“Gently release.”
I tried to release, gently.
“Just surrender.”
I tried to surrender, but not so gently. In the silence, with my vitals now completely exposed to the ceiling above, something arose in me, a warped, three-headed-monsterlike panic, and I knew on some primal level that I was not safe. I needed to move. I needed to escape.
I sat up on the mat, stiff all over again.
“Can you lie back down?” It was a question, but it felt like a command.
I shook my head from left to right, no. Avoiding eye contact with the teacher, stuttering, because words to explain what was happening inside me weren’t available to me at the time, I sprinted out of the room, ran to my car, and drove off.
I didn’t yet understand these post-traumatic rumblings, but they were a small price to pay for the feeling I got of being in a place where as a woman I wasn’t looked at like I was a liability or an opportunity for conquest, where I could listen to the soothing voice of an instructor who had no personal agenda to work out on my body, or abuses to unload on my psyche. So I went back.
In the final few months of my military career, I was doing all I could to maintain my composure for my Marines. Each day amounted to keeping people alive, tolerating the knives in my back, and when my day was done, getting into my car and hightailing it off base, music blaring, tears falling.
The yoga twins knew something was amok in Jacksonville. My days were saturated with violence and uncertainty. On a typical day I made sure hundreds of teenagers properly threw live grenades over a cement barrier and ducked with the correct sense of urgency. If some kid didn’t follow safety rules or one of our instructors wasn’t paying attention, someone would be dead and my ass would be on the line.
I could handle this. I lived for this. But the sexual harassment investigation, on top of everything, was more than my body could contain. The twins gave me shelter, week after week, with an endless supply of smiles and deep forward bends. I was not flexible, but flexibility was beside the point. I learned to lie still on my back while they placed oil on my palms and feet. I smelled oranges and lemongrass.
One day back on base, I chose to teach my company yoga. I demonstrated pose after pose, which they soaked up like hungry recruits. Yoga today was the great equalizer. Hamby and Katz were having a blast. Even First Sergeant Mackey was deep in it, although probably silently cursing me for stretching the muscles in his older, battered body. I kept a close eye on Thomas, who had no choice under my command but to reach, twist, and bend, exposed before the women he had harmed.
There were eager cries of enthusiasm when I asked if they’d like to learn some inversions. Headstand. Handstand. Scorpion. These were not poses for beginners, but Marines tended to forget there was any way but all the way. So I taught them to balance upside down against the wall of the barracks. The hell with form or caution. Laughing, heads down and forearms on the grass, they flung their legs up against the bricks as if there were no such thing as gravity, and for a moment, I was at ease and happy, forgetting about both the lieutenant’s toxic presence—he had given up on these poses anyway and was standing to the side—and my contempt for the command. My Marines were having fun, and so was I.
• • •
If there was one redeeming element to my last year in the Corps, it was that I gained a close ally and a best friend beyond the Marines. Before getting command of my company, I ended up working on a special project with my old boss, Greg Jacob, the captain who had tried in vain to get justice for our students who had been sexually assaulted and who’d extracted me from the destructive relationship with Staff Sergeant Lowell. We spent several months putting together a training curriculum for tens of thousands of reservists who had just been recalled by Uncle Sam to deploy to Iraq.
Greg thought I was wasting my talent. He was one of the only Marines I’d meet who believed I had something to offer the world. Greg may have been raised in the culture of the infantry, but he was a far cry from his peers. He was well read in everything from feminist theory to world history.
A member of the Lakota Sioux tribe, Greg intimately knew the history of the US government’s exploitation of people of color. He had wrestled with the meaning of gunning down poor Black people in Liberia or earning his Purple Heart while defending a Nike shoe factory from mobs in Indonesia. After the episode with Fox, the sexual predator, Greg was convinced there were few reasons left to drink the Corps’ Kool-Aid. And when I told him what was going down with my lieutenant, he supported me instantly. Our shared experiences with the Marine Corps’ hypocrisy would form the foundation of a connection few people could touch, in or outside of the Marines.
