The irony that the Air Force might be too good for me, too safe and comfortable, or the notion that I might deserve to be treated better than I was in the Corps and that there was something wrong with being treated well, was not lost on me. The Marines had instilled all sorts of dysfunction in me, so that when a healthy alternative presented itself, I had trouble embracing it. Somehow the Corps had still managed to convince me that even if I would never be good enough for the Marines, nothing else would ever be good enough for me. Not these Air Force flyboys, that’s for sure, with their laid-back banter and winning smiles.
It didn’t matter if this was illogical, or even objectively disturbing. On the inside, I was still a Marine. I declined the Air Force offer. It was Marines, or nothing.
CHAPTER 10
Unraveling
In 2007, three years out of the Marines, I was in the mental health wing at the Manhattan VA Medical Center, crying in an empty room on the second floor. I was on the phone with Eli Painted Crow, a retired soldier in California whom I met through a network of veterans opposed to the US war in Iraq. She and I bonded instantly, cussing up a storm and howling over everything from our mutual suspicion of institutions to the mistreatment of everyone without enough rank or testicles to matter.
As a cried into my cell phone, Eli played the part of Battle Buddy. She was the only reason I was here today in the first place, in this Mordor-like building with stark white walls and hundreds of dudes who look like battered remnants of human beings.
I would come to know Eli as the woman who saved my life. She survived Iraq, barely. I survived, well, I still didn’t know what. But she knew pain, whether it was the pain of her own tribal peoples or the pain of women who had been stomped on or cast aside. Though we came from different worlds, she didn’t deny my suffering.
Twenty years of soldiering (three of them on the drill field) and rabble-rousing for powerless troops made me trust her. Three thousand miles away, she calmed me down with words about how I needed this and how it would be good for me—anything to keep me from leaving the hospital.
I returned to the waiting area, where spirits were festering. Every being was in conversation with someone here or beyond. Some men lurked before office doors, demanding an audience. Others barked at the television set, cursing idiot anchors, Al Qaeda, or the Mets. Some sat alone, reciting lengthy monologues that were interrupted only by grunts of disapproval from some invisible arbitrator.
In these situations I was relieved to be unnoticed. But I made myself smaller still. A door swung open down the hall.
“Ann-uhr . . . Ann-you . . . uh . . .”
I did not need this attention. I stood quickly. Men’s voices, both real and imagined, paused. Eyes were watching all parts and angles of me, waiting for my next move. I armored, instantly, as I had learned so well to do in the Corps, and followed a woman’s quick footsteps down a hall and into a small room. No words were exchanged. No introductions made. I barely knew I was there.
I sat down with a chubby fiftysomething administrative aide. She stared into a computer screen, mindlessly dishing out a government mandated survey for new veterans, a verbal back and forth about why I was here and what may have screwed with my seamless reintegration back into society. The exchange was about as warm and comforting as a military pap smear. The pace, the coldness, and the automaton-like manner of this woman were starting to mess with the fragile sense Eli had built up in me that everything was going to be all right.
I felt an impending explosion of What the fuck, lady? rising when her flat-line voice unevenly switched gears into the section of the survey clearly meant to draw out the female issues in the veteran population.
“Have you ever experienced unwanted sexual contact?”
“Um. Yes. I think so. I dunno.”
She was throwing these questions at me like baseballs in a batting cage, with barely enough time for me to handle one before the next one was launched. Her words felt rough and dry, like sawdust.
Those tears I thought I’d fully spent on Eli started coming back, harder than before, as I fumbled through my responses. Without looking at me, she read one question after another on her desktop, checking the boxes yes and no until my crying turned into sobbing, the kind where yes-and-no responses were no longer decipherable.
Suddenly, she stopped and turned her eyes toward me. She said, “Oh. Oh dear.” She was looking around in a panic, finally found a box of tissues, and shoved one into my hands.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, and left me there, convulsing. She returned a few minutes later and told me a doctor would be able to see me.
The attending shrink that evening was sitting behind a very large metal desk. It was past dark now and I was the only thing between him and home. I felt raw and childlike, like a small girl. I had wiped my face dry for him with my shirtsleeve, but sensing how little he wanted to be here, I started up with the waterworks again. The tears were on their own fucking program. I think this frustrated him, because he rolled his eyes like an artillery round, up and over to the other side of his head. That was enough to snap me out of my grief.
I lost it, started yelling about him, about the admin lady with the emotional intelligence of a paper clip, about me, about the state of this fucking universe and the monsters and morons I had to contend with. It was an epic, diabolical rant about my pain, much of which I imagine got lost between the heaving, the waterfall of snot, and the general shock and awe of my delivery.
Eventually my tantrum settled. He had stopped with the eye rolling. I had his attention. He offered me a spot in an in-patient psychiatric unit. This sounded extreme. And comforting.
“What would you like to do, Ms. Bhagwati?”
I got quiet. And then remembered, I had to feed and walk my dogs. Greg and I had had a fight earlier, because I wanted him to come to the hospital with me, but he needed to be out of town for work. Shiva and Uma were home alone. No shrink was going to make me leave these animals. They now seemed like all I had. I agreed instead to get a full psych eval from one of his colleagues.
