Andrea Motley Crabtree — What the Army Took Back
1985 · U.S. Army · Living Record
The badge was real. The achievement was real. What came next was also real, and it needs to be told with the same seriousness as the triumph that preceded it — because in the architecture of Two Americas, this is how the story always goes. A door opens. A person walks through it. And then the institution, having tolerated the breach of its custom for as long as it could stand, finds a way to close the door again.
Andrea Motley Crabtree earned the Army Diver Badge in 1982. She was one of only two soldiers — out of thirty — to pass the course at the U.S. Navy Deep Sea Diving and Salvage School in Panama City Beach, Florida. She was the first woman, and the first Black woman across all military branches, to do so. What she received in return was not celebration. It was a gauntlet that never ended.
Her first assignment was Fort Belvoir, Virginia. There were roughly 39 divers total in the U.S. Army at that time. All of them had been men. The majority of them, by her own account, were not pleased to have her. The welcome she received took specific forms. Soldiers turned her air off underwater. They placed a dead snake in the freezer she used. They walked around naked after PT in spaces she shared. They assigned her what they openly called impossible tasks, hoping she would fail publicly and give them a reason to move her out. She did not fail. She did not leave. “For the most part, I could put up with it,” she said, “because I was a diver. I was diving. I was doing what I loved and I was learning. I loved what I was doing.”
After eight months at Fort Belvoir — a posting cut short, she believed, because her presence was generating too much friction — she was reassigned to South Korea. There she encountered Sergeant First Class James P. “Frenchy” Leveille, a renowned master diver with the authority and the reputation to do whatever he decided to do with her. He introduced himself with a declaration: he ran the operation, he decided who dove and who didn’t, and if she couldn’t pull her weight, he would remove her himself. It sounded like a threat. It turned out to be something else entirely.
Leveille told every diver under his command, directly and without qualification, that he would decide who dove and who they dove with — and that anyone who refused to dive with Crabtree would be removed from dive duty themselves. He staked his own career on the principle of fairness. “As far as I was concerned,” he later said, “she was going to get the same treatment and same opportunity as everybody else. She was a good diver, and she was a good Soldier. That’s the way I rated her.” The troops fell in line — not because they had changed their minds, Crabtree noted, but because of the respect they held for Leveille. “Command climate is everything,” she said. “It trickles down.” Under his leadership, she grew into a diver of genuine skill, learning more in South Korea than she had in dive school. She remains friends with Leveille to this day.
And then the institution made its next move.
Her orders for advanced schooling in California — the next step in a career that, by her own assessment and that of senior leadership, was on a trajectory toward the Master Diver Badge — were cancelled without adequate explanation. Her 300-point Army Physical Fitness Test scores were rescored using the male standard, a bureaucratic maneuver that reframed her performance as deficiency. And then came the official notification: her MOS, 00B, was being closed to women due to changes in policy.
She had not failed. She had not been found unfit. She had not violated any regulation. She had, in the estimation of diving’s senior leadership, committed a more unforgivable offense: she was good enough to make master diver, and they were not willing to let that happen. “I’m not trying to be conceited,” she said, “but I was a good diver. And the senior leadership knew it. They knew if I was allowed to continue, I would’ve made master diver. And they would be damned if that was going to happen on their watch.” An officer, pressed on why she had been accommodated before training but not during or after it, told her plainly: “We didn’t think you’d make it.”
She filed complaints with her chain of command. She filed with the post inspector general. She filed with the specialized training branch sergeant major. She filed with the Department of the Army inspector general. Every avenue closed. Every office told her there was nothing they could do. In 1985, she made the only decision left available to her. She told her command they had won. She requested to be relieved from dive duty.
“I’ve been angry every day since then.”
She finished her military career as a signal soldier — a capable one, serving until her retirement as Master Sergeant in 1998, twenty-one years after she first enlisted. But the diving was gone. The thing she had loved, the thing she had bled to earn, had been taken back not because she had failed it but because she had succeeded at it too completely.
The anger she carried did not stay contained to the edges of her professional life. “That anger has taken its toll on every aspect of my life — on my marriage, my children. It’s affected my finances and, most of all, it’s affected my mental health.” She now travels with a service dog. She has spent years, by her own description, trying to heal. She has found some of that healing in telling the story publicly — at MLK observances, at veterans’ events, in interviews. She lives now in the Augusta, Georgia area.
In January 2023, she was invited to speak at the Martin Luther King Jr. observance at Fort Lee, Virginia, before a few hundred people including the installation’s commanding general. She told the full story — the dive school, the badge, Fort Belvoir, South Korea, Leveille, the cancelled orders, the rescored PT tests, the inspector general complaints, the request for relief. At the end of the event, a senior engineer officer approached her. He placed a challenge coin in her hand. He removed his Sapper Badge — the badge of the Army Corps of Engineers. And he apologized on behalf of the engineers.
It was the first apology she had ever received from anyone associated with the Engineer Corps or the military in the forty years since she had been forced out.
“I get a little choked up when I think about it,” she said.
The MOS that closed to women in 1985 has since been redesignated 12D and reopened to all genders. The Army Women’s Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art now display her portrait. She has been consulted by novelists. She has been interviewed by national news organizations. The institution has found many ways to celebrate the history it spent three years actively trying to prevent.
She has one question she has never stopped asking, and it deserves to stand without commentary at the close of this entry:
“There is no real reason why any woman who was able to do the job shouldn’t have been able to do it. Or any reason why I should have been the first in 1982 to be a female diver for the Army.”
She is not asking why she succeeded. She is asking why the barrier existed at all. She is asking why, in 1982 — seven years after the Navy’s first female diver, in the middle of the Reagan era, on the far side of the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Rights debates, the integration of the armed forces — a Black woman still had to be the first. And why, having been the first, she was then forced to be the last.
→ See also: Andrea Motley Crabtree — The First (Contribution · Living Record · 1982)