Unbecoming

by Anuradha Bhagwati

  Franco ended up getting promoted to major. A few months after I left Okinawa, a friend told me he had gotten in trouble for harassing a bunch of officers’ wives. I just shook my head. I’d already moved on.

  • • •

  North Carolina was as Deep South as I’d ever lived. And Jacksonville, North Carolina, made Quantico, Virginia, look like the liberal Northeast. Jacksonville was my first full immersion in conservative backcountry living, a sprawl of strip malls, fast food chains, tattoo parlors, and bars surrounding Camp Lejeune, the largest Marine Corps base in the world.

  The School of Infantry had its own location off to the side, at Camp Geiger. I was assigned to Echo Company, and when I went in to meet my new boss, I could already feel something different in the language and look of the Marines in his charge. He spoke with an intensity and seriousness that defined Marine Corps infantry. He called the troops in to meet me. There were about thirty men, mostly sergeants, a few corporals and staff sergeants. They were all infantrymen. The gunny had just whipped them into silence and stood to the side, ready to tear out the tongue of anyone who spoke out of line. They looked up at me expectantly, as if I were about to deliver them from death or kick the crap out of them.

  Their discipline was impressive. If there was any question about working for a noninfantryman, and a woman at that, I picked up nothing from this group. Most of them had never worked with or for a woman. And they were training only male Marines in this company.

  Unfortunately, just as I was getting settled, my new battalion commander had me reassigned to a neighboring company that was training both male and female Marines. Apparently the infantry captain there had two young kids and he needed some extra support in the field while he helped take care of his family. Though most of the staff was infantry and male, we had a handful of female corporals and sergeants, as well as a female first sergeant.

  I drove out to the field to observe my first training evolution. The NCOs were scattered in various stations, each with fifteen to twenty young Marines, bright-eyed, awkward, and mildly terrified, learning about cover and concealment. My goal was to meet the instructors and get a sense of the schedule.

  I walked over to one squad. Their sergeant was small and loud. She skipped over to me, her yellow bob bouncing off her shoulders.

  “You must be our new XO, right, Ma’am?” She was as much cheerleader as squad leader. She spent the next couple of minutes rattling away about the personalities in the company like she was preparing me for my entrance at a frat party. I’d never heard so many “likes” uttered from the mouth of a Marine. But nothing prepared me for the shock of seeing her pull up and re-roll the cuffs of her trousers while she tied her laces and then bloused her boots, snugly wrapping boot bands around her trousers to keep them in place.

  The sergeant was wearing knee-high yellow-and-black-striped socks underneath her camouflage uniform. She didn’t even try to hide them.

  “You always wear those, Sergeant?”

  “What? Oh, these? Yes, Ma’am. Aren’t they, like, great?”

  She bounced back to her squad while I stood there in shock. What the heck kind of company was this?

  When I saw the troops with the company commander, Captain Jacob, they treated him like he was their pal. He not only didn’t mind, he seemed to encourage it. It was clear he had no idea how to manage women. A couple of the younger women looked at him like they were lovestruck. They all called him Sir, and it was clear that the infantry guys would have gone to bat for him, but the group was way too relaxed around him. I wondered if the presence of women there had made everyone nuts.

  Back at the company office, I took my new CO aside.

  “Sir, do you know what your NCOs are doing out in the field?”

  Captain Jacob chuckled. “Lieutenant, feel free to fix whatever needs fixing. It’s all yours.” He was serious. With two young kids back home and a wife who was apparently giving him hell for his long hours, the captain gave me full license to rein in his troops. I was in charge whenever he wasn’t around.

  The bumblebee socks were gone within a day. And the NCOs started straightening up when they saw me. The SNCOs, senior enlisted infantrymen who essentially supervised training in the field, were surprised. I developed a reputation as a hard-ass XO, the one who wouldn’t let the troops gaff off. There were some talented junior women in the company, and the lackadaisical standards hurt them the most. Lost in a sea of hard-core infantry guys, they had a lot to prove, but no one was holding them to a higher standard, or taking them seriously. All their senior enlisted mentors and officers were infantry guys who had neither the experience nor the courage to treat them as hard as they would the men.

