Representation always mattered. When the Phoenix VA Medical Center was in the crosshairs of congressional attention after veterans had died waiting for appointments, binders full of men (and no women) were invited to testify to the Senate about the failing VA system. The chair of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, Bernie Sanders, didn’t seem to mind this glaring misrepresentation of the veterans world, proving that Democrats (and Independents) often had as little interest in service women’s empowerment as Republicans.
In 2014, VA secretary Eric Shinseki resigned in the midst of the scandal, making way for new leadership. A few months later, Bob McDonald invited SWAN to his first meeting of veterans organizations. It had taken five long years for SWAN to get a meeting with a VA secretary. The large VSOs, chartered by Congress, held a closely guarded monopoly on the ears of power brokers. Despite SWAN’s exposing VA’s discriminatory practices toward veterans suffering from the health consequences of sexual assault and harassment, General Shinseki had never fully understood the impact of sexual trauma on veterans. I was hoping Secretary McDonald would be more open than his predecessor.
Before heading into the meeting, I paused outside VA headquarters to get a long look at VA’s motto. Uttered by Abraham Lincoln, the quote was sacrosanct:
To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan.
I sensed that at VA, where shutting up and waiting was a rule, and badly behaved women were in short supply, few had questioned the meaning and impact of this phrase. VA clearly was not only not caring for him who had borne the last century of battles, it most definitely was not caring for her who had borne twice the battles.
I snapped a photo of the plaque and posted it on Twitter, with a defiant tweet that inspired a variety of aggressive responses from white male veterans who didn’t understand what the big deal was.II
My intro to VA headquarters didn’t begin well. After passing Lincoln’s obsolete quote, I headed through the metal detector in the lobby and attempted to pick up my name tag. I finally found it. It said “Ann.” Several years ago, in a conversation with a media adviser, I made the unfortunate decision to shorten my name to Anu to spare myself the misery of constantly feeling othered and marginalized in public.
Ann was a name I’d come to despise in Washington. Nancy Pelosi called me Ann. I’d experienced nothing quite as odd as publicly correcting that living legend of the left that I was not, in fact, Ann, only to have her call me Ann again. My full name had practically put a stop to congressional business during a House hearing. Republican congressman Jon Runyan, a former NFL tackle and by all accounts one of the few nice guys in Washington, was completely flummoxed by “Anuradha” when introducing me at the hearing. He stuttered for what seemed like minutes, staring into his prepared notes, sounding out the letters, again and again, trying to piece together the syllables. I felt awful for the man.
My nickname was a merciful sacrifice, a compromise I made for the American people. It didn’t get much simpler than A-N-U. (Feeling the full brunt of selling out my heritage wouldn’t come until the 2016 presidential election, when I would go back to my full name, with fervor.) But today I was either Ann or no one at all. I slapped the sticker on to my chest and forced a friendly smile at the administrative aide.
The room upstairs was like most that I entered in Washington. It had that peculiar feel of male-only spaces: bodies were sized up, chests were thick with inflation. Men who entered were greeted with frat boy handshakes. In loud voices, they engaged in power banter. The few women who entered were looked over, and then overlooked. These guys practiced a risky game, as some of these women were occasionally lesser-known members of Congress or power staffers who moved mountains in Washington.
The few women who were invited to these top-level VSO meetings rarely brokered in power. They were safe bets, their soft suggestions to “serve our veterans” so nonthreatening that they were immediately forgotten. I rarely met a woman veteran. If I did, she was usually the only one in the organization.
I settled into my seat next to a friendly senior from Jewish War Veterans, who seemed to have little ego and little need to invent one.
It was obvious when the secretary entered, because silence fell over the men, and a nauseating obsequiousness replaced the chest thumping. Veterans could play the roles of servant and sycophant with disturbing ease, as both skills were perfected in the military. There was a rush to be identified and known, to Sir the secretary into some kind of trance.
The new guy circled the room, shaking hands, patting backs.
Call me Bob.
Yes, Sir.
No, please, call me Bob.
Trying to charm veterans with this schtick was a hell of a bet. I found it much easier telling folks what they needed to hear when I addressed them by their titles. I wasn’t here to make friends with a man whose agency we’d sued several times over for sex discrimination. Mr. Secretary would do just fine for me.
Bob, the former CEO of Procter & Gamble, launched into an epic speech. He was showing off his business creds, the billions of people on the planet who used Procter & Gamble products every day, his relentless focus on customer service and innovation. He started showing off about VA employees, many of whom I’d known to be lazy, incompetent, or downright mean. It was refreshing when he started telling the old guys at the table, some of whose joints had been creaking and popping since Vietnam, that one of the best orthopedic surgeons in the country was working at a VA hospital out in California. She was a West Point graduate. I perked up. The fellas around the table joined in, insisting they’d see her for knee and hip replacements. We were all rooting for the surgeon.
Then Bob stepped in it, deep.
It’s unbelievable! She’s about this short. Just unbelievable!
The secretary held his hand at his waist, suggesting a surgeon of hobbit size. He shook his head in amazement and laughed. An uneasy silence ensued, but no one said a thing. I wondered if the VA’s best orthopedic surgeon knew her boss was reducing her to a tiny, cute girl doctor.
