With the winter holidays fast approaching, time was running out in the congressional calendar. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid got his staff on the phone with us one day to talk this through. None of us budged. It suddenly got contentious.
“We’re not a one-trick pony. We care about the long-term welfare of service women, not just one issue,” I said vehemently, leading a senior Democratic staffer to bark back. She could holler all she wanted. The Democrats were looking for easy options and quick victories, and we weren’t about to sacrifice the better bill for a short-term solution. We wanted the bill passed as it was. They listened.
On the day the bill was being voted on, we sat in the Senate chamber with colleagues from Vietnam Veterans of America, looking down on the short haircuts and bald heads of elected officials. The process was painfully slow, so I began playing a little game, identifying the senators who were Black, Brown, or female. It was a tiny group.
In the end, we could not get the five votes we needed to pass the bill. There were lots of reasons we lost. The main one seemed to be political infighting in the Democratic Party. Senator Claire McCaskill, a recipient of a SWAN Summit Award in 2013 (I’d nicknamed her Mad Dog McCaskill for taking on four-star Marine general James “Mad Dog” Mattis on sexual assault in the military), had come forth as the key opponent to Gillibrand’s bill. Our best guess was that McCaskill, a lifelong champion of assault survivors, had taken the other side in an effort to stay relevant to conservative voters in her home state of Missouri. But she’d awkwardly positioned herself as the bad guy, the defender of a sexist, broken status quo.
Watching the two senators run around Capitol Hill chasing Senate votes for opposite platforms was bewildering. Weren’t these two supposed to be working together? Worse than this, the conflict-obsessed press was eating it up. It irritated the heck out of me that these two impressive women were being portrayed like a couple of teenage blondes in a catfight.
One year later, I was relieved to see them working together on campus sexual violence, even sharing an umbrella in press photos. So much had changed by 2014. Campus reform had the public support of President Obama and Vice President Biden, both of whom stayed shamefully silent on military sexual violence. The Democrats had pulled their act together for civilian women, crafting the Campus Accountability and Safety Act in order to improve the way universities handled assault and harassment. But to my eyes the college campus work looked mostly like an orchestrated attempt to show unity in the party.
It was easier to rally Americans around college women than around service women, because far more American women were attending universities than enlisting in the military. Women made up only 15 percent of the military, and this was a tiny fraction of the American population. But 50 percent of the average university population was female. That was a lot of women, and a lot of parents. Numbers meant votes, and we did not have the numbers to sway a Democratic White House on military reform. We cheered the work of campus activists, but it burned inside knowing that politicians cared so much less about women who served in uniform.
Formidable women like Valerie Jarrett, Tina Tchen, and Sara Rosenthal made space for SWAN and survivors in the White House, but in the end, President Obama never publicly took our side. I remember the feeling of walking into the White House and never for a minute letting my guard down. After my experiences with the nation’s two largest bureaucracies—the Pentagon and VA—and witnessing the behavior of members of Congress, I trusted no one in Washington.
I vividly remember meeting Valerie Jarrett. She sat us down in her office and told us first thing that she and the president deeply sympathized with us, because they had daughters. I wanted to tell her that this line did not work on me, on us, on anyone, really, that many of the commanders I knew who were sweeping assaults under the rug had daughters, too.
We had brought one female and one male veteran to the White House that day to share their stories about sexual assault with Jarrett and other aides. When Ayana and Rick had finished telling their stories, Jarrett wanted to know more about me. I said very little. But I told her, “The military doesn’t teach moral leadership. It teaches battlefield leadership.” I thought I saw a flicker of something in her eyes, but she said nothing in response. She couldn’t.
The president never budged. I often wondered if Barack Obama would have changed his tune if Malia or Sasha had wanted to attend a military academy. There was no stake in this for him, or Biden, a military father who prided himself on being a champion of ending violence against women. Even today, Biden, a fierce advocate for military personnel and families, has ignored the issue of sexual assault in the military, despite recently setting up an entire foundation devoted to violence against women.
The military had far more lobbying power than we ever would. Military culture was still fundamentally harming women, the branches had yet to fully integrate their assignments, and all across America, the social tide was rapidly shifting against women’s equality.
I was tired of trying to convince average Americans that service women were worth their time and money. I was tired of being a community’s sacrificial lamb, the Marine Corps’ pariah, and a woman whom politicians used, abused, and then tossed aside. Mostly, I was tired of seeing people treat one another so poorly. There had to be another way to make change. I knew things would shift once I left. There was no way of telling if anyone would carry the torch forward. But I needed to take care of myself. It was time for someone else to step up and figure things out. In early 2015, I bowed out, said good-bye to Washington and SWAN, and retreated inward.