Meanwhile, Greg’s marriage had fallen apart. He was separated, living in the barracks, and still somehow managing to get his young kids to and from school. It was a messy time to fall in love. Thomas was completely protected and coddled by his senior officers, but his threats against my personal life didn’t land on sympathetic ears, whether it was because Greg had already told our higher-ups we were together or because these senior infantrymen had seen and done it all before, who knew. After my time in Thailand it was easy to believe many Marines were privately managing secret relationships while putting on masks in public.
By North Carolina law, Greg couldn’t be officially divorced until one full year of separation. While he waited for the paperwork to come through, we moved together with my dogs into a house in downtown Wilmington, and I had some semblance of home for the first time since I joined the Marines.
When I told my mother I was moving in with Greg, she was horrified.
“What kind of a person are you, breaking up his marriage!” she cried. In her mind, I was the heartless vixen who had steered Greg away from his helpless wife and kids. Greg insisted that he and his wife had separated months before we’d gotten close, but my mother’s shaming was more powerful than anything Greg could have said to convince me otherwise.
When shit hit the fan with Thomas and the battalion, Greg was my only support. I came home each evening from long days of commanding my company, sobbing, collapsing in a huddle, holding my animals, wishing my life away. Greg told me that what I was going through—the personal isolation, the cover-ups, the threats and intimidation—was far worse than anything he had experienced in war.
• • •
When the school commander decided to promote Thomas to captain and give him command of my company before the sexual harassment investigation was even complete, I went radio silent. I kept thinking about my mother. She hadn’t raised me to put up with this shit. I remember pondering if I should bring in my junior senator, the former First Lady of the United States. A congressional investigation by Hillary Clinton’s office was the next logical step. But I was exhausted. And completely demoralized. Nothing had happened to Thomas, but I didn’t need to see Thomas punished anymore. I needed recovery.
I had applied to graduate school—a move that Hubbard questioned, asking me, “What are you going to do if you don’t get in?” as if he cared.
At my final school function, Hubbard called me forward to speak. With sickening gall, he told the room full of senior infantrymen that my leadership as a company commander had been defined by taking care of others. The grunts in the room gazed at me with cold, detached eyes. I decided to say my last few words in gratitude to First Sergeant Mackey, who’d had my and the other women’s backs despite the school trying to crush us.
All the women who were in Thomas’s crosshairs left the Corps within months, including me, Katz, Hamby, and the corporal who was in fact a lesbian. One of my staff sergeants called me weeks later, after I’d driven back home to the Northeast, a guy who’d once told me I was as good a company commander as any infantry officer he’d ever met.
“You shouldn’t have quit, Ma’am. You let them win.”
His words stayed with me for some time. Was I really a quitter?
I felt as though I had no real choice but to break
up with the Corps. My misery was starting to look a lot like trauma. Men like Franco and Thomas and Hubbard were everywhere. And I’d always be answering to or avoiding them. I’d wanted badly to serve in combat. I’d wanted to prove myself and test my limits. It was impossible to have been fed the inspiration I’d gotten for five years from the men I’d known—men like Mackey and Bristol—and not want to deploy with them overseas.
I made no time to reflect on what I’d done well in uniform. It was not possible for me to see anything but the worst of my experience, when the worst seemed to be all that surrounded me. I was drowning in self-hatred. And I was drowning in shame. Shame that I couldn’t protect my Marines. Shame that I’d made so many mistakes. That I possibly wasn’t good enough for the Marines, just like Baughman had said. And worst of all, shame that I may have proven that women didn’t belong in the Corps.
I ran away from the Marines as quickly, furiously, and thoroughly as I’d run away from my parents. But it was becoming increasingly apparent that the person in my life I most wanted to run away from was me.
* * *
I. Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.
