Unbecoming

by Anuradha Bhagwati

  My fellow lieutenants surrounded me with boos as I sat down, my head still held high. Those who remained silent fidgeted in their seats. The captain seemed surprised by the question, but didn’t know the answer. (It would take another fifteen years to open submarines to women, after the usual political brouhaha about the cost of installing female bathrooms and the risk of close living quarters had quieted down.)

  We learned to shoot in the icy Quantico winter. I took to it naturally, which surprised the crusty guys around me, hoping I’d drop more shots and wondering why I didn’t. They didn’t associate marksmanship with women. My staff platoon commander, a captain and the first infantry officer I would have as a boss, was terribly amused by my ability to shoot a target at five hundred yards without any previous experience.

  When I was stationed on Okinawa a year later, I shot the range high among hundreds of Marines, some of whom had served for years, many in combat arms fields that demanded pointing big weapons at hopeless targets. When the range officer in charge announced my name as the best shooter, the sea of camouflage uniforms around me parted. Faces turned grim when they saw the name belonged to a woman. I’d really messed with their sense of order.

  Shooting became a respite from the disillusionment I felt in my new world. Marksmanship had nothing to do with brawn. In fact, ego was a liability. To shoot well, you had to be in a state of relaxed concentration. You allowed the body to breathe and timed a slow and steady squeeze of the trigger with the pause after exhaling. Rushing, wanting, or trying too hard to hit black were recipes for failure. This was the domain of yogis and mystics. I dug everything about it.

  My company learned to shoot in the elements, lying prone on the snow-caked ground, our rib cages encased in load-bearing vests, freezing rain falling on our faces, air biting into our lips and turning our fingers into ice, so that at times I couldn’t tell where my skin ended and the trigger housing group began. At OCS I’d spent weeks cradling my weapon at all hours of the day and night, learning to fear it and to fear losing it. But I didn’t truly feel the rush of the Rifleman’s Creed until I was at TBS, inserting live ammunition into cartridges, feeding rounds into my chamber, and shooting down range.

  I may have been a crack shot with a rifle and pistol, but that’s where my natural talent ended. I was absolutely out of my league when it came to other field skills, which made up the crux of our curriculum in the tick-infested woods at Quantico. We became intimate with every dip and dive in that thick, mad wilderness, and were expected to find our way out regardless of the visibility, the elements, or the time of day or night. Instructors spoke about the contours of the natural world with laserlike precision. Using a basic compass and a laminated map of the woods, we were expected to locate an infinite supply of tiny red ammunition cans, mounted on top of wooden stakes like mailboxes, each marked with a distinct yellow number, planted years ago in the soil, thick with rust.

  Navigating three-dimensional terrain by looking at a two-dimensional map was supposed to be a teachable skill, but I was completely lost. A life spent traversing the urban wilderness prepared me for none of this. My idea of land navigation was knowing streets from avenues. My idea of wildlife was subway rats, pigeons, and roaches. Each hill and valley in the Quantico woods apparently had its own unique personality. How was I to know one peak from the next?

  I tried desperately to keep up, leaning hard on the experienced Marines in my company to help me with skills like patrolling. I spent every free Saturday trekking through the woods, hunting down those insufferable bright red ammo cans from morning till sunset, until the blisters in my boots bled and I was thoroughly exhausted. Occasionally I got so lost I wouldn’t make it back to the starting point on time, and I’d get exasperated looks from the officer in charge, which paled in comparison to my own frustration with myself.

  According to the Corps, women (Women Marines, or WMs) were as bad at field skills as Black people (Dark Green Marines) were at swimming. Absurd stereotypes and specialized acronyms followed us everywhere. Failure was expected of us, and success was considered a rare achievement.

  I remember walking into a squad member’s room where my fellow lieutenants were hanging out. Someone had a Marine Corps poster lying out on a rack. One of my squad members, Jim, grinned at me and said, “You know what Crowley said would make this poster even better? If she weren’t in it.”