CHAPTER 17
Red (White) and Blue
The #MeToo movement exploded on American consciousness like a cluster bomb in the fall of 2017. My relationships with men—my dad, my friends, and the masses on social media—were suddenly all worth reconsidering. I was constantly on edge. Cranky. Sobbing. Furious. I considered never dating men again. I did not even want to hear their voices. I wondered how one might go about banning them from public spaces. I realized I was not the only woman plotting their end. The women in my life reminded me that I was, in fact, completely normal for feeling all of these things.
I was so busy trying to keep track of which of America’s celebrity darlings had been cast from grace that it didn’t quite hit me that #MeToo had bypassed the military. I didn’t realize this fully until I was watching clips from the Golden Globe Awards. I was thrilled that activists, several whom I knew through SWAN’s work, were accompanying Hollywood stars on the red carpet. I knew that no one from the veterans community had been asked to join. It bothered me, but then came Oprah’s speech.
I wept as Oprah channeled our collective rage, our memories of being harassed and assaulted in the workplace, on the streets, in subways and churches, at home. She was speaking for all of us.
And then, among victims of sexual violence, she mentioned military women. I saw Hollywood’s glitterati and my fellow activists nod their heads, and I stopped in my tracks. I wanted to howl at them, “You couldn’t find one Black Woman Veteran to invite to this shindig? Not one?” For all of Hollywood’s sweeping overtures, the nation was still paying lip service to women in uniform. After everything we’d done to expose and reform the culture. After all the scandals that continued well into the present. #MeToo was going to talk about military women and bow down to the pressures of patriotism, but they weren’t going to invite veterans to the freaking party?
Civilian advocates who knew so much better had dropped the ball. They’d forgotten us. They’d forgotten that women in the military faced more burdens than women in the civilian workplace and had fewer legal options to address assault and harassment. That without civilian oversight, service members were fending for themselves in a system that literally owned their bodies. They’d left them to fend against generals. They’d left them in Trump’s hands.
• • •
In September 2016, I attended a live town hall with Secretary Clinton and Donald Trump on
the USS Intrepid, the WWII aircraft carrier docked off the west side of Manhattan. I had every reason not to attend. I’d retired from professional advocacy for good reason. By attending an event where veterans would be posturing around powerful people, I was revisiting old wounds. Folks would be clamoring for photos, chumming it up with bros, and sizing me up, from my ethnically ambiguous features to my chest on downward.
On top of this, I was burdened by the certainty that I’d be one of few women and people of color at the forum. Even before neo-Nazis rallied in Virginia, I was sure of one thing I’d suspected before but never fully known till now. In the United States, more than I was anything else, I was Brown—more than I was female, more than I was queer, and more than I would ever be a veteran. This was never a choice, but by now I had learned to embrace my Brownness like a badge of honor. I was no longer shortening my first name.
Half of the folks in this room were voting for Trump. Some part of me knew that being there in my body and in my skin was important. I sat with Hillary’s people in the front row.
Clinton’s portion of the town hall was largely unremarkable, but then Trump arrived with an entourage of family members in haute couture and red-carpet hair. The glitz and glamour was starkly out of place with the feel of the room, in which the results of war were, if not the point, then at least the backdrop, with several veterans in wheelchairs or carrying canes, and most of us dealing with one thing or another.
Like we were a distant idea on the horizon, Trump called veterans “them” and “they” so many times in thirty minutes that I wanted to get up and say, “Jesus Christ, Sir, they’re right here in front of your face!”
Matt Lauer was hosting the candidates, and eventually turned to us for Q and A. An older African American man stood and was introduced as a former Marine. As the cameras rolled, he said, “I have a daughter who is interested in joining the service. But when she researched the military, she saw the stats on sexual assault, and decided not to go.”
He continued, “I have a concern, about the rape of women in our armed forces. As president, what specifically would you do to support all victims of sexual assault in the military?”
Trump was nodding, long and slow, as if to convey he understood the girl’s decision, while my head spun. Was this really happening? Had our work gone so mainstream that a playboy celebrity real estate tycoon turned presidential candidate was about to formulate a response before tens of millions of people about military sexual violence?
“Your daughter is absolutely right. It is a massive problem.”I
While my mind raced between verklempt and stunned, Lauer dove in, reminding Trump that he had tweeted the following only three years earlier: “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military—only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”
Suddenly, service women’s welfare was in the hands of a treacherous billionaire. Some of us had practically thrown ourselves on pyres to draw attention to this issue. This guy had done nothing but objectify women for most of his adult life, and he was now commanding the attention of tens of millions on the topic. I was sickened. And transfixed. God, this was great television. I wanted to vomit.
