Unbecoming

by Anuradha Bhagwati

  Shock and Awe

  These initial encounters with civilian activists informed how we organized our first major national conference. “Truth and Justice: The Summit on Military Sexual Violence” made waves in Washington. We’d moved mountains to make it happen, raising about two hundred thousand dollars to host a hundred military sexual assault survivors on full scholarship to the nation’s capital—housing, travel, the works. My staff worked tirelessly. Meanwhile, we’d made such a ruckus over sexual violence in the news that politicians were clamoring to meet with our veterans.

  Our guest of honor and keynote speaker was Mary Lauterbach, a Marine mother from Ohio. Mary’s daughter, twenty-year-old Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach, was killed in 2007 while serving in the Marines. Maria’s murder was widely considered a revenge killing by Cesar Laurean, the man she’d accused of raping her. She was seven months pregnant when he killed her (Laurean was not the father), buried her in his backyard, and fled to Mexico. In 2010, he was found guilty of first-degree murder.

  Mary was everyone’s mother this week. Wherever she went, hugs followed.

  SWAN was presenting the Lauterbach Award for Truth and Justice to Senators John Kerry and Susan Collins, and Representatives Nikki Tsongas and Mike Turner.I Tsongas and Turner were the best example of bipartisanship I’d seen so far on this issue. They founded the Military Sexual Assault Caucus, and with our regular input, legislated literally dozens of military reforms, all designed to improve a survivor’s chances of accessing justice in a grossly unjust system. One of these was the ability of a victim to swiftly transfer units in which her or his perpetrator also served. If Maria’s request to transfer out of her unit had been approved, she might have escaped Laurean.

  Kerry towered over us with silver hair, lanky limbs, warm eyes, and a long face. When I walked him through the room, my skull a foot below his chin, it felt as though the seas had parted. Veterans rose to greet him and I was in no rush to get him to the stage. This was no ordinary official, and we all knew it.

  Kerry stopped by a table where some of our older survivors, several of them male, stood up to greet him. Like Kerry, they were Vietnam veterans. Some of them had been trapped beneath the weight of invisible wounds for forty years. This was possibly the first time their pain was being publicly recognized, by a man of Kerry’s stature no less. I think Kerry knew this. How could he not? This formidable man was bearing witness now to the tremendous suffering of his community. Many of us were in tears.

  I was balancing about a hundred things on very little sleep that day, including media appearances and congressional visits, while my staff was balancing several hundred more details supporting the veterans who were attending. We had brought a few social workers to the summit for extra emotional support. We had required a letter of recommendation from a counselor or other similar person to vouch for each veteran before we provided a scholarship—we knew that traveling hundreds of miles from home and spending forty-eight hours with a bunch of strangers wasn’t necessarily in every veteran’s best interest.

  There were so many unknown factors, which meant a minefield of potential emotional and psychological triggers for our participants. One of our attendees hadn’t been out of her apartment in years because of her trauma. And visiting Congress was often enough of a horror show to send anyone packing. Two years ago, I’d had a particularly infuriating meeting with a senior congressional aide—a tall, white, conservative Marine infantry officer. He refused to look me in the eye, instead just addressing Greg. Filled with so much anger that I was barely able to speak, I canceled my remaining meetings and hopped on an Amtrak out of Washington, DC.

  We were carefully trying to minimize any chance of our survivors having traumatic experiences at the summit. But some things could not be controlled.

  We had put together a series of panels for our attendees. Our board president, Kalima deSuze, an Army veteran and social worker who continually blew me away with her ability to ensure that all people felt validated and welcome, had just finished moderating a discussion with a diverse panel of survivors. They had echoed experiences from the crowd itself, and many veterans were feeling seen and heard for the first time in a long time.

  Touched by what I’d heard, I walked out into the hall to get some water while the next panel started. My assistant, Olivia, suddenly appeared, pulling me aside. “You need to get in there, Anu.”

  I opened the door to the ballroom and anxiously chugged my water as I took in the scene.

  Our next panel looked as if it were about to self-destruct. We’d gathered a group of experts on military law and policy to lay out the obstacles to making change to the justice system. A retired military judge was digging himself into a grave. An older white grandfather, he was a liberal advocate for reforming the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) and had contributed behind the scenes to major changes in legislative reform for victims. But the judge had misjudged his audience.

  He was deep into a history lecture about how the UCMJ came to be.

  “Military law isn’t half bad. This is why it works.”

  One veteran was standing, teetering on her legs, her voice cracking.

  “No way!”

  “Are you fucking . . .”

  Feet shuffled beneath hotel tablecloths and a wave of murmurs and panicked looks passed from one end of the room to the other. His blasé legal oversimplification was coming across as a slap in the face to a room maxed out in human suffering. Hadn’t we briefed him on what kind of an event this was?

  Much to my relief, his presentation quickly wound down, and another panelist—a civil rights attorney and a young woman of color from the ACLU—took over. I followed a small group of veterans out of the hall and walked into the bathroom, desperate to splash cold water on my face. A dozen women stood, leaning against sinks and walls, deep in anxious conversation. They stirred when I entered.

