First Woman Ascends to Top Drill Sergeant Spot

Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King , the first woman to run the Army’s Drill Sergeant School.
Her new job will have significant influence over the basic training of every enlisted soldier.

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 Gen. 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.

Command Sgt. Maj. King held a meeting with her first sergeants.

On Tuesday, the Army will make Command Sgt. Maj. Teresa L. King, 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 King 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. Her first job in the Army was as a postal clerk, a traditional position for women in those days.

She says she regrets not having been deployed to a war zone during her 29-year Army career, though she has trained many soldiers who were. 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 King, 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 demeanor, 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 King’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 and command sergeants major — are women, though more than 13 percent of Army personnel are 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.

Sergeant Major King said one of her priorities would be to recruit more women into her school.
But she pushes back at the notion that she has risen because she is a woman. “When I look in the mirror, I don’t see a female,” Sergeant Major King 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. 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. 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 King 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 King prowls the grounds of Fort Jackson, where she was the top noncommissioned officer for a human resources battalion before being promoted to commandant.
“She can always find the cigarette butt under the mattress,” said Patrick J. Jones, a public affairs officer at Fort Jackson. Respect for rules and dedication to training is what keeps soldiers alive in combat, Sergeant Major King 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 King 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 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 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 King 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 meet the same standards as men. While she says most women cannot meet those standards, she believes she can. 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.”