MARINE CORPS AIR STATION NEW RIVER, N.C. - Marines have the option to swear in and ship to boot camp together with a friend using the buddy program. After boot camp, Marines go off to Marine Combat Training and their respective Military Occupational Specialty schools.
After several months of training, Marines go to different bases around the Marine Corps; it is rare to see someone from their recruit training platoon or their recruiting station.
Cpl. Sara Passehl and Cpl. Ashley Bitterman have spent their entire lives and Marine Corps careers together.
They are identical twins who enlisted together and managed to get stationed in the same office at Marine Wing Support Squadron 272 aboard Marine Corps Air Station New River.
They have basically spent every moment from before their birth to a deployment to Afghanistan together. They also shared a barracks room together until one got married.
The Marine Corps has the smallest percentage of females among all the armed services with only 6.7 percent females, according to http://www.womensmemorial.org. In the United States, 33.1 out of 1,000 live births are twins or about three percent, according to http://www.cdc.gov.
“The probability of a set of twins joining the Marine Corps, getting stationed at the same place and deploying to Afghanistan at the same time are astronomically low,” said Fernando Schiefelbein, a Coastal Carolina Community College mathematics and statistics instructor.
“We use each other like a back board,” said Passehl.
Bitterman said they have the uncanny ability to know what the other twin is talking about before she says anything.
“People see us finish each other’s sentence and they just stare,” said Passehl. “They ask us all the time how we do that and I tell them we are telepathic.”
They do not intentionally try to confuse people, but their superiors have talked to one twin thinking they were talking to the other.
“One time at our MOS school at Camp Johnson, we both bought the same black leather jacket,” said Bitterman. “Not because we wanted to look alike, but we have similar taste in clothing. I’m not going to not buy something because my sister has it too. So imagine us with the same black jacket, same pants, same shoes and same black sunglasses. We walked in front of the gunny on duty and scared him. He stared at us and one of us reached out a hand and told him ‘come with us if you want to live.’”
It became easier to tell the two apart when Bitterman got married, but the two still confuse people who are new to the support squadron.
They say that when they walk together anywhere, they get confused looks from other Marines and they explain they are, in fact, twins before people start asking questions.
The twins say that it is wonderful working with their best friend.
“It’s like a party every day,” said Passehl.
Their time at MWSS-272 has come to an end and both Marines have received orders to different units, but the Marine Corps has not separated them too far. Even though they will no longer work across from each other, they both will be working aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune.