In June, Brigadier General Loretta Reynolds, USMC, became the first woman to take command of the Corps’s legendary recruit depot, Parris Island.  “Lori” is a feminist’s dream.  In March 2010, she became the first Woman Marine to hold command in a combat zone, when she served in Afghanistan as commander of Headquarters Group, First Marine Expeditionary Force, a post she held until March 2011.  She is one of only three female generals in the Corps, and in 1982, when she entered the Naval Academy, the first graduating class of female midshipmen was only two years old.

When the ladies of that first graduating class were in their Second Class (junior) year, Navy Cross winner James Webb penned an instantly infamous article for Washingtonian entitled “Women Can’t Fight.”  For some time after its publication, not a few mids waved the article in the faces of their female counterparts, Reynolds perhaps among them, asking the questions Webb asked: “Why are you here?  Why do you want to be here?”

The article is undeniably coarse.  In graphic detail, Webb describes the filthy life of jungle combat and the depravity of behavior into which his Marines descended.  With equal candor he declares one effect of the sexual integration of the Academy: “[I]t is no secret that sex is commonplace in Bancroft Hall.  The Hall, which houses 4,000 males and 300 females, is a horny woman’s dream.”  In 2006 Bruce Fleming, an English professor at the Naval Academy, echoed Webb when he wrote, “We put powder kegs of libido in a single huge building, Bancroft Hall, and add a respectable minority of women to spark things off.”

Webb doesn’t mince words: “I have never met a woman, including the dozens of female midshipmen I encountered during my recent semester as a professor at the Naval Academy, whom I would trust to provide men with combat leadership.”  He adds, “There is a place for women in our military, but not in combat.  And their presence at institutions dedicated to the preparation of men for combat command is poisoning that preparation.”

Webb, now a politician, has repudiated the article.  Some speculate the piece cost him an invitation to be Barack Obama’s running mate, but three decades later, General Reynolds’ new command notwithstanding, Webb’s assertion that the presence of women undermines the effectiveness of combat training, to say nothing of performance under fire, is no less true.

Webb clearly understood at the time he wrote the article, and probably still understands even if he is afraid to say so publicly, that the nature of women has not changed, not only in the past 30 years, but in the whole of human history.  The central reason women have no business in combat is not the very real consequences of their relative lack of physical strength (a favorite argument of conservatives, but one easily answered by feminists: Increase physical training).  For all I know, General Reynolds is physically suited to the rigors of combat.  But if conservatives would simply say that bearing arms is a violation of the nature of women, which is to give and nurture life, they might do more to arrest the weakening of our force.

Marines understand this.

If you live west of the Mississippi (or in Michigan or Wisconsin) and enlist in the Marines, you will attend boot camp in the near-perfect weather of San Diego.  East of the Mississippi, you are headed for, as the cadence goes, the “land that God forgot,” where “the sand is 14 inches deep and the sun is blazing hot.”  Add oppressive humidity and sand fleas, and you get some sense of Parris Island, South Carolina.

Which boot camp is tougher is a never-ending rivalry for E-Club bars from Camp Lejeune to Okinawa.  PI Marines mock “Hollywood Marines” because they are issued sunglasses.  MCRD San Diego graduates have to concede San Diego’s temperate climate, but their trump is that Parris Island trains female recruits.  San Diego is for men only.

On the scores of occasions when I witnessed my Marines argue this question, I never once heard a Parris graduate fire back, “Yeah, well, WMs are Marines, too.”  The assertions of Marine Corps public-affairs officers notwithstanding, the rank-and-file Devil Dogs do not much respect WMs (or the more derogatory “BAMs”).  Instead, they regard them with a mixture of bemusement, disdain, and, in some cases, lust.  In the best of circumstances male Marines tend, quite naturally, to look after their female counterparts the way an older brother would protect his little sister.

No serious warrior culture respects women who hold command.  That female Marines do not have to meet the same fitness and strength requirements as male Marines exacerbates the relationship between female commanders and their male subordinates, but the matter runs deeper than training standards.  No amount of diversity or sensitivity training is going to alter the average Marine’s sense, however crude, of natural law.  Marines know that the more a woman is like a Marine, the less she is like a woman.  The latest piece of evidence in what ought to be an unnecessary argument is a device issued to WMs in Iraq and Afghanistan to help them adapt to conditions in the field: the Feminine Urinary Director, or FUD, which allows them to void their bladders while standing.

This is how Brig. Gen. Loretta “Lori” Reynolds will be viewed: as someone who needs a FUD.  Someone who, to be a Marine, must act, insofar as she can, like a man.