Some connections lasted for moments, others for days. These relationships horrified me, compounding my self-loathing each time I removed my clothes or closed a door. I lived in constant terror of being discovered. Even after the encounters were over, my fear and the shame of being found out were devastating.
Some men whom I thought were single hid the fact that they were married. Those who were married would gladly have disappeared their own wives. Divorce would have been a sensible out for them, but few had the courage for that kind of change. The first time it occurred to me that a man who had a wife and kids back home was hitting on me, was trying to get me into his bed, I politely excused myself, made a beeline for the bathroom, and gagged into the toilet. I should have stayed in that bathroom. I should have found a way out. I didn’t. This pathology, this sexually driven self-hatred in which the part I played was to just go along, seeped slowly into me and stayed put. There was nothing left in me to recognize. All that remained was a pervasive nausea. This was the beginning of the end of my self-esteem. I spent weeks letting him inside me, hating every minute of his catlike moaning, as he assured me that his wife wouldn’t mind. Like hell she wouldn’t.
Most Marines came with baggage. One very senior guy had set aside plans for Catholic priesthood to become a Marine and prove to everyone around him that he was a badass. He was book smart and gorgeous, but detached and seemed far too gay to be anything real to me. Still, I was convinced he could save me from the torment of my lonely existence, and I clung to him, hard. He must have realized my desperation, or his, as he didn’t stick around too long.
Another officer I knew had worked his way through Thailand’s prostitutes, year after year, while his demure, obese wife sat at home thousands of miles away, taking care of their kids. I found all of this out after he had fucked me, and like a fool I was actually surprised he had a family. I must have been one of dozens of women he was banging on this deployment.
These men were in all sorts of deep personal shit, wearing various layers of denial. Some were simply setting aside adult responsibility, or feeling the rumblings of early midlife. Others had personalities that were split in two. Most of them were senior, career Marines in the kind of emotional turmoil that required extensive soul searching and a fire team of therapists to sort out. Most of them would never bother.
How I ended up crossing paths with them, naked in bed, was something that would take ages to understand. Years later, a trauma counselor would make the grave mistake of suggesting that perhaps my foray into these forbidden relationships was titillating for me—my version of living wild and free, and testing the limits of the law, like Thelma and Louise. I was appalled and enraged by her analysis. I only wished I could live for my next sexual conquest. I wished I could love flaunting the authorities like some maverick woman. But I was too guilt ridden for all that. I was conquering no one with these escapades, least of all myself.
My fear stemmed from many places. I wasn’t just a sheltered Indian girl who hadn’t had much sex in her life, who wouldn’t have known what you meant if you’d talked about men’s ulterior motives, who’d spent so much time studying and fussing over grades that sex wasn’t even the luxury of daydreams. Whatever sexual awakening I was having now, there was much more at stake. Half the shit I was doing could have landed me in military prison.
The military regulated sex with puritanical zeal, all in the name of good order and discipline, but that was hardly the reason. You could get court-martialed for all sorts of sexual acts. Rape was thankfully on the books (in words, at least, it was criminalized). So was bestiality. So, ironically, was sleeping with a prostitute. But so were homosexuality and sodomy—that is, oral or anal sex with someone of either sex. You could also face jail time for adultery and fraternization. The military’s antisex laws stretched far and wide, criminalizing far more consensual sex acts between adults than nonconsensual ones.
Though I wasn’t married, I could have been court-martialed for sleeping with a married service member. It occurred to me years later—it seemed obvious to anyone but me—that I was playing out some childhood narrative, that all of these men were way older, in most cases a decade or two more experienced than I was and well versed in Marine Corps culture, meaning I could work through all my crippling insecurities about needing Dad’s approval by taking off my clothes for them and pretending they cared about me.
I quickly discovered there were enough adulterous officers in the Corps to form their own regiment, but I was playing with fire well beyond that. The gay priest was a first sergeant. In military parlance, that spelled fraternization. Although he was older than me by several years, he was technically junior in rank. Senior enlisted Marines ran the show on the ground—heck, they ran the whole Marine Corps—but ultimately they reported to officers, which meant if he and I crossed paths on base, he was calling me Ma’am and saluting me.
I was being reckless, and I knew it. Sleeping with someone I outranked, even if he was ten or fifteen years older than me, wasn’t worth it. The stress was more than I could handle. Fraternizing made me a pathetic leader in the eyes of the Corps, or so we had all been told. I remember spitting vitriolic judgment toward officers whom I’d heard had engaged in relationships with junior personnel. They were men who clearly had taken advantage of lower-ranking women, right? And yet here I was, doing something I had sworn was unthinkable just a year ago. The shame burned.
It would be a long while till I realized that military law wasn’t so black-and-white. These rules were rarely enforced. As if Pattaya Beach was not proof enough, few people in uniform cared if two straight adults were having consensual sex. In fact, it appeared that every man who was having sex with a woman he wasn’t supposed to be having sex with was well protected by other men. The military’s rules amounted to scare tactics on paper, vestiges of a time when perhaps religion ruled more than common sense, but irrelevant to day-to-day life in the Corps.