At the VA a few days later, my initial consultation with a psychiatrist lasted just three minutes. Apparently that was all it took to digest the full story of my life and all the possible ways I might be hurting. After hearing my one-woman lamentation, a rapid-fire summary of the causes and symptoms of my heartache, a desperately condensed overview of my broken relationship with the Marine Corps, the doctor slowly widened her eyes, as if I posed some kind of threat to her safety, and determined I needed drugs. Little white pills, with a doozy of a pharmaceutical name no one could spell and I could barely pronounce.
This doctor didn’t tell me a thing about the pills she’d given me as casually as the time of day, until it occurred to me to ask, “What is this supposed to treat?”
I sensed her hesitate, not because she was hiding anything, but because she had never been asked. She said, without a hint of emotion, “Primarily, bipolar disorder . . .”
Bi-fucking-polar disorder.
I didn’t fully digest the litany of other things she said it also treated, like seizures. The sad thing was, I didn’t care enough anymore to say that I was perfectly sane, and not in the least bit manic, but still hurting in one hundred ways. Pointing out the obvious to endless numbers of VA employees had become a full-time job from which there was no return. And retelling what I thought they should already know and understand was like a knife to my gut, after which the wound never healed and I was left in a puddle of sadness so deep and consuming that there was no way out but down.
I was just so tired. I would rather have these government pills numb me into oblivion, for all the wrong reasons, than give one more ounce of myself to fighting these people with their glazed-over eyes and what-on-earth-could-you-possibly-need-from-me attitudes.
Defeated, I walked down the staircase to the basement, where prescriptions were dished out. The truly hopeless among us—those of us in deep neurochemical shit—were lined up like
sheep being iron prodded and funneled toward the slaughter chute, knowing on some level, This is really it, this is the end of the road. Men at this stage were too far gone to even gawk at or harass me—normally that certainty would have provided me the comfort of knowing my place and how little I mattered.
Eventually, a staff member crouched in a closet of an office who spoke barely working English processed my prescription and sent me back upstairs to a corner of the lobby, a sprawling wasteland of bodies moving in too many directions. Here in the waiting area, a herd of beaten-down old men in tribal ribboned baseball hats lingered and leaned into walls, staring hopelessly into television monitors or fuming into space, occasionally grunting in the direction of the pharmacists, who were protected behind thick glass windows and reinforced brick walls, about the length they must wait, and then inevitably, because no one ever responded, because whomever had the answers behind walls was behind walls for a reason, they settled back into the thick haze of waiting.
My survival here took on new meaning. It meant avoiding eye contact with veterans who still saw chunks of rotting flesh on winding desert roads or the thumping of helicopter blades on the way into or out of the jungle. It meant steering clear of men whose bodies were still on the move, midstride and midmission.
Their memories lay beneath the hum of fluorescent lightbulbs, sometimes lost to consciousness, provoked and shaken loose by the strange sight of me, long haired, brown skinned, tiny, dodging triggers in the hallway. To them, I was a veiled, babbling hajji mother at a checkpoint; a call girl at a Saigon bar; the ex-girlfriend who slept with his neighbor; the cunt wife who disappeared with the kids; the whore of a sergeant who shouldn’t have gotten promoted; the recruit he forced underneath him in the barracks and hadn’t recalled until just now. I was none and all of these things. And I was a fresh, convenient target.
This would ordinarily have been enough to make me wild with fear. But today I was only timid. Withdrawn. Sinking into my cold metal chair, huddled over my chest, crossing and locking my legs shut, wondering how it would be possible to disappear more completely from being.
• • •
Back home, I took my first pill.
The rash started too small to notice. By the afternoon it had grown, spreading across my back and legs. It reminded me of the chiggers that burrowed beneath my camouflage uniform in North Carolina swampland where, sweaty and exhausted, I was force-fed permanent lessons in loyalty about how fragile and female I really was—fragile because I was female or female because I was fragile, I didn’t know—that would nest beneath my skin, bide their time, and hatch when I least expected, and no manner of scratching my skin till blood gushed over dark green socks and combat boots would stop the itching, would stop the feeling that they’d entered without permission, made a home inside my body, and claimed victory.
There was no time to get sentimental, because soon enough, the itch was in my throat, tickling at first, then going for the voice I barely knew I had. I felt some instinct rise within me that something permanent was about to happen: the end of breathing, the end of it all.
Bucking all carefully honed tools of survival—self-preservation, even common sense—to steer clear of the building I had come to know as my very own personal hell, I walked with Greg at my side into the VA emergency room.
I approached a nurse, casually. The business of my throat clamping up triggered a red flag. Even through my fog, I was impressed. I didn’t know red flags existed at the VA, where I was resigned, where they were resigned, where people gave up and gave in, where people who once cleared rooms and took hills now let fate determine whether or not they would ever be someone again.
I passed out at some point on an ER bed with tubes connected to my arms. The rest was a utopian blur, where I no longer had to give a damn about myself or anyone else. I was so drugged up I wouldn’t have felt hurricane waters from lower Manhattan rising over the sheets and drowning me. That I had chosen to let these people take me down and put me under, when in my right mind I never would have fallen asleep in this place without armed Amazon women standing guard at the foot of my bed, must have meant I really didn’t give a shit anymore.