II. Infantry Training Battalion, the unit where all enlisted infantrymen are trained. Because of the ban on women in the infantry, there were no female students or staff at ITB at the time.
III. Attorneys in JAG Corps handle legal matters for the military.
IV. The Sivananda Yoga Ranch is still alive and well. It is one of the few classical yoga institutes in the United States.
PART II
* * *
CHAPTER 9
Invitation to a Beheading
Cambridge, Massachusetts
2004
Two weeks into my master’s program at Harvard University, I got the phone call I’d been waiting for from Marine Corps Training and Education Command. A female master sergeant delivered the results of my sexual harassment investigation. She was smart and authoritative, and I exhaled for the first time in ages. She and the general in charge determined that Lieutenant Thomas was in fact guilty of sexual harassment. They’d advised the School of Infantry to remove Thomas from any leadership positions and to reflect the incident in his records.
Unfortunately, this decision lacked the fear-of-God impact of real Marine Corps ass chewings. Equal Opportunity rulings had no legal or criminal weight. The general’s words were simply a recommendation, not a verdict. And when the colonel in charge of the School of Infantry was the bad guy who swept the lieutenant’s mess under the rug in the first place, it meant nothing happened to Thomas in the end, except for a private counseling session, in which I’m pretty sure the colonel toasted the lieutenant for his good fortune, and the lieutenant thanked the colonel for saving his ass.
I thanked the master sergeant and hung up the phone. The only consolation was that I was hundreds of miles away from all that craziness, rebuilding my life from scratch.
Remarkably, when I left the Marines, I ended up in Lexington, Massachusetts, in the house that I lived in as a baby. It was empty now except for me and Shiva and Uma, who, aside from Greg, were the only two beings left over from my time in uniform.
Greg was now living in Long Island, New York, while I finished my studies. Greg had come up north with me despite a near breakup. In the middle of the investigation at Camp Lejeune, I completely shut down, and before rejecting the Corps as a whole, the first Marine I rejected was Greg. I cheated on him with a complete loser of a man, an older Marine in the school who was a serial womanizer, and like so many others, married but not revealing he was.
It was the first time I’d ever cheated on anyone. My best friend, no less. The man who’d had my back. I don’t know what I was doing. Hurting Greg may have given me one more reason to think I didn’t have a right to real happiness. He forgave me, even though I did not feel I deserved to be forgiven.
I’d brought my furniture from North Carolina up to Massachusetts. Greg helped me paint the rooms in bold colors: yellow, orange, and midnight blue. I might as well have painted them gray. Some nights I just lay in bed staring at the space between my feet and listening to the suburban darkness, this silence that was too silent to find peace in. On other nights my dreams took me back to the Marines.
I had a recurring nightmare in which Sergeant Hamby was struck by lightning and left at the bottom of a ditch. I was trying to bear the weight of a crackling, falling telephone pole so it didn’t crush her into the mud. I was holding the log over my head while trying to dig her out of the earth. It was too much, and I could not save her.
Reality was shifting beyond me. I turned on the television to make sense of my place in the world. It was a hopeless endeavor. Every network contained pictures of proud young men with big guns, sunglasses, and tan boots kicking down doors, patrolling hot urban streets filled with throngs of sun-drenched men and head-scarved women, and small brown children with large brown eyes. I wasn’t sure if I was the one holding the weapon or looking into its muzzle.
There was an unused Ka-Bar within arm’s reach by my bed. It had mostly been for show, this knife. Now it was my protection from the silence of the night. I imagined taking the blade from its sheath and carving along the thickest parts of my legs, slowly, so I could hear the sound of sinews giving in, sense the warmth and wetness of this flesh. I would remember then how it was to feel. If I cut well, I was bound to leave a good scar. The blood would stain these sheets, so I would not forget.
