The roles service women chose—in my case, the proud protester—had lasting repercussions, so we had to be sure before acting. To be a woman who commanded men in an institution where men had asserted their physical and sexual dominance for so many generations was complex. “Leaning in” was irrelevant for us, and resisting seemed like a path to martyrdom. I was still discovering the rules of engagement in this world. It seemed time to test them.
Captain Hoffman was one of our main instructors at Communications School and a first-class egomaniac. He was obsessed with the infantry. He made up for the shame and indignity of his lesser status as a communications officer by telling stories about how much time he’d spent working with the grunts. His proximity to infantrymen was supposed to mean he had gained some kind of leg up on the rest of us POGs.IV
The man had a squeaky, slippery voice that he tried to mask with the intensity of his storytelling. Today, Hoffman was going on as usual about some deployment with an infantry unit. He considered himself an entertainer, so he shifted gears with some levity. I had no idea what led Hoffman to this particular theme: “I mean, if he’s on top of you, and if there’s nothing you can do about it, then you might as well stop fighting and relax, right? I mean, why waste your energy?”
Oh shit. Did this guy just give us guidance about how to be raped? Quick glances were exchanged around the room. Or maybe it was just me, looking for affirmation. I was still fuming when his lesson finally came to an end. Against all laws of self-preservation, I approached Hoffman.
“Sir, can I talk to you about something for a minute?”
“Sure, Lieutenant Bhagwati.”
He took me into a tech closet on one side of the room. There was no backing out of this now.
“Sir, that joke in class, about the woman being raped. It was really offensive.”
There was a pause and a shift in his eyes, as if he were taken aback.
“I mean, don’t you have a mother, or maybe a sister, Sir? Imagine if that happened to them.”
Even in the shadows, I sensed him planning a response. He spoke slowly, methodically. Without the bravado he usually dressed his words in.
“Okay, Lieutenant Bhagwati. I get your point. Thanks for talking to me. Is that all?”
“Yes, Sir. Good afternoon, Sir.”
My rape lecture made the officer rounds at school. It came up one day when I sat down with my supervisor, Captain Wolf, for a performance evaluation. After I’d spent a year in the Marines, he was the first officer I’d met whom I looked up to and who valued my contribution. Not surprisingly, for the first time in the Corps, I was doing well among my peers.
“Lieutenant Bhagwati, I see you as one of these officers who’s going to be really good.” He compared me to another captain at the school, a physical specimen and a woman whom every man and woman among us worshipped. In my mind she was Xena the Fucking Warrior Princess. I could barely contain the compliment, and I’m pretty sure I blushed. (Almost twenty years later, Captain Nethercot would be the first woman in history to command Officer Candidate School.)
“But the culture, it’s going to challenge you. And it’ll be up to you to pick your battles.” I took this to mean that Hoffman was not the only knuckleheaded Marine who told casual rape jokes. But I already knew that. Wolf was trying to warn me before I got out into the fleet and commanded Marines on my own: success meant overlooking the Marine Corps’ sexism.
I had no idea how to do that.
• • •
The lieutenant who graduated at the top of our communications class was a woman. Robbins was a prior enlisted non-commissioned officer, and focused on her studies to the point of ruthlessness. I happily rooted for her, because she had outperformed all her male peers, causing more than a few guys to grumble.
Several months after graduation, I was in Okinawa, commanding a radio platoon. I ran into Robbins at the post office. I’d just experienced a public humiliation on the rifle range that was playing on repeat in my mind. A staff sergeant who was working the range had approached me before dozens of wide-eyed enlisted Marines.
“Ma’am, do you like to dance?”
I looked up from my rifle. “Excuse me, Staff Sergeant?”
“Do you like to dance, you know, salsa, merengue . . .” The guy gently swayed his hips. He was no Ricky Martin.
“Yeah, sure.” The men around us, junior both in chevrons and years, grew silent. The staff sergeant was my age, maybe older, but I outranked him, and military law prohibited anything he thought he was going to get out of this exchange. Marines were staring at us expectantly. I tried to block them out, looking away, fidgeting with my manual, where I was recording all my shooting data.
“You wanna go dancing in the club this weekend?” The wind on the range seemed to suddenly die down.
It finally came to me, this word that a lifetime of submission had repressed deep down.
“Uh. No.”
“You sure, Ma’am?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure, Staff Sergeant.” I looked at him. I held his gaze. He eventually wandered off.
With my authority in question, I knew I had rejected his advances too mildly. The Marines around me were expecting more, and judging from their reactions, I had seriously disappointed them.
I told Robbins the story. She listened without any emotional response. I had forgotten how icy she could be.
“What should I have done?”
“Well, guys don’t mess with me, because they know I won’t put up with it.”
I was rattled. Even subconsciously, I began to connect the dots. Women who are targets deserve to be. Robbins may have been a poster girl for the Corps, but she was no longer mine.