There were hours upon hours of insecure sleep, glimpses of white coats, and the sound of feet coming and going. I prayed for some end to this, for some new reality, whether here or in the afterlife. But I got pulled back in.
I was always getting pulled back in. No amount of pharmaceutically induced oblivion could stop me from giving a shit about some poor son of a bitch to whom I would always be faithful. Even conscious, my best efforts to steer clear of these moments were useless.
I couldn’t see the new patient when he arrived. But he was more real to me than I was to myself. We were separated by a thin white curtain and my heavy, aching head and the fact that I could not make my mouth move no matter how hard I tried. There were anonymous bodies standing everywhere. I saw their shoes underneath the curtain, disordered, out of formation. I was the only one who heard him.
He was a Marine. This I knew from the tenor of his voice, the edge to his rough, throaty pleas, and the way they rejected him, made him feel invisible and crazy. He was hurt. And no one was listening. I knew this.
“You need to calm down.”
“I am calm. Fuck you. Get your fucking hands off me.”
And the more he tried to tell them, the more their voices became detached from the rest of them. This is how experts talked when they weren’t experts at all. He got frustrated, of course. He became all sorts of pissed off and desperate, getting louder and more physical, because when no one sees or hears you, you want to jump out of your own body.
They got scared, as experts do.
“Call security.” They said it without emotion, like his pain hadn’t even scratched the surface of their hearts.
Boots came running. Black boots. Heavy bodies. Weapons. He was muffled, muzzled, prodded, and shut down, like a rabid dog.
My body was not my own, so I could not get up. I could not tear down the curtain. Or kick them in the fucking shins and pound them in the throat with my knuckles to stop them and say what I wanted to say: I’ve got you, bro. I’ve got you. You’re not alone. You’re not alone.
They released me the next day. I spent most of that month in bed, my head pounding with the ache of steroids.
I eventually checked in with my shrink at the VA. I told her she nearly killed me. She was aghast. She couldn’t believe that the one life-threatening side effect no one ever got from this medication was the thing that happened to me.
I didn’t see her again. It was the last time I would take anyone’s little white pills.
• • •
Despite this experience with the VA, I still needed to talk to someone. The eye-rolling shrink had made an appointment for me to see a Military Sexual Trauma counselor. She was one of hundreds of clinicians across the nation assigned to treat women and men who had experienced sexual harassment or assault while serving.
I was curious that the phrase “military sexual trauma” existed and deserved a government-endowed acronym no less. The term was created in the aftermath of the 1991 Annual Tailhook Symposium for TOPGUN aviators in Las Vegas, where over one hundred Navy and Marine Corps officers sexually assaulted eighty-three women and seven men. Someone in Washington knew incidents like Tailhook weren’t just flukes, and the Military Sexual Trauma program was born.
My appointments with my MST counselor began at the Harlem Vet Center, a small, welcoming place that had the feel of a community center more than a treatment facility. As I learned early on, vet centers were created because Vietnam veterans had demanded an alternative to VA medical centers, where far too many veterans had received horrible care. Vet centers were generally considered places of refuge, where your counseling records were kept confidential, independent of big VA and its creepy attorneys, paper pushers, and public affairs hawks.
I seemed to be the only woman who walked through the doors of the Harlem V
et Center, but aside from wondering if I was in the right place, there was a palpable sense of decency here. I felt safer and more welcome with people of color, though I was only beginning to realize this. Counselors and receptionists spoke in unusually warm and civil terms as I entered and took a seat on a soft leather couch—Good morning, Are you waiting for someone, How are you, miss—and I felt some of my now pathological urge to resist lose its edge.
I spent months coming to the vet center for counseling, week after week, sometimes two or three times a week, just to ensure that the hours in my day didn’t swallow me alive. In my first few visits, I was a one-woman ragemobile, and there was really nothing stopping me from exploding all over the world around me except Doc, who was patiently listening, taking it all in, one lightning strike at a time.
Doc was a typical Freudian head shrink, wanting to start back at the beginning, making me feel like my head was constantly turned backward. I had done my damnedest to run away from my parents’ constant scrutiny, and here I was, stuck with Doc, digging up my childhood like nothing else in the world mattered. Why couldn’t she focus on the here and now?
I exhausted myself trying to explain the ins and outs of the Marines to Doc. She’d been doing sexual trauma work for almost two decades, but she hadn’t seen a lot of Marines. And there were so few women in the Corps that we barely left a mark on the consciousness of veterans providers. Doc was part Jewish mother and part naive audience. She had boundless patience for my outrage, but a horrible poker face. Sometimes I would tell her things about the Corps and her eyes would grow huge, her head shaking uncontrollably left to right in disbelief.
“You called one another killers?”
“Uh, yeah.” Didn’t everyone who worked with veterans know this stuff? The rape jokes, the porn aplenty, the sweeping assault and harassment cover-ups, and the fact that I still wanted back in the Corps despite all of it challenged her sense of logic to the core.
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