One afternoon I was having coffee with two women in my class, die-hard activists for racial justice and gender equality, and unapologetically queer, and it occurred to me that this moment never would have been possible in the Marines. There were no activists in the Corps. The few friends I had repressed their racial, religious, and gender identities with the same intensity with which they trained for deployments. Sipping my coffee and listening to these women talk about June Jordan and Audre Lorde, I started tearing up. I told them, “I couldn’t talk to anyone like this in the military. Women weren’t supposed to think for themselves.”
They looked at me with a mixture of sympathy and surprise. Watching women hold their own without being slut-shamed, damned, or erased for existing in the same space as men was a sweet form of therapy. Another gift was meeting students from all over the world, confirming for me that the band of brothers I used to serve with, many of whom flinched at the sight of a brown-skinned man, a burqa, or a turban, did not have the final word on who I was or how I lived my life.
I found myself here at the academic intersection of all things violent and possible. This was an exhausting place to be, where morality was relative, and everything was open to discussion.
My law school class on the rights of those seeking asylum turned one day to a discussion of Nazi tactics. There was a twentysomething Jewish law student, straight out of college, rapping fervently about the unique nature of the individual Nazi who was blindly following orders to kill. I listened closely.
This kid was too educated for his own good. Like most of his peers, he would become a corporate lawyer, with a shot at becoming a real muckety-muck, in just a few years. Few people would ever question him. And poring over all that case law, he would rarely have the time to question himself.
Still, I knew this kid could have been me, or maybe I used to be this kid, and I responded with as much care as I could, raising my hand and explaining that even good people could be trained to think and commit horrific, unthinkable acts of violence. I saw the kid, this top-of-the-class, smart-as-fuck Harvard Law student, getting riled up. He was shaking his head vigorously, No, she’s wrong.
He could not comprehend. Law school was not cultivating this kid’s imagination. He could not even pause to consider the possibility of a world larger than the books he had read, or the stories he had grown up with. The Nazis couldn’t possibly have been born human. Real human beings would never do what they did. You either were or were not a psychopath. It was just that simple.
This reductive analysis of those who perpetrated violence had my head spinning for years. I had no reason left to believe that some people were good and some bad; with his combat awards, Thomas would be some kind of god to sheltered kids like this. And Fox had not only gone to Iraq after putting his hands all over female Marines, he’d gotten killed there. He would be remembered as a war hero, and all his sins forgotten.
• • •
Three months out of the Corps, I was in my university computer lab writing a paper on US torture policy. This was the kind of situation my childhood moral compass would have immediately rebelled against. But these days, I was all in.
My professor, Michael Ignatieff, a former journalist turned human rights scholar, had recently written a provocative article supporting the US war in Iraq. His reputation as a good guy was being called into question by the bleeding hearts of the Western world. They’d damned him as a traitor to the cause.
Moral relativism—let’s invade for the greater good—could morph into all sorts of twisted thought experiments in the ivory tower. This was the world I currently occupied. With my academic privilege, I discovered the extent of my own sadism, and my own shame.
Ignatieff had made himself quite the target for leftists and peaceniks. He believed human rights must at some point meet the cold truth of reality on the ground, and the needs and limitations of the state. He delivered lectures with enviable charisma. He had the intellect, looks, warm eyes, and poetic voice that pulled you in and convinced you he was on your side. I was used to men like this.
At the front of the lecture hall one day, he pulled up the now iconic photo of an Iraqi detainee stripped down to a loincloth, hooded and just barely standing on a small box in the Abu Ghraib detention facility.
The headline read: “Is This Torture?” There were murmurs. Blatant attempts to impress the professor. And sighs of frustration.
Some folks dismissed the exercise immediately, calling my professor a war criminal behind his back. But I lived in the no-man’s-land between right and wrong. I felt compelled to undergo the intellectual exercise of examining what I believed and formulating a new worldview, a handbook, on morality. I wasn’t going to swallow the ethical guidelines of a fairy-tale universe, where people were conveniently marked as either heroes or villains.
I’d been changed. Fundamentally altered, down to the DNA. Bristol was largely to blame, or praise, for this rewiring. Because Bristol had driven home in me my relative lack of worth as a woman in this world, I had homed in on men’s vulnerabilities with ferocity. Necks and groins were practically begging to be sliced open. I could do this well, even at my size. My inner monologue was a study in sociopathy. I had been such a quiet, domesticated child. I had never stood up for myself. Now the tables were turned.
Street harassment by creepy dudes would be enough to make me want to stab a man, tear his tongue out, and then make him swallow it, but my threshold had shifted of late, my bar had dropped, and so many innocents had become part of my selection pool, potential targets of unchecked rage. I found my inspiration in the extreme ends of a stale, oppressive gender binary: giggling white women with high-pitched voices, high heels, and makeup, and men reciting football stats, bench press feats, and S&P stock-bond nonsense. In my mind, I orchestrated ugly endings to them all. These assholes had no idea what was going on around them.
For years in front of my mirror, like a good Marine protégée, I had practiced reaching for my switchblade faster than the eyes could take it in, flicking it open, cutting the air, slicing neck and torso, again, and again. Even imagining it in my mind felt like a release, like the lust for conquest had been spent a little.
