was that we were representing something more than ourselves." 
During Thursday's graduation, Lt. Col. David Wallis, the training battalion's commanding officer, paced in front of the graduates and summarized infantry training in his speech by bellowing one of the Marine mantras, "We don't promise you a rose garden!"
Older Marines with combat ribbons pinned to their chests waited along the walls to escort male graduates to their new infantry units. But no one was there to escort the women. Although they have completed training, they will be assigned to other jobs until the Marines decide whether to open up infantry units to women—a process that could take years. 
However, they have been forbidden from joining units and jobs explicitly formed for front-line combat duties. Now, the Marines are the first military branch to put women through some of their most-rigorous training routines to see if they can perform as well as men.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...


The Kennedy Curse, as he titles his forthcoming book. And he takes the reader back to Joseph Kennedy, the founding father, who chiseled his way to the Court of St. James's as ambassador in 1937. On a trip back to the United States, aboard an ocean liner that was also carrying Israel Jacobson, a poor Lubavitcher rabbi, and six of his yeshiva students, who were fleeing the Nazis, Kennedy complained to the ship's captain about the distracting noises caused by the Jewish passengers praying on the high holy days of Rosh Hashanah, demanding that they be forbidden to continue exercises so distracting to fellow passengers. "Rabbi Jacobson put a curse on Kennedy, damning him and all his male offspring to tragic fates."


The Kennedys are a cursed family.

Their father Ambassador Joe Kennedy—a womanizer like his progeny—before WW II was pro-Hitler and during the war stymied every effort to save millions of Jews. One great rabbi cursed him and his family since he participated in helping kill the Jews and their progeny. After John Kennedy was elected president his father had a stroke.

In 1944, his son Joseph P. Kennedy's bomber he was flying on a World War II mission exploded over the English Channel just a few minutes after takeoff.

His sister, Kathleen Kennedy Cavendish, died in a plane crash in France four years later.

President John F. Kennedy in 1963, and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, in 1968 were assassinated.

Ted Kennedy himself questioned whether there was a curse on his family in a televised statement after the incident of his driving drunk over a bridge in Cappaquiddick killing Mary Jo Kopechne who he was with who died—not from the car crash or drowning—but because the pocket of air she had ran out because he did not get help soon enough. Ted wondered "whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys?"

From Wisegeek:
"in 1972. John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, died in 1999 while en route to Martha's Vineyard when JFK Jr. crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean after making a series of piloting errors.

"Several nephews of the late John F. Kennedy have also died or were injured under unusually tragic circumstances. In 1973, 12-year-old Edward Kennedy, Jr., son of Ted Kennedy, lost his right leg to bone cancer. Two of Robert and Ethel Kennedy's sons have suffered untimely deaths, including David Kennedy, who died from a cocaine and Demerol overdose in 1984. Michael Kennedy then died in a skiing accident in 1997 after he collided with a tree during a game of ski football."

Robert Kennedy had said, fter Ted Kennedy's 1964 plane crash, "Somebody up there doesn't like us."

The curse goes on…