“You don’t fear getting wounded? Dying?”
“Uh, no.” Why would I fear losing my life? Doc’s inability to relate to Marine basics made me feel more invisible. Still, I came back, again and again. It was better to come here and rage than to go nowhere at all.
Doc and I talked at some point about filing another claim for disability compensation. I had already gone through the claims process when I left the Corps. I’d applied for multiple muscular-skeletal injuries and had a gigantic medical file to support it, but despite my joints crackling daily like a Rice Krispies symphony, I was rejected on most counts. The VA was now giving me a tiny disability check each month—the smallest amount legally possible—for my right knee, a bureaucratic diagnosis that irritated me to no end because there was so much of me that hurt beyond one damaged joint. But like a good Marine, I wasn’t going to complain about it—I was grateful that I didn’t get my leg blown off fighting bad guys in the desert.
My friend Eli laughed off all that proud veteran talk as pure bullshit that the military drilled into us as recruits, gobbledygook that presented only the most extreme physical wounds on the battlefield as worthy of anyone’s attention. The VA, according to her, was banking on our solid, guilt-ridden military training so fewer of us would ever have the gall to apply for disability compensation. She explained that I deserved support for all my injuries. My knees, my back, my shoulder. My aching heart.
“They owe you,” she said. What did I have to lose? I went for it.
The nation’s second largest federal bureaucracy (behind the Department of Defense), the Department of Veterans Affairs was not just a paper-pushing monstrosity with poor management and long lines. Wounded and injured veterans were subject to VA’s obsolete rules, policies designed specifically to protect VA’s coffers. In practice, it amounted to cruelty.
After months of dissecting my history and mind, Doc concluded I was suffering from depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress from facing year after year of sexual harassment in uniform. It was a story line that was blatantly obvious to any thinking, feeling person but me, as I figured I was the one to blame for how I felt. Having Doc put my pain into words was my first validation out of the Corps. Doc’s words, for better or worse, gave me hope.
As I dove into the claims process, I felt as much investigative journalist as patient. Following VA instructions, I started collecting all the evidence to support my claim of harassment within the military. This included the extremely difficult task of tracking down folks who witnessed or participated in my sexual harassment investigation. Some Marines I couldn’t find. They had retired, moved, or disappeared from the grid. There was no special victims support team to hold my hand while I tracked down colleagues, dredged up hostile memories, and fended off my body’s emotional reactions.
After weeks of searching for the Marines who supervised my investigation in North Carolina and at Marine headquarters in Virginia, I finally found the staff sergeant who was the main point of contact on my investigation. She still remembered my case, as if it were yesterday. But she had bad news. By Marine Corps policy, my investigation had been destroyed.
I was dumbfounded. It meant there would be no official record of Lieutenant Thomas sexually harassing the women in my unit, or the Marine Corps officially recommending his censure. He was a free bird. I took the time to verify that the file had, indeed, vanished. I tracked down a senior civilian in the Department of the Navy Inspector General’s office, who confirmed that the Navy and Marine Corps destroyed all equal opportunity paperwork after two years.
“Why would they do this?” I asked the guy urgently. He was wishy-washy on the phone, didn’t give me a straight answer. But I wouldn’t let him go.
“Is it because they’re protecting the perpetrators?”
He paused.
“Yes. Most likely.” Although he was on the Department of Defense payroll, even this guy couldn’t summon the shame to lie to me.I
I went back to the staff sergeant. She wrote a two-page summary of the investigation from memory. She recalled the sordid cover-up details almost as well as I did.
My claim went through the system, with more than enough of the evidence the VA had said I needed to connect my military service to my current medical symptoms. Along with the EO account, it included a lengthy personal testimonial that I’d labored over for weeks; statements from personal friends and colleagues who witnessed the incident and changes in my behavior and mood over time, like Greg and Eli; my own private journals from the Corps; my official DOD medical records; and an official letter on VA letterhead from Doc.
While I waited for a response from VA, life went on.
• • •
I was sitting in a small room on the mental health floor of the Manhattan VA hospital, with nine other women veterans of all ages and races.
“Did you ever think that maybe the Marines don’t want you back?” Sharon, a social worker who led our weekly women’s group, answered as much as asked the question. A former Army drill sergeant, she had more tools to work with than most VA employees. The women were silent, listening, waiting for me to respond.
I had become a full-time veteran. I was in too much pain to do much else. I dragged myself to VA regularly now to attend to an assortment of health issues, emotional and physical. It required subjecting myself to the daily indignities of entering the hospital. Despite security measures in the lobby, nothing suggested safety.
This VA entrance was the most pathetic place I knew, where sadness festered and hovered in the air. The metal detector beeped as each of us walked through, and the routine was always the same. Every poor soul had a limp, and when he didn’t have the space to limp forward, he was whining or muttering at the fool in front of him, who for the umpteenth time had forgotten to empty his pockets of keys, change, and cell phone.
The security guards beyond the metal detector had hollow, dull eyes. Some were chomping on burgers while veterans made the long, slow march through the line, crumbs nestled like white lice on their dark blue uniforms.
