The story of how we made national change is new only in that service women had never been the focal point of national attention. It would be simpler to tell a story about how easy it was—it happened relatively quickly, and on the surface, I’m told I looked like an unfazed, smooth operator. But the dynamics that developed among those of us who carried service women’s issues to the national forefront were not only toxic but often traumatizing. Because our work was so new, I did not have the benefit of guidance from previous generations. All movement building is gut-wrenching, for sure. But our work didn’t need to be quite as difficult as it was. I’ve decided to tell these stories, despite the pushback I surely will get, because there is still so much work to be done. And we must get to the bottom of these toxic organizing dynamics for women in and out of uniform to succeed.
A few of SWAN’s founders and staff, including me, had been interviewed by Helen Benedict, a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, for a book on service women’s experiences. She was one of the first civilians to bring attention to military sexual assault. Eli, who’d lovingly steered me out of my deepest depressions, ended up on the cover of Benedict’s book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq. Within months of its publication, things got sticky.
Some amount of controversy is inevitable when a white woman from the ivory tower writes a book on the experiences of women of color and working-class white women. Extreme controversy is inevitable when that journalist is also new to military culture, and not much a fan of the military. Benedict had oodles of credibility writing on sexual assault generally. But she came not only with too much unchallenged privilege but also with heavy leftist baggage, including a resistance to militarization that she did not honestly own up to when writing Lonely Soldier. An antiwar and antimilitary perspective colored the way she presented service women’s experiences to the public. Like several civilian activists I would subsequently meet, Benedict also assumed a knowledge and a familiarity with military culture that made me question her authenticity and motivations—as if she knew the system even better than women who’d served and who’d suffered while serving.
Benedict’s ignorance led to inevitable criticism from veterans who’d given testimony for her book. She’d oversimplified their lives. Many women appeared like agentless victims of a war that shouldn’t have happened. It was a narrative that just screamed exploitation.
Eli ended up going head to head with Benedict, demanding an explanation for the way in which she and others were portrayed. I had Eli’s back and then some. Benedict did what most privileged white women do when women of color demand accountability: she got defensive and started talking paperwork. She insisted she’d gotten the veterans’ permission. She insisted they’d all signed contracts. She even insisted that she was a true ally, and that her secondary trauma from digesting veterans’ traumatic experiences was proof of this. That just about left Eli speechless. It reminded her of the generations of white people who’d come to Native lands, taking and exploiting Native traditions and narratives for profit, and leaving nothing in return. I couldn’t argue with that. Sadly, Benedict considered herself heroic. More heroic, even, than her subjects.
When the Columbia University School of Social Work made Eli’s life the subject of the students’ final project, based on Benedict’s portrayal of her, hell broke loose all over again. This moment conjured up a nasty history of white supremacy in the medical world—including experimentations on Black bodies, eugenics, and a history of white folks exploiting the resources and lives of poor and Brown people for personal gain. When the social work students, many of them students of color, found out that Eli was not only upset but retraumatized by the school’s decision to use her “story” as a case study, several of them boycotted the assignment. It was an impressive and moving show of solidarity that demonstrated that sacrificing their privilege—and possibly their Ivy League degrees—was worth it in order to defend the agency of an exploited veteran.
These harmful experiences in which veterans were mistreated by people insisting they were innocent made me very cautious about engaging in the future with civilian activists. One of the things I needed to learn most, and that I had not yet grasped, was that as veterans, we did not need to work with everyone who came to us, and that if we did, we could set the terms for our relationships. We could say no. Or we could say yes. That most of these dynamics mirror conversations on sexual consent is not lost on me. That most civilian activists who touted their gender expertise did not bother to consider this parallel is troubling.
Even though I’d seen the press corps’ horrendously insensitive treatment of traumatized veterans, I still wanted to believe it was possible to report on women in the military without harming them. I didn’t say no to Dick, not at the Veterans Day parade or in subsequent conversations. Dick made me feel like he was on our side from the beginning—and hell, when hardly anyone was on service women’s side, this felt rich. It felt validating. Like we weren’t crazy or alone.
Kirby hinted at just enough to make us excited about the project. The Sundance Film Festival. The Academy Awards. I’d seen his films. An eternal optimist with my heart on my sleeve, I opened up. I let my guard down. I offered him our resources and technical expertise. My staff trained him in Military Culture 101. Then in Military Justice 101. We suggested talking points. Gave him a list of dozens of experts and policymakers. Discussed the pros and cons of various organizations and congressional offices. We made ourselves available, week after week, month after month, guiding him toward something that would be a legitimate analysis of the military’s failures on sexual violence. I felt like we were planning the invasion of Normandy. We could all feel the excitement of working on a major project.
