Unbecoming

by Anuradha Bhagwati

  I returned to the barracks each day with bloody knuckles, torn palms, and purple legs. Ortiz and I were at the top of our game. Guys back in our battalion made comments that we’d changed their minds about what women could do. One guy, a lanky sergeant with a mouth too big for his own good, hinted that he’d be happy to serve with us in combat. I made him repeat it out loud, and privately rolled my eyes.

  When we trained, I carefully partnered with guys who were larger than me, sometimes carrying Marines who outweighed me by eighty pounds up hills and across fields, fighting in mud, sand, and wet grass, and tossing them again and again to the ground. Their weight was one thing, but what was hardest was finding their center of gravity within all that body mass. They didn’t fall as easily, and lifting them over my shoulders felt like carrying unwieldy tree trunks. Most of the guys treated my body as if it were any other, and I appreciated that. Some dudes hit me harder than necessary for learning purposes. We all had different points to prove. I took it willingly.

  One morning I stepped up for a pugil stick battle with a Marine who had an upper-level belt in tae kwon do. Pugil sticks were quintessentially Marine. Using them simulated close combat with a rifle, with each end representing the bayonet and buttstock of an M16. But rifles and bayonets were deadly and graceful. Pugil sticks were heavily padded, clumsy, and enormous, like Q-tips for giants. We often looked like clowns in our headgear.

  I was tired of waiting for a fight, so I swung at his head, hard. He had no patience for my enthusiasm, settling things quickly with a single uppercut to my jaw. I barely saw it coming. I sank to my knees, hearing my instructors’ voices and watching various shades of green dance before my eyes. It was the first time I was knocked out. I could barely put words together, but I glowed on the inside with pride. I didn’t care that I had lost. I was trying to prove that I wasn’t afraid to fight.

  A few days before graduating the course, we were practicing chin jabs in an indoor facility. I took a stance like Muhammad Ali, left foot forward, left hand protecting my skull, knees bent and relaxed. I swung my right elbow back and low, preparing to strike the heel of my hand an inch from my partner’s jaw. I came up swiftly with the full force of my right hip behind me. Something popped. And just like that, I was on the ground.

  Marines started running my way. An older recon guy was calmly hunched over me, hiking my trouser up over my knee. This was the same goddamned knee that had healed from surgery a year ago. My kneecap had flown out of the socket and settled back in. And as if the pain itself wasn’t bad enough, the knee was swollen as wide as the largest part of my thigh and not much was keeping the patella in place.

  Just that week I had volunteered to represent my battalion and go to Quantico for the Marine Corps’ black belt course, where I would be training with Bristol himself. I had one working leg. I sat down with our head martial arts instructor, whom I’d come to idolize.

  “You think I’ll be okay, Master Sergeant?”

  “Ma’am, you’ll do better than some of the guys there,” he said, smiling. “Just take care of that knee.”

  Back in my room with my new green instructor belt cinched around my trousers, a brace wrapped around my kneecap, ibuprofen and bags of ice at the ready, I tried to fast-forward my healing. The battalion commander had been briefed about my injury. To curb any doubts I might have had about the black belt course, he sent word that I was going to go stateside unless my femur was sticking out of my thigh.

  It was settled, then. I was headed back to Quantico.

  • • •

  In our first of six weeks of black belt training, my squad was deep in a three-hour evolution, a deceptive word that suggested the gentle drag of time. The twelve of us had been bear-crawling on our hands and feet for an eternity, sticking our asses high in the sky as we inched our way over a grassy landing zone.

  I had long since stopped feeling my arms. It was a thing of beauty how much the body could do when it lost all sensation.

  We were starting to resemble an accordion, with folks going too fast or too slow. Disorder was death to Marines, so someone’s voice down the line had begun calling cadence to keep us moving forward in sync.

  One . . . two . . . step! One . . . two . . . step!

  I kept up, my head down, eyes blinking sweat onto the grass, determined to bear-crawl till hell froze over, never allowing a knee to hit the deck.

