The Toughest Woman in America
How did a girl who loves shopping and never leaves the house without lip gloss become the meanest of the Marines?
By Christian Davenport
Photo Credit: Andrew Hetherington
The former teacher drops to his knees, crying.
He's broken and dispirited, a whimpering, sleep deprived
mess. But if he expects mercy, he's come to the wrong place. There's no mercy at Officer
Candidates School.
Marine Corps Gunnery Sergeant Ronda Porter has
seen candidates crack before — so tired they fall asleep
standing up, so physically taxed they puke, so on edge
they jerk when she screams. But in her seven years as a
drill instructor, she's never seen anyone buckle like this.
She glares from behind her desk, stone-faced.
"What's wrong with you?!" she snaps.
"It's you," he says, eyes on the floor. "I'm intimidated."
"You're 6'2" and I'm 5'2"!" She could have added: "And
I'm a woman." But he isn't concerned with her gender;
he's terrified by her power, the only currency of consequence
at OCS.
As a drill instructor — or sergeant instructor, as they're
called at Marine Corps Base Quantico — Ronda Porter has
been trained to display every degree of displeasure, from
pissed off to put out, frustrated to ferocious. It's all an act,
a bit of Marine Corps theater staged at the sprawling,
woodsy base in northern Virginia. But it's a convincing
performance, especially for the lowly civilians she spends
10 weeks breaking down until they graduate — if they
graduate — into Marine officers. Last summer, Quantico
welcomed 2500 candidates, its second-largest class since
the Vietnam War. But even with our armed forces spread
thin across Iraq and Afghanistan, anywhere from 12 to 30
percent of these recruits won't make it to graduation.
It's the drill instructors' job to determine who does.
They are the meanest species of Marine—unflinching,
infallible, almost inhuman embodiments of 234 years of
Corps toughness. This one also happens to be a petite
32-year-old beauty whose rise through the ranks was as
unlikely as her decision to enlist in the first place. Porter
grew up in tiny Bristow, OK, with a deep aversion to sweat
and dirt. In high school, her sport of choice was shopping.
Enlisting was a lark that came at her high school guidance
counselor's suggestion as a way to pay for college.
It took. Porter liked the order, the discipline. Instead of
using her education bonus to get her college degree and then
striking out as a civilian, she made a career in the Marines,
14 years and counting. Seven of those have been as a drill
instructor, first at Parris Island (of Full Metal Jacket fame),
then at Quantico. Her commanders saw in this young woman
with the toothpaste-commercial smile the kind of controlled
ferocity required of drill instructors. "She is as tough as nails
and never falters," says Colonel Rick Mancini, a former commanding
officer at OCS.
And Porter knew as soon as she stepped onto the field
how to be the steely paragon of Marine ethos. She mastered
the art of detachment and learned to tap an atavistic hardness
that makes her larger than herself. "I call it the bitch
switch," she says. Flick it on and Ronda becomes Gunnery
Sergeant Porter, a lip-curled instructor who can sense
weakness from 60 paces, who screams sometimes for
16 hours a day with barely a pause, until her skull pounds
and her voice fails. She pops Excedrin like candy and sips
hot water with honey, but the only real cure for a throat
gone hoarse and a headache from the sound of your own
raised voice, she'll tell you, is more screaming.
NEXT PAGE: THE TOUGH MARINE'S FEMININE SIDE
post a comment