Lioness The Origin Story Ep. 4

With stories and insights from USMC Colonel Maria ‘MJ’ Pallotta and retired USMC Colonel Maria Marte, this episode reveals how the same conditions that led to the creation of the Army’s Team Lioness in 2003 affected the USMC in Afghanistan in 2004. Colonel Marte describes how she and her female Marine ‘searchers’ attached to combat units on missions that took them outside the wire for three to four weeks at a time. Like the Army’s Lioness soldiers, their mission was to defuse tensions with women and children and gather intel. Their duties as ‘searchers’ occurred before the Marine Corps formalized their Lioness program in 2005. Colonel Pallotta explains how these ‘boots on the ground’ decisions, while technically a violation of the Combat Exclusion Policy, depended on whether a commander went with the spirit or the letter of the law.

Turning to Paramount's Special Ops Lioness, everyone agrees that, after the most recent episode, ‘The Choice of Failure,’ the show is a Hollywood fantasy that has nothing to do with reality. But, unfortunately, by calling it Lioness, the show muddies the actual history of women who served nobly under that appellation and its iterations. 

CORRECTION: Don't Ask, Don't Tell was repealed in 2011.