One morning as I walked through the machine it beeped. Combining flirtation with that particular disrespect reserved for women, the security guard said to me, “You carrying a weapon?”
I said nothing. The only woman within a mile of his comment, I spread my arms like Jesus so he could run a security paddle alongside my flanks and beneath my armpits, no doubt an instrument that worked as well as the metal detector itself. My face was blank, but my fighting instincts were on high alert.
The machine beeped. It beeped again. He smirked from a place where there was no shortage of smirks, figuring I couldn’t possibly be carrying something shiny or explosive, and waved me through. I was just on this side of unhinged and would have relished the opportunity to show him what I could do with a weapon. A pocketknife. A handgun. Or even my bare hands.
Sharon wasn’t trying to hurt my feelings, even though all I felt was a slap in the face. She was probably right. Why the hell would the Corps want me? Right now all I wanted to do was make the Marines love me, change my history, and make the pain go away. But pain had its own timeline, which made control freaks like me feel absolutely helpless.
The problem with Sharon’s theory was that even if the Corps no longer wanted me, there was no escaping the Corps. My Oorah tattoo was seared into my left shoulder like a branding: USMC: U Signed a Motherfucking Contract. Once a Marine, always a Marine. It felt like a curse. Semper fidelis. Why must I still, after all this, be faithful? And yet even now I was dreaming about the Corps, in three dimensions, with my senses on fire.
The ivory tower and an advanced degree didn’t save me, just like it didn’t save my mother. Concealing my wounds in busyness and plans for the future hadn’t gotten me anywhere. The future had no patience for unresolved trauma. And back in New York City, there were no new beginnings. My memories and nightmares revived themselves, as though the second phase of torment had just begun.
Sometimes, it was too
much to take, like the afternoon I’d had shitty back-to-back encounters with VA’s chair warmers, rough-throated women who would not give me an appointment for weeks even though my body was falling apart. The jock orthopedic resident who admitted to me he’d rather be working on hard-core dudes with serious injuries than patients with whatever I had. Being told, We need you to fill out this form, one too many times. All of these words penetrating my tough exterior like piercing armor bullets, sending me over the brink, out the double doors and into the hallway, sinking against the wall and letting gravity and heavy sobs take me down to the hospital floor.
As I sat, folks walked by my huddled mass and said little. It was best that way. I was safer collapsed in my own mute world. An employee finally approached and asked me if I was okay. I shooed her off, hand waving, muttering something like yes.
There was no love here. There was only contempt. I might as well be on the same level as rats and roaches. Depression will do this. I was in that primordial place before speech, before reason.
If you asked me how I was, I would have looked past you from somewhere beyond language. Words hurt. Words would never be enough. Words only failed me here, where I never said the right thing, in the right way, at the right time.
My body caused me nothing but pain and suffering, embarrassment and shame. Walking hurt. My knees buckled and popped. My shoulder crackled. My neck was hollering. It was better to lie down and remain still. Let the feet go by.
In this safe fugue state, the tape loop that had begun long before the Corps started up again. This body of mine, with female parts that announced themselves before I could present myself, cursed and betrayed me in the end, made men question my worth, made them resent me, made them cast me out.
I didn’t know who I was without their acceptance. Without Dad’s acceptance. But I didn’t need them to make me feel small. I felt small all on my own.
Depression was like this, too. Self-hatred working itself thought by thought and cell by cell through my body, shutting down any impulses to move forward or move at all, impulses to feel good or make others feel good. Joy had no home inside me.
My body was numb. Shut off and locked up. It was safe that way. I couldn’t remember the last time I had sex, or even thought about it. I fiercely avoided the topic for months. Doc was concerned that until I talked about sexual intimacy, I wouldn’t be able to move through any of my pain. Didn’t she understand that was the point?
I was detached from my body the way sociopaths were detached from their feelings. I hovered above it. Beyond it.
Occupying a broken skeleton was humbling and humiliating. I couldn’t move well, or fast. I tiptoed on sidewalks and limped up and down subway stairs. And when I ate now, food was no longer fuel for physical feats. Food sat inside me, sticking to my sides, storing up for nothing in particular except more reason for me to pick on myself.
For the first time in my life, I was aware that I had hips. Womanly, baby-birthing hips. And breasts that had ballooned without warning. Rolling layers of blubber in my belly that had appeared for the first time since adolescence, since Dad had called me fat and refused to look at me. My body was out of control. Nasty. Hanging out there for all the world to ogle or demean. I could no longer hide. The Marine Corps would be laughing at my state of disgrace. Unable to hang with the men, my worth had plummeted.
I handled immobility without grace. Disconnected from the vehicle that moved me through my life—first one knee, then the other, then a shoulder, then the rest—unable to run from or pound through the anxiety and disappointment that life was throwing my way, I was forced to sit still, with my mind and all the hell of my thoughts, within my crumbling body.
