Unbecoming

by Anuradha Bhagwati

  “Holy shit, that’s Smith,” one lieutenant said, his eyes shifting. I looked up on stage, and saw my friend, the only other female officer in the battalion, bent over toward the crowd, swinging her head like a lasso, her long hair making giant windmills in the air. Next to three other women on stage, Smith was whooping the dance floor into a frenzy. Apparently, there was a place for us in this world.

  I couldn’t watch her anymore. I turned around and walked out.

  • • •

  It turned out that while Bristol was kicking my ass in Quantico, some of my fellow lieutenants back in Okinawa had turned their backs on me. They didn’t understand why I got to go play ninja girl, while they had to stay behind supervising their platoons. The fact that I had volunteered for the training while they had not was completely lost on them.

  I’d earned my black belt. I’d bled and sweat and popped a kneecap out of the socket over it. I’d been knocked out. I’d taken enough painkillers to put my liver through hell. I’d accumulated enough scar tissue in every joint in my body to make me dependent on a lifetime of MRI tubes, orthopedists, physical therapists, and body workers. This belt was part of my uniform now. I didn’t need to prove a goddamned thing to anyone. Except that of course I did.

  I ran into Quinn on the streets of Pattaya one night. He’d been drinking for hours. Quinn was an okay guy, as far as fellow lieutenants went. He put together a swim team from our battalion, and even though my amateur freestyle left a lot to be desired, he coached us through a couple of meets, where much to my surprise I earned myself a few ribbons. (This was more due to the fact that I was the only woman stationed on the island who had signed up for the meet.) I knew his wife. She was a sweet, pretty woman who was taking sushi classes out in town. They seemed like a happy couple.

  I didn’t know what it was about that moment that made Quinn nuts. Perhaps it was the heat, the booze, something I was wearing, or the way I looked at him as we headed toward each other on the street.

  He wanted to know about the black belt course. I said something unremarkable. It was tough. It was great. Who knows? Maybe he’d heard that I was prepping for an international amateur fight now under supervision of my martial arts instructor, the broad-chested karate sensei. I’d been training in Thailand during my free hours with a fellow Marine, a tall blond dude, a green belt instructor who in another lifetime would have made a great surfing partner. We’d spar after work hours in the Thai base camp with pads and other equipment that had been brought over with us from Okinawa. When I got into town I’d watch real-life Muay Thai fighters sparring in a ring in the middle of one of the seedy tourist bars. I was feeling happy for the first time in my life.

  But Quinn had a bone to pick. I did not realize I inspired this in people.

  I didn’t expect it. I didn’t know I needed to. He threw a punch at my right cheek before I realized it was coming.

  That quiet, personal kind of violence wasn’t new to me, but it still took me by surprise. At The Basic School a year before, a fellow student, a massive bodybuilding type, threatened to pound my head through his car window as we drove full speed down the highway—he’d said something demeaning, I’d challenged him, and he didn’t take my rebuttal so well. He never followed through on his threat, but it shut me up, fast. He was enraged, and behind the steering wheel, with the mass to easily crack my skull in half. I’d forgotten about him until now.

  The overt ragers, the lusty drunks, the manically emotional guys—they were easier to handle somehow, they threw obvious swings. Their insecurities about manhood were tied into their language and swagger; they moved deep into their steps. But Quinn’s swing at my jaw came from nowhere.

  Marines had gathered around us, waiting for something to happen. A physical reaction. A verbal response. I took a moment. I didn’t feel much in my jaw. My tongue made a quick sweep of my teeth. Nothing was missing. Gums were intact. Maybe he’d thrown a sissy punch, just to mock me.

  I looked at him, dumbfounded. He smiled at me, assessing my next move, my next word. I had no plans. The shock of being smacked down by a colleague on the streets of Thailand was too much for my system to process.

