Unbecoming

by Anuradha Bhagwati

  “Sir . . .” I paused. God, I felt like I was stuck in some never-ending loop where senior officers were completely confounded by Marine men doing awful things to women.

  I couldn’t read my BC. Was he buying that two of the best Marines in his battalion had some personal vendetta against Thomas, a man who’d established a solid reputation for undermining women? Katz and Hamby had everything to lose by making a stink about a Bronze Star–toting officer who was chums with the school colonel.

  “Captain Bhagwati, I’ve been in situations like this before, where two Marines just look like they want to knock each other out.” Hubbard meant Thomas and me. What was he playing at? Thomas hated me because I was a woman. It was just that simple.

  I had to try something else. Something personal.

  “Sir, if your daughter was in my company, would you be okay having Lieutenant Thomas as our executive officer?”

  The mood in the room was somber, but a smile unfolded on Hubbard’s face. He was in another world.

  He said, “Yes, Captain Bhagwati. Because you’re in charge.”

  I had officially entered Crazy Town.

  “Sir, I urge you, at the very least, transfer Thomas to another company. Send him to ITB.II He can’t work with women. It’s not a good idea for anyone.”

  My plea must have sounded like a child’s whine, because for whatever reason, Hubbard was not budging. I had no cards left to play.

  “Captain Bhagwati. Thomas is staying in your company. And you’re going to fix this situation.”

  • • •

  Over the next few days, I learned that the Marine Corps had its own methods of dealing with sexual harassment allegations, particularly when the accused was an officer.

  Soon after my conversation with the battalion CO, the battalion executive officer forced me to play along in the military’s most beloved method of ensuring harassment like Thomas’s went away quickly, without any paper trail: informal resolution.

  This amounted to the major sitting me down with Thomas for a casual conversation. Thomas sat there calmly, like a well-prepped criminal defendant. God, the guy could really act. I was in no mood to play. I was horrified by the school’s attempt to squash Katz’s complaint yet again.

  “Captain Bhagwati, Lieutenant Thomas, this meeting is designed to address any misunderstandings between the two of you.”

  I was dumbfounded. Since when did this become about misunderstandings between Thomas and me? I could barely sit still.

  “Sir, I’m not participating in this. Thomas shouldn’t even be here. It’s inappropriate.” I stood up suddenly, bid the major a good day, and walked out, leaving them both stunned.

  I thought hard about what to do next. I headed for the school headquarters on base. I asked to see the school XO. He worked for the school colonel, Keller, who was surely protecting Thomas, but perhaps he was more reasonable than his counterparts.

  I was right. The man listened to me. He nodded his head. Sympathized, commiserated. It was looking good for Katz. But at the end of the day, I was just a lowly captain, and senior officers had loyalties only to one another. Within hours I was summoned to report into my battalion commander’s office.

  Hubbard’s face was bloodred. With the fury of twenty years of infantry experience behind his voice, he told me, “You will not speak to anyone outside of your chain of command about this incident. Do you understand, Captain?”

  I understood. With this gag order in effect, I went home, shaking.

  I was dragged into the battalion commander’s office again the next day, with Thomas in tow. We sat down beside each other uncomfortably, like two children awaiting punishment after pissing off their dad. Hubbard looked at us both sternly. Before he could get two sentences out, Thomas interrupted him.

  “Sir, I have proof that Captain Bhagwati is in an inappropriate relationship with a—”

  “Not another word, Lieutenant.” Hubbard’s blue eyes darkened. Thomas stayed quiet.

  “Captain Bhagwati, I want you to go over what you expect of Lieutenant Thomas going forward. Lieutenant Thomas, I don’t want to hear any nonsense about you from your company commander or anyone else. Is this understood?”

  “Yes, Sir.” It was the first time I’d seen anyone aside from me smack Thomas down. It seemed to be the only way to get him to do the right thing. That was not comforting.

