Facebook Photo Shows Female Marine Bloodied During The Corps Infantry Course

The Marine Corps has gone to great lengths hiding identities of the first female students to attend their officer and enlisted infantry courses.

But one of them turned up on Facebook with a bloody face in a posed photo.

We're not going to link to the explicit military Facebook page that posted the photo, but solid sources have verified to Business Insider that the pictured Marine is indeed one of the females attending the course.

Her injury raises plenty of questions, though, needless to say, she looks tough as a pile of iron nails.

via Facebook

In January, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta cleared women to enter combat arms job fields in the military. Since then, the Marine Corps has started a pilot program to see if women are even capable of completing the rigorous infantry training without lowering the standards - those being just the basic physical standards required of men to be infantry.

Since then, six women have failed the officer's infantry course pilot program. The Corps intends to run 100 women through the program in a year's time.

Fifteen women recently became the first trainees in the Corps' enlisted program.

Notably, if any of these women pass the course, they will not earn the infantry rating. The pilot course is simply to test if women are capable of passing existing standards.

Any women who complete the course will then go on to another job school.

So essentially, these women are doing it strictly for posterity's sake.