Except I was fucking chickenshit. I left the knife where it was, watching it. Though I rehearsed it well in my mind, I did not step into any moving trucks, or jump off any highway overpasses. I kept it all inside, partially trapped, so that it seeped out just enough to keep me mad, stuck, and miserable. It was so typical. No follow-through. No commitment. I was a bad Marine, and I was even worse at ending myself. There was no way out.
• • •
Choosing to attend a public policy program at the most elite school I could imagine was my way of making sure the Corps felt small. This was my exit route, and my new beginning. The thing that would give my life meaning. But graduate school at Harvard was no reawakening. It was certainly not a homecoming. It was just purgatory, a place to bide my time, pretend that I belonged, act like I cared. My head was disconnected from my body. I was floating from moment to moment, sad, furious, bitter, detached.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were rolling along, and everyone not wearing a uniform, everyone who would never, ever wear a uniform, wanted a piece of the action. Professors and students very proudly professed opinions on foreign policy strategy, diplomatic alternatives, military readiness, and new tactics developed by an ever-growing web of dark-skinned terrorists. My classmates, white men with career eyes on the NSA, Pentagon, and State Department, had a real boner for Al Qaeda. They talked about Islam like it was a woman whom they would never have. They talked about Osama bin Laden with too much personal enthusiasm, as if they were finally gonna get even with their childhood bully. Men flocked to national security classes, inspired. In a world where no one was safe, these folks had found their purpose.
I was fed up with this place where fantasy concocted in classrooms would very likely become reality in Washington. People talked about war like it was a video game. And they talked about troops as if they were either demigods or no one at all.
One day, out of nowhere, I got an email from Bristol. Time stopped for a bit and I could not recall where I was. He was spending a year at MIT, at a program for select senior military officers. He told me he had just been showing off about my black belt journey to some folks. I felt a rush of pride. I still worshipped this man. I would still crawl over broken glass for this man. I hated and loved this man. Bristol was my Kurtz, and no reality in the Ivy League could explain my pull toward him. We talked about having coffee but it never happened. This was just as well. I might never have found my way back. It was the last time I heard from him.
I was not free from the military’s influence just yet. A
handful of active duty and veteran students attended graduate school with me, which meant I was constantly on edge, watching my back, preparing my defenses for the next ambush. The vets didn’t understand why I wasn’t hanging out with them after hours, drinking beer, laughing about the dumb shit we all went through and sharing war stories. One ex-Marine, a friendly guy who’d just returned home from Iraq, was eager to share company with another Marine and wanted to connect with me. I desperately avoided him.
The former Navy SEALs among us were treated like immortals. One was working his way through the female population like he’d just been released from prison. Another military student, a five-foot-tall Navy ensign all of twenty-two years old, told me with a sadistic grin that he couldn’t wait to get out there and kill a bunch of terrorists. The short schmuck rekindled whatever disgust I had for morons with access to weapons.
One blond-haired, blue-eyed student, a young Robert Redford look-alike, was doing the talk-show circuit for a book he’d written about his Marine Corps recon and infantry exploits. I wanted to like him, but he talked about war and civilian casualties and his pussy-loving, “raghead”-hating troops like he was Lawrence of Arabia. The media was eating him up, and he was massaging them right back, with eloquent sentences and cultural insight they couldn’t seem to get enough of. If he had any idea of the critical role he was playing in the larger world of white conquerors triumphing over Brown savages, he didn’t let on. I pushed him to open his mind to some bigger picture that I could barely put into words back then, but he was too far gone down the path to celebrity. Like most public war heroes, he was living in his own bubble and untouchable.
I had too many strong feelings and no skills to manage them around these folks, so I avoided them. I sought company in places from my past. This felt safer. More like me, somehow.
Being in an institution in which half my classmates were now women took a few weeks of acclimation. Women were no longer expected to take a backseat to men, and my system was in shock. I began to wonder if something good inside me had shifted irreparably, if the Marines had changed my wiring about how I perceived women. Had I become a misogynist?
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