Against all common sense, I had enrolled in my father’s class at Columbia, a popular seminar on international trade. If he was such a big shot, I figured I’d get a glimpse of him in action. It was a giant, sloping classroom, and I sat somewhere near the back. I avoided eye contact with him, instead watching students from around the world hanging onto his every word. God, he tells those jokes in public, too, I remember thinking. I tried desperately to hide in my seat. I wanted nothing to do with him. Yet there I was.
I lasted only one semester. I remember the afternoon I walked into Swati’s bedroom, crumbled into her lap, and wept uncontrollably. I couldn’t do this anymore, going along with my parents’ plans and feeling so broken inside. It felt like I was dying. She held me and stroked my hair, asked me softly what would help and what I wanted to do. I didn’t know. I went where they told me. Choice was an abstract concept. Free will was something my white friends talked about in European philosophy classes and then expressed shamelessly in their own lives. In my world it was equivalent to disrespect for one’s elders, a kind of Indian upheaval.
I did not know what it would feel like to stand tall, to trust my own feet, follow my own instincts, and breathe fully. I was too sad to dream. I wanted out of this cycle, only I didn’t know where to begin. When I quit school suddenly, my folks were shocked and confused, as if after twenty-three years of watching me struggle to be like them, they hadn’t seen it coming.
They loomed, calling constantly, asking what I was going to do next. What are your plans? I had none. Everything I wanted to do had been forbidden since long before I could remember.
• • •
G.I. Jane was supposed to be a distraction over the Thanksgiving holiday, not a call to duty. I’d taken Smita, Swati’s little sister. We walked out of the theater onto a dark New York City sidewalk, jacked on adrenaline, hearts pumping. Demi Moore starred as Lieutenant Jordan O’Neill. Buzz-cutting her hair live on camera, clenched jaw and eyes on fire, ready to consume the whole world, O’Neill became my symbol of one woman bucking the system and thriving in spite of it. The one-armed push-ups didn’t hurt, either.
Then a pre-Aragorn unknown, Viggo Mortensen played the part of Master Chief John James Urgayle, O’Neill’s sexist, skull-crushing Navy SEAL instructor. Maverick and Iceman were no match for the Master Chief. I was wrapped up in his sadism and authority like a puppy starved for love.
I’d spent most hours in childhood and adolescence dutifully engaged in my studies. But after years of earning As that had no connection to a deeper sense of purpose, I realized that what I really wanted was some kind of physical and mental reckoning. Taming my body was a form of control that I didn’t have in any other part of my life. Along with this, it became clear to me that being smarter than the boys wasn’t enough for me. I wanted to beat them at everything else, too. And maybe, if I was honest, kick their asses a little.
G.I. Jane pushed feminist boundaries but took grand liberties with the truth—there were no women in the Navy SEALs,II and there was no desire at the Pentagon to change that—but I didn’t know the facts then and wouldn’t have cared. I was riveted.
In the film there’s a well-known simulated hostage scene during Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) training in which Viggo beats the crap out of Demi in front of the male trainees. Pinned down with her hands cuffed behind her, Demi seethes with fake blood spurting out of her mouth as Viggo cuts off her belt and prepares to tear off her trousers. Spent and humiliated, she finds a second wind, boots him in the nuts, head butts him hard, and kicks him to the ground.
He recovers, knocks her out, and gloats, while she gets back to her feet, spitting up blood, barely standing, proclaiming, “Suck. My. Dick.”
Her team goes wild. She has become one of them while also rising above them. It still gives me chills.
I wanted that. Even more, I needed that. It felt strangely like lust. And I wasn’t sure if I could see a line between lust and pain. No part of me cared to know why I was drawn to a culture in which degradation and humiliation were entwined with belonging. I needed to fight in order to prove myself, even if I wasn’t sure whom I was fighting or what I was trying to prove.
