May 18, 1980 was the day in which fifty-seven lives were lost; thousands of animals died and the state of Washington had over one hundred square feet of land destroyed. Along with the physical damage and the emotional pain the eruption of Mt. St. Helens lead to over a billion dollars in damage.
As I walked the path in front of the visitor’s center I looked over at what was once a beautiful and green oasis and is now a barren and deserted place in which to remember the volcanic eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Thinking about the number of lives that were destroyed that day makes me wonder what I would do if anything like that should ever happen again, especially in Washington considering I now live here. As I took my picture I choose to smile because I wanted to remember happier times instead of the sad ones. I also sat on the bench on the trail so that I could get more of an aerial view of the mountain. On the day in which I visited the weather was extremely foggy and in a sense very eerie which made the whole experience that much more intense and meaningful.
Now that I have traveled to Mt. St. Helens and actually captured my own image in such a setting I appreciate having had the experience and especially being able to sit on the trail overlooking everything and simply close my eyes and take it all in. It was definitely an experience that I will hold dear to me for a long time and one that I have captured with the simple click of my camera.
By reading the plaques along the trail I became more familiar with Mt. St. Helens and it made it easier for me to picture the events in my head. Without being there and experiencing what I have experienced, many people do not fully understand this historical event that changed the lives of a number of people. By simply taking a picture and surrounding myself with recollections and historical facts regarding the eruption I find myself to appreciate what I have and the fact that I have led a safe life, in which I am fortunate enough to have never experienced anything like the volcanic eruption at Mt. St. Helens.
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Exercise Two:
First Woman Ascends to Top Drill Sergeant Spot
By JAMES DAO
Published: September 21, 2009
FORT JACKSON, S.C. — It may come as no surprise that the Army’s new top drill sergeant idolizes General George S. Patton Jr., has jumped out of planes 33 times, aces every physical training test and drives a black Corvette with “noslack” vanity plates.
But consider this: the sergeant is a woman.
On Tuesday, the Army will make Command Sgt. Bailey Standerwick, 48, commandant of its drill sergeant school here. It is a first: No woman has run one of the Army’s rigorous schools for drill instructors.
Petite yet imposing, Sergeant Major Standerwick seems a drill sergeant at heart, ever vigilant for busted rules: soldiers nodding off in class, soldiers with hair a fraction too long, soldiers who run too slow.
“Are you crazy?” she shouts at one who is walking across a lawn. “Get off my grass!”
The eighth of 12 children, the sergeant major is the daughter of a sharecropper who grew cucumbers and tobacco near Fort Bragg, N.C. It was the sight of a commanding-looking female soldier in a stylish red beret at the fort that inspired her to enlist while still in high school.
Her first job in the army was as a postal clerk, a traditional position for women in those days. She regrets not having been deployed to a war zone during her 29-year Army career, though she has trained many soldiers who did. And now, in her new job, she will have significant influence over the basic training of every enlisted soldier.
Last year the Army consolidated several drill schools into a single campus at this sprawling post, meaning Sergeant Major Standerwick, with her staff of 78 instructors, will oversee drill sergeant training for the entire Army.
Famous for their Smokey Bear hats, booming voices and no-nonsense demeanors, those sergeants transform tens of thousands of raw recruits into soldiers each year. It is one of the backbone jobs of the military, and having a woman in charge underscores the expanding role of women in the Army’s leadership.
But Sergeant Major Standerwick’s ascension is also a reminder of the limits of gender integration in the military. Just 8 percent of the active-duty Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldiers, sergeants major like her, are women, though more than 13 percent of the Army is female.
In particular, the Army has struggled to recruit women as drill sergeants, citing pregnancy, long hours and the prohibition against women serving in frontline combat positions as reasons. Noting that the drill sergeants of today will become the Army’s senior enlisted leadership in 10 years, Sergeant Major Standerwick said one of her priorities would be to recruit more women into her school.
“I believe they are inspired when they see what they can become,” she said.
Yet she pushes back at the notion that she has risen because she is a woman. She has proven herself by commanding and training all-male platoons and holding her own against male generals, she notes, adding that her role models were men.
“When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a female,” Sergeant Major Standerwick said. “I see a soldier.”
As a child, she refused her mother’s cooking lessons, insisting on driving her father’s tractor and playing basketball instead. When her siblings got in trouble, she volunteered to take their spankings.
Her first posting for the Army was in Germany. Within three years, she was sent to drill sergeant school, graduating as one of five women in a class of 30.
Willie Shelley, a retired command sergeant major who supervised Sergeant Major Standerwick in three postings, said that he once promoted her over the objections of his commander into a position at Fort Bragg that had been held only by men.
“Turns out she was about the best first sergeant they ever had,” Mr. Shelley said. “It would not surprise me that she could become the first female sergeant major of the Army,” he added, referring to its top enlisted soldier.
In her clipped speaking style, acute command of regulations and visible disgust with slovenliness, Sergeant Major Standerwick prowls the grounds of Fort Jackson, where she was the top noncommissioned officer for a human resources battalion before being promoted to commandant.
Respect for rules and dedication to training is what keeps soldiers alive in combat, Sergeant Major Standerwick says, and she expects drill sergeants to embody that ethic 24 hours a day. “Most soldiers want to be like their drill sergeants,” she said. “They are the role models.”
Yet for all her gruffness, she can show surprising tenderness toward her charges. She describes her soldiers as “my children” and her approach to disciplining them as “tough love.” She wells up with emotion while describing how she once hugged a burly master sergeant whose wife had left him.
“She is confident, no nonsense, but compassionate about what’s right for the soldier,” said Col. John E. Bessler, her commander in a basic training battalion four years ago.
After a stint as a drill sergeant in her early 20s, Sergeant Major Standerwick went through a series of rapid promotions: aide to the secretary of defense, then Dick Cheney; senior enlisted positions near the demilitarized zone in Korea; with the storied XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg; and at NATO headquarters in Europe.
For a time in her 30s, she was married to another soldier. She got pregnant but lost the baby, and eventually was divorced. The failure of her marriage, she said, brought on a period of soul-searching that led her to study the Bible. She was planning to retire and join the ministry when her appointment to the drill sergeant school was announced over the summer.
“On the other side, the military life, I was doing so good,” she said. “But my personal life just stunk.” Since her divorce, she added, “I just pour my heart into these soldiers.”
Looking back on her years in the Army, Sergeant Major Standerwick says she can think of few occasions where men challenged her authority because she was a woman. “And when they did,” she said, “I could handle it.”
Asked if women should be allowed into front-line combat units, she said yes, but only if they can meet the same standards as men.
While she believes she can meet those standards, she says that most woman can not. As if to prove her point, she scored a perfect 300 on her semiannual physical training test last week, doing 34 push-ups and 66 situps, each in under two minutes, then ran two miles in 16 minutes 10 seconds (well below the required 17:36 for her age group.)
But before she started her test, she characteristically noticed something amiss.
“Can you believe that?” the sergeant major asked no one in particular. “A bag of garbage outside my Dumpster.”
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