  Hubbard dismissed us. Thomas followed me into an adjacent conference room as I mustered whatever poker face I could, Hubbard’s words still echoing in my head. I was terrified. Of Hubbard. Of Thomas. Of what I knew was happening. Of what I didn’t know was happening. Without any way out, I started performing.

  “Lieutenant Thomas, I need you to make sure you’re not sexually harassing anyone in the company. Saying sexually explicit things about any staff member or student. Using words that could at all be construed as being sexual in nature. Demeaning women. Speaking about women’s bodies . . .” I could barely believe the words coming out of my mouth. In what bizarre world did this need to be said?

  The guy was really playing along. Two minutes before he was threatening bloody mutiny, but now Thomas was taking notes—or possibly, drawing a picture of me with a bayonet in my chest—as though I were giving him an op order. This was not lost on him, the recipient of a combat valor award and a guy who’d spent so many years kicking down doors and shooting Brown people around the world that he looked twice my age on a good day. I don’t know for whom this administrative humiliation was intended more, him or me.

  “Got it? Any questions?”

  “No, Ma’am.” He looked at me with the corners of his eyes signaling triumph. As if nothing had happened. In that moment I realized I was dealing with an experienced sociopath.

  I went back to my company. We were in the middle of a training cycle while this drama was unfolding. First Sergeant Mackey got our Marines together in the company hut out in the training area. Thomas was not present.

  “Guys, I tried my best to get the battalion commander to understand what the lieutenant has been doing here. The BC’s not listening. He doesn’t seem to care. I’m really sorry. Sometimes you can be right and it just doesn’t matter.”

  I heard some gasps and some what the fucks. The guys, all grunts, had Katz’s back. That was good to see. That support was probably all she was going to get, but it meant something. We sat there for a few minutes. A couple of folks had questions for me, while the rest looked like someone had just kicked their teeth in. One of the NCOs rose to his feet, impatiently.

  “Come on, we have work to do.”

  He was right. We couldn’t let these morons derail training. Life went on. I gritted my teeth. Thomas went about the training area the proud victor. I said little to him, and he said little to me. The Marines just did their jobs. But any feeling of joy in the company was gone. This was no longer a safe space to work, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

  Fourteen years later, Mackey would tell me vividly that during those tenuous months, he followed Thomas around the company training areas. Shadowed him in the field. Even before the harassment scandal erupted, Mackey didn’t trust the lieutenant with any junior women and knew I had no power to stop Thomas. Mackey had seen everything during his career. The idea that the Marine Corps was so impotent in dealing with sexual predators that Thomas had to be watched like a sex offender around a schoolyard floored me.

  One day, two of my staff sergeants approached me in the company pickup truck. They looked at me expectantly through the window.

  “Ma’am, the lieutenant is at it again. He’s talking shit about women. About you, too.” I felt an all-too-familiar rage arising inside me as they told me the latest details. But I started to wonder, why the hell hadn’t they said anything to Thomas? So what, he was an officer. But he wasn’t God. When were they going to realize that they, too, had a say in right vs. wrong?

  Later that day, the battalion commander was walking through the training area. I remember it was hot outside. I
saluted Hubbard, and he returned the salute.

  “Sir, Thomas is back to his old tricks.”

  He paused. “I’ll get the XO to sit you two down again, sort this out.”

  “No, Sir.” He hadn’t meant it as a choice, but I didn’t care. “Thomas hates women. I’m not letting him get away with this again.”

  I left the BC standing alone in the dirt road, blinking. After a sleepless night, I drove across town to Camp Lejeune, the site of legal headquarters. It was my first brush with military lawyers since Horse Face had been dropped from OCS. Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps was another world inside the military.III Marines generally spoke about JAG as though it were in some ivory tower and removed from the realities of the Corps, but it was often the glue holding the institution together.

