Most guys were totally new to yoga, and I witnessed the posturing that took place before class started. It never lasted long. In my first class, a few minutes into a deep breathing exercise, an older veteran started shifting in his seat. Seconds later, he stood up.
“Can I leave? I . . .”
He didn’t know what to say.
“It’s okay.” He seemed terrified to move, and terrified to stay. He was alarmed. Wild-eyed. I tried to exude warmth. He ran out of there, like I had years before.
It would be the first of many times over the next decade I experienced veterans wondering why they were having traumatic responses to relaxation techniques. Few would be ready to ask me why. Occasionally, someone dared to be vulnerable, and I would do my best to explain that what they were experiencing was normal. But it was up to them to choose to dive deeper. There was no way to fast-forward healing.
Because most of my students were men, I was extra conscious when a woman came to my class. The yoga classroom was my new laboratory for examining the dynamics of gender, power, and trauma.
The younger guys barely blinked at the presence of other women. They’d acclimated, perhaps, to my authority in the room. But some of the middle-aged and older veterans occasionally acted as though they were witnessing the arrival of a new species. The older veterans’ gazes were informed by generational norms, and I had no patience for it. I realized the thing I wanted to develop most as a teacher, and as a person, was the confidence and presence in my body to ensure that all people felt safe. I did not realize that I was developing a new voice.
I took extra precautions I rarely saw teachers take in normal yoga classes to make sure that each person would feel protected and comfortable. My queer students, particularly men, were often in the closet with their military peers, and I could feel them compartmentalizing their lives as they walked among the other veterans and settled down to their mats. In the work of embracing vulnerability, some of us wore more layers than others.
I ensured women, regardless of their experience with sexual objectification or trauma, would not have to suffer the extra burdens of daily harassment if I could help it. The tough-guy persona that many women had adopted in the military was impressive, as far as feats of survival went, but I wanted to ensure that no woman had to wear this armor in my classroom.
When I taught poses that looked or felt extra vulnerable—ones in which butts were raised in the air, or inner thighs and hips were opened outward—I made sure that veterans weren’t facing one another. This way, they could practice yoga without needing to keep on high alert. I was intimately aware of when this dynamic was present. I hoped I would have enough authority to stop anyone from objectifying or otherwise harming a fellow student.
With most of my attention on my students’ welfare, I didn’t expect that I would be a target of student harassment as well, but military culture sometimes desperately lingered. Phil, a middle-aged veteran, simply could not resist subversive behavior with me in front of other students. Like Fox, Thomas, and Franco, he was unruly. Wouldn’t take suggestions from the teacher. Would interrupt and challenge me. Flirted. He’d offer to help me set up the classroom with a slippery voice that made my skin crawl. Ten years out of the Corps, and it seemed I still couldn’t handle sexual advances and personal humiliation from a man without boundaries.
I could picture Gunny Cain telling me to just manhandle the punk, but force was not something I wanted to reinforce in this setting. I did the best I could at the time. I cut off his remarks and went straight back to teaching the group. I gave him a very exasperated, enough-is-enough look. I flat-out ignored him. I was trying to cultivate equanimity in myself and my students, all the while wrestling with wanting to kick Phil in the nuts. I didn’t want to disrupt the flow or feel of the class. I just didn’t know what to do with him. He eventually stopped coming, much to my relief.
Over time I learned that my instincts about boundaries were very good, and that I needed to believe in myself. The Corps didn’t have boundaries, and I couldn’t help enough women inside the Corps because of that, but I sure as hell could protect the veterans in my own classroom. Learning to say no was my first step. Learning to say no without feeling that I was doing something wrong was the next. Doing this while completely grounded in my feet, and aware of my breath, and conscious of my emotions was real power, the kind that harmed no one and helped everyone.
Yoga seemed to be the key to bridging two remarkably different parts of myself: the part that was still Bristol’s minion and the part that was devoted entirely to kindness and nonviolence. During SWAN’s hardest months, my staff can tell you that when I had to skip yoga classes to be in Washington or fund-raise around the country, that bridge was lost. The commander in me came out and consumed whatever kindness I’d cultivated toward myself and others. This wasn’t sustainable. I wanted to stop hurting. And that meant I also wanted to stop hurting other people.
I had faith in the veterans to whom I taught mindfulness, and therefore I could retain some sense of humanity for the veterans and Pentagon officials I encountered in my activist life. I genuinely saw them as capable of change, all evidence on C-SPAN to the contrary, because the guys I worked with in the yoga classroom were entirely devoted to examining their worst demons. I suspect my being female, a Marine, and a former officer had something to do with this. I think it allowed my students to find the place where they, too, were bridging aggressiveness with humanity. It was a place men could get real with their softer side, something that absolutely needed to happen if any of us who had served were going to heal from the harm we’d committed or received.
Teaching veterans was only partly responsible for keeping me together through these years. The rest was all thanks to the hodgepodge of dudes who showed up, week after week. The more compassionate I was with them, the kinder I was to myself. And, there was Jimmie.