  My infantry learning curve on matters of sex and gender was steep, and I was rapidly taking mental notes. During one top-level briefing among officers in the school, my captain diagnosed the problem of several young Marines in our company not performing up to the Corps’ standards as vaginosis. It was another level of slur, as if the darkest, foulest thing one could be, furthest from the tribe of real men, was the smelly, itchy mess of infection in the damp nether regions of a she-human. I sat there in silence as he plowed forward with his briefing to the colonel. No one said a word.

  Other breakdowns in training occurred along gender lines. The guys just simply were not training the female students hard. Whether it was fear of hurting them, or being hurt by them, I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. With the war in Iraq now under way, many of our students were going to be deployed to places like Fallujah. It didn’t matter that our students weren’t infantrymen. There were no more front lines in America’s wars. Everyone was fighting out there, regardless of their jobs. These infantrymen could no longer afford to treat our students like Barbie dolls.

  I threw the female students up on pull-up bars, and I insisted to my captain that we integrate squads to the lowest possible level, ensuring that women were not being sheltered in all-female units. The women would have to find a way to come out of the protected shells they’d grown at Parris Island, where boot camp was still segregated and completely unequal. And men would have to get used to women training alongside them.

  I was on my belly one day with one of the squads, low-crawling alongside them, when a private came up to me, starry-eyed.

  “Ma’am, you’re in better shape than most eighteen-year-olds!”

  I looked at him briefly before an NCO howled, “Shut your piehole, devil dog! Get your ass back in gear. Now!”

  I shook the company up. Remembering my training from black belt school, I wore combat boots on company runs while the others wore sneakers. I wanted them to know women didn’t deserve special treatment. In fact, we could handle more than they thought.

  Immersed now in infantry culture, I was getting to know some real characters that didn’t exist in the integrated world of support units. The infantry guys treated me with an odd mixture of curiosity, fear, respect, and befuddlement. Sergeant Murray was a typical infantryman: average-looking, skinny, and tenacious as hell. I remember holding an empty Gatorade bottle one day, asking him where the recycling bin was, and he looked at me like I’d personally offended God, Country, and Corps. Warfighters did not recycle.

  He was a know-it-all, but he had the skills to back it up, so during my first week with the company, Murray gave me a personal tour of the training area at night to break me in. He took me through miles of woods under the black sky. He was happily aiming for the thickest brush. Flashlights were out of the question. He barely made a sound while I stomped behind him like an elephant in the jungle. I silently cursed him, wishing I had a machete, and maybe the gall to kick him in the nuts. I could hear him chuckling ahead of me every now and then. My legs were covered in chiggers for the next month.

  Murray was arrogant to a fault, but utterly reliable, and the guy you wanted by your side in a scrape. I’d been there a few months when the captain mentioned to me that Murray and his wife were in dire straits, and that Murray was now on thi
n ice for dating another woman. It seemed his wife was raising hell with the command, and the battalion commander was getting tired of the drama.

  Murray found himself reporting to me in the company office one day, looking petrified. I’d never seen him look nervous. It did not go down the way he expected.

  “Sergeant Murray, you’re human. But you’ve got to be a little more tactful, yeah? Look, you’re an adult. Just remember you’ve got to respect how delicate this is, not throw this in anyone’s face. Treat this with caution until the divorce goes through, okay?”

  I’d never policed people’s hearts, and I wasn’t about to start doing it now. He was terribly shy all of a sudden. The grunt in him was nowhere to be found.

  Quietly, he said, “Yes, Ma’am. Thank you, Ma’am.”

  Murray acted like I was some kind of angel after that. He’d expected me to crucify him and pronounce him a fornicator. I had no interest in all that. He just needed some time to sort his life out and grow a little.

