Army's drill sergeant single moms face challenges

FORT JACKSON, South Carolina (AP):

Few women make it into the ranks of the Army's top drill sergeants, even fewer when they face the challenge of being a single parent. But there they are, running fresh recruits through the gruelling boot camp that welcomes every new soldier.

To juggle childrearing with a job that features 18-hour days and six-day weeks, the women take different paths: One sent her two daughters to live with relatives in Tennessee, one drops her son and daughter at an Army-run day-care centre at 4:30 a.m., while a third woman's own mother moved from Texas to care for her 7-year-old granddaughter.

"You just have to build a big extended family," said Drill Sgt Esasha LeBlanc, a 10-year-Army veteran with a 10-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter. "It's like being sent to war."

The 30-year-old LeBlanc is one of 74 female drill sergeants at Fort Jackson who are single parents, out of the 207 women holding the job at the training post this summer. By contrast, 39 of 523 male drill sergeants are single parents, Army officials said.

Numbers have grown

The number of women in the ranks has increased since basic combat training for both men and women was more widely introduced in 1994. Male and female drill sergeants train both sexes in combined units during the 10-week boot camp that all new recruits go through.

Fort Jackson trains half the Army's male soldiers and more than 60 percent of its female soldiers every year. Altogether, 60,000 soldiers train here every year to fill the Army's ranks of 570,000 men and women.

Fort Jackson began training women to become drill sergeants in 1972, but they only trained other women until 1977. When the draft ended in 1973, women were eligible for only nine per cent of the military's jobs and composed only 2.5 per cent of the ranks; now 14 percent are women.

The number of women in the military swelled in the 1990s, when Congress began opening up more military jobs to them. Military leaders now say they can't go to war without them: the Pentagon says about 255,000 women from all military services served in Iraq and Afghanistan.