A seventysomething African American Navy veteran from North Carolina, Jimmie came to my first class in 2008 and has barely missed a class since. I have never needed to try to be strong around him. He has never needed to thump his chest around me or the other guys. Jimmie walks gently, the way he speaks. He is slender and has a still, curious face. He reminds me of the softest and most merciful among us. This is not to say Jimmie is without impact. He says only a few words, smiling each time I enter the room and thanking me when he leaves at the end of class. This seems important to him.
One year early on, Jimmie told me his VA doctors asked him what he was up to. His blood work had never looked this good. He told them yoga. They seemed fascinated and maybe a bit unconvinced. Over the years, though, they become more interested.
Jimmie was the reason I kept coming back to teach. I knew he’d be there, twenty minutes early, lying on his back on top of bolsters and blankets, in his favorite restorative yoga pose. On those hard evenings when I’d given up on the Pentagon, on my parents, on myself, there was still Jimmie. When I didn’t feel like teaching, because I was too hurt or exhausted, I remembered that he would be there, waiting to practice. He always helped restore me.
A year back, Jimmie attended a teacher training in therapeutic yoga. He now assistant-teaches weekly restorative classes and loves it. He stands with great presence these days. I call him Benjamin Button, because he looks younger every year.
A decade after our first class, Jimmie speaks to me more frequently, often to remind me of my goodness. I sense in his quiet insistence that he wants me to believe it. I settle back and try to accept his offerings, as uncertain as I am about their implication. When I miss class now, it isn’t to rail against bad guys in the military. I’m usually off to a meditation retreat, where I will tune into my breath and my body, and practice compassion for all people, especially those who hurt me. Especially myself.
He tells me, “That’s good. You always come back a different person.” Jimmie is not a tall man, but he stands tall when he says this. “Go enjoy it. You deserve it.” Sometimes I forget who is teaching whom.
CHAPTER 15
Handling the Truth
SWAN’s work was grueling, but also more rewarding than anything I’d experienced in my life. When organizing for service women’s welfare worked well, it was because good people put their best intentions forward, and mutual respect was unquestionable. One of my favorite moments arrived in 2012 when we joined a couple of dozen retired general officers to end one of the military’s most unjust policies: service women who became pregnant as a result of rape were required to pay out of pocket for their abortions.
Abortion was an unspeakable thing for veterans groups. Not surprisingly, SWAN was the only organization that supported this reform. Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America called the issue a “political football,” and refused to support us. I wouldn’t even get started with their staff on what kind of nonsense it was to treat violence against service women with a sports metaphor.
Our ragtag group of former officers was led by a tireless attorney from the ACLU, Vania Leveille, not a veteran but the only other woman of color I knew at the center of military reform conversations. I was the youngest member of this team, and being a former captain and about thirty years younger than most, I often felt in awe of these retired officers. Vania had even managed to pull in Carol Mutter, the first woman to be a three-star general in the Marines.
Our contingent hit every corner of the Hill and the White House, pleading with wavering members of Congress to have a heart. Federal employees and incarcerated women were granted government-paid abortions after being raped. But service women weren’t?
I’d never been part of such a well-organized policy overhaul. It was as covert as any military operation. It needed to be; we were talking abortion, and we had to be careful with how we played this issue in order to get Republican votes. In the end, enough Republicans came to our side, and Congress repealed the policy. I had my first shot of whiskey after that victory, shared with an Army colonel on my left and an ACLU feminist on my right. After getting pro-choice legislation through a Republican Congress, it seemed literally anything was possible.
When organizing by and for service women succeeded, awards, reelections, and fame were not part of the picture. Veterans led the way, and their voices and vision for justice were bolstered by civilian expertise, not the other way around. This was the way movements created hope and minimized damage to people already in pain. This was the way to create lasting change.
• • •
Early in 2011, SWAN received a phone call from Yale Law School. A professor there had recently established a pro bono clinic for veterans, and he was interested in supporting our work. A few days later, Mike Wishnie visited our office in New York City. As we sat down, he handed me his card. His contact info was written in Spanish on the back. ¿En español? Was this guy for real?
I had no idea I was meeting with a living legend in the legal community.I
Mike wanted his legal clinic to serve veterans who had been left aside or forgotten, and women were at the top of his list. I was now used to feeling colonized or used by manipulative personalities. But Mike didn’t stir up the smell and feel of exploitation. I’m not sure how a white man in his ivory tower position had learned to sit back and listen, but my instincts told me to trust him.
Mike and I homed in on one issue area that I knew all too well: Veterans Affairs’ disproportionate rejection of women veterans’ PTSD claims. Based on word of mouth and the experiences of numerous clients, we believed that VA needed to overhaul its PTSD regulations.
VA was incompetent at best in dealing with most claims. But women faced an extra layer of institutional incompetence. VA hadn’t caught up with the fact that tens of thousands of women were serving in combat. On paper, the combat exclusion policy, a twenty-year-old Clinton-era policy, was designed to keep women out of direct ground combat. It denied women assignments to male-only specialties like infantry, armor, and special operations. However, due to warfighting needs in Iraq and Afghanistan, women now served in frontline roles never seen in previous American wars.