  All of a sudden, a large pair of black boots appeared under my chin. I had no time to think. I was hauled into the air like a rag doll and tossed over a wide set of shoulders. I saw blue sky, tree line, and my squad’s camouflaged rear ends still pointing toward the heavens and trudging along. In the confusion of being upside down and half delirious, I didn’t see a face. I wondered what asshole instructor, what godforsaken beast of an infantryman with an ego too large for his own good had dared to fireman’s carry me, my chest smushed into his back and my ass still facing the clouds.

  The voice would give him away. It hinted at thunder but never broke. Always composing verse, George Bristol filled his sentences with carefully constructed pauses that lingered and haunted, that made you wonder if the next burst of words would take your head off. He was a midrange tenor, but his language operated in a place that was deeper and more deadly. His voice was as smooth as mercury. He would never need to raise it, this large, sadistic monster of a man. If he spoke any louder, ceilings would crack, grown men would shudder and crumble, and never get up again.

  Lieutenant Colonel Bristol, who had birthed this close combat program from the darkest recesses of his imagination, had removed me from my squad as if he’d just orchestrated a high-stakes kidnapping. As if I was about to be sent to a very dark hole in the ground. I was now being paraded around the eleven men below me. Immersed in their own physical pain, they didn’t even know that I was gone.

  Bristol’s nose was crooked from years of being smashed against fists, knees, floors, and walls. His white skin was roasted from years of patrolling beneath the sun. He was the size of Godzilla, each leg a mighty column leveling the ground beneath him. I was one-third his mass, making me the goddamned queen of underdogs.

  Bristol was a master manipulator of human emotions. I was spellbound, and wary of letting him in. Rumor was he had delved deep into psychological warfare and special operations, and mastered the grisly stuff American moms and dads never knew about and congressional intelligence committees took to their graves. This made him legendary. A prior enlisted infantryman, he’d been in the Corps more years than I’d been alive, and spent several of those years manhandling America’s enemies overseas.

  We had circled my squad three times now, I his nonconsensual partner in a dance that had no clear mission. I was trying to breathe as his shoulder cut into my gut. Upside down, I saw my squad, still inching forward. Whatever he was up to, I couldn’t stand that I was getting a break from my squad’s collective agony. I had to earn my respect.

  Bristol was lecturing me on nothing in particular, but then started talking about my role here, informing me that I was responsible for my roommate’s poor performance. He was talking about Riley, the PhD from OCS who’d been responsible for our leg-shaving orders, and the only other woman in the black belt program. She had a temper like a maniac, and was just not cutting it physically. He wanted me to know that if she had a problem, it was my problem, too. This was no feminist motivation speech about women lifting one another up. He was insulting Riley and taunting me at the same time. This was all a game to him.

  I thought, Goddamn it, put me down, motherfucker.

  Eventually, he did. I yes Sir’d everything under the blazing sun and scurried back to my squad.

  Bristol was eager to prove that I was different. It wasn’t enough for me and my squad to know that I was a woman. He had to show us.

  We were on the obstacle course early one morning. Bristol had been shadowing me that day. Officers did this often, calling it supervision, but sometimes I wondered. He was like a mosquito in my ear, whisper
ing tales about each obstacle in the evolution, giving me tips that I didn’t need on this course that I knew in my sleep, while I heaved and pulled myself along with my squad. At some point I thought I’d lost him, and I exhaled a bit under my flak jacket. Moving as a unit, we began to traverse the wooden hurdles. Suddenly Bristol was there.

  He stopped our squad and approached me, casting a shadow over the course. He reached his enormous arm behind my head and grabbed my hair in one giant fist, pulling my skull back, slowly, as if to make sure my face would be seen. I saw the men in my squad as though I were seeing them for the first time. I do not know if the same was true for them.

  I wasn’t looking for protection. If he was going to use me as a prop, I wanted witnesses. Bristol could only execute this sort of thing in front of the guys. My guys. Humiliation of women had a particular flavor when executed before silent men.

  “This is what they’ll do if they get their hands on you. What are you going to do then, Lieutenant?” My face was frozen but my brain was operating on rapid fire now.

  The smart-ass in me totally agreed.