  “Oh my god,” I muttered. “I can’t believe what just happened. He isn’t like this usually. I’m so sorry.” Several sets of eyes opened wide.

  “Oh thank god, Anu.”

  “Are you kidding? I’m so mad I could hit something.”

  They all looked at me. I must have seemed beside myself, because they gave me warm smiles. I pulled myself together.

  “Hey, will you come back inside? I’m gonna say something to the whole room.”

  They agreed, and we walked back in. One of our other civil rights attorneys was, thankfully, giving the final remarks on the panel, sounding thoroughly compassionate, despite his lawyering, and wrapping up loose ends that had derailed many of our participants.

  I waited till he finished. Kalima had taken the mic, and other social workers were already working individual tables, calming nerves, listening to cries and complaints. I walked to the podium.

  “Hi, everyone. I want to say something.”

  Some folks looked up. Others continued to look shell-shocked.

  “Our panelists have spent decades carving out expertise in different ways the justice system does and does not work for sex crimes victims. They are all our allies in fixing a broken system. But the point of this is not for you to agree with everything they say. I’ve heard a couple of things today that make me want to bang my head against the wall. But we can make up our own minds about what we choose to listen to.

  “Take what you want that’s useful. Leave the rest. Remember, you’re the only expert on your lives, on what happened to you. So take whatever frustration you have, and ideas you have, and rage that you have, and use it for change.

  “You’re fired up? Good. Stay fired up. We’re visiting Capitol Hill this afternoon. Channel all of this and unleash it on your elected officials. They’re the ones who have the power to change the system. Tell them your stories. And if they don’t listen, remember, you have the last word. You don’t like how they respond? Then vote them out of office.”

  Veterans were hooting and hollering, getting out of their seats. Congressman Mike Turner, who’d witnessed
my speech from the back of the hall, was less than thrilled—I got a talking-to the way a senior officer might have counseled me back in the day—but his fear of being voted out of office by angry veterans was a small price to pay for getting the group focused and back together. I was flushed, exhausted, and exhilarated—but still very, very concerned.

  • • •

  It was like something out of House of Cards. If you’d told me I would be in a one-on-one battle with a sitting member of Congress, with an entire community’s sanity hanging in the balance, I would have thought you were nuts.

  On the second day of the summit, my staff received an emergency call from one of our participants. A veteran had thrown herself down a large set of stairs in the Cannon House Office Building after leaving a party hosted by Representative Jackie Speier. The woman had not been drinking and had not slipped on the floor, nor was she suicidal. All of that would have been understandable, forgivable. Instead, her fall was a stunt orchestrated purely for attention. A hundred veterans wandering around Capitol Hill with cell phones meant news traveled fast. When we got the call, I thought only one thing: Fucking politicians.

  Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, was royally pissed off that SWAN had not given her a role to play in our conference. We’d been careful to recognize hard-fought victories on both sides of the aisle and train our veterans to know the policy issues on the Hill. Most importantly, we’d given them the platform to tell their personal stories to elected officials who by this time were desperate to be included in our House and Senate visits. Speier wasn’t interested in all of this organizing. Her impromptu party for our summit veterans appeared to be a way to get back at us, throwing a wrench in our plans to get a hundred trauma survivors safely and efficiently around the halls of Congress and back home in one piece.

  In retrospect, we should have probably just let her speak and called it a day. But by then she’d gotten too unpredictable. A tiny but vocal band of her supporters had surfaced as well, occasionally unstable, hurling vicious, sometimes threatening comments left and right on social media at anyone they felt was a traitor to the cause. The cause itself was often unclear, and the list of traitors included many activists, including me. This had nothing to do with their character, or mine, and everything to do with unresolved trauma. Speier had little idea how to manage a traumatized population. She was a politician, not a therapist, and yet she often acted like she was the only one in the world who cared about people who were hurting. I’m not sure what she was trying to prove.

  Speier had hooked dozens of summit survivors away from our carefully scheduled activities on the Hill with a fancy reception. She had coordinated nothing with our staff. Not even a request, or a heads-up. Our veterans left Speier’s party late, missing planes, trains, and automobiles back home. My staff, overworked and under-rested from eight months of planning and supervising one hundred trauma survivors and twice as many congressional offices, was ready to leave Washington. But that wasn’t possible now. My staff paid out of pocket to remedy the congresswoman’s move and get our veterans home safely. And just when we thought things couldn’t have gotten worse, we got the call about the jumper.

  Speier’s background was legendary. As a young congressional aide, she’d survived the massacre at Jonestown, where Jim Jones ordered his henchmen to assassinate Speier’s boss, Congressman Leo Ryan, and then persuaded his followers to kill themselves. Speier almost bled out on the tarmac in Guyana. I have no idea how this trauma shaped her, for better or worse. We were told it was an experience that she rarely talked about.