My bruised ego did the only thing bruised egos do when they want to fight back. I found some additional reason to harbor contempt for Robbins. Fueled as I was by a desire to find some additional flaws in a woman who didn’t help other women, it came easily: Robbins had married an officer several rungs up the chain. In the military, fraternization was a criminal offense. It’s why the staff sergeant shouldn’t have hit on me, and why it was suspect that Robbins had married a senior officer.
The truth was, I didn’t actually care about any of this. The Corps made a huge stink over sex and love between consenting adults, but didn’t seem to flinch over nonconsensual incidents. I had barely scratched the surface of how hypocritical a world I was living in. And behind closed doors, I was already beginning to break the rules.
* * *
I. Allen would one day become a four-star general commanding legions in Afghanistan. He retired early from the Marine Corps in 2012, after sending hundreds of emails to a Tampa socialite at the heart of the national security scandal involving CIA director David Petraeus and his biographer, Paula Broadwell. Later, Allen vouched for Hillary Clinton before the masses at the Democratic National Convention, and ultimately took the helm of the Brookings Institution.
II. A cover is a military hat. Men’s barracks covers were broader and more angular than women’s, and were widely considered to be superior. The women’s bucket cover looked dumpy in comparison. It hardly seemed like something a real Marine would wear.
III. Cleaner, lubricant, preservative was the chemical substance we used to clean weapons. We kept it in tiny bottles in the buttstock of our rifles.
IV. Persons Other than Grunts, the Marine Corps’ primary term for losers.
CHAPTER 5
Heart of Darkness
My own descent toward violence was slow, but not unpredictable. I was a kid who had heard you’re not good enough one too many times, and was sensitive enough to believe it. I was not a natural-born Marine. I was a nerd, an Indian, and a woman. I questioned too much too often. But one thing was for sure. The voicelessness I’d felt throughout my childhood had stoked a world of rage inside me. It was only a matter of time till it came out.
As a Marine, I knew violence as something that, like my sexuality, was not yet fully realized.
On one
unforgettable day when I was twenty and still at Yale, I had become the object of an explosive parental intervention. They had cornered me in their living room. Everyone was standing. My father was shouting, my mother looming supportively by his side. I had committed the most horrendous offense imaginable: I had gotten a B on my college report card. It was quite possibly the first B of my life, but what followed had been coming for a long time.
“You,” Dad fumed, “are wasting your education.”
What my father was trying to say was that I was not just wasting my education, I was wasting my life, and calling their lives into question. Trying my best at Yale despite a world of hurt was not the point. This failure of mine would have karmic cost. We were dealing with ancestors and family reputations. The disgrace had intergenerational, cross-Atlantic consequences. This was a matter of second-generation Desi diaspora shame.
It was a royal mismatch. I looked away to deflect Dad’s vile pronouncements and Mom’s ravings. I cowered and attempted to escape the living room. They followed, down the hallway to my bedroom, shouting the whole way.
There was really no way out of this, never living up to what I would have been had I just been born in India, where parents didn’t have to deal with the embarrassment of ungrateful progeny, where daughters existed to obey and serve, and parents were worshipped, idolized, and always right.
I was in no place to stick up for myself. Dad’s cruelty had many layers. He loved to pick on those who couldn’t defend themselves. He attacked from the flank, taking down my friends.
The company you keep
Divorced parents
Lost children
Idiots
Degenerates
Insulting the young women who had befriended me over a lifetime of feeling alone was too much. I took his abuse, but I would not accept what he was doing to them. A lifetime of suppressed feelings rose up.
Stop it, stop
Stop saying that
Stop calling me fat
And ugly
I’m not stupid, just
Leave me alone
And with this flood of resistance, something else arrived. A moment without any foresight. A brief taste of freedom. My hand rose quickly, striking him across the arm. I wanted more, but I did not yet have the confidence to summon a solid jab to the jaw. It was enough for both of us. I froze, while he grew silent.
My mother inhaled the whole world, pronouncing, as if we didn’t all know, “Oh my god, you hit your father.”
Her dumbfounded voice and wide eyes made me sink my head to my chest in absolute despair. I sobbed inconsolably for hours on end, so that for days afterward my head hurt too much to move, or speak, or eat.
The feeling of being this small in the world would prepare me for the Marines like nothing else. I shut down, and for the first time, felt my potential for indifference. I didn’t need to think or feel anymore. Emotional detachment felt powerful. Engaging again with my true feelings would require incentive. And that kind of reckoning would only happen after years of humiliation in uniform.
• • •
As a radio platoon commander in Okinawa, I was in charge of fifty-odd Marines, most of whom were young men. The transition to management was a shocking one. I leaned heavily on the senior enlisted men in my platoon to show me the ropes while I learned to navigate what being an officer was all about. Most of my Marines were teenagers and men and women in their early twenties. I was twenty-six. We were all on the other side of the world from home. My first weekend as a commander, one of my lance corporals got caught drinking and driving out in town. I had the whole platoon at attention, reaming them all for his mistake. I was balancing absolute power and a multitude of relationships for the first time in my life.
Before and after work, I hit the gym hard, and ran along the roads in town like a zealot. I had healed my knee and had no intention of slowing down. I’d cut my three-mile run to under twenty minutes, provoking a “Damn, Ma’am” from the Marine who ran my shop, Gunny Cain, as I ran past him on our platoon PFT.