  I didn’t swing back. He wanted to see what intricate skills I’d absorbed, what superhuman physical prowess, what new miracles I thought I could work on his body because I’d earned a title he didn’t think I deserved.

  I walked away. He muttered, snickered, did the things men do when they think they’ve proven a point. I imagine the next morning Quinn had some hint of a memory about this moment. That perhaps some shame would surface when his wife asked him next about how I was. We never interacted again.

  Gunny Cain and I were walking through the Thai base the next day, and I told him about the incident. He was surprised by Quinn’s behavior, but also concerned about mine.

  “Ma’am, you should have swung back.”

  “What? Why?” I was all ears.

  “He needs to know you won’t take that kind of thing lying down.”

  “I didn’t know I was defending my honor.”

  Gunny Cain wasn’t impressed. There was still so much he had to teach his young lieutenant. The world I was immersed in now had no place for the art of diplomacy. Forgiveness was a weakness and kindness a sign of some pathological femininity.

  Only I wasn’t sure about these rules. It wasn’t that I wasn’t man enough to fight back. I just didn’t buy that my worth was based on drawing blood from a guy who was being an asshole. These rational tendencies would mark me in the end, but I guess I didn’t care enough to change. I knew I could bruise some balls if it was damn well needed.

  • • •

  One morning things were unusually quiet on base. I ran into a fellow officer between racks in the female housing area. It was Biel, the wobbly voiced candidate from OCS.

  “Did you hear about the Army colonel?”

  I hadn’t.

  “He hung himself last night. They found out he’d slept with an underage girl in town.”

  She was neither shaming the colonel nor commiserating with the Thai girl. Biel was simply stating the facts, as plainly as she’d told me the weather. As I wandered to my post, I seethed inside. Who were these men?

  • • •

  Several weeks into Thailand, I had fully acclimated. I was hammered on the dance floor at Tony’s. I was off to the side of the club, minding my own groove, no longer self-conscious or caring about anything or anyone my fellow jarheads were doing. A local woman approached me.

  “You want dance?” she asked. I looked at her. She was tiny, with dark brown eyes and long black hair.

  The woman and I hardly spoke, her grasp of English not much better than the emergency Thai I’d learned. We danced.

  “You want outside?” She pointed over the bodies on the floor toward the exit.

  “Okay.”

  She firmly took me by the hand, knowing I was several shots in now, guided me off the floor, past my colleagues and out of the club, around lesser-beaten, winding Pattaya roads. Only locals seemed to walk these streets. I was leaning on her completely, and despite her smallness, I felt invincible, and above reproach, and safe. I paid for a hotel room, and minutes later we were in bed, our bodies locked together.

  When she fell asleep, I showered and got dressed. There was a moment where the alcohol lifted a bit, and standing against the sink in the bathroom I was faced with the question of whether or not I was dreaming, and what, if any, consequences awaited me. And there was the flicker of this thought: for the first time in my life I was really living on the edge.

  It’s clear to me now that I had given up on the Marine Corps long before this. If everyone else was above the law, then why shouldn’t I be? I wasn’t married. I didn’t have kids back home, crying themselves to sleep at night. I didn’t have some homebound wife I knocked up straight out of high school, the victim of my pathologically seductive dress blues, oblivious to the Corps’ day-to-day realities about monogamy, misogyny, and m
arriage.

  So fuck the rules. Fuck convention. And fuck the Corps, too. I returned to the club that week, but I never saw her again.

  A few nights later, a fellow lieutenant, a short, nerdy colleague with a knack for science, took me aside at Tony’s. He looked at me like he wanted something and we shared a sudden, drunken kiss, each shot and exchange of bodily fluid in this place adding to my growing sense that I had no idea who I was or what I was doing anymore.

  “We should hook up when we get back to Oki,” he suggested.

  He was not my type.

  “Sure. Okay.”

  After a long pause, he said, seriously, “I need to tell you something.”