  The head of the School of Infantry was a colonel with a storied infantry career. He’d survived a legendary injury in his younger days, which added to his notoriety as the real deal. On one of his jumps, he apparently hit the ground so hard that his femurs shot up through his hips. He was one of very few men who was thrilled to have me in his unit simply because of my résumé. He had a college-aged daughter to whom he wanted to introduce me, because she was interested in the Corps. He saw me, with my Ivy League creds, as some kind of role model. My fellow infantry officers were stuck halfway between disbelief and jealousy over this extra attention. Civilian smarts and women’s inherent worth had no bearing on their world.

  If I was doing well at work, my personal life left much to be desired. When I wasn’t with my company, I spent many evenings staring at the sky, wondering what was next for me. I was desperately lonely. The few friends I’d made were stationed elsewhere around the globe. Jules was stationed at Parris Island, South Carolina, and living with her girlfriend. She was so deep in the closet I wondered how she was surviving. I had no friends in Jacksonville. There were no single officers in the battalion, and no other women officers stationed at the School of Infantry aside from an awkward attorney whom I barely saw anyhow.

  Jacksonville was a wasteland that challenged me to the core. I spent my free time working out and sprucing up my house there, the first property I’d ever owned. I got one dog, a rottweiler. Then a second, a chocolate Labrador. I named them Shiva and Uma, after the mighty Hindu god of destruction and his loyal companion.

  A few months into my tour, a new female lieutenant was assigned to another training company in the battalion. She was excited to be there and seemed like a nice person. I still remember her—friendly, unassuming, smart, blond. Not like many women officers I knew, who tended to hide their personalities under several layers of suspicion. I remember talking to her during her first week and answering her questions.

  Two months later, she was gone, just like that. Word was she couldn’t handle the guys in her company. She couldn’t hang with the infantry. My gut told me half of this was bullshit. I knew what those infantry dudes were capable of putting her through. Her own boss was a first-class tool, an insecure grunt who still used the term “Dark Green Marines” to refer to Marines who were Black. His assumptions about her were probably just as bigoted. I was ambivalent about her fate. Part of me wanted to rally on her behalf. And part of me was tied up in my own fragile ego, which had been suckered and manipulated since my first day in the Corps. I had survived working with these grunts. She hadn’t. That made me worthy.

  Hours at the School of Infantry were long and grueling—I spent three straight weeks and many long days and nights with my staff, getting four hundred young Marines through our rigorous curriculum. We had five days off before starting the cycle all over again. I spent most of that time just catching up on sleep.

  Around this time, my company staff was given some kind of tactics exam by the battalion, and they failed it, miserably. It wasn’t all that surprising. Most of the guys on our staff had been grunts in the fleet and knew their way around the real-world infantry like they did a porn site, but a multiple-choice test was challenging a whole new set of muscles. The boss assigned me and his senior staff sergeant, Henry Lowell, with improving the company’s tactical knowledge. We came up with homework assignments for the NCOs, which felt like a personal kind of torture for both us and them. That month they were like grumpy kids, wearing pouty faces and constantly complaining.

  Staff Sergeant Lowell was an emotional, hotheaded guy. He’d lunge around the training area, ripping into NCOs and students left and right for professional infractions and all-around boneheadedness. He was a tiny hellion, about forty pounds overweight, who read a worn paperback of Anna Karenina in his free time. He treated me with appropriate distance, but was curious about my education, asking me questions about all sorts of things from politics to philosophy.

  “I can’t believe you chose to join the Marines, Ma’am. You could have done anything.”

  Assigned to reform the company and prep them for the next exam, Lowell and I spent hours after work each day over coffee and paperwork. As time passed, we became friends. When I told him about a scumbag lieutenant from Okinawa who had dumped me for another woman, he offered with full sincerity to get a group of grunts together to beat the shit out of him.