As we held our breath, Trump defended his tweet as “absolutely correct,” causing a stir in the crowd that despite all our military training could not be fully repressed and provoking an explosion on Twitter.
Within five minutes, I’d witnessed Donald Trump say more about sexual violence in the military than any sitting president. Barack Obama, a darling of feminists, had said little and done next to nothing. Was Trump for real? What the hell would all of this mean for us?
I thought I’d seen it all. And then, one month later, came Pussygate.
• • •
When a secret 2005 recording was released of Donald Trump admitting to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful [women]—I just start kissing them . . . I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything . . . Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything,” he was still just a villain without a title. He had neither nuclear codes nor armies under his command.
Pussygate emboldened the forces of misogyny and ensured job security for tens of thousands of therapists around the nation. But no one seemed interested in what it would mean for the military.
Despite Trump’s predatory proclivities, in November veterans voted two to one for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. This betrayal was one too many for me to take.II Lines were drawn, and I saw them clearly. Military women, like their civilian women counterparts, favored Trump. Only Black service members were more likely to vote for Clinton.III
What did it mean then that most veterans voted for a man who had outed himself as a sexual predator? What would it mean to salute or serve the predator in chief?
It would be easy to cast aside this discussion, as most who voted for him have done. But not if you support the troops. It makes me wonder what lines have been drawn when generals choose to serve at the pleasure of an admitted sex offender. But then, the president’s generals come with related baggage. Not nearly as heavy as the president’s, but relevant nonetheless.
For starters, the president’s former national security adviser, General H. R. McMaster, mishandled a sexual assault case involving two former West Point rugby players while he was commanding general of Fort Benning.IV He had allowed the two accused lieutenants to attend Army Ranger School, even though they were still under criminal investigation. He received nothing more than a slap on the wrist by the Army vice chief of staff.
And then there’s Vice President Mike Pence, who has made his views on military women well known. (His son is a Marine officer, if that matters.) In 1999, Pence famously wrote about the Disney film Mulan:
From the original “Tailhook” scandal involving scores of high-ranking Navy fighter pilots who molested subordinate women, to the latest travesty at Aberdeen Proving Grounds,V the hard truth of our experiment with gender integration is that it has been an almost complete disaster for the military and for many of the individual women involved . . . Put [men and women] together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan. Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.
And finally, there are the president’s Marines. Defense Secretary James “Mad Dog” Mattis, a four-star general who spent over forty years in an all-male infantry environment, has legendary views on integrating (or not integrating) the Corps. At a speech he gave in 2014 at the Marines Memorial Club, he said,
In the atavistic, primitive world of Marine infantry . . . the idea of putting women in there is not setting them up for success . . . [The point is] whether or not you want to mix Eros. Do you really want to mix love, affection, whatever you call it, in a unit where you as a twenty-year-old squad leader can point at someone else and point forward, knowing full well you’ve now introduced all the affections and the testosterone, and the love and everything else that goes into young people, and some of us aren’t so old that we’ve forgotten what at times it was like heaven on earth just to hold a certain girl’s hand, okay?VI
And, as recently as September of 2018, he told students at Virginia Military Institute that “the jury is out” on women in the infantry, calling into question once again whether he has the right character and temperament to be a secretary of defense.
Of course, pick up the news any day of the year, and it is hard not to think that Secretary Mattis, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and General Joseph Dunford, a trio of Marines as hard as nails, are the only civilized beings guarding us from the president’s madness. But they are not above our scrutiny simply because their boss is madder than they will ever be. Let’s hold our standards higher than this.
It boggles my mind that we are living in a nation run by Marine Corps infantry generals. How did we come to this? The answer, I suppose, is that we are in a state of emergency. In
no other White House would one justify the need for a band of extreme, knuckle-dragging warfighters to keep the republic from imploding and the planet from exploding. But their influence over civilian governance comes at great cost. I do not want these men steering our nation’s policy, or constructing guidelines about what men should do or what women should not dare to dream about doing. Steeped in a lifetime of the worst forms of misogyny, their old-school segregated infantry views about women are unacceptable. Until these men confront misogyny in all its forms—their president’s, their own, and the military’s—their views about women are a liability to average Americans and uniformed personnel alike.
• • •
Since Pussygate, my weekly sessions with Doc are not enough to hold back my awful feeling that the world doesn’t care whether women live or die. Since the 2016 presidential election, I must walk by official photos of Donald Trump on my way in and out of VA doctor’s appointments. Some days, I cuss at him. It is an awful photo, even