JACKSONVILLE - The three chevron stripes she wore as a Marine Corps gunnery sergeant didn't come with Judy Pitchford to her civilian job running the USO in North Carolina. In the Marines, when she told people what to do, they did it.

Since she took over the USO, she has had to learn other ways to persuade people to work to improve the lives of service members and their families.

"You can't talk to them like they're your troops," who got yanked out of bed in their underwear when they were too hung over to work. But if Pitchford left her rank behind, she took with her from the military its way of building leaders.

"You become a leader when they tell you to go do something, without telling you how to do it," she says.

Friends, family and co-workers say that management style has allowed Pitchford to rebuild the United Service Organization in the state from one dilapidated center in Jacksonville to three centers that serve thousands each month with a handful of paid staff and more than 600 volunteers. She is working on re-establishing a center in Fayetteville, where the nation's first USO was built in 1941.

"Everybody listens to Judy," says Patsy Schneider, a friend in a similar line of work, as recreation director for Camp Lejeune, the Marine Corps base in Jacksonville. "You know, her passion really comes out. It's just like a little aura she has going on: 'I love service members and my whole life is about taking care of them.'

"I have never really seen her have to tell anybody to do anything. They gravitate to her and say, 'What do you need?' "

Last week, she needed to take care of some last-minute details for the USO's major annual fundraiser, the Salute to Freedom, a black-tie gala held last night at the Capital City Club in Raleigh. The event, which starts at $150 a plate, gives USO supporters a chance to mingle and to honor the achievements of one member from each branch of the service.

Pitchford wore a white Grecian-style gown for the occasion, indulging what she calls the "girlie" tendencies that almost kept her out of the Marine Corps.

"I'd thought I'd be a fashion designer or a stewardess," Pitchford says, recalling the aspirations of a young Mary Judith Hoernig growing up in Lansing, Ill.

One of seven children, she graduated from high school in 1978 at age 17 and took off for Chicago, 30 miles away, where she got a clerical job with a brokerage firm. By age 19, she decided she needed to get further out into the world, and with two older brothers already in the Marines, the Corps seemed the way to go.

"My brothers said, 'You don't belong in the Marines,' " Pitchford says.

She went to Parris Island for training. The second day, she sat on her bunk crying, saying, "My brothers were right. I don't belong here." Then it was too late.

She stuck it out. A former cheerleader and sometime gymnast, she gradually became a runner, military style. The first time she ran a mile and a half without stopping, she knew she could make it four years.

In 1980, when she enlisted, women in the Marine Corps were told their role was to "free a man to fight" by doing the administrative work of war. After Parris Island, Pitchford was sent to Camp Lejeune, where she and other "women Marines" were trained in etiquette and the application of makeup. At combat engineers' school, she also learned how to manage logistics and supplies for heavy equipment units.

'To be a grunt'

After four years at Lejeune, she went to Camp Pendleton, Calif.

"That's where I learned to be a Marine," Pitchford says proudly, "how to hike mountains, how to shoot machine guns. That's where I learned to be a grunt."

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