On a muggy summer night in South Carolina, I stand in pitch darkness surrounded by what could only be described as eloquently orchestrated chaos. It is the Battle of Fallujah night event, part of the United States Marine Corps’s 54-hour culminating exercise in recruit training known as “The Crucible.” My team is spread out across the field taking in the scene from different vantage points. It’s so dark I can barely make out the faces of those standing next to me except for when the occasional flare illuminates the sky. Marine Corps recruits, completely exhausted at this point, low crawl through the sand while drill instructors hover over them yelling “MOVE FASTER” and “GOOOOOOO. PUSH.” Even the loud, booming voices of the drill instructors are no match for the level of ambient noise piped in from movie battle scenes and simulated mortars, all of which are intended to induce stress in the recruits.
As I watch the event unfold, I catalog everything in my head, waiting for the time when I return to my hotel room to furiously write down observations in my field notes. I take it all in, looking around at the unfolding symphony of noise, struggle, authority, grit, movement, and flashes. I glance upward at the unassuming moon above us, and in that moment deep gratitude washes over me because I realize I’m doing the kind of sociology that was of my wildest dreams.
Determining My Path as a Sociologist
In graduate school, I mulled over what I wanted to do as I charted the path ahead of me. I entered a PhD program unsure academia was for me but stayed open to exploring different aspects of teaching, research, and scholarship. I knew sociology was for me; I just didn’t know what direction I wanted my career to take. In my dissertation phase I started taking an inventory, classifying what I liked to do, what I didn’t like to do, which subjects I cared about, what methods drew me in, and how all of that aligned with my strengths and talents. I landed on the fact that what made me feel alive as a sociologist was using the frameworks and tools of sociology to answer big, important questions in need of answers. As C. Wright Mills articulated, bringing the sociological imagination to life connects personal troubles with public issues. I believe it is through the lens of sociology that we can best illuminate how leaders and decision-makers can improve policies and practices for our government, institutions, and communities.
The question which brought me to Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, SC, that summer night was “How can the Marine Corps increase gender integration at recruit training while maintaining the same level of discipline, physical fitness, and camaraderie as their current training models?” To answer it, we went deep. I led a team of social scientists who conducted hundreds of hours of ethnographic observation of recruit training, interviewed leaders and drill instructors at every level, held focus groups and conducted surveys with recruits, and reviewed current policy documents and training materials. Proposing applicable alternate models and policy recommendations for increasing gender integration at Marine Corps recruit training necessitates expert knowledge of the large logistical apparatus that seamlessly trains tens of thousands of young civilians each year. It also requires a layered, nuanced awareness of the social and cultural environment shaping recruits into marines—that’s where the sociology comes in.
Why Policy Needs Sociology
The stereotypical images of recruit training focus on the physical aspects—flailing recruits sweating as they endure endless push-ups ordered by the unrelenting, omnipresent drill instructor. The physical challenge of it all is undeniable—but, first and foremost, recruit training is an institutional master class in socialization. Recruit training in the Marine Corps indoctrinates civilians with institutional core values (honor, courage, and commitment), teaches service customs and historical traditions, and requires recruits to embody the mannerisms, body posturing, and expectations of behavior to become a marine, sailor, airman, coast guardsman, soldier, or guardian.
For the Marine Corps, the goal is to break down the person who showed up and re-build them into something new—a marine—who becomes an invaluable asset for our national defense. Even with all the established procedures, rich history, policy regulations, and infrastructure supporting the process, at the end of the day this transformational process comes down to the people: marines make marines. A dedicated team of drill instructors spends day in and day out with recruits for 13 weeks, molding them into institutional actors—basically trained marines who then will become the legacy of the institution itself.
Therefore, understanding recruit training is impossible without attending to the social in a significant way. Developing effective policy recommendations requires an attentiveness to what people do (and what they don’t do); why they do it; how people shaped what has been done; and what meanings are produced, shared, and sacred in this process. Policies without consideration for the people operationalizing the policy and those impacted by the policy (in this example, drill instructors and recruits, respectively) will, ultimately, succumb to failure. Sociology attends to that which cannot be ignored: the people, their relationships, social nuances, and cultural habits.
Sociologists are Needed Everywhere
When I first told my (lovingly supportive) parents I wanted to major in sociology in college, they raised their eyebrows, “And what can you do with that?” they asked. My youthful-blindly-optimistic-follow-my-passion-self did what any straight-A-freshman-student would do and asked my advisor, a sociology professor, for help. She assured me sociology is a useful major and handed me a pamphlet to share with my parents. Across the top the pamphlet read: “What can you do with a sociology degree?” Clearly, I was not the only one with this question. While I cannot remember its specific contents, the message boiled down to ‘you can do anything with sociology’ listing off several dozen careers where a sociology degree is useful. It’s one of those messages that feels like a cop-out but is, in fact, true. You can do sociology everywhere. In fact, we need sociologists everywhere.
If the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything, it’s that you can have all the physical science in the world, but if you don’t understand the people and their social and cultural norms it will be a lot harder to use infectious disease science to prevent infectious disease. You have to marry the social (science) with the physical for the best results. The opportunities for applying sociology are vast. All of our societal woes are desperately in need of sociological thinkers to discern patterns and make connections in the unique way sociology provides.
As a senior researcher at Insight Policy Research, I bring the sociological imagination and the tools of social science research to U.S. military leaders and decision-makers to inform policies and practices that will serve, and hopefully improve, our military force. The U.S. Marine Corps Gender-Integrated Recruit Training Study I’ve described is just one of several engaging projects I get to work on. I provide research support for the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, one of the longest standing U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) federal advisory committees, which provides annual recommendations to the Secretary of Defense on the recruitment, retention, employment, integration, well-being, and treatment of service women. I conduct research for the Naval Health Research Center, identifying risk and protective factors for military spouses and families using longitudinal data from the Millennium Cohort Family Study. I am also engaged with research and policy work for the DoD Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office.
Some may wonder how much value a sociologist can really bring to an institution like the military, one that is responsible for our national defense. Clearly, I am not designing better equipment or weapons, nor am I contributing to medical breakthroughs that could be used on the battlefield. But I am attending to the people—to their equity and social well-being—so they can show up prepared to do their jobs better, and that…that is just as important and necessary.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
