Becoming a Marine
Quantico, Virginia
October 1999
It was my first time on a military base. Trees in the Quantico woods had just begun to turn yellow, orange, and red. Several sets of rectangular barracks overlooked a barren cement parade deck, each brick building less warm and personable than the next. If I’d seen barbed wire fences, I might have confused this place with prison.
Marine Corps Officer Candidate School, like Marine Corps boot camp for enlisted recruits at Parris Island, South Carolina, was gender segregated. There were many things that made the Marines different from the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard:I the small size, the amphibious focus, the stubborn adherence to tradition. But gender segregation was the element that trumped them all.
Men would be trained by male drill instructors (DIs) in a separate area of the school, while women would be trained by females. My platoon was infinitely smaller than the male platoons. If the Marines were made up of “a few good men,” few women at all joined the Corps. Only 6 percent of Marine officers were women, meaning that my miniature all-female platoon stood alongside four towering all-male platoons, each containing several dozen men.
The Marine Corps is the most physically demanding of all the service branches. Aside from pull-ups over push-ups, the Corps’ physical fitness test requires the longest run, at three miles. And it’s the branch that until recently restricted the majority of its job opportunities for women, with more than a little pride.
Officer Candidate School (OCS) was a ten-week hallucination. Mostly I remember the feeling of bewilderment, being tossed from insult to insult, and running from one end of a room to the other away from shrieking voices. I remember my body being physically thrashed and my mind slowly losing its grip on any reality I’d once known. I cannot tell you the first names of most of the women I served with. I cannot even tell you with whom I shared a bunk for the most transformative ten weeks of my life. My lapse in memory has little to do with me and everything to do with the Marines.
We learned each other’s last names because there were no first names in the Corps. There was Sir, and Ma’am, and an explosion of ranks. The Marine Corps had no interest in sentimentality. Names didn’t mean a thing here, unless your dad was a general or a senator, and even then, the drill instructors would try their best to whip the nepotism out of Junior without provoking the US government. The fact that we had names at all was merely to distinguish one body from the next. We had become a collection of blood types and social security numbers. I came to know myself as everyone there came to know me: Bhagwati.
The DI’s job was to make Marines. Weeding out the unfit, undisciplined masses who didn’t deserve to wear the Marine uniform was the highest calling. Drill instructors guarded the gates to the Corps. And they were not easily impressed.
My introduction to Sergeant Instructor Staff Sergeant Baughman, the DI whose mission was to break me, was like all our encounters: I was stunned into paralysis and she was profoundly annoyed.
On day one, my platoon was seated at the front right corner of an enormous indoor classroom. Sea bags we’d meticulously packed back home with dozens of required training items rested at our feet. I looked to both sides of me, eyeing the women I would be spending the next ten weeks of my life with.
Like me, dozens wore thick, brown-rimmed military-issue glasses. These ghastly things were called BCGs, or birth control glasses, because they guaranteed you’d never get laid. I saw an assortment of short haircuts, courtesy of home clippers and the nation’s cheapest barbers. Bouncy ponytails and tight braids. Soft eyes and steel jaws. We were mostly white and a few shades of Brown. Only one of us was Black. Seated beside several hundred men, we were thirty-four women.
The waiting was making my stomach turn. And then, without warning, two dozen camouflaged Marines—our drill instructors—swooped into the hall like birds of prey, driving us to our feet with flapping arms and hollering at us to haul our bodies and bags outside into the open air.
There was not enough room to funnel ourselves outdoors at the speed the DIs desired, and the helpless clot that we formed at the exit drove them mad. I saw a blur of wide-rimmed hats tipped menacingly downward over enraged eyes; thick webbed green belts and garish gold buckles cinched tightly around impossibly narrow waists; sleeves rolled up in perfectly pressed white bands; veined forearms, bulging biceps, and chiseled triceps; shiny black boots practically blinding us; wide-open jaws spewing forth an infinite fountain of contempt.