Demi’s transformation stayed with me. The following spring, I rode my bike down Broadway at 4:45 a.m. each morning. The lanes were entirely deserted except for the occasional delivery truck dropping off inventory at grocery stores. I entered Central Park and cut across the narrow lane alongside Sheep Meadow. I saw no one. Unlit, quiet New York City parks echoed generations of rape warnings, and looking over my shoulder was something I’d learned when I was a child.
I was meeting a group of middle-aged men and women, all white, mostly lawyers and bankers, New York’s overworked, overstressed upper crust. I was unique among them, twenty-four and Brown, wide-eyed, a recent graduate school dropout, searching for meaning anywhere I could find it.
I locked my bike and made my way to a dimly lit cement patch, where a couple of bodies were hovering, yawning, and stretching under the black sky. Jack and his assistant came out of the shadows of Central Park’s elm trees. Jack was a short, wiry man with hamstrings that popped and a tight, muscular chest. The sleeves of his T-shirt closely encircled biceps and triceps honed through a lifetime of lifting, pulling, and pushing large, unwieldy objects—bodies, boats, weapons, equipment—from one place to another over and through every conceivable natural and man-made element. Jack’s voice was mean, firm, and strangely resonant. He was my first real-life Navy SEAL, and I was transfixed.
I was too naive to know the special brand of theater Jack was performing as he barked at us to get on the ground and push. I ate up every order, and I couldn’t get enough.
Confined to small spaces on cramped boats and submarines, the SEALS had perfected infinite variations on heart-pounding, lung-bursting calisthenics. Something cosmic was playing out here in the thousandth push-up and five hundredth mountain climber, this dance with mortality and the will to ignore one’s own screaming body. Jack was teaching us to embrace fear and accept misery. The body was merely a vehicle for the mind to experience something beyond physical limitation, and I pushed past it, with something that felt like faith, with Jack hollering an evangelism that conveyed absolute certainty in the soundtrack over my head.
My back flush against the concrete, hair beyond any hope of staying in my ponytail, grit digging into my palms and forearms, I summoned another hundred flutter kicks, hollering my count back to Jack’s cadence, watching the city transform from starless black to dawn. I felt both numb and exhilarated. Penetrating muscular soreness and physical exhaustion would define my next few weeks. And because there was no feeling in the world like this, even this was not enough. I wanted more.
• • •
Two months later, I arrived at a Navy recruiting station on Harlem’s main business strip, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard intersects with Malcolm X Boulevard. The walls were plastered with rah-rah posters depicting big boats and deadly planes, aircraft carriers, submarines, and camouflaged men carving through surf on Zodiacs. Every branch of service had been branded by billion-dollar advertising companies in fancy boardrooms, encapsulating the unfulfilled longing of American adolescents, down to each unique cultural or demographic footnote, with the ruthless precision of the nation’s best political operatives. They’d hedged their bets that we were all suckers for something, rejected or urged on by society or family in some primal way, wishing for something larger than life, or at least something more than the mundane existence we’d been living.
As I stared at the posters, I was greeted by a dirty blond, mustached sailor and my heart sank. This was no Jack. This was no Jane. The man was dough-faced, soft around the waist, and covered in white.
I sat down and immediately felt too comfortable. Like a travel agent, the Navy’s poster boy regaled me with stories about seeing the world. I looked at him, bored to death.
“So, how do I become a SEAL?”
“
Excuse me?” he said.
I blinked.
“You want to be a Navy SEAL?” The truth was served like a hammer on my head: “You can’t.”
“What do you mean I can’t?”
“Women just . . . can’t.”
“Why?”
He didn’t know why, and by the sound of it, if anyone knew, they hadn’t given this guy any explanations. He told me patiently about the prohibition on women in combat. Women were banned from doing hundreds of jobs in the military: SEALS, Delta Force, infantry, armor, artillery. The list was endless.
Reality was quickly setting in. G.I. Jane was a myth created by Hollywood. These glorified photos of special operators on the walls, trying to sucker me in with promises of being my best and testing my limits—all of it was bullshit.