  A colonel invited me into a plush carpeted room, sat me down in a leather chair, and listened. It felt good to be able to speak without being told that women were plotting to ruin a good man’s career. A senior military lawyer, the colonel suggested I meet with Base Equal Opportunity (EO) to file a complaint. I’d received dozens of force-fed EO briefs over the years, death-by-PowerPoint Marine Corps presentations on the politically correct regulations that were feminizing and weakening the Corps, none of which actually protected vulnerable Marines from bigots in uniform. EO allegedly covered the full gamut of discriminatory treatment, from Thomas’s blow-job rumors to Marines not getting promoted because they were Black, female, gay, or Muslim.

  I decided to give EO a shot. I was tired, driving myself forward by the growing sense that if I slowed down at all I’d realize how powerless I was in the face of these senior officers and either freeze or fall apart. A staff sergeant—a white woman with short brown hair, impeccable manners, and a warm voice—sat me down in a folding chair before a wooden table, a setup that reminded me of public schools back in New York City.

  In the next few hours that the staff sergeant spent with me, it became clear that her assignment was not the soft, cushy billet for POGs that most Marines said it was. I was throwing everything at her from sheer outrage to details about who had done what to whom and where, and she dealt with it like some kind of therapist-cum-crisis-communications-expert while maintaining the calm bearing of a monk.

  “Ma’am, it’s a clear case of sexual harassment. There’s no gray area here.”

  What? If it was so clear-cut, why was I sitting here like some kind of asylum seeker, waiting for the other shoe to drop?

  She went on.

  “Ma’am, it’s not just the lieutenant’s actions. You have clear grounds for charging your battalion commander for failing to address the ongoing harassment. He was derelict in his duties.”

  I grew terribly silent. Almost numb. She left for a moment to talk to her boss. We joined him in his office a moment later. He was a full-bird colonel, the officer in charge of EO for all of Camp Lejeune. He was the only Black officer I’d met in my entire career above the rank of captain. I don’t know what happened exactly. I just crumbled.

  As tears and snot dripped down my face, the colonel invited me as gently as he could to take a break. I sat there, shaking. Somehow I mustered the words, “Sorry, Sir, I’ve never lost my bearing like this in front of a senior officer.”

  “Staff Sergeant, get the captain some Kleenex.” Those words were meant to offer compassion but they stung, as if Thomas himself had said it. They waited for me to find my breath.

  “Sir, you want me to charge my battalion commander? He has a daughter. And a wife.” They let me breathe. Softly, I said, “I’m only a captain.”

  “Captain Bhagwati, it’s your choice. I know it’s not an easy thing.” The colonel was the king of understatement. This ludicrous proposition undermined the very order of the Corps. We always took orders from senior Marines, or faced terrible, life-altering consequences. A Marine was not meant to charge her boss, particularly after being threatened by that boss, who was clearly taking orders from his boss. It was just not done. I was protecting Katz as best I could, but there wasn’t a soul protecting me. The system was broken, and we all knew it.

  I sat there in a quiet, timeless bubble that I came to know years later as a dissociative response. How I survived despite it—or that I survived because of it—might have said something about my genetic makeup, or a steely inner disposition, or luck. It sure as hell wasn’t my training. The Marine Corps prepared me for none of this reality. It hadn’t prepared any of us.

  I wished time would stop, so I could stay there in the relative safety of these two Marines, who so clearly, unequivocally affirmed that the officers at my school had staged a united cover-up to protect a junior infantry officer.

  I went back to my company. I needed counsel from someone I could count on. I sought it from Sergeant Hamby, who lacked guile and would talk to me straight, even if it was going to be uncomfortable or difficult. We sat on a bench outside the battalion office. I caught her up on my legal conversations and laid out my options.

  “Sergeant Hamby, what do you think? Do you want me to move forward with this?”

  Hamby thought quietly. She finally said, “Ma’am, you’re the only one who can do something to stop him.”

  It was settled then. The same day, I filed an official investigation into the incident with EO. It would be completely independent from my chain of command at the School of Infantry. EO would appoint an impartial investigator to step into the school, interview witnesses, and come up with recommendations as to what to do with Thomas.