I was eventually thrust out into the daylight by the force of the candidates behind me. I ran, tripped, and dragged myself across the pavement following and followed by dozens upon dozens of human bodies, toward god knows what, but herded forward by the maniacal chorus all around me.
I looked up suddenly, and saw her for the first time, in all her glorious redness. Staff Sergeant Brenda Baughman stood huge before me, roaring at me to empty the contents of my bags onto the parade deck. Like a fool, I hesitated. She sensed my hesitation and pounced, swallowing the last bit of personal space that buffered me from the Corps. I desperately overturned my bags and gouged out contents with my arms. I watched in horror as sports bras and underwear scattered on the deck and toiletries ricocheted across the concrete between hundreds of scrambling feet.
There was no time to be embarrassed. The sheer sight of this mess on the pavement—her pavement, I discovered—sent her into hysterics. She was in my face, her throat crimson and voice barking so deep inside me I thought my internal organs would blow. She wanted me to clean this nasty mess up, now, so I crawled on hands and knees, clumsily gathering toothpaste, tampons, and an assortment of socks and T-shirts, and stuffed them back as quickly as I could into my sea bag. But I wasn’t quick enough, and Baughman let me know this with a deafening howl.
Somehow I made it into the barracks with all my belongings, Baughman spewing disgust in my direction the entire way. I grabbed one of the few racks and footlockers that were still available and stood at attention, one heel desperately seeking stability from the other, chest heaving, as Baughman, another staff sergeant named Reyes, and a tiny pugnacious staff sergeant with wire-rimmed glasses named Hernandez sauntered up and down the middle of the squad bay, glowering and looking for any excuse to snatch the eyeballs from our skulls. We had arrived at our new home. We were Charlie Company, First Platoon.
Within hours, Baughman had firmly entrenched herself in my brain matter, and the position of attention became my new normal. We stood for hours each week with our heels together and feet at a forty-five-degree angle. I showered and fell asleep with my feet at attention. It was the pose I would reorient my life around.
Baughman was a modern-day Cassandra. She declared during our first week that 50 percent of us would be gone by the time our company graduated. She wasn’t warning us as much as telling us how proud she was of that fact. On day one, a handful of us, including me, were placed on her Got to Go list. She was rarely wrong with her predictions.
Another candidate from New York City—an attorney who had signed up to become a Marine Corps Judge Advocate—didn’t last a week in our platoon. She had desperately long, wild, curly hair. She couldn’t put it in a regulation bun to save her life.
Today was her day of judgment. She had Baughman on her right and Reyes on her left. The onslaught was deafening.
They’d been calling her “Horse Face” since day one because of her mane. Horse Face had responded to the charge of mismanaging her hair like a lawyer, as if the barracks were in fact a courtroom. She tried to argue her case before Baughman and Reyes, but this was not the time or place for a lengthy opening argument.
First Platoon held its breath. Standing at attention in front of our racks and foot lockers, we were witnessing the downfall of an officer candidate.
Horse Face was a vegetarian, and a picky one at that. She was refusing to eat the chow provided at meals, meaning her body was not going to get enough essential nutrients to survive trai
ning. This was unacceptable.
“What kind of a Marine is a vege-tar-ian?”
“So you can kill the enemy but you can’t eat a freaking cow?”
“We’re training killers, here, Horse Face, not puppy lovers!”
“Betcha the enemy could use a nasty lawyer!”
It was endless. Absurd. Priceless. Horse Face left the next day. We were one woman down.
DIs had a way of imprinting themselves upon a human being’s deepest layers of consciousness—infiltrating dreams, altering language learned at birth, reprogramming basic bodily functions and priorities, desires and fears.
Brenda Baughman was a Marine Corps legend. She was a ferocious wave of dark orange hair tamed mercilessly into a Marine Corps regulation bun, and freckled skin the color of nectarines that burned beneath the sun.