  He pointed at the woman in the photo—a lone female Marine, in her female-only uniform, a round bucket cover,II skirt, and high heels, surrounded by half a dozen large, impressive-looking men in combat gear and sharp dress blues.

  “What do you think of that, Bhagwati?”

  “I think it’s fucked up,” I replied, turning red and walking out.

  TBS was my first full introduction to men in the Corps. Some thought I was a spy, a backhanded way of referring to my allegedly big brain, and a stark reminder that not only did I not fit in here, I was probably working for the other side. “Blowing shit up,” a phrase I was coming to know as key to a Marine’s basic sense of his own identity, was not my primary obsession. And I asked questions unbecoming of a Marine, about culture, history, peoples.

  No one appreciated my extra layer of interest. My spearevals reflected this. When the company was asked to pick adjectives to characterize me, I was rated as everything from “intellectual” to “sleepy.” (The Marine-like traits we were all going for were things like reliable, tough, and strong.) And while I was allegedly being assessed on my potential to lead Marines, I faced another layer of evaluation as a woman. As hard as I tried, it seemed impossible to shake this.

  One afternoon, our company was cleaning weapons in the armory. We’d just finished a weeklong training exercise in the field and we were exhausted. Sleep was near, and the anticipation of hot showers and clean sheets was the only thing keeping us on our feet. Everything about being in the field was intimate. It wasn’t just the shared experience of being taken to our physical or mental limits. It was the shared fluids.

  It was going to a place beyond filth, beyond stink, where bodily discharge, environmental substances, and man-made chemicals combined to assault our flesh and senses. Putrefied sweat, vaginal fluid, and seminal emissions; caked blood and blisters on the verge of combusting; CLP;III Tabasco sauce and toxic runoff from everyone’s favorite Meal Ready to Eat, the digit-size sausages known as the Four Fingers of Death; pound cake crumbs stuck like parasites on smeared green-brown camouflage paint; saliva, snot, earwax, and crusted eye goop oozing from the sockets—it was a merciless mess.

  These forays into and out of the field provoked all sorts of spontaneous commentary from the prior enlisted grunts. It was a veritable slam poetry session. (One infantry boss I had years later referred to the vaginal discharge that was inevitable after days of not showering in the field as “grilled cheese.” This phrase incited hysteria among the other infantry guys, who had never heard anything more hilarious in their entire lives.)

  Jim was a prior staff sergeant and infantryman, older than most of us by about ten years, and therefore some kind of mentor to the rest of us sorry new lieutenants. I guess he figured the experience he’d gained in the Corps gave him a license for uncensored honesty. While we were scrubbing down weapons, he stopped to take a long, hard look at me.

  “Bhagwati, looking at you makes me never wanna have sex with a woman again.”

  This stung, as it was meant to, but I bore it, like most insults. I’m not sure what Marine coming out of the field was pinup material, but it seemed as though women’s primary function here was considered to be the ability to turn men on. Mostly I was reminded that if I wasn’t in the Corps to be someone’s eye candy, I had uprooted the laws of nature and challenged men’s purpose and sense of direction.

  These reflections came freely and often, always unsolicited and unprovoked.

  Officer dress regulations required collared shirts, trousers, and a generally conservative fashion sense. Knowing less about the relationship between the sexes th
an most women I served with, I took the regs at face value. The price of not playing the gender game, of not knowing there was a game in the first place, was steep.

  My fellow women officers had clearly read some handbook I hadn’t. Several women tested the limits of what constituted acceptable civilian attire. They avoided the mandatory collars. Their necklines plunged. Glutes and hips protruded through tight pants, and heels and makeup were all in. These variations on strict military regulations were clearly condoned, or overlooked. My male peers couldn’t get enough of it. It was the most live stimulation anyone could get without leaving the base.

  I was still processing the mixed messages. I was sitting in the barracks one evening in civilian winter attire—baggy pants, a warm turtleneck sweater, and comfortable clogs—waiting for liberty to sound. Some punk in my squad—he was one of dozens of small, bulldoggish Marines with a Napoleonic complex—looked at me and snickered.