Bob wanted our feedback on a new VA promotional ad, so he played it and asked for our reactions. I was never afraid to give one, but it took him ages to call on me. He called on one guy at the other end of the table three times before his assistant, an overworked, enthusiastic ex-Marine, told him to take my question.
The secretary approached, and the room grew silent. The first female voice all day, I introduced myself, firmly and formally. Bob’s well-oiled smooth-guy banter, which had gone on now at a quick, uninterrupted clip for two hours, stopped suddenly. He squinted at my sticker.
“Ann?”
“No. Uh-nu.” He squinted again at my chest. Here we go, I thought.
“They got it wrong, Sir.”
“What’s it supposed to say?”
I told him again.
You could feel billion-dollar corporate wheels turning in Bob’s head. There was no movement in the room. Bob had made me hypervisible. Whether it was my strange name, the unruliness of my hair, the brownness of my skin, or the fact of my having been a Marine, I had disrupted the rhythm inside this room within seconds.
Bob walked over to me. Came in close. Too close. I could hear myself breathing.
Bob reached his hand over to my chest, touched the lapel over my left breast.
Removed my sticker. Placed it on the table.
Bob took out his pen and squeezed himself between my body and the old Jewish war veteran next to me. Bent over the table on the right side of my body, Bob crossed out the second “n” in Ann and wrote a “u.”
I managed somehow to look up at the veterans across the table from me. I could not read their detached, deadpan expressions, but somehow with a straight face I formed the words, “Valuable use of his time, huh.”
It was a useless thing to say, joking around about how Secretary Bob was playing Bob the secretary, to buy time while my body reassessed its options to fight, flee, or freeze. The strange thing
about shock is the way it interrupts time and space, slowing all one’s senses.
He peeled the sticker up off the table. Bob shifted back and then slightly forward, telegraphing his next move, as he prepared to slap the edited sticker back on my chest. Bristol’s training kicked in, hard.
My arm was up, fending off his hand. I took the sticker from him, saying, “I’ve got this, Sir.” I put it back on the lapel of my suit. I don’t even know why I bothered to wear it. I felt naked.
The silence from the men surrounding us was so loud it felt like I was screaming inside my head. Later, my colleague from Vietnam Veterans of America would tell me he thought I was going to punch the secretary. I wondered why I didn’t. I wondered, why didn’t he?
I felt myself slowly disappearing, floating above my body and theirs. Despite years of doing this, honing my advocacy skills, shaming brass giants into admitting their weaknesses and taking hits from powerful enemies, it still happened sometimes, and it had happened here and now.
The lines between safety and security had been blurred long ago by this experience of offering my body and life as a battleground for political posturing. In that moment, Bob and I had an audience, but no one intervened to save him from me or me from him.
When the meeting ended, I stayed an extra hour to speak to the secretary’s assistant. I was back in my body and was speaking calmly. This conversation was a courtesy to him, a fellow Marine and a decent guy. And it was a heads-up to Bob. Because clearly Bob had not been prepped to meet a veteran like me, or an organization like SWAN.
I did what no one else in that room was going to do: I briefed him on the inappropriateness of the VA secretary touching me. And I reminded him that the secretary was a named plaintiff in my organization’s lawsuit accusing VA of sex discrimination.
His assistant nodded vigorously. His face was already pale, but it was now ghostlike as this information sank in. He insisted he’d set up a private meeting for me with Bob. I even believe that he tried. It was our last invitation to VA headquarters.
• • •
Changing VA’s approach to military sexual trauma was deeply satisfying, but I was desperate to attack sexism and sexual violence at its source.
It had always been clear to me that the root of the military’s hostile work environment and high rates of sexual assault was the ban on women in combat. For several years we’d been in discussion with veterans and attorneys about how best to go about repealing the combat exclusion policy. In 2012, our colleague out of the University of Virginia sued the military on behalf of an Army colonel and a first sergeant who argued that the policy had affected their career progression. The ACLU decided to up the ante, and a few months later, SWAN was an organizational plaintiff in Hegar v. Panetta, a groundbreaking case challenging the combat exclusion policy.
MJ Hegar was an Air Force major from Texas and a decorated helicopter pilot.III Her helicopter was shot down while she was flying a rescue mission in Afghanistan. She sustained injuries but fired back, and was awarded a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, one of the Air Force’s highest combat distinctions. MJ was humble and unafraid to be vulnerable in person. I’d met few officers in any branch as authentic as her. Three other women joined MJ as plaintiffs: Jennifer Hunt, an Army NCO and Purple Heart recipient who kept cracking me up with jokes, and two Marine officers, Zoe Bedell and Colleen Farrell, who had been members of female engagement teams in Afghanistan.
SWAN joined the four trailblazing service women—I started calling them the Fantastic Four—in order to provide organizational support to back up the plaintiffs’ claims of discrimination. What made the Fantastic Four particularly impressive wasn’t their military résumés or brainpower, all of which was obvious to anyone who met them. It was their willingness to take on the Pentagon while they were still in uniform. Suing the DOD while you were earning a military paycheck took a particular kind of courage.