I ended up a key character in the film, underslept, hair frazzled, bags under my eyes, looking exhausted. In its review, the New York Times called me a “fierce victims advocate.” But by the time I saw the film, I felt furious and victimized. I also felt like a fraud. How could my testimony and activism be used to support a narrative that was not entirely legitimate? I had never felt so out of place or far from the work of helping people as I had working on that film, or with the attorney whose litigation it featured. Our careful contribution had been sucked into a whirlwind publicity storm that often seemed to have more to do with fame and little to do with healing, or even with actual military reform. Dick seemed to have made a lot of promises to a lot of people, or perhaps not enough promises to the right people. Either way, a whole lot of veterans were pissed off. And all of a sudden, some of them wanted my head.
It seems hard to fathom, but when all of this was going on, I may have been the only former Marine speaking out and organizing against misogyny in the military, and without the kind of cautious deference with which most veterans engaged the powers that be. But I was deeply uncomfortable being looked to for all answers or being expected to be all things to all people. Folks didn’t like being disappointed, especially when they’d pinned all their hopes on you. I’d heard that this type of thing happened in organizing—that becoming a lightning rod was part of the job—but I didn’t realize this was inevitable. We were starting something that had never been attempted before. As the only folks on the block, we were all things, good and bad, depending on your perspective.
Early on in our work, we’d been approached by a rabble-rousing trial attorney, Susan Burke, who had taken on the now defamed Blackwater Corporation. She seemed to thrive on taking down powerful opponents. Burke wanted to enlist my personal testimony and SWAN’s organizational support for a case she was putting together against the Pentagon on military sexual violence. Burke had been inspired by Helen Benedict’s book, which gave me pause. However, being an attorney, and having sued military contractors on behalf of burn-pit victims in Iraq and Afghanistan, she knew military law and policy. Working with her was an opportunity to hold the Pentagon legally responsible for widespread sexual violence. We jumped at the offer to partner.
Anxious but excited, I gave her a full day of testimony about my experiences with sexual violence in the Marines. It was triggering, but a relief to be able to share my experiences with a smart attorney who blamed me for nothing I’d gone through and validated the institutional misogyny I’d been forced to endure. I remember feeling lighter that day. I agreed to be an individual plaintiff in her case.
Fierce in her convictions and unforgiving in her pace, Susan was part attorney, part pit bull. During the week of the lawsuit filing, I met the plaintiffs, my fellow veterans, in Washington, DC. A group of mostly young white women—Regina Vasquez was the sole woman of color—who’d served as enlisted service members in the various branches of the military and Coast Guard, they had flown into Washington from around the country. Sitting in a white-walled conference room, they looked shell-shocked and worn out. They were clutching water bottles and coffee cups, making small talk.
I was already uncomfortable.
I wondered about my fellow vets. I saw no social workers. No counselors. No media trainers. I don’t remember seeing a spouse, a relative, or a supportive loved one, the backbone of any human being’s ability to survive a political shitstorm.
I had dealt with individual national security reporters for a while now, and I knew the kind of support that was necessary to get myself through a typical day of facing them—Doc, yoga, my dogs, and Greg were just a starting point. I also had media training, and a growing community of feminist activists who validated my contributions and recognized the chutzpah it took to show up and speak about this stuff. Even with all that support, I was still triggered and raw with the average reporter. These plaintiffs were about to face the national press corps over the most intimate details of their lives. How exactly was this going to work?
Susan had decided at the last minute that I would not be a plaintiff, and that I would support her case as a subject matter expert. Apparently, my harassment was not as bad as her other plaintiffs’ rapes. No shit, I wanted to say. But what kind of a woman would actually say this to another woman, and in this way? And how were we going to change a culture of everyday sexism in the military by thinking just like the patriarchy, by creating a narrative about a few of the worst cases, rather than recognizing that the full spectrum of wholesale sexual violence should be under the microscope, from rape to harassment? I was interested in cultural transformation: daily discrimination against service women allowed sexual assault to thrive, and also explained officers’ unwillingness to prosecute it. Talk only about so-called brutal rapes and that’s all the public would pay attention to, and all the generals would be forced to respond to on camera. The truth was so much deeper and more pervasive than that.
Susan needed someone to speak to the American public, and she knew that a civilian attorney doing all of this media would not come across as sincere. Whoever ordinary Americans were, they seemed not to trust lawyers, reporters, and politicians. I became the media’s go-to person for explaining the issues the lawsuit raised to a national audience.
The media may have considered me an expert, but behind closed doors in Washington, I was not always granted respect, and I often had to fight to be heard. I was always surrounded by a sea of white folks wondering who I was and what I was doing there. The day before the lawsuit was filed, I joined Susan on a series of high-profile congressional visits. My relative youth and race confused this group of powerful white women. Susan neglected to introduce me to the members of Congress, and they must have assumed I was Susan’s “help,” because they barely looked at me. I could not afford to take a backseat in these meetings where you could practically taste and smell the power. None of these people were veterans. And white women had no qualms about running over women of color. I wasn’t going to let it happen again.