  “Bhagwati, your wardrobe reminds me of my grandmother’s.”

  I shrank. Comebacks like “Your grandmother must be really hot” were nowhere in my toolkit back then. Not even a blip on the radar. I remember he was in charge of our squad during a night patrol. We were all lying prone for what seemed like hours, and I must have nodded off for a second, because all I remember was his shadow breathing into my face, “Bhagwati, wake the fuck up. If you weren’t female I’d beat the shit out of you.”

  The only way I got this asshole to stop haranguing me was to outrun him in physical fitness evolutions. And I did. Often.

  This was not what I signed up for, this place where women who didn’t spend time working the guys into a sexual frenzy were looked down upon. I thought I’d be a part of an elite warrior society where the women who joined didn’t give a shit about turning on some loser dudes by flirting or flashing skin. The Amazons, Joan of Arc, these icons of warrior society were mythical in this world. How my female peers couldn’t see the role they played here blew my mind. It took several weeks before I realized things weren’t as simple as that.

  Tyler was one of my roommates, and a woman I might not have met were it not for the Corps. She was a real gem, an honest-to-god good person. Didn’t judge or speak ill of others. She wasn’t book smart in the least—I remember the men in the platoon making enormous fun of her for not being able to do basic math, while I seethed in anger in her defense—but she worked hard. She had a fantastic, enviable southern twang. She was petite and white, and unlike me, she dressed like a rock star during liberty. She quickly became one of the company’s sex symbols. There wasn’t a day that went by when she wasn’t rejecting some idiot lieutenant’s advances.

  On Saturday evenings before heading out into town, she was obsessed with beauty rituals. One day she taught me the finer points of trimming the pubic region. I came to understand that her boyfriend back home preferred her like that during sex, which was the first time I’d given thought to the possibility of options down there, and the fact that someone else’s grooming preferences might determine how much time I spent in the shower.

  One night I heard sounds outside our barracks room but I didn’t think much of it since we got so little sleep as it was. Outside our door, Lieutenant Hughes was trying hard to enter the room. He was an enormous man who had graduated from one of the big-football, big-fraternity colleges in Texas. It took a lot of booze to make a guy like Hughes drunk. He was shit-faced. He forced the door open and made his way into Tyler’s bed. From the top bunk on the other side of the room, I shot up.

  “Phoebe?”

  There was a long pause. Was I imagining this?

  “Phoebe?” This time, with more urgency.

  “I got it, it’s okay,” she sighed.

  It sure as hell didn’t sound okay. Hughes was making sounds drunken morons make when they’re trying to shove arms down trousers and roam hands over breasts. I listened harder, staring blindly in the dark toward her rack. Phoebe, one-third his size, was calmly talking to him, as if she were negotiating a hostage release. Her own.

  Below me on the bottom bunk, my other roommate groaned and turned over. How was everyone not awake and alarmed? I sat through several long, hard minutes of back and forth, till Phoebe talked Hughes up and out of her bed, walked his hulking, drooping body out of the room, and locked the door.

  I was bewildered. “You all right?”

  “Yeah.” She sounded tired. Resigned. Like she’d dealt with this kind of thing before.

  No one mentioned the incident again. Except me. In the morning, I sat next to Napoleon in the large classroom, and when we were on break, I mentioned Hughes’s frightening break-in.

  “It was like he was going to rape her.”

  I didn’t have a chance to finish my thought. Napoleon jumped down my throat with quick, agitated whispers, as though I’d crossed a major line.

  “You need to shut your mouth. You could get Hughes into trouble.”

  Whatever flurry of nonsense he said to protect Hughes from facing any consequences for his actions, it made me pause. He was no ally. I looked around the room. Phoebe was sitting there stoically, looking like she’d moved on. She hadn’t asked me for help. And my other roommates didn’t care one way or another what had gone down in our room last night. I let it go.

  My personal education about Marine culture happened in total isolation, and often in silence. I was learning fast now. Women appeared to have two choices in the aftermath of a sexual violation: either act like nothing was wrong and play along, like Phoebe, or suffer privately and keep quiet. If speaking out was actually an option, I hadn’t seen anyone try it. Thus far, I’d been too busy just learning to get by.