Today’s campaigns blurred the distinction between forward and rear areas—support units where women traditionally served were now vulnerable to enemy fire. Soldiers in combat support roles were traversing roads in Iraq and Afghanistan that had been laden with improvised explosive devices (IEDs), meaning women were coming home with traumatic brain injury, PTSD, and many other combat-related injuries.
Military awards were being denied to women who had served alongside men in combat, and VA was adding insult to injury by denying combat-related disability claims filed by women. Eventually, the government could not argue with flag-draped coffins of female soldiers on the nightly news. But VA would not budge when it came to PTSD stemming from military sexual violence.
VA had institutionalized rape culture in its own policies, making it agonizingly difficult for a PTSD claim based on sexual harassment or assault to be approved. On top of institutional hurdles, there were reasons we needed to pay extra attention to wounds stemming from sexual trauma. Unlike harassment and assault, combat injuries were largely experienced among military peers, with witnesses, and officially recognized by markers like combat awards and badges, like a Purple Heart. From the military’s perspective, there was no shame in being wounded in combat. Injuries that stemmed from the battlefield were considered legitimate. However, those that stemmed from military sexual violence were not.
One of my colleagues who had experienced both combat injuries and military sexual assault—what women veterans had named in typically sinister military parlance “the double whammy”—told me VA wasn’t going to believe she was raped. She focused her entire PTSD claim on her combat experience, even though she was clearly still suffering from the impact of sexual trauma.
Wishnie’s clinic filed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for SWAN so we could get the VA’s records on MST claims rejection. Unsurprisingly, VA could or would not give us the material in a timely manner. So we sued. Twice.
When VA finally gave us the FOIA’d data, it blew our minds: PTSD claims based on sexual trauma were being denied at twice the rate of total PTSD claims. We had uncovered the VA’s institutional bias and released our findings to the public. The press had a field day.
While VA was rounding up its lawyers, we hit Capitol Hill hard. In 2012, I testified before Congress about MST claims alongside Ruth Moore, a Navy veteran and rape survivor who had spent twenty-one years fighting with VA to get her PTSD claim accepted. Ruth spent a quiet life on a farm in Maine with her husband, daughter, and a group of baby goats. She gave hugs freely, even to members of Congress.
I took Ruth aside after the hearing and invited her to join our MST claims campaign. She agreed. A few months later, we’d crafted the legislative language and the Ruth Moore Act was introduced to Congress with Representative Chellie Pingree and Senator Jon Tester as its main sponsors. Pingree was one of our earliest champions. A former farmer and small business owner, she brought her folksy, honest brand to this incredibly emotional issue. Her staff oozed empathy and patience, and we all spent countless hours over this bill, haggling with VA leadership, wrestling members of Congress, and massaging the media over to our side.
I traveled to Washington for the press conference a few days after abdominal surgery removed a cyst in my ovary. I was laid out on the floor of my Amtrak train, and almost passed out on my walk over and through the Capitol building for the press conference. But there was no way I was going to miss this. Ruth’s historic bill represented my own journey with VA as well.
Reporters listened. And they quoted us liberally. All of this activity and attention caused a sea change at VA, where attorneys, public affairs reps, and leading administrators had failed to defend a broken, unjust policy. In an attempt to ward off our bill—we were demanding that Congress rewrite VA’s PTSD regulations to allow sexual trauma survivors to provide no more evidence than that required of combat veterans—VA finally decided to play nice. They retra
ined all their claims officers and began to apply a much more liberal approach to MST claims.
I know this intimately, because while we were taking the Hill, I was also still a patient. After four years, and the combined efforts of six pro bono lawyers, one senator, and one member of Congress, my claim for conditions related to military sexual trauma was approved. I received a 40 percent disability rating. Years later, my colleagues and veteran friends finally convinced me to appeal for a higher rating, but at the time, I was just grateful that someone in VA was finally listening.
In 2014, the VA awarded Ruth more than four hundred thousand dollars in back pay for PTSD. It was one of the sweetest victories I’d ever witnessed.
• • •
Changing the culture of the VA involved a lot of press, and would not have happened without litigation. Veterans service organizations (VSOs) were always a factor, though, even when most of them avoided us. Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) was one of the few VSOs that regularly had our backs, signing onto our litigation to change VA’s PTSD regulations for sexual trauma, and supporting sweeping sexual assault reforms. It wasn’t surprising that they did and so many others didn’t. At the time, VVA was the only VSO that had elected a woman president, and currently had a female vice president. When I spoke to the men who led the organization, it was apparent they recognized that women who served during the Vietnam era had made a difference in the organizing efforts of the larger community. Women weren’t just window dressing. Lots of the other organizations were having issues just hiring women or dealing with extreme day-to-day sexism among staff members still steeped in military culture.
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