I had a lot to prove, and a lot of rage to work off. It seemed that most of the treatment I was subject to in the Corps was outside of my control. The one thing I could do was commit to getting stronger. It was my personal mission to become physically larger than life, to outgrow the skin-and-bones, Gandhi-esque frame I’d been cursed with by genetic default. Working harder than everyone else had only gotten me so far, because I was trapped inside this miniature body.
So I trained, relentlessly. I trained with men who were enormous and capable of superhuman feats, carrying three times their body weight, some double or triple my size. I would not let the Corps define how little I was, how little I could do, how little I could move, or pull, or push. I was hell-bent on proving them all wrong.
The more men wanted to hold me back, the more I wanted to fight. Most guys wanted women to train with women, like some auxiliary fitness club where saying sorry was required before you kicked someone’s ass. This was no way to get stronger, to improve oneself, to be a better Marine.
I ate carefully, conscientiously. I ate large amounts of animal protein. I started taking creatine. I lived for the bench press and stacking on more and heavier plates as each month went by. The lat pull-down machine was making my back huge. In my tank tops and shorts, I got shameless stares from guys at the gym, thick with some combination of awe and lust. I ignored them, did more sets of pull-ups, and sauntered in and out with my sweat-soaked towel, hungry for the next workout.
Two years into the Corps, I returned home to visit my family. My mother took me shopping for new civilian clothes, because my back and arms no longer fit into my wardrobe. She was terribly distressed over this fact. I asked her if she knew what I did for a living, if she knew what a Marine actually was. She ignored me.
My father, who always had the last word, who relished dishing out phrases that damned women and girls like me to the deepest realms of low self-esteem, told me emphatically, “No man will ever marry you.”
• • •
Most Marines found their inner warrior at boot camp or OCS. My switch should have been flipped in those first few weeks with Baughman, but I was on a delayed timeline. I faked my war face as I floundered through the Corps’ aggression-building lessons. The natural-born killer within me was nowhere to be found. Like a dormant virus, violence found its way in me when it was good and ready. Two years into the Corps, I finally discovered my bloodlust.
While stationed on Okinawa—the Rock, where Allied forces and Japanese soldiers had slaughtered one another and civilians in the last and bloodiest battle of the Pacific War—I volunteered to attend the Marine Corps’ close combat instructor training program. The system, which had been developed to deliver deadly hand-to-hand blows to the enemy, was being revamped by a legendary warfighter named George Bristol. The Corps was now cautiously integrating women into its instructor ranks.
Bristol, then a lieutenant colonel, had spent over thirty years practicing Eastern martial arts, making him a perfect fit for developing the Marine Corps Martial Arts Program (MCMAP). He was trying to update a close combat system known for its brutality. Gouging out eyes and disemboweling guts were beloved jarhead preoccupations. Marines needed to do all of these things to the enemy when necessary and still look dignified on the nightly news. And now revolutions and riots the world over were being televised 24-7. MCMAP was going to bring some Zen and civility to bone crushing.
The program had a belt system just like the traditional Eastern arts, and training was now required across all ranks for promotion. I earned my tan belt on a hard green field at Camp Hansen from a short, fiery lieutenant who made up for his lack of height with chunks of muscle and a contagious amount of energy. Throwing giants across the field without breaking a sweat, he looked like Mighty Mouse.
We started our daily regimen by “body hardening” with a partner, training each limb and major muscle group to withstand punches, kicks, and throws. For minutes, we’d
pound forearm against forearm, fist against belly, and bootlace against inner and outer thigh, till the grimaces on our faces turned into a passive acceptance of our reality. We wore our bruises with pride.
Unlike professional gyms or dojos, we didn’t use mats when we threw each other to the ground. We’d hip check bodies hard to the earth, tumbling again and again across the field as we learned the proper ways to roll and fall without causing too much permanent injury. The older Marines twisted their faces in pain or tried to mask it, poorly, as they hurled their beaten bodies down to the dirt with guys half their age. I couldn’t get enough of this, so when the opportunity to become an instructor arose, I jumped at it.
In our green belt class of sixty-some-odd Marines, Sergeant Ortiz and I were the only women. Eternally reliable, Ortiz was the platoon sergeant of my radio platoon. It was a huge résumé builder for any Marine. At four eleven, she was not to be underestimated. Ortiz was a quiet, humble, and determined spitfire, organizing our ragtag group of junior Marines into an effective unit that was ready for deployment at a moment’s notice. She was also a master of pull-ups, with veins bulging from her wrists and forearms.
Our green belt instructors were three of the Marine Corps’ senior instructor trainers. They wore black belts marked with one or more red stripes, each signifying how much advanced training they’d received. Our group was led by a tough reconnaissance master sergeant and two staff sergeants—one six feet eight inches of solid muscle who was a larger version of Sly Stallone in both speech and size, the other a wide-chested African American karate sensei who somehow mustered equal amounts of ferocity and warmth. I was in heaven.
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