We stared at each other.
“Well, what can I do, then?”
He whipped out a clipboard and pounded through a long list of questions, assessing whether or not I would qualify for the Navy. I appeared to be a standout recruit, and the sailor was eager to move forward. But I couldn’t get over the man’s gut. His friendly style. The cushy posters on the wall. This place was more a promise of a honeymoon than the first phase of the rest of my life. I didn’t want to get a tan on the deck of some cruise ship. I didn’t want a European vacation. I wanted trials. I wanted to be tested. I wanted something extreme.
• • •
I walked into my first Marine Corps recruiting station in downtown Manhattan wearing formal slacks and a blazer and found myself in a staring match with a silent, grisly sergeant. No one offered a friendly greeting, and apparently chairs were not meant for visitors. One dude dressed in a finely pressed olive-and-khaki uniform with shiny black shoes was sitting on a couch off to my right, pretending he was busy with paperwork, but keeping most of his attention glued to my every move. I got the sense he had earned the right to sit on that couch, and I had not.
“Good morning,” I said.
Four eyeballs drilled into mine like screwdrivers.
“Uh, I was interested in finding out more about the Marine Corps.”
“Oh, she thinks she wants to be a Marine,” said the man on the couch in no apparent direction. The other one snickered.
His remarks worked like a charm. Now I was curious. I didn’t realize that the men there were steeped in two treasured Marine traditions—fucking with the new guy and insulting women.
A staff noncommissioned officer walked in and introduced himself. He was clearly the assigned adult on duty, and his presence softened the wolves, just slightly. As he stood before me, I took him in. Soft-eyed, Puerto Rican, classic good looks. His uniform was a thing of beauty. I was being Ma’am’d up and down. I’d barely made it south of the Mason-Dixon line, and that was to go to Disney World. I was no more a Ma’am than his colleagues were gentlemen.
He asked how he could help me. I told him I was interested in joining the Marines. The man on the couch coughed loudly. The staff sergeant’s eyes grew wide for a moment, but he quickly masked it. I guess they didn’t see too many women around here.
He handed me a series of dog tags inscribed with Marine Corps “leadership traits.” Initiative. Courage. Enthusiasm. These one-word values symbolizing the essence of the Corps reminded me of a cheap advertisement promising the fountain of youth. Maybe he sensed he’d already lost me, because he suddenly asked, “Wanna see a video from boot camp?”
“Sure.”
The staff sergeant pressed play on the VCR. I heard grunts and thunderous yelling. On the television screen, I saw young people covered in mud, exhausted and on the verge of crying, gutting out some hell-like obstacle course in the shadow of drill instructors with terrifying grimaces and even more terrifying voices. I couldn’t tell if the thick, slimy muck on their foreheads and cheeks was sweat, snot, dirt, or blood. I was hooked. Oh, how I was hooked.
“It’s Parris Island. Interested?”
“Mm-hm. Yes. Definitely.”
He grinned and sent me into a private room to take a preliminary aptitude test that consisted of basic English and math. A few minutes later, I gave him my exam and he was floored when he discovered I’d gotten all the answers right. Something shifted.
“You went to college?”
“Yes.”
“Where?” The sergeant looked over at me from the couch, and then looked away quickly.
“Yale.” No one coughed.
The head recruiter changed his tone now. I wasn’t sure why.
“You know, you’re qualified to be an officer.”
“Oh, she wants to be an officer now,” grunted the guy on the sofa.
“Ignore him.” I did.
I was sent across the island to the Officer Selection Office near the World Trade Center, where Marine officer candidates were screened and groomed for ten weeks of harsh training in Quantico, Virginia. If the enlisted side of recruiting was scrappy, fierce, and irreverent, the officer side was built on pride and decorum. No one was playing, and the men made sure to let you know that casual activities like smiling were not encouraged. I had no idea whether or not this stiff-upper-lip approach rooted out the playboys and brats among the officer class.