However, if one of the parties was disliked, things got risky. And as I was learning firsthand, on the rare occasion when these rules were enforced, they were usually brought to bear against women. I heard stories later on about how deep the shaming of service women went; one female officer was marched off in handcuffs for sleeping with the wrong man, a woman who had given years of her life to serving in uniform. I felt horrible for her, and for him. Why was sex or love between adults anyone’s business if it didn’t get in the way of their jobs?
If neither party was being harmed or exploited, I wasn’t sure what the military gained from criminalizing consensual adult relationships. Couldn’t the services handle these inevitable human connections in some way that didn’t cause so much unnecessary shame, hiding, and permanent damage to people’s careers? Couldn’t folks just be transferred to other units if relationships got in the way of people’s work? Why was the military playing priest and judge in the bedroom?
Most of the men I connected with were living double lives. Some combination of smooth-talking con men and sad, alienated loners, they were very, very good at this. I, who had no secrets to keep before wearing this uniform, now had everything to hide and something to lose, even if I didn’t recognize its worth to me at the time. I was not good at this. I was in over my head, and drowning.
I had every reason to step outside of this pitiful, self-hating cycle. But there was no way out. I felt like I was in too deep. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I didn’t know what would snap me out of this. A homicidal wife. HIV. The brig. I didn’t know what would hurt me most. Some part of me wanted to find out. Some part of me wanted to be punished for all my transgressions. Maybe it would prove I didn’t belong in the Marines after all.
* * *
I. Under “don’t ask, don’t tell,” “homosexual conduct” was a punishable offense that could get you kicked out of the military. It included verbal statements about one’s sexual orientation, as well as same-sex encounters like holding hands, kissing, and soliciting sex. Really, it amounted to anything, even intent
to commit such acts. And your fate was entirely up to your commander.
CHAPTER 7
Joining the Grunts
Two months after Thailand, I stood before my battalion executive officer with a copy of my fitness report in my right hand.
My company commander, Captain Franco, whom I saluted at this point only because military custom required it, had given me the lowest possible marks on my report. In the real world, it would have meant looking for another job, but a contract was a contract. There was no justification for these marks other than retaliation, and I told my executive officer just as much.
Franco and I had butted heads over far more than the anonymous Thai woman. A mediocre officer who was socially awkward and a clumsy manager, he led our company by forcing people to obey him rather than seeking counsel from his subordinates and listening to good ideas.
But worse than this, Franco had clearly missed the memo on sexual and physical boundaries. Inexplicably, I became his pet when I returned from black belt training in the States. At one staff meeting, Franco wanted to nominate me for a young leadership award, though no one, including me, seemed to be sure what I’d done to earn this recognition. In front of Jones and the lieutenant who’d swung her hair in Tony’s, in front of Gunny Cain and the other senior enlisted leaders in the company, Franco began swooning over me, like a man with a schoolboy crush. I turned beet red, trying to hide in my seat as the Marines in the room grew silent. Franco’s first sergeant, a wiry Black woman with twenty years in the Corps, sensing that a temporary paralysis had set in in the room, responded to the captain’s excesses by moving the meeting forward at lightning speed. I dealt with his attention by silently fuming and then avoiding him completely.
One week I was in the company office to grab some paperwork, stopping to say hello to one of my Marines, a young kid who was injured and assigned to help with admin. The captain came out of his office and sidled up to me, telling me he was feeling cold. Before I could even conjure the thought So what? he placed his hand on my cheek to demonstrate his body temperature.
“See?”
I didn’t respond. I had no idea whether my Marine had witnessed the interaction, but I backed away and out of the office, with a deadly look in my eye.
Captain Franco had no clue about personal space or contemporary gender norms, so when he’d taken his lieutenants out to dinner in town one evening, I shouldn’t have been surprised that he gave my fellow woman officer and me long hugs, while he firmly shook Jones’s hand. Locked in his slimy embrace, I wanted to hurl. My skin itched all the way home.
Franco didn’t restrict his harassment to young officers. One day toward the end of my time on Okinawa, my new platoon sergeant, a stellar young Marine with bright red hair, approached me, telling me the captain had been giving her a lot of attention, and that it made her feel uncomfortable. All I could do was tell her I was watching him closely. Being a lecherous Marine wasn’t enough to move the Corps to action.
I had one brief moment of vengeance, when I was teaching the company their introductory martial arts requirements, and the captain was now my student. Approaching me with flirtatious eyes, he asked me how to execute a particular jab to the skull. Without hesitating, my palm struck his head, knocking his helmet into his forehead and sending him back a couple of feet. He looked at me, stunned, resentment building in his eyes. I did not apologize.
“Got it, Sir?”
But all that paled in comparison to the final blow I dealt him, on behalf of one of my Marines.
At six feet four inches, Lance Corporal Ibrahim was the tallest Marine in my radio platoon. He was just a kid, eighteen or nineteen tops, with soft eyes and a gentle demeanor. He was Black, and he was Muslim. Ibrahim’s faith had deepened over the last year, and he wanted to observe Ramadan for the first time in his life. We were not deploying anytime during the monthlong fast, so there was no good reason not to support him. It would be his responsibility to do his job in the platoon during the day, including participating in physical training each morning, in extremely hot conditions.