All the while, I was learning what it took to manage real people behind the scenes, all of whom wanted justice, particularly when so many of us were reeling from hurt. Some of the civilian power brokers who surrounded us—attorneys, heads of women’s organizations, news producers, and politicians—had cast us in distinct roles. A lot of hoopla was made in public to call the women who were plaintiffs “survivors,” but behind closed doors, I witnessed how cruel people could be toward my fellow veterans. Biases about those of us who had served stung me deeply. I overheard disturbing conversations among so-called allies about the plaintiffs. They were the kinds of conversations I was used to when white folks would talk smack about Black folks and oddly assume I would take their side. What about me would make these powerful people think I had more in common with them than with my fellow veterans?
There was perverse talk among these civilians about the validity of each plaintiff’s case, which I took to mean, Could you really trust these women? The elitism was palpable. I wondered how many women and men hadn’t made the cut for this lawsuit. I wondered why a male plaintiff in the case, an infantry guy who’d been raped by fellow infantrymen, wasn’t more prominently featured in news accounts. If more men were being assaulted in the military than women, why was this band of civilians not talking about it? I wondered how many veterans had shared the intimate details of some corporal or lieutenant’s betrayal only to be told years later, It’s not good enough for the nightly news, because you were drunk. It was your fault. You’re not white enough. You’re a man. You’re not likable on television. No one will believe you. My heart broke.
And I was angry, too. Defensive of veterans. There were the jokes these activists told about the military, a kind of sick leftist arrogance about America’s continued losses in wars from Iraq back to Vietnam. If the Pentagon couldn’t get its shit together on warfighting, they said, laughing, how could anyone expect them to get sexual assault right? I cringed inside. These civilians sounded like monsters. Jesus, had they no respect for the dead? For the wounded? For all those kids?
They painted me as the organizer and reformer, and the plaintiffs as victims. Dick and Burke told me one day, You’re the only one who can do it. By that they meant, I was the only one among all of us who could be an expert. I looked at them, skeptical about their motivations. It was an artificial division that I did not agree with. The truth was, all the veterans Susan had brought together, me included, were both victims and experts. She and I had very different views on optics.
That week, Burke offered me an insight that I will never forget: the public saw you as either a victim or an expert. You could not be both. If you were a victim, the public doubted your credibility, even unconsciously. It wasn’t fair, she insisted. But that’s the way it was. In this scenario, I would be the expert, not the victim. Susan warned me that some of her plaintiffs would be upset and jealous that she was not extending airtime to all of them. It was all part of a big strategy to select the right plaintiffs for a narrative the public would relate to. Not surprisingly, Susan’s lead plaintiffs were white, female, and blond.
I took this home with me and wondered to what extent all of this crafty staging was necessary. If these were the rules of the game in Washington, I could not accept it. This is not how change was supposed to happen. I had been raised to believe that the personal was political. Feminists and women of color in particular had encouraged me not to compartmentalize my feelings. We did not need to divide our real lives from our public lives. In fact, being ourselves and sharing our heartfelt truths, including and especially how we had been hurt in the world, and how we were going to rise up in spite of it, was the whole method behind cultural and political transformation. But in Washington, I was young, Brown, and a veteran. Credentials didn’t matter—they looked down upon me.
• • •
We announced the lawsuit to the nation at the National Press Club, where photos of presidents, media pundits, and celebrity change makers plastered the walls. Susan wisely did not allow reporters to directly address the plaintiffs. It would have been carnage, a victim-blaming onslaught, which was more than any human being should be expected to handle. Meanwhile, my protective instincts were on high
alert. I felt responsible for these veterans. This place seemed foreign and cold. The bright lights, rolling cameras, and stern white faces of national security reporters, many of them men, did not inspire comfort.
Susan’s cases, first one and then another, ended up blasting a hole through the Pentagon’s zero-tolerance bullshit. The military had no idea what hit it.I
SWAN was such a huge part of the media presence following the litigation that many folks in DC thought Susan’s cases were, in fact, ours. I joined two or three of Susan’s clients in a series of national interviews that set the stage for congressional interest. My most memorable was an almost forty-five-minute live interview with the conservative pundit Piers Morgan. It was a surreal experience in which, both before the show and during several commercial breaks, from across an enormous, shiny CNN news table, he genuinely asked me to explain the facts. I carefully coached him on rape culture in the military so that he would not come across as a monster when redirecting questions to the plaintiffs. I did dozens of interviews. We were all over cable news and the major papers. Lawmakers were urgently calling our offices, wanting in. The game had changed, almost overnight.
* * *
I. Susan’s strategy was all shock and awe. Her litigation did little to actually chip away at the legal barriers service members faced in challenging the military. The main one, the Feres doctrine, upheld by the Supreme Court, essentially prohibited service members from suing the government for injuries sustained during military service. But my sense was that by focusing the media’s attention on how much these women had suffered, someone powerful would have to pay attention.
CHAPTER 13
Unbecoming Page 23