United States Marine Corps:
Sergeant Major Laura Brown by Robert Voris
It was all an accident. A happy accident, but still. Laura Salazar was 17, a third-generation Mexican-
American and the second of three daughters being raised by a single mother in San Antonio and knew that when she graduated from high school that she would need to strike out on her own. In February 1984, one of her classmates at Oliver Wendell Holmes High School left early to go meet with his recruiter. That’s when Laura decided she would enlist in the Air Force. There was a problem, though. The Air Force
recruiting post was closed that day. The Marine Corps, on the other hand, was open. So she became a Marine. And when her initial enlistment was up, she stayed a Marine. SgtMaj Brown, as she is now known, is the Sergeant Major for Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.
She figured out pretty early on that she enjoyed Marine life. As early as 1985, when she was a Private First Class assigned duty as a finance clerk, Brown realized that she was enjoying her time. “At eighteen or nineteen, you don’t think of anything as a career,” Brown recalled. “It’s just a job. But what a job.” Later on that same year, she saw a military magazine
that featured a Sergeant Major on the cover. “That picture of power and authority was very appealing,” she remembered. At the time, there were only a few females in leadership roles, but one of them was a drill instructor named Amy Price. Brown didn’t yet understand how Price did it, but she knew that was what she wanted to do. That going through the drill instructor training and eventually molding young recruits would give her the kind of challenge and bearing that she wanted most. It took six more years of work in disbursement
and payroll, but in 1992, she shipped out to Parris Island to attend Drill Instructor School. By the time she was reassigned to Iwakuni, Japan in 1994, she had graduated five platoons of recruits and served as the first female history instructor for both male and female recruits. She also found time to marry First Sergeant Mark Brown in 1993. After 27 years with the Marines, SgtMaj Brown is beginning to look at post-military life. Her husband retired from the Corps in 2008 and is pursuing his
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Master’s Degree, and she will pursue Business Accounting and Administration, which makes sense given her 14 years of experience in the field and, of course, the Marine Corps’ commitment to pay for her education. There is only one military goal she has yet to achieve: working for a general. At the same time, she is confident that the opportunity will arise in the three years that remain of her career. Career, husband, family, college, travel, service – quite a
lot of SgtMaj Brown’s life might have been different if the Air Force recruiter had been open that July day in San Antonio, though the Sergeant Major believes she would have had an advantage in any military environment. “I didn’t come in to the Marine Corps and learn honor and discipline,” she said. “I learned that at home, and being raised in a Mexican- American household you learn that anything that doesn’t kill you can’t break you.”
Celebrating 19 Years of Diversity
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