Provoked, Baughman was human napalm. When she spoke, she bellowed, and her throat turned red-hot, expanding its circumference in all directions. Blue-green blood vessels punched through the skin on her neck, throbbing with each expression of disappointment. Grown men twice her size cowered before her. She was scared of nothing and no one.
It was Baughman’s job to terrorize me. I was slow to learn, and walked around like a wounded animal. The DIs had concocted two names for me: Furby and Bag of Wheaties. Furby because my big brown eyes reminded them of those Gizmo look-alike dolls, and Bag of Wheaties because they had neither the patience nor the desire to acknowledge my actual name.
As my other platoon mates began to catch on to the rhythm of OCS, I faltered. I was often the last to get something done in the barracks, whether it was putting the hospital corners on my rack or laying out my gear for an inspection. It’s possible I had no business being a Marine. I thought too much. I questioned almost everything. I didn’t understand the meaning of age-old customs and courtesies, and like a toddler, I wanted to know why everything was the way it was. For Marines, thinking before acting was a liability. You were just supposed to do what you were told, and fast.
I realized how completely unprepared I was for OCS when we marched to the armory and I had no idea what the big deal was. Some of the other women had been foaming at the mouth to get their hands on an M16A2 service rifle. I had no appreciation for guns. I didn’t know the difference between a sidearm and a howitzer. When I stepped forward to pick up my rifle, I hesitated. I didn’t have a clue how to hold it. At 8.79 pounds with a loaded magazine—they were not yet loaded—it wasn’t so much the size that flummoxed me as much as its overall presence. Like the newness of holding a squirming baby, I felt like it had far more power over me than I did over it.
Going forward, we orchestrated our entire lives around these rifles. Baughman spent days trying to get me to hold mine correctly, and then weeks getting me to respect it. We marched with our rifles, held them above our heads, and worked out with them. We slept with our rifles, the barrels wrapped tightly to our hips, the cold muzzle making contact with our elbows. We took them apart into infinite puzzle pieces and put them back together, till we could do it without thinking. We practiced drill with them, slamming them against our chests and clutching them just so for inspection.
Nothing spoke to the urgent matter of these rituals like the Rifleman’s Creed. We delivered this ode to our new companions in unison, like true believers:
This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life. My rifle, without me, is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless . . .
When I first hollered the creed, I silently rolled my eyes. My perspective on guns had been shaped by a lifetime of liberal immersion. I’d grown up in the Rodney King era. Cops used too much force, especially against people of color. Hunters, with their funny outfits and Second Amendment ramblings, epitomized America’s strange obsession with violence, and I was a Bambi-loving, socialist-leaning peacenik. The Columbine massacre had happened six months before I arrived at OCS. I believed in gun control and had no desire to fire a weapon. Yet here I was. And much to my disbelief, with Baughman’s direction, I became as preoccupied with my rifle as she needed me to be.
One afternoon we were in an outdoor training area, deep in the Quantico woods. We had carefully stacked our rifles in balanced clusters while we got ready for the next period of instruction on offensive and defensive tactics. I volunteered to deliver platoon numbers to the company gunnery sergeant,II first ensuring someone made sure to watch my rifle. You never left your rifle unattended, unless it was locked up in an armory. Never.
I got some head nods from my platoon mates and took off to find the gunny. As I about-faced to return to them, I heard Baughman hollering my name through the woods. I sprinted back to my platoon area. The rifles were gone. My platoon had vanished. Baughman was standing there, holding a single M16A2 at arm’s length.
“Bhagwati, what the freaking hell is this doing here?”
I peered a little closer. I knew that serial number like my social security number and blood type. These days I could recite assorted facts and figures without thinking twice.
I sputtered some explanation, appealing to her sense of reason, sure that she would understand. She did not.
“Get on the deck, now! Damn it, Bag of Wheaties, get down!”
My disbelief at this unfortunate turn of events and my slowness to drop to the ground were not helping my case. Baughman’s boots began kicking up the earth like a mad bulldozer, showering me in dirt as I hit the deck.