It’s important to realize that service women’s integration had not happened organically, or because it was the right thing to do. Service women had sued over all sorts of civil rights matters, including the right to be pilots and to deploy to the Middle East without wearing headscarves. Integration—equality—required litigation. We were following that precedent.
We argued that combat exclusion was preventing the plaintiffs from accessing prestigious assignments after returning home, and from attending follow-on schools like Army Ranger School, all of which were critical for career progression. When we launched our press conference in California early one morning, the press went nuts. One week later, I hadn’t gotten more than a couple of hours of sleep, and the five of us had done so much media on so many networks that I lost my voice and got the flu. We were all high on adrenaline. The press finally had enough ammunition to take on Pentagon leadership. The generals in charge appeared utterly out of touch. Old. White. And very male. Women in the military had never looked more deserving of meritocracy. It was the most exciting time I could have imagined.
Two months later, our phones wouldn’t stop ringing. The secretary of defense had decided to overturn combat exclusion. We watched tearfully, our eyes glued to every network in the stratosphere, as Leon Panetta stood alongside the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and spoke about the courageous women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the long overdue need for change.
Our lawsuit transformed the military rapidly. In 2015, I was stunned as the chief of naval operations announced he was opening the Navy SEALs to women. I couldn’t believe that sixteen years after my adventures with G.I. Jane, I was finally seeing the military’s most elite force allow women a shot at going through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL school (BUD/S).
When the Marine Corps opened up Infantry Training Battalion (ITB) to enlisted women volunteers, they came forward in droves. And then, in the most uncensored way possible, news broke. A photo of four of ITB’s female grads-to-be was circulating around social media. PFCs Cristina Fuentes Montenegro, Julia Carroll, Katie Gorz, and Harlee “Rambo” Bradford had posted a selfie, and it had gone viral.
The Marine Corps was incensed at the women’s audacity at going public, knowing Americans would eat this up as some kind of feminist milestone. The women were allowed to graduate with their male counterparts, but they were not assigned infantry jobs. Two years later, well over four hundred women had passed enlisted infantry training. It was enough to create an all-female infantry battalion, conjuring up mythological narratives about Amazon armies. But the Corps was doing all it could to prevent these women from being assigned to infantry units and hoping for an exception to the secretary of defense’s announcement.
Meanwhile, the Marines had opened up Infantry Officer Course (IOC) to women officers, a far more mentally and physically grueling school than the enlisted counterpart. Thirty female officers had given the course a shot, but few were making it beyond the first tough week of training. A small debate was breaking out among women veterans advocates about whether or not IOC’s curriculum was adequately measuring infantry officer potential. These voices were largely coming from the non-Marine community, and from women advocates who had no interest in single physical standards for men and women. Their frustration with IOC’s training requirements sounded like they thought IOC was just too physically tough. That was code for something I refused to support: a desire to lower physical standards for women.
Lowering standards was a loaded phrase in our world. It partly represented men’s paranoia with women’s presence in the military. But it was also a legitimate concern that fundamentally ate away at men’s confidence in women’s performance and women’s confidence in themselves. The fact was, women were capable of all sorts of physical prowess, particularly in events that required long-term physical and mental endurance. I’d personally witnessed a colleague of mine, all 130 pounds of her, swim for two hours across the Strait of Magellan in forty-degree water in nothing more than a bikini and two swim caps. I’d seen women in CrossFit
competitions lift more than most infantry guys I knew. I was convinced these extreme athletes were the types who would be able to pass the Marine Corps IOC standards as well as those required by special forces.
The real question was, was the military going to make the job welcoming and hospitable enough to draw these women away from the civilian job market? Why would women like these give up legal protections and chances for career growth in the civilian sector only to face the military’s hostile work environment and still deeply entrenched rape culture?
• • •
With fully integrated basic training and far more women (18 percent of the Army was female, as opposed to 7 percent of the Marines) in the ranks, the Army was way ahead of the Marine Corps on combat arms integration. When the Army opened Ranger School to women volunteers, it changed everything.
My cadre of West Point sisters was feeding intel to me whenever possible about the progress of two young West Point graduates who were slogging through Ranger School. Eventually, I got a call. Lieutenant Shaye Haver and Captain Kristen Griest were about to graduate. Buzz-cut, rugged-faced, laser-eyed, and lean and wiry, these women had not only survived the course, they had thrived. That week, they garnered their own hashtag on twitter (#ShayeandKristen) and had unwittingly earned a legion of worshippers, both male and female, across the globe.
I celebrated over the phone with my colleague Sue Fulton, who’d graduated from the first class of women at West Point. Sue was a tour de force, standing over six feet tall with a bellowing voice that I could imagine summoning legions from the underworld. She was one of a handful of pioneers who had paved the way for women in the Army. I then called Donna McAleer, another West Point alum from the early eighties, who’d written a book about women at West Point years ago. Donna had given me solace over the last few years of lonely activism, listening to many of my stories, always lifting me up. I was crying, she was ecstatic, and we were both beside ourselves with hope. Anything was possible now.
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