  Speier was a bundle of empathy and raw emotion. She burst onto the scene after Susan Burke’s first sexual assault case was filed against the Pentagon. She wanted to unscrew the military’s broken judicial system overnight.II She had fewer boundaries than any other member I’d met. Speier was a hugger. She tried to be your favorite aunt. At our first meeting, she’d laid out enough fruit and cookies to feed a starving village. She didn’t know the military and was out of place in the defense world, but she was determined to get involved. She grilled us for an hour or two about everything that would need to be fixed in order for survivors to get justice, as her staff furiously took notes. She wanted us to hold nothing back. On the spot, she asked us to write a bill to repair the military justice system. And we did.

  This was no small effort. The military justice system was as old as George Washington, and its vehicle, the UCMJ, was deeply entrenched in the way the military conducted its day-to-day affairs. The military justice system was as ingrained as Marine Corps customs and courtesies. It was as sacred as the American flag. It was a stinking artifact that had survived the Civil War, both World Wars, and the transformation of modern warfare. It was going nowhere. Nonetheless, we pressed forward, because we were idealists and dreamers, and with the system as broken as it was for victims of sexual violence, we had nothing to lose by attempting to transform it.

  We worked with our attorney colleagues to lay out legislative language that would eventually become Representative Speier’s signature bill. At its core, it would remove commanders from overseeing judicial proceedings. This needed to happen if any change was possible in the military. Commanders would all too often try to avoid scandals from breaking, rather than repair them at their root. I had seen this firsthand, and so had most of the victims I’d met. Commanders were not impartial arbitrators of justice. How could they be, when both the victim and the accused worked for them?

  Years after our fallout with Speier, I still recognize her contribution to keeping the heat on the military. In recent years, she took on the Marines when no one else would, aside from SWAN and a couple of reporters. Do I wish that someone like Tammy Duckworth, Tulsi Gabbard, or Seth Moulton, with military backgrounds and the language and temperament to engage the Pentagon, had taken on the Marines instead? Hell yes. But they didn’t. And in not taking the lead, veterans who were members of Congress left the work of military reform in the hands of colleagues without any military experience, like Speier.

  Speier seems to have finally found her political stride in the #MeToo era. But back when I was working with her, she was a mess of histrionics, misplaced blame, and grudge holding. I’d much rather tell this story without including her, because there are few things worse for me than calling out a fellow woman in a patriarchal institution. But I can’t tell this story authentically otherwise. For better or worse, Speier was as close to our issue as a member of Congress got.

  I’m concerned with the things that should and should not happen in the name of making change for service members and veterans. Jackie Speier didn’t know how the military operated, and she was too impatient to understand why customs and traditions were the way they were. When we pushed back on basic facts, she took this to mean we weren’t on her side. Her colleagues in both parties were so frustrated with her emotional tantrums that some quietly attempted to train her in military basics, while others flat-out ignored her.

  Within months, fishy things began to happen. The congresswoman quoted our staff’s talking points verbatim, in conferences, on television, and in House chambers. But she had also created a huge platform for her close friend Nancy Parrish, a wealthy older white woman from Florida who was a Democratic fund-raiser. Out of thin air, Parrish created what appeared to be an “AstroTurf organization,” a nonprofit designed solely to support a member’s legislation. Just as badly, the organization, Protect Our Defenders, was neither founded, led, nor staffed at the time by people with any experience on the issues. Therefore Speier could use it to push forward her agenda without resistance. It was as creepy as anything I’d seen in Washington.

  It’s one thing for an author, moviemaker, or go-get-’em attorney to exploit the experiences of military veterans. It’s another thing altogether for elected officials to do this. Service members, at the end of the day, risk their lives to execute political goals. Most elected officials—even the downright rotten ones—knew there were lines that could never be cross
ed with our community. Speier couldn’t have cared less.

  We first met Nancy Parrish in a coffee shop at the Sundance Film Festival, where Dick’s film was screening. I listened respectfully while Parrish vigorously lectured my colleague and me for an hour about what veterans needed. I remember thinking, Jesus, this lady has no idea what she’s talking about. I felt outraged that it was this easy for someone with a whole lot of dollars to enter a community with no experience and no expertise and just grab a microphone. I was also sad. Why didn’t people with money support those in the community already doing the work well? Instead, they engaged in cultural appropriation. Worse than that, this behavior was exploitation of a community that was so beaten down by military injustice and betrayal by a nation that it may have been too overwhelmed to see this woman for who she was, or worse, even care.

  I pushed back hard, especially on the day she offered to merge her fledgling organization with SWAN, as if we would ever be so foolish to do such a thing when we worked so hard to build something from the ground up, with our own sweat, tears, and life experiences. Like Speier, she grabbed what she could of our talking points, although she didn’t understand them, and delivered them poorly. She proved every American’s concern that money and connections were the things that counted most in Washington. Not facts. And definitely not people.

  As we approached the date of our first summit, Representative Speier called me, wanting me to make Parrish’s brand-new organization a cosponsor of our conference. We’d worked for several months to raise funds so survivors of military sexual violence could come to Washington, DC, for free. Close allies, veterans and civil rights organizations that had served veterans for years were contributing valuable support for these scholarships. It was an impressive coalition of groups that simply wanted to help.

  There was nothing friendly about Speier’s request. Being strong-armed by an elected official for personal ends has a particularly eerie feel. Being a veteran made it feel almost unreal. I told her a word she was not interested in hearing.