My mind was a beast. My father’s words from childhood had come full circle. You’re ugly. It’s disgusting. It was the kind of brutality that would make me throw a grown man to the floor before he dared say that to a child. But hatred turned on myself felt right. I will never be good enough. I believed and deserved every word of it. And damn you if you tried to convince me otherwise.
Time slowed. With dark sacks under my eyes, salty cheeks, and a shallow breath, I scraped myself off the hospital floor and headed back through the city to my apartment.
• • •
Home was where my dogs were. Greg, the committed partner and patient cheerleader, stayed by my side through this dark decade, watching me self-destruct, and try, and self-destruct again, one month after the next, witnessing my dangerous dance with the Marine Corps, my attempts to change them, to heal myself and move on.
I feel like I can’t make you happy, he said.
It’s not your job to make me happy.
He didn’t know what to do. Nothing he said helped. He didn’t know why therapy hadn’t fixed me. Supporting every effort I’d made in the early years to try to go back into uniform, he now sensed a shift in me. Maybe a shift toward real darkness, or worse, stagnation. He shifted as well, not in the direction I expected.
These days I dreamed about being shipped off to Afghanistan. I was in the tightest quarters. An inch between my face and the rack above me. There was hardly any air and I didn’t know where I was going or who I was with. I woke up sweating and terrified but feeling a strong pull to find out more.
I want back in, I said.
He usually talked about next steps. Encouraged me to follow my dreams.
If you put on that uniform again, I’m leaving. I’m serious. I’m done.
We barely touched each other anymore. He had been keeping track of time like a record keeper. Days had turned into months, and then into years. My sloppy attempts at sexual connection only happened when my guilt about his sadness made me try to touch him, try to get past my horror of feeling vulnerable while witnessing his sexual needs, but it never worked. I couldn’t contain my disgust, my lack of trust. It was him, it was the Marines, it was me, it was everyone.
I didn’t know if I would ever have sex again. Celibacy gave me some sense of control in a world where I had no control over how people treated me and how I felt.
His memory of the history of our sex lives was a cruel reminder of our changing circumstances. Apparently, I used to love sex. I had only vague memories of this. Flashes in my mind of wanting. This was before the ugly end of my career. He remembered every moment. Every embrace. I just remembered shame, and hiding, and fearing everyone around me.
Are you gay?
No.
Then why won’t you touch me?
I just can’t.
Greg finally gave up. One day I borrowed his laptop and discovered he’d been surfing the Web for porn. I became hysterical. Self-righteous. Furious. He became furious, too, yelled at me that it was none of my damn business. Doc told me it was none of my business, too. I didn’t get why she was taking his side.
We didn’t talk about why he needed pornography. Or alcohol.
Greg was a large, unwieldy man with big hands and a barrel chest. He needed a lot of booze to feel booze working at all, which meant that when everyone else had called it a night, he was still warming up. I didn’t know any dry Marines. Half were alcoholics; the rest appeared to be in training.
Sometimes he drank so much that his words became weapons and he’d begin raging about nothing in particular. He got louder and louder, till I got so scared I’d hide in the bedroom with the dogs. I held their warm furry bodies and cried. They loved him, their big burly dad, and they were scared, too, because I was scared and he was out of control.
On this particular night, while I was hiding in my room, he was yelling about the Corps and me, the young children he’d lost to his ex-wife, and memories that he still hadn’t faced about pulling triggers in faraway places like Liberia. He released it all that night, vomiting all over our apartment, yelling throughout, till there were no more words left to say, and no more alcohol left to throw up. I rocked myself to bed with my girls.
I considered leaving him after this. We had an awful conversation, about not having anything in co
mmon. Which was absurd. We had too much in common. We had the Marines in common, and that was more than enough, and also part of the problem. Some part of me detested him for having been one of them, even if he was the only human being to protect me from being swallowed up by their devices. As I withdrew further into my own body, he became more and more like all the others. No amount of distance would separate him in my mind from the Corps. His hands were like their hands, enormous and groping. His words were loud, intrusive, and present without invitation. Alcohol magnified this, making him grotesque and me invisible. His physical presence loomed, and nothing in me could fathom how I ever felt safe enough to be vulnerable with him, naked, and open to love.
It was Greg’s third all-out drunken episode in three years. It made me wonder if I was crazy to love him. Doc kept on telling me he needed counseling, as if it were as simple as that. I looked at her furiously. Why did she think this was something within my power to control? The last time I broached this with him he turned on me like wildfire. It was not my job to convince him he needed help. Eli, who’d been sober for years now, told me alcoholics came in many forms. You did not need to drink every night to destabilize the ones you loved.
I stuffed my doubts deep down in my bones so I would never talk to him about it, and he would never yell at me again. Somehow, this détente worked. We managed. We coexisted. I didn’t have any real idea of how to begin to leave him. I wasn’t missing courage as much as the notion that something different was possible.
And then there was this ugly suspicion that felt about as real as anything ever would: that part of the reason I couldn’t leave Greg was because he was my best and last real connection to the Marines. That I needed his approval, because without it, I wouldn’t know that I’d done anything right. Without his approval, I’d never have theirs, either.
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