Baughman shoved my rifle over my wrists. “Count off!”
Flat on my belly, I pushed up, down, and up again, pathetically hollering, “One, two, three, one! One, two, three, two!”
“Louder! Sound off, Bag of Wheaties, sound off!”
When I finally crawled to my feet, covered in grime and clutching the barrel of my rifle with two hands, Baughman ordered me to double-time it to the classroom. As I took a seat, snickers erupted from the men around us. Going forward, I would never fully trust the women in my platoon. And I would never leave my rifle alone again.
I learned that there were two types of women at OCS: those who were in it for themselves, and those who had some interest in the group’s welfare. Sometimes this “what’s in it for me” attitude manifested in subtle ways, like keeping your distance from a woman who was considered weak, either physically or mentally. Though weakness was not, in fact, contagious, the powers that be often lumped women together, because there were so few of us. So it was considered reasonable to avoid other women who were struggling. No one was expecting warmth and hugs here, but, at times, women acted as though humanity itself were a liability. Many of these women were die-hard careerists who only looked out for themselves. They made me seriously doubt the military slogan “I’ve got your back.”
Part of me sympathized with their instincts for self-preservation. If we didn’t look out for ourselves, we faced the certainty of getting picked off and kicked out. Still, I could never support their methods. I preferred a collaborative model of coexisting with other women in this merciless environment. Thankfully, a few other women in my platoon were on the same page, including some who’d already spent years as enlisted Marines, like Stephens, a tiny sergeant with boundless energy and a cowgirl accent who never had a mean thing to say about anyone; and Hudson, who took charge never to save her own ass, but to finish the job and make sure none of us were making the platoon look bad. The only Black woman in our stressed-out band of misfits, Hudson was calm and confident, as experienced as Baughman or Reyes but never revealing the fact that she herself had been a drill instructor in order to maintain cohesion in our platoon.
While I struggled to fit in with my female counterparts and become worthy of the Corps, I was comforted by the fact that at least physically, I was in my element. In our first physical fitness test at OCS, we ran as a single company. I started my run with a pack of men and finished the end of my third mile with a solid sprint. As I began to walk it off, a male drill instruc
tor appeared out of nowhere, accusing me of cheating, saying I didn’t run the last mile. I objected, but he silenced me with one look. One did not have a two-way conversation with a DI.
“What’s your goddang name, Candidate?”
“Candidate Bhagwati, Sergeant Instructor!”
“Get out of my face.”
The next morning I was summoned to my platoon commander’s office. Baughman gave me strict instructions not to fuck it up.
I stood at attention before the captain’s desk while she pored over paperwork. We were not permitted to look an officer in the eye. With broad shoulders, square hips, and an average build, our platoon commander was nothing like the wiry, fiery Baughman.
“What was your run time yesterday, Candidate Bhagwati?” she asked me firmly. I muttered my time, calling her Ma’am.
“And what was your last run time back home?”
The times were different by a few seconds.
“You’re dismissed, Candidate Bhagwati.”
“Ay, Ma’am.” I about-faced, poorly, and pivoted out the door as fast as I could. No one accused me of cheating on a run again.
In training evolutions where we were integrated with the men in our company, I felt free to run fast and push myself. I often noticed then that despite our DIs’ tendency to call us nasty females, a handful of men were struggling as much as our weakest women. Unfortunately, not enough of our training was integrated.
My platoon’s introduction to traditional Marine Corps physical training involved a dramatic safety orientation around the O-course (obstacle course), a series of towering hurdles made of splintered logs, wooden beams, steel poles, and thick, sinewy ropes, all of which had to be traversed within two minutes. It was the kind of upchuck-worthy evolution that made me want to be a Marine.
The O-course started with a vertical jump and flip over a bar that was several feet off the ground. Before we gave it a go, our gunny placed a ramp beneath the bar. I looked beyond our O-course to where the male platoons were training. I didn’t see any ramps.
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