Now that I was out of the Marines, the lust was still there. People with strong opinions had started to bore the hell out of me. Folks at Harvard seemed like phantoms of a force-fed childhood, where you simply believed what you were told to believe.
As I was typing my response to my professor’s torture question, a friend tapped my shoulder, asked me what I was working on. I divulged everything: what I’d be willing to do for the right information to prevent 9/11 or to save us from the next homeland invasion. I got graphic. I’d remove fingernails, then hack off fingers, one by one. My friend, the gentle son of migrant workers, a pacifist to the point of being vegan, patiently absorbed this account while his eyes widened.
Calmly, he said, “Wow, Anu, that’s fucked up.”
I loved his candor. I loved it so much.
“Yeah, Raul. I guess it is.”
I let his words soak in. There was no pride in this moment. Just a sick realization of what and who I had become. There was safety in telling him this, a kind human being who hadn’t aggressively declared his ambition in the white man’s power game. Even through the shame, I felt relief in hearing his response. I still wanted to be punished. And punishment from him seemed appropriate, even though it was probably not what he intended.
I needed to understand what all of this meant, to commit violence for the sake of politics, which I privately sensed was just another version of ideology. My mind was drawn deeply toward the grotesque, to what was utterly, obviously real, and yet masked from the sugarcoated world of American reality.
I had never killed anyone. I didn’t know if I wanted to. But I wasn’t sure that I didn’t. And god knows I certainly could have, and would have. Bristol had shown me my bloodlust, and shown me how to use it. There were fewer lines I wouldn’t cross. There were fewer lines.
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As a Brown person, I knew it was risky to be too curious on the Internet. It wasn’t difficult to find a website where I could flesh out these questions, test my moral waters, press my own buttons, and discover what kind of lost soul I really was. It was too easy to find what I was looking for. Some poor white dude had wandered into the worst place at the worst time in some godforsaken mountain pass in Af-Pak, and now he was looking into my eyes. He was scruffy, filthy, exhausted. Wide-eyed and dazed at the same time, he knelt before a camera, surrounded by thugs.
Beheadings are primal. Beheadings in foreign languages and far-off lands predictably more so in an us vs. them world, with the guttural glottals and the Soviet-era rifles brandished against the chest. Executions seem infinite, the knife is dull, and, as it turns out, for all that gooey, warm pulsing blood pumping to and from the brain, the human neck is remarkably thick and stubborn. Still, after all of that sawing, the head just falls to the side and tumbles to the ground.
Part of me wanted to watch my first beheading again. But I couldn’t. I slammed my laptop screen down to the keyboard. There was no unseeing now. The shame of watching was all mine to bear.
• • •
It was about this time that I took a tally of the violence in my life. The anger was palpable, bursting through my skin, leaving me feeling wrecked in its wake. My body did not feel like my own. My relationship to living things began to change. My relationship to those who were vulnerable filled me with pain.
My body was repulsed by bloody things. I wanted no part in harming others. Now, in this hell, I refused to eat meat. I couldn’t bring myself to inflict pain on another being. I was trying to save some part of myself that I wasn’t sure existed anymore. I no longer knew if I was a good person.
I could not bear the weight of my relationship with my dogs, these bundles of unconditional love. All I could bring myself to do was find ways of punishing myself for not having loved them as well as they loved me when I was in the Marines. Memories from North Carolina surged to the surface, when I had punished them for disobeying me, hollered like a crazy woman, slapped their noses or sprayed water in their faces for having accidents while I was at work. The guilt of taking my fury—at the Corps, at myself—out on these creatures who wanted nothing more than my attention just about killed me. Uma and Shiva had shuddered and made themselves tiny in these moments, while I stood over them, twisted with emotions that had little to do with them and everything to do with a life I could not control. I was racked with guilt, and self-hatred was the only thing I felt I deserved.
Greg insisted that these animals loved me. That they forgave me. But I didn’t believe him. How could they forgive, and love me on top of that, when I didn’t love myself? Denying that I could or should be loved felt agonizing. In truth, it also felt sublime. I was not ready to understand what this might mean.
I wanted to exorcise this monster out of me, that thing that needed to be violent in order to be heard. But it did not seem safe for me to do this. It meant becoming invisible. In this world where women—and Brown women especially—were not seen or heard or wanted, my anger was keeping me engaged, reminding me never to disappear into the background, and never to let them silence me.
I had to keep resisting. But I was exhausted. This was no way to live.
• • •
It should come as no surprise that I tried to go back in. It was some kind of perverse irony that the thought came to me—I can be a Marine again, but better this time—as I was listening to Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm.” Love and violence were inseparable draws in my life, one never manifesting without the other.
I wept, listening to his lyrics as I was driving down the highway in Boston, realizing I didn’t feel at home anywhere, especially not within myself, where it might matter most. I had never finished what I started in the Corps, and it was driving me nuts. The place I wanted most to be accepted had not accepted me. But I played some part in this. I never went to Iraq. I never went to Afghanistan. I still wasn’t a real Marine.