  Being a woman in the Marines was hazardous. Being sexually naive and emotionally sheltered like me was deadly. No one was going to save Phoebe, or me. The band of brothers didn’t apply to us. And if sisterhood existed, I certainly hadn’t seen any signs of it.

  Baughman did not warn us about this. The tiny number of experienced women who might have been mentors or guides in some other universe were too mired in their own survival strategies in the Corps to lend a hand or offer words of wisdom to the next generation of GI Janes. Putting up and shutting up were being bred into us. Watching other women flail or fall by the wayside became a spectator sport.

  It wasn’t our fault. Sticking together would have been suicide here, as risky as lack of dispersion on a patrol through enemy territory. If there was not enough physical space between you and the next female, you would both be taken down. There was no refuge where you could seek solace in order to survive the next day. That was the stuff of sorority fiction and feminist mythology. In the Marine Corps, we had to adapt, assimilate, and move on, or suffer. And who the hell wanted to suffer? Most of us left that shit back home.

  • • •

  Things took a turn for the worse when, several months into training, I blew out my right knee running through the woods with a squad automatic weapon. I had to have surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital and sat out several weeks of field training on crutches, making daily visits to the physical therapy clinic. Not being able to train with my company frustrated me to no end. I could no longer keep up physically, and the men grew resentful. I remember Hughes making fun of me as I stood on crutches, supervising my company’s PFT, and thinking, Motherfucker, you’re lucky you’re not in jail.

  In order to prove myself, I asked to be dropped to the next company and start my training over from scratch, but my commanding officer refused, insisting I’d done enough. I graduated The Basic School in the bottom third of my class, despite my best efforts to recover from surgery, absorb the curriculum, and fend off extreme scorn from fellow lieutenants. I was just relieved to get out of there.

  Unfortunately, I’d been selected as a communications officer, something not remotely in the realm of my interests or natural skills. Technology was not my thing, and never would be. I had put intelligence officer at the top of my wish list, but any knack I had for analysis, languages, and observing human be
havior was tossed out the window for the needs of the Corps. The thing I most wanted to do—human intelligence—was still off-limits to women, for no good reason I or anyone else could think of. My infantry captain had given up hope on my tactical skills long ago and once told me gruffly during an evaluation, “You’re fairly intelligent.” He had not meant this as a compliment. Perhaps denying me the intelligence field was his way of ensuring I stayed miserable.

  The Marine Corps didn’t believe in either comparative advantage or cultivating one’s interests. At least, not for women like me. If the Corps had an HR philosophy, it would be “shut the hell up and do what you’re told.” But none of these occupational choices mattered much for me in the long run. Marine culture was the most galvanizing force in my life now.

  • • •

  Rites of passage in the Corps involved one of two things, violence or sex, and often both. Engaging in Marine rituals was high-risk, but alcohol was the fluid that lubricated the nerves. It either took the edge off or sharpened it, depending on what unresolved issues were eating at you most.

  My first invitation to a strip club in Quantico came early on in my communications training. The clubs outside military bases were as plentiful as tattoo parlors, dive bars, and chain restaurants. Despite urging from my fellow lieutenants, I declined. I was not interested in paying people to take off their clothes. Married, single, monogamous, cheating, it didn’t matter—my fellow lieutenants were all in.

  The next morning I was overwhelmed with stories about lieutenants getting lap dances from the girls out in town, some very likely the girlfriends or wives of men we would soon be commanding in the fleet. I felt embarrassed and kept my head down.

  A handful of women in my class joined the men on this field trip, a decision I didn’t understand back then. These women weren’t queer, as far as I could tell, although if they were, “don’t ask, don’t tell” would have made them anxious about tagging along. Whether and how uniformed women took part in these sexualized rituals was confusing. We worked our asses off for the rank we held, but moments like this reminded me that we only seemed to be separated from the young women writhing on the poles by the dollar bills in their thongs.