In fact, I didn’t know much about military rank or hierarchy at all. Class defined relationships in the military—initial rank was simply determined by whether or not one had a college degree, without any regard to why one guy had attended college and the next had not. There was a small class of folks who issued orders, and a large mass of folks who executed them, regardless of their opinions or talents. As an officer, I’d be doing the ordering, and I’d have to believe in what I was saying for folks to want to follow me. I didn’t realize that this life might amount to something more than me pushing my mental and physical limits.
My model for officer behavior was Captain Irving, my officer selection officer. He had all the attentive qualities of the staff sergeant, but far more size. He had dark brown skin, was calm and intelligent, and was built like a linebacker, with enough meat in his lats, pecs, and quads to challenge the fabric of his uniform to an unfair fight.
Captain Irving seemed to think I would fly through Officer Candidate School, based solely on my fitness abilities. After working out with the ex-SEALs, my body could handle all sorts of physical torture. But I was skeptical. I was a solid amateur athlete, but I was no Olympian, and at 135 pounds, with legs like twigs, I was a lightweight. I was expecting to see thousands of real-life Joes and Janes once I was in the thick of it. Wouldn’t everyone in the Corps be like them?
I imagined it was Captain Irving’s bad karma getting an officer candidate like me. There was no end to my questions. About politics and war. American interventions in Vietnam and the Middle East. Shooting the enemy when the enemy was a child soldier, or an unarmed civilian. The poor man had probably never been grilled like this. And adding to a long list of insufficient answers, my captain could not quell my concern about the Marine Corps’ oddest, most humiliating acts of gender segregation.
It was with great surprise that I learned that women in the Corps were not required to do pull-ups as their physical fitness requirement, but instead had to do something called a “flexed-arm hang.” This bizarre upper-body task required a woman to hold on for dear life with her chin over a pull-up bar for seventy seconds. It wasn’t a measure of much, except maybe how long I could tolerate a wounded ego.
Not being required to do pull-ups was insulting. Pull-ups were the Marine Corps’ tried-and-true test of upper-body strength, practically its physical rite of passage into the brotherhood. Pull-ups were hard. I loved them for their physicality, and for the empowerment they symbolized—the feeling of lifting myself up and over whatever was holding me down.
I did only one flexed-arm hang, for official recruiting documentation. It left a sting and opened up a world of doubt in me about what I was doing here. Captain Irving calmly insisted that men and women were treated equally in the Corps, but I remained skeptical. In a despera
te attempt to keep me engaged, he decided to put me on the phone with one of his colleagues, a female captain, so I could get the real scoop about women in the Marines. I got straight to the point.
“If women aren’t supposed to do the same things as the men, how exactly do women fit in?”
“Well, that’s just not true. I have to do everything the men do.”
I was confused.
“Except the pull-ups, right? And what about the run time?” I ran fast for a woman. I ran fast for a man, too. I didn’t understand why my score was rated differently than some dude’s.
“The Corps is about a lot more than physical fitness tests.” She went on about the amazing things she had done in uniform. She didn’t care that there were two separate standards for men and women. Like all the Marines I’d met so far, she didn’t ask questions. She was a true believer.
I eventually came to know the flexed-arm hang not as a test of strength but as a glaring symbol that separated women from the hardworking men who made up the real Marine Corps. It was a way to quietly integrate women into the Marines without actually letting us dream big. It was just one of many humiliations that bonded all women in the Corps.
The warnings were loud and clear before I ever signed my name on the dotted line. I would have been a fool to think that these unjustified acts of separating men and women would not define my next few years. But the part of me that wanted to get as far from my life as possible was much stronger than the part of me that believed in self-preservation.
In October 1999, I waved good-bye to my parents and drove south to Quantico.
* * *
I. A slogan from a World War II recruiting poster.
II. SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land forces) are the Navy’s elite special operations warfare teams. SEAL training is known to be among the toughest in the US military.
CHAPTER 3
Unbecoming Page 4