  Uh, I don’t know—buzz my head, Sir, but the Corps won’t let me.

  The other side was goading him.

  Say it, Sir, say what they’ll really do to me. Or just fucking do it. Or are you scared I might cry? I was preparing for his next move, which I knew would happen without any warning. I was no hero in a Ridley Scott movie. G.I. Jane was a fairy tale. There were no comebacks with Bristol.

  He eventually let go. Maybe it was the quiet stink in my eyes, or the steadiness in my presence. I had learned by now to hold and wait for him to shift gears. When he moved on, we went back to training as if nothing had happened.

  I was a lightweight compared to the hulking guys in my course. They responded to me in different ways. The other officer in my squad, a major and a helicopter pilot who treated me like a daughter as much as a training partner, pissed me off to no end when we partnered up in ground fighting. A former competitive wrestler and a push-up champion, he just sat there beneath me, refusing to offer any resistance for me to practice my guard or mount techniques.

  “Come on, fight me, Sir!” I hollered at him.

  Another time, I was matched with a dude twice my weight, and after rolling around for a bit back and forth he just straddled me, sat down on my pelvis, and checked out. The guy was practically taking a cigarette break. I couldn’t move out from under him to save my life, though I was making a hell of an effort to. Bristol walked by, unamused by my wriggling.

  “You’re not going to win like that, Lieutenant. Figure it out.”

  A few days later, I was summoned into a boxing ring to spar with one of our instructors, a beefy midwestern staff sergeant whose back and chest threatened to swallow my skinny Indian skeleton whole. I took a fighting stance, ready to pound on him and receive whatever punches he threw at my rib cage and gut. I summoned my adrenaline and braced for impact. Whatever I lacked in size and brawn I tried to make up in willpower and capacity to take a pounding. But he refused to meet me in the center of the ring, saying, “I need you to put on a flak jacket, Ma’am.”

  I paused. (Pausing was a luxury occasionally afforded to officers, a relative privilege that only sometimes made up for the fact of being female.) Something wasn’t right here. The men in my squad who fought before me in the ring had not worn flak jackets. Why would I strap an extra sixteen pounds onto my chest and back to take on the Incredible Hulk when he already outweighed me by 125 pounds?

  Pauses were risky when you were physically exhausted but not nearly done with whatever physical pain lay ahead. Pauses broke your momentum and messed with the chemicals that were short-circuiting your better instincts not to hit someone twice your size. I was spent from having my ass kicked for days on end, indoors, outdoors, and every which way by very large Marines, on one good leg no less. I was exhausted just trying to walk straight.

  I was the only woman in this squad. And I’d experienced just enough to know the difference between safety and bullshit. The staff sergeant was a Muscle Milk–guzzling machine-gunner whose main education in life came from Marine Corps infantry. He was our lead instructor and an expert on tearing humans limb from limb. I couldn’t possibly adopt a separate training uniform and be padded up like some princess.

  The rest of my squad, a group of infantrymen, a reconnaissance Marine, and a massive former cook, grew still, sweating profusely, watching this drama unfold.

  “Ma’am, it’s standard safety gear for females.”

  “But I don’t need any safety gear.”

  “Ma’am, it’s—”

  “Staff Sergeant, the guys don’t have to wear this. So why should I have to wear it?”

  “Ma’am.” He paused, and summoned a poker face for me, the female officer, who, despite any natural laws he thought ruled the order of things between men and women, technically outranked him.

  He said this cautiously.

  “It’s for your protection, so you don’t get hurt.” He blushed. Oh lord.

  The idea that this burly staff sergeant and his cadre of tough guys had given enough thought to consider the safety of my breasts stunned me. It meant he’d actually considered that I had breasts. I quickly shook the thought from my head.

  What female weakness was it this time? Was it breast cancer, or baby making? Or, god forbid, was it simply cosmetic, that they didn’t want my boobs to suffer the indignity of bruising?

