Pacific Profile
Being All She Can Be
Army Life Has Changed Melisa Laelan’s View of The World.
Since the Compacts of Free Association went into effect in the mid-1980s, hundreds of citizens from the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau have joined the U.S. armed forces. Many islanders saw duty in Desert Storm in 1991 and on peacekeeping missions in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. Still, while the number of islanders in the U.S. military grows each year, Marshall Island women in uniform are relatively scarce — an imbalance that Melisa Laelan is helping to change.
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Laelan exhibits the outwardly unassuming personality that is typical of many people in this small central Pacific nation. But she’s breaking the stereotypical image of women in the Marshall Islands. A1995 valedictorian at Marshall Islands High School, Laelan went from graduation straight into the U.S. Army, where she’s been since, serving in S. Korea, Texas, Germany and now Kansas. Army life is a universe away from her home in Laura village, a sleepy rural town on Majuro Atoll where pigs and chickens are just as likely as people to be crossing the road.
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If someone had told Laelan while she was still in high school that she’d go on to become staff sergeant in the Army, dishing out orders to American troopers, she’d have laughed in disbelief. Laelan explained that she took the U.S. military entrance test in Majuro more on a lark than having serious intentions of signing up. But after passing, she decided to enlist.
“It was something different,” she says. “A Marshallese female in the Army.” To say that jumping from a culture that defines the term “laid-back” into the disciplinarian Army has been a life-changing experience for her is to be guilty of a significant understatement. But other Marshall Islanders have also found the rigors of the U.S. military to be a welcome contrast to their experience in the Marshall Islands — and a quick way to grow up.
Boot camp was a wakeup call for Laelan, who was not sports- or time-oriented as a teen-ager. “I didn’t expect anything like that,” she says. Early morning wakeups, and running, road marching, running, push-ups, sit-ups and more running. But she passed the physical part of boot camp and was dispatched for a tour in S. Korea.
Her first months in the Army in the U.S. were tough as she came to terms with the reality of being in a totally foreign environment away from family and friends, and unsure of her new role. Looking back, Laelan says she was operating under a Marshallese woman’s mindset that “females don’t do any hard jobs. I thought if it came to fixing vehicles or lifting something heavy — that was for the men. My job was working on computers.” Back home, the closest she came to a car engine was the driver’s seat. In Korea, she was changing engine oil, fixing flat tires and whatever else needed doing. “Anything to do with a vehicle, I’ve done,” she says with a hint of pride.
Now she’s a staff sergeant, which means that among other things she’s in charge of the 6:15 a.m. platoon formations and roll call, and assigning tasks to personnel in the 39-person strong unit. She says she’s never had a problem in the military because she wasn’t an American citizen. But sometimes men have a problem with her being a woman in authority. So what does she do? If they don’t obey orders or are late or commit other infractions, “I ‘drop’ them,” she says. “Drop them” is a euphemism for falling immediately to your hands and knees to do 50 or more push-ups. Only one or two drops, and she finds no one has a problem with her authority.
But, she hastens to add, she doesn’t pull rank for the sake of showing she’s in charge. “I treat people the same way I want them to treat me,” she says. “Respect has to come from who you are not from the rank on your shoulder.”
During a visit to Majuro in October — her first home since joining the Army in 1995 — she volunteered to teach at her high school, where she also spent time encouraging other Marshallese, particularly women, to consider careers in the military. “It’s time for Marshallese women to wake up and realize that not only men can do things,” she says. “Women can do them, too.” Life in the military — the discipline — “will change the way you look at things,” she adds. “You learn not to take crap and to stand up for what you believe is right.”
