Finnish defense forces, military police of Kainuu brigade, winter batch of 2008.

There we're around fifty people in my unit, three women. One of them stayed with the privates like me, two went to sub-officer school.

The one who stayed with us was fine. Really nice and cool person and everybody liked her. She was slower in every respect than others. I was second slowest of the guys, but she was slowest. Personally I liked not to be the slowest so thats nice. But I guess in war people don't run these days that much, except when things go to shit. If mu unit ever goes to war, she is quite strong candidate to be the first one killed.

One of the women started to train new recruits right after that sub-officer school session. The other and five guys came to lead us "old timers". It was a disaster from the beginning. They had some advice from the school to be extra rough at the beginning, because if you are too kind to recruits at first, it's hard to tighten up, but it's always easy to slacken the discipline a little.

So all the new sergeants tried to yell at us, but we already knew how things worked and didn't care much. The sergeants got called for bad leadership by our captain and we got no punishment. I guess this female sergeant tried to compensate her lack of balls by being extra mean at first. So she was most upset when it didn't work out. After this none of the sergeants really trusted us to do what was needed. But we we're weird ass privates and actually liked to drill the real stuff, not some parade marching. Most sergeant guys quickly learned to give as as much slack discipline-wise as we wanted and in return we performed quite well when it was really needed. At the same time our female sergeant started to feel depressed because she failed at this. That depression had it's cost in all her performance, and soon she didn't perform even when leadership was not needed.

Some guys really had hard time taking commands from women. Yes it's a shame and it should not be that way. But the military is there to defend our country, not to make us better people. And nine months is not enough for everything right now, so some kind of "equality training" is not very good idea to do in the force. I think best they can do in the military is to try to form groups that naturally bond and function. I can't see why they could not make all-female unit.