  I didn’t believe that the Corps gave a rat’s ass about the health of my breasts or any infant’s chances of successfully breast-feeding. They were my goddamned boobs, and little did they know that I did not consider myself either a milk production machine or a cautionary tale for oncologists. Being forced to wear breast protection gear, among a sea of hardened dudes with rock-solid chests, was like few other humiliations I’d endured in uniform.

  Everyone was waiting. My squad knew I was feisty and strong-willed, but they didn’t know how far I’d take this. Some of these guys tiptoed around me, these enormous, hulking men, treating me like a doll. I had to toughen them up. A few were blessed with common sense, and I respected them for it. My favorite instructor was a short, stocky infantryman, Sergeant Doyle, who wasn’t afraid to kick me hard in the gut and send me flying across the room to get me to learn something. He didn’t believe in coddling me.

  This was not that Marine. But I was fed up and getting nowhere, and the embarrassment was slowly taking over any will I had to hold out. What was I going to do, complain to Bristol, who had likely orchestrated the whole thing in the first place? I slung the jacket over my precious chest and swung as hard as I could at that cocksucker.

  • • •

  Bristol hazed the first woman who attempted the course a year ago, a physical specimen who was built thin and compact like me but could do more pull-ups than lots of guys. Several hours a day for six weeks, in the heat of summer, he’d subject her to extra drills, after everyone else had been dismissed from a full day of grueling training. Apparently, Bristol’s infantry minions nervously watched him from the sidelines until they told him what he was doing was unfair, and even more, dangerous. I don’t know if he was trying to prove women didn’t belong here or simply knock her out of training with heat exhaustion or heart failure.

  I was his second experiment, though in what I wasn’t sure. Bristol’s bottom line was that killing took a certain brutality that women did not possess. No amount of superior fitness, physical strength, or sociopathy would make women suitable for the art of killing. Remembering my rugby team from college, I thought Bristol had a lot to learn about women.

  Pepper spray—oleoresin capsicum, or OC—was one of Bristol’s favorite training tools, the kind that separated the boys from the men, the pussies from the warriors.

  When our OC qualification day finally arrived, Sergeant Doyle calmly stood in front of me. I closed my eyes, as if that were going to help. An equal-opportunity distributor of pain, Doyle held the can of pepper sp
ray three inches from my eyelids and pulled the trigger for what seemed like minutes, till my forehead and cheeks dripped with chemical ooze, my skin seemed to melt, and my eye sockets felt like they’d been filled with gasoline and set on fire.

  Virtually blind, I swung at a series of targets with batons, elbows, knees, and fists, egged on by my instructors, and using whatever other senses I had to decipher what around me was real and what was not.

  After I’d made it through the striking course, cursing whichever desperate Brown people had first surrendered their hot peppers to these sadistic white men, shaking my head furiously to try to purge the burn from my brain, Bristol came toward me, hovering.

  I distinctly sensed glee in his voice when he told me, “It’s like watching Planet of the Apes.”

  I took this to mean I was the fucking monkey.

  The fire lasted for several hours, and no amount of rinsing our eyes with cold water eased the burn. A bunch of us from my squad were huddled together, commiserating, waiting and praying for the searing to stop. One recon Marine, his white face splotched with red marks and eyes still clamped shut, compared it to having his head dipped like French fries into a vat of boiling oil. Some guys were crying. Bristol stood above us, overlooking the chaos, satisfied.

  I might have been Bristol’s experiment, but he became the object of my curiosity. He must have known there was a way to get to me. It was only a matter of finding and pushing the right buttons, and no Marine had found mine thus far.

  Bristol’s war stories were private, but he revealed information if it served his purpose. He wanted me to believe that he and I shared many things in common. He let me know he was a cultured man, a reader, an aficionado of travel and philosophy.

  He dug into my past. He sat me down in his office one afternoon and talked about his appreciation of my education, my cultural grooming. During his martial arts forays around the world, he’d spent time in northern India with an ancient society of wrestlers. Bristol made me his private audience. He knew I was listening closely, that he was building a bond, that intimacy between us could be created through a regular dose of intellectual banter, that his attention would make me vulnerable, and susceptible to the power of suggestion. I knew all this, even as I let him draw me in. As if I had a choice.