LtCol Lindsay L. Rodman on the Tradition That Brings Marines Together
Like many other Marines, my favorite part of being a Marine is being among other Marines. Marines understand a part of me that my kids and my husband think is sometimes silly (that’s the kids) or sometimes crazy (that’s my husband). I love them more than anything, but sometimes I also need to be a Marine, celebrating with other Marines.
On the Marine Corps’ birthday, I know I will have the opportunity to be around Marines, celebrating our history and traditions. I look forward to it every year. I love meeting up with other Marines in person – grabbing a drink on or around November 10 and catching up with Marines from every walk of life. Sometimes it’s Marines I’ve served with and sometimes it’s Marines I’ve never met before. It doesn’t matter – it’s meaningful no matter who it is.
I also love the text messages that I receive from Marines around the world. Each one of them means so much. We can’t be together, but that means that each person took the extra effort to include me in their celebration. As a female Marine, that means even more to me. I have spent a long career trying to fit into this community, and just the little gesture of saying “Happy Birthday Marine!” goes a long way. I’m grateful to the incredible men and women I’ve served with, who make the extra effort to maintain those connections and include all Marines in their birthday celebrations.
Why will the 250th Birthday be even better than all the others? It’ll be an opportunity to make the extra effort to reunite with and meet even more Marines. And… I’ll aim to set a new record for happy birthday texts in a single day. I hope everyone else will as well!
About the Author
Lindsay Rodman, Lieutenant Colonel, United States Marine Corps Reserve, is a born-and-raised New Yorker, and a graduate of Duke University, Harvard Law School, and the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is currently on active orders attending Marine Corps War College. She is a judge advocate and a Latin America Foreign Area Officer. In her civilian capacity, she is an intelligence lawyer in the Office of the General Counsel, Department of Defense, and an adjunct professor at the George Washington University Law School.
As an active-duty Marine, Lieutenant Colonel Rodman served in Okinawa as a defense attorney and deployed to Afghanistan as the operational law attorney for 1st Marine Division (FWD). In her last two active-duty tours, she was the Deputy Legal Advisor in the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and then she was selected as a White House Fellow, serving as Director for Defense Policy and Strategy on the National Security Council Staff. In her civilian capacity, she joined the Department of Defense after her White House Fellows year as the special assistant to the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel & Readiness, and then as a Senior Advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Stability and Humanitarian Affairs. Lieutenant Colonel Rodman then obtained a fellowship from the Council on Foreign Relations to study Arctic Security in Canada. After moving back to the United States, she became a non-profit executive, first as the Executive Vice President of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and then standing up a new non-profit, the Leadership Council for Women in National Security, serving as its first executive director.
She lives in Washington, D.C. with her husband, Major Matthew R. Turk, Royal Canadian Air Force (Retired), and their two amazing and adorable kids.