My closest friends from the Corps had left active duty around the same time as I had, but then deployed to the Middle East as reservists. Jules had gone to war even when she risked being outed as a lesbian. I was too busy feeling sorry for myself to realize I wanted to experience a combat deployment. Surely I could survive. I had sucked up so much in so many years. What was one more year of suppressing joy if it meant a permanent sense of service and accomplishment?
Five years after I’d fled the School of Infantry, I called up a Marine recruiter, some emotionless staff sergeant who couldn’t have cared less about my hopes and dreams about reupping and deploying to Afghanistan. He said he’d make some calls and get back to me. I started training hard again, because if I was going to do this, I needed to be indestructible. The Marines might still hate me, but at least I’d be able to keep up.
In Brooklyn, where I now lived with Greg and the dogs, I started lifting weights again in earnest. I gave up swimming and resumed running, the activity my orthopedists and physical therapists told me never to do again because of my knee injuries. A couple of months into my new regimen, on the loop around Prospect Park, I felt a sharp twang in my left knee. I paused. I tried to get going again, but the pain was piercing. I half walked, half limped two miles back to my apartment and got the ice packs from the freezer. I knew this routine too well.
I was so pissed. A doctor told me I’d torn my meniscus. No big deal if you were an amateur ground pounder, but this was my third knee injury on two knees and I was ten years older now than when I first started out to prove everyone wrong. The Marine Corps had no patience for steady physical disintegration. Neither did I.
I was desperate for a solution. It occurred to me during weeks of moping and getting my ass to physical therapy that there was another option. Perhaps I could join a different branch of service. One that was less physically demanding. I could still deploy to the Middle East without wrecking my body before I even got there. Besides, I’d been told more often than I wanted to hear that I would have been much more valued in the Air Force or Navy, where intelligence wasn’t seen as a weakness or liability, as it was in the Marines.
The Air Force required only a 1.5-mile run. I figured that with enough preparation and painkillers, my knees could handle that. I reached out to an Air Force recruiter. He was courteous, friendly, and respectful. And so naturally, I was suspicious. We discussed intelligence billets, that elusive assignment that the Marine Corps had refused to give me so many years ago. He hooked me up with a C-5 unit at a Massachusetts airbase and guaranteed me an intelligence slot. I could even keep the rank of captain.
I visited my prospective unit and was greeted by the intelligence officer, a major who sat me down as though I was interviewing for a civilian office job. There were no threatening stare downs, no jabs at the contours of my body or my relative smallness. He wanted me, remarkably, to feel comfortable, to settle in, to be myself. We talked about the culture of the place, the work, the intelligence field, his time overseas. He was civilized. Smart. Unpretentious.
He walked me into an enormous hangar, where I gawked at a C-5, the biggest damn airplane I’d ever seen. This hulking piece of machinery was responsible for transporting every piece of warfighting equipment imaginable, including tanks and very, very big guns.
As I stood there in awe, the major decided it was time to meet the bosses. He brought me into a room where three colonels rose to greet me. I was completely disarmed. In the world I knew, the colonels should have remained seated. I should have been reporting to them, standing rigidly, ready to take orders, with enough fear and respect to make them feel the power they had over me in their blood. This was not how it was. These airmen were broad chested, enormous, clothed in cushy flight suits, and stood with a true ease and confidence that I was unfamiliar with.
“So, why does a Marine want to become one of us?” the senior colonel asked, embracing my tiny fist in his bear paw. His eyes were oozi
ng warmth.
I was instantly in love with these guys, and not in that creepy I’ll-never-be-good-enough-for-Kurtz sort of way. There was no guile, no ego, no bullshit.
“We would love to have you join us, Anuradha.” I was Sir’ing up a storm to make up for this godawful state of everything being A-okay and informal, which was making them crack up. Even when they were laughing, it was not at my expense. They were clearly familiar with Marines, and they knew I’d work my ass off, perhaps too much. They insisted I’d get used to how different things were here.
Greg had taken the day off to drive me to the base, and was nodding his head vigorously when I reported to him that these officers seemed like decent dudes.
“That’s how the Air Force is.” I was stunned that such a thing existed. Back home, I began to process. I could ship out this year, fly out to Air Force intelligence school, get this deferred dream back on track, but with people who weren’t hijacking my chances of success and peace of mind at every turn. I’d be out in Afghanistan within a year or two, serving my country, doing things the way they were supposed to be done this time around.
But something was eating away at me, and I wasn’t sure what, till it occurred to me that this whole nice-guy routine, which was utterly authentic, and probably very damn good for my psyche and morale, wasn’t Marine enough for me. I got on the phone with the Air Force major again, asking him how often I’d be outside the wire, with boots on the ground. It sounded to me like I’d spend most of my time overseas protected indoors, in air-conditioned spaces. The stories I’d heard from countless Marines about how spoiled and bougie the Air Force was came flooding back to me. In the Corps, we used to take pride in how few resources we had, and how rough things were. Looking down upon the other services, which were far better funded and equipped, was what got us through the day sometimes. They were sissies. We were warriors.
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