  I think if I’d had anyone at all to confide in, to share my fear and self-hatred with, a safe place to name these things that I had felt ever since the beginning, even some family member or friend back home whom I could talk to about my life in this cold, isolating place, things would have turned out differently.

  One evening after we’d worked on our assignment, we prepared to drive our separate ways, but I invited Lowell over to watch a movie at my house instead. His hand brushed mine on the couch, and I knew there was no going back.

  It was a mistake that, as the senior Marine, I was entirely responsible for. It didn’t matter that he was several years older, or that because of his infantry background and his years of experience in the Corps, he had more authority in this unit than I did. Every day I wanted to take it back. He was not only someone I shouldn’t have been with, he was also someone I didn’t want to be with. Like all my questionable partners, Lowell had personal issues that were haunting him. One day he opened up about his past. Lowell’s family had pimped him out as a child to men who would pay for sex. And some part of that nightmare was still haunting him. Lowell crooned to his sexual organ, wanting me to recite things to him—to it, in fact—that I now realized had probably been planted in his brain decades earlier by his abusers. It seemed to me that some part of his being with me was about healing from rape and erasing any stigma about his manhood from his memories.

  Whether I was part therapist or something else to him, I wasn’t sure, but here I was. And I was compromising both of our careers. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t in his chain of command, that I couldn’t actually influence his reporting marks. We were in the same company, and he still took orders from me. Things became even more insane when Lowell wanted to tell the captain, our boss, that we were together, as if this was something we should be proud of sharing. To my amazement, Captain Jacob didn’t care.

  “So what?” he said. And we all went right back to work.

  If I was taking on more than I could handle, I wasn’t conscious enough of it at the time. At a company function, I was surrounded by grunts with their impressive stacks of combat ribbons. I had worked hard and felt like I belonged for the first time in a long time. I was drinking more than my frame could hold. Filled with booze, emotion, and gratitude, I apparently planted a kiss on my captain’s lips. Thankfully, I don’t remember it, and when I found out months later, I was horrified to discover I’d done such a thing. The captain had just told Lowell to get me home safely.

  This was a dysfunctional arrangement that worked for a few weeks. The problem was, I was sick inside with fear. Petrified by my own s
elf-destructive behavior, I reached out to a family friend back home, who sat me down, sternly pleading with me to break up with Lowell to avoid ending up in military prison. I know, I said. I know. But I did nothing.

  Neither Lowell nor I were being careful. I was starting to get soft around him, and it showed. One day he drove me into work when our Marines could have easily seen us exiting the car. And on another day, after a company physical training session, I changed my clothes in the company office while Lowell was in there as well, with our junior Marines wandering back and forth outside the door. It was clear I’d lost my mind.

  The captain noticed this, or perhaps guessed it. He called us in and told us firmly it was over. I was relieved. I couldn’t handle the pressure anymore. But Lowell was furious. He felt the captain had embarrassed him. Lowell was stubborn and naive, and determined to screw the system. I had no interest in burning up alongside him. Eventually he got stationed elsewhere, but I had come awfully close to blowing it.

  Captain Jacob may have saved our hides, but I couldn’t save Lowell. It turned out this whole time Lowell wasn’t recovering from child abuse as much as reliving it. One morning, long after Lowell had transferred to another unit, I was scheduled to supervise a live-fire range. One of my favorite SNCOs was chatting with me during a break.

  “Ma’am, did you hear about Lowell?”

  I tightened up.

  “No. What happened?”

  “He went home to be a recruiter. He was busted for messing with his female recruits. His wife left him.” My insides froze, but I tried to play it cool.

  “You’re kidding.” I knew Lowell was dealing with ghosts, but I had not expected him to prey upon a bunch of doe-eyed teenagers. Disgusted, I did not want to know how old these girls were. And I had no idea he had been married. I felt like I needed to be purged. I was relieved and grateful that my boss had separated Lowell and me when he did, and with so much mercy. There was no time to be shocked or to get sentimental. I had a job to do. I tried to forget I’d ever met Lowell and pressed onward.