  As for criminally charging my battalion commander, I was terrified enough of the repercussions of the EO investigation without the additional pressure of throwing my boss behind bars. But there was more to it than that. Even though he had done the wrong thing, I still felt a dizzying sense of something that felt like loyalty. This was not actual loyalty—like the kind I felt for Katz or Hamby or Mackey. It was a warped loyalty based on abuse of power and lies. If my parents had introduced the concept of love being entwined with force, manipulation, and authority, the Corps had drilled it into my sense of the world. Affection was wound up in power, and even though Hubbard had abused his, I was on some level still the obedient Indian girl who could not fully challenge my father. Hubbard may have ended up being the unintended beneficiary of my unresolved daddy issues.

  Upsetting the order was necessary in order to free my NCOs, and in order to free myself, but I was barely functioning at work anymore. Sleepless and anxious, I put on a game face that required emotionally shutting down. Every minute I was on that base felt like suffocation.

  I followed the advice of the JAG colonel I’d seen and got a restraining order filed against Thomas. I didn’t know what he was capable of, and the school sure didn’t have my back. I had visions of Thomas showing up on my doorstep with a loaded shotgun and blowing my head off. The battalion responded to my restraining order by getting a restraining order against me on Thomas’s behalf. When Hubbard, the man I could have charged, called me in to sign the paperwork about the distance I’d be forced to keep from Thomas, I laughed out loud in disbelief.

  I now made sure that I never entered the battalion commander’s office without a witness, and took careful notes of everything he said. I wasn’t going to risk being threatened by him again in private.

  The next month was a haze of waiting. I had come up with a list of about fifty witnesses for the investigator to interview. Thomas’s comments spanned the spectrum of gossiping about who might be a lesbian—he’d focused his attentions on one corporal in particular—to scrutinizing the dimensions of our young female students to inventing illicit relationships between female and male staff in the battalion and spreading sexual rumors about me and countless other women in uniform. Apparently this was stuff he’d been doing for a while.

  Some part of me knew that seeing justice in a system where men wanted nothing more than to shut doors to women was not likely, but I was a hopeless optimist. I had some sense that had stayed with me from the outside world, a world I
was increasingly seeing as the real world, while this was one of fantasy and nightmare.

  • • •

  As my faith in the Marine Corps plummeted and the lieutenant’s sexual harassment morphed into a full-fledged battalion scandal, I began to seek refuge in unexpected places.

  I was living in Wilmington, North Carolina, now. It was an hour-long commute from base but well worth the hassle because it reminded me that there was a vibrant world outside the Corps. I was surrounded by college students, shaggy-haired surfers, multigeneration Black families, even a gay bar that pulled in crowds of colorful queers from all around the Carolinas.

  One evening on the drive home I stepped into a yoga studio just off the highway. Yoga wasn’t new to me. I discovered it back when I was a second lieutenant, navigating Captain Hoffman’s rape jokes and my friends’ strip club tales at Communications School. On a whim, I had spent two weeks of leave at a yoga ashram in the Catskill Mountains.IV I left feeling giddy and peaceful, but when I returned to Quantico and put on my uniform again, I realized it was hard to practice being calm and centered and cultivate the art of killing at the same time. Being a Marine meant summoning the best of my rage and aggression. Peacefulness had no place in my survival. And as a woman in the Marines, survival was all that mattered.

  Yoga was about creating space for vulnerability. Now, at the School of Infantry, I felt like I had nothing left to lose. In the studio in Wilmington, I was greeted by two women, identical twins who had sturdy shoulders and wide lats from years of standing upside down. But what I remember most was their kind eyes and warm smiles.

  This was not the land of CLP. The place smelled like lavender and pine trees. The walls were soft yellow and lime green. I entered a room that faced the woods, and we stretched, breathed, rolled over, and stretched some more. After an hour or so of this, we lay down on our backs.

  A middle-aged teacher, white, female, and skinny, softly encouraged us.