  He told me I was becoming the object of a witch hunt by fellow officers who took issue with my recent activities with a local woman. The pounding club music, the throngs of drunken, sexed-up warriors, the fog of alcohol, inside me and everywhere, dulled my fear.

  Silently, I thought, What do they know?

  His eyes were gentle, even through the alcohol.

  “It’s all bullshit. They’re trying to fuck with you.” And then, warmly, “Watch your back, Bhagwati.”

  I was still feeling bulletproof, and more than a little arrogant. I was too young and drunk to realize what this really meant, until one morning I was required to report to my commanding officer in a private tent on base.

  I should have been terrified. But I had never seen an adult squirm quite like this man was squirming now. Over the course of the next few minutes, any authority Captain Franco had acquired by rank and any anxiety I felt as the junior officer faded.

  With his eyes avoiding mine, he said, “The battalion commander asked me to talk to you. About your, um. Behavior.”

  I knew deep down what this guy, my boss, the man I had to Sir regardless of whether or not I respected him, was trying to say. But I really wanted to hear him say it, because I knew how excruciating it was for him to put the words together, and because I could not wait to throw down after he did.

  He said, “You were making out with another woman in a club.” Well, he wasn’t entirely wrong, but I didn’t remember the specifics, so I probed a little.

  “What was I doing exactly, Sir?” I asked, with a straight face.

  Franco still couldn’t look me in the eyes. Wriggling in his seat, he answered, “They said you were feeling her up.”

  This term I learned from prepubescent girls and boys long ago sounded all sorts of wrong coming out of the captain’s mouth. In this moment, I hoped he didn’t have any daughters. There was some language grown men should bury and never use again. Beneath my calm exterior, something I had learned to hone well after two years of suppressing responses and obeying orders, I felt the familiar sting of humiliation rise. I refused to let it take over. I decided to have some fun with him.

  “Well, Sir, I don’t really remember. I was pretty drunk.”

  In part, it was the truth. But whether I was playing more with Franco or with my own life was uncertain. I had just set myself up for an additional chargeable offense, and I was throwing it in his face along with my homosexual conduct.I The notion that conduct unbecoming an officer—being wasted in a public place—might be the next possible threat to my career had occurred to me, but what the hell, there wasn’t a sober American service member within a hundred miles of Pattaya Beach, and I was taking my chances that sheer audacity and some sixth sense about justice were going to steer this talk in my favor.

  For some reason, maybe it was the thought of having to crawl back to the battalion commander empty-handed, the captain finally found his cojones and launched into a lecture about the inappropriateness of same-sex relations. I put up with about twenty more seconds of his Bible-thumping before I couldn’t take it any longer and decided to end his misery and mine.

  Square in his eyes, I told him, “Sir, if you have a problem with my alleged behavior, you should have a problem with actual adultery, too. And if you want to make a big deal about what some lieutenants said they saw me do in some nightclub, I’d be more than happy to make a big deal about every single married Marine in the battalion screwing Thai hookers every night for the last three months.”

  The painful silence and the unrelenting flush of Franco’s face were long and satisfying. He had no response, no Are you threatening me, Lieutenant? because it was obvious that I was, and what was more, he knew I was right. Marines were breaking marriage vows and military law in every seedy corner of Pattaya. I could practically read his mind: What does she know about me?

  He wasn’t willing to find out if I was bluffing.

  “That’s all, Lieutenant Bhagwati.”

  I ended up on the first plane back to Okinawa. Rumor was it was because they didn’t want me causing any additional trouble. Whether it’s because they thought they’d have hundreds of raging wives and impending divorces on their hands or a “don’t ask, don’t tell” incident in which I was their primary character, I would never know. But I wasn’t done with this homophobic stunt, even if I wasn’t on the right side of military law.

  Back on the island, I took aside one of the married officers who had reported me to the battalion commander and gave him a piece of my mind. He’d spent twenty years in the Corps, but I couldn’t have cared less.