Ibrahim had submitted a request through the chain of command for Comrats—Commuted Rations—which would give him the extra pay to purchase food at the commissary so he could eat his meals at night during Ramadan. The fast prevented him from eating the free breakfast, lunch, or dinner offered to Marines at the chow hall during the day, so this simple solution made sense. It meant his survival.
Captain Franco received the request for Comrats and swiftly denied it. Gunny Cain came to me with the news. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had no idea to what extent Franco’s stunt was some Catholic power move to harass a young Muslim Marine, but I didn’t waste too much time thinking about it. I talked at length with my gunny about Ibrahim’s options, and then spoke to Ibrahim, who nodded his head with plenty of yes, Ma’ams and no, Ma’ams while I told him his options. Ibrahim thought about it and made his decision.
It was ballsy for everyone involved, but given the captain’s general level of incompetence, I didn’t care about the consequences to me, and more important, Ibrahim had nothing to lose. I was firmly backing the kid. Ibrahim requested mast to the battalion commander, an administrative move that allowed a junior ranking Marine to speak to an officer several rungs up the chain of command when he perceived his grievance was not being addressed by more immediate supervisors. Ibrahim walked the paperwork straight to the battalion office, as I instructed him, bypassing the captain altogether.
A day later, I was summoned to see Franco.
“Good morning, Sir.”
The captain said nothing in response. Barely looked at me. I could have cut the tension in the room with a samurai sword. Then, suddenly, he barked, “I could charge you for what you did, Lieutenant!” I guessed I was no longer his favorite platoon commander. He reached into his desk desperately, knocking over papers, and pulled out a Manual for Courts-Martial, the military’s tome on criminal justice. He flipped open to a page that had been specially marked for this particular ass chewing, and read a paragraph with great emphasis.
I listened intently till he stopped reading and looked up at me, triumphant, as if he’d just pronounced me guilty as charged.
I inhaled.
“Sir, it’s Ibrahim’s right to speak to the battalion commander. There’s nothing illegal in requesting mast.”
“That paperwork should have come directly to me, Lieutenant,” he growled.
“Sir, his Comrats request did come directly to you. You denied it.”
He stuttered, seething. I could see him evaluating his next move, and mine.
“This isn’t over, Lieutenant. You’re dismissed.”
“Aye-aye, Sir.” I about-faced and took off. I walked back to Gunny Cain’s office, telling him the news. He received it with typical calmness, but I could tell he was concerned about me.
Three days later, the battalion commander called me in to see him. The captain was waiting inside the office. My belly tightened.
“Lieutenant Bhagwati, have a seat.” The lieutenant colonel was all in senior officer mode, gathering his flock together. I sat down next to Franco, who was silent and grim.
“I’m approving Lance Corporal Ibrahim’s request.”
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Is there anything else the Marine needs? Or anything you want to say?”
I thought hard. Then I went for it.
“Well, Sir, I think it’s really important that we let our Marines know we care about them. Especially since 9/11. I think we’ve got to be very careful to let Muslim Marines know we aren’t going to discriminate against them, considering all the anti-Muslim sentiment in the world right now.”
“That’s a great point, Lieutenant Bhagwati.”
The battalion commander’s support was the last I’d get from this unit. Standing now before my major, armed with these anecdotes of bullshit behavior by Franco, he had nothing left for me. He didn’t care about Franco’s harassment, of me, of other women,
or what clearly was Franco’s attempt at punishing me for making him look like an ass before the battalion commander. Instead, he said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you wanted to start over.”
He was right. I’d been looking at next duty stations. It was 2002, and while a friend in a neighboring unit had joined one of the first deployments to Afghanistan, and I wanted to be in the thick of it, it was a long shot that my platoon would have the opportunity to go there anytime soon. Leading enlisted Marines was fun and challenging, and worth it every day. But the officers in this battalion were another story. There was no point sticking around here.
At a final officer dinner I attended, I rose to my feet and thanked everyone—the porn addicts, the adulterers, and the homophobes—for everything I’d learned. I think I said it more to be seen than anything else. None of these officers were going to miss me, and I sure as heck wasn’t going to miss their backstabbing and jealousy.
I wanted to be somewhere exciting, and I’d found an opening back stateside, at Camp Lejeune. Like the black belt billet, it was a unique position that had recently been opened to women officers. I’d be an executive officer at the School of Infantry, helping instruct brand-new Marines from Parris Island in the combat skills they’d need to know in the operating forces. I’d be working almost entirely with infantry Marines, on both the officer and enlisted side. I’d actually have an infantry officer’s billet. It would be the closest I could get to the infantry, something that was still irrevocably off-limits to women.
My then sexual partner, the infantry officer who’d blindfolded me, looked at me like I was nuts.
“Why would you want to work there? All grunts think about is killing, drinking, and sex.” He would know. Still, if the infantry was where the real Marine Corps was, I wanted in.
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