Blake Hall
In March, blonde and blue-eyed Athena Brattin Cain was crowned the winner Miss Sonoma County, a beauty pageant in the San Francisco Bay area. A few months into her reign, seventeen year-old Cain will swap her crown for camo at Marine Corps boot camp in Parris Island, South Carolina. She will leave home for boot camp on Aug. 10.
If you are surprised a beauty pageant winner could join the military, think again. Before the pageant, Cain was the only girl on her high school’s varsity football team. She can do more than 50 crunches in two minutes and can hold a flexed arm hang for one and half minutes, easily exceeding the minimum requirements for Marine Corps enlistment for her age group and gender.
Her parents were actually more shocked that their daughter became Miss Sonoma County.
“I definitely think I’m breaking a pageant stereotype. A lot of people think they’re just pretty little models, or they sing. Or they want to be designers. And that’s not the case for me,” Cain said. “I wanted to prove that I could walk around with a crown on my head and be a normal person, be a patriot and be in the military.”
Though she looked at all the military branches, Cain chose the Marine Corps because she thought it would be the most difficult.
“I like a challenge, and I like expanding my abilities. It’s the toughest branch for females,” Cain said.
Cain is one of only seven girls from Sonoma and Marin County to join the Marine Corps. After completing three months of boot camp, Cain will move to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and train to become a combat engineer.