  “It’s none of your goddamned business what I do or do not do with another woman. Got it?”

  He looked at me, appalled. He did not expect to be confronted. Something changed in his face, as if he’d been exposed. He smiled.

  “Yeah, Bhagwati.” He didn’t apologize, but he never fucked with me again.

  • • •

  Now that I was settled back in Okinawa, it became obvious to me that the Constitution I’d sworn under oath to protect and defend was supported by a culture that was indefensible. Marine bravado was fragile. Our ego was barely held together by various well-rehearsed slogans about men’s strength and heroism. Some part of me stopped giving a damn. Only I wished what came out of me as a result of my not giving a damn was something worth fighting for, an ownership of my body, a genuine pride that arose from realizing my own value.

  But my choice to play the girl gone wild because everything was so unfair did not contain any artistic sensibility, any grand sense of history or timing, or foresight about the moral arc of the universe. My universe was tinged with a real adolescent nihilism, a kind of You wanna screw me? Fuck you then, I’ll just screw myself. I played with fate like I’d just pulled the pin on a grenade and held on, waiting to see which parts of me wouldn’t blow up.

  My self-destruction hurt me more than anyone else. I was naive and sexually inexperienced, but even more than that, I was lost and sad and so alone I could barely get through the average day. I had no skin to protect myself from people’s language, and no moral reference that counted for shit anymore. Men’s words about women, the filth that was said to keep us from realizing our potential, became the core of what I believed about myself. There was no way out of these years to which I had signed my life but through them. I did not make it any easier for myself.

  Though it scared me, though I was sick to my stomach with self-loathing, I found myself, slowly and unbearably, sleeping with a small assortment of Marine men, each one more indifferent to the consequences of being with me than the last, wretched lost souls who like me were so off course from living fulfilled lives that I wondered if anyone who joined this institution had anything going for them aside from the idea of belonging to this place.

  There was no such thing as respect for a woman in this uniform we wore, so it should come as little surprise that they had little respect for me. Some were in awe, or in lust of how different I was from the women they had known, but mostly I was their receptacle, their distraction from a mediocre existence, the thing that kept them from hating themselves completely.

  We were codependent in our misery. I felt contempt and disgust for most of them. This was exceeded only by my self-hatred for choosing to be with them. I convinced myself that th
ese men couldn’t possibly understand anything about me, and didn’t on any level deserve me. I must have figured a few moments of meaningless human connection and a convenient orgasm would wipe out the loneliness and alienation I felt. I was using them as much as they were using me, to get closer to oblivion, to being nothing and no one.

  One lieutenant, a young infantry jock with wide shoulders, an enormous back, and legs like tree trunks, introduced me to a new kind of sex, an emotionless, detached fucking that complemented his slightly sociopathic personality and obsession with black ops missions. One day he had my legs high over his shoulders. There was a dead look in his eyes as he stared through me, like he killed small animals for fun, which he no doubt had done.

  “I want to blindfold you.”

  I didn’t want to go down that road, but I went along, mindlessly submitting, letting him wrap the cloth around my head and enter me. I don’t think I said a word the whole time.

  Minutes later, he wanted to film me. I paused as the issue of trust hung before me, my instinct to protect some part of my self-worth or some notion of my public reputation having not yet completely vanished. Somewhere in my memory of how things used to be, I found the courage to tell him no.

  “Come on,” he insisted.

  I said no again. But truthfully, I have no idea whether he got me on camera while my eyes were covered, whether some ancient footage of my motionless, naked body is floating around the Internet somewhere.

  “Come here. I want to do something.” I put my arms around his back. He lifted me effortlessly off the bed, carried me through his barracks room, and placed me in the tub like a bath toy. I’m not sure where this fantasy of his stemmed from, or where it would go, though it seemed an awful lot like he was orchestrating the home version of a rape-drowning scene from some porno he’d seen one too many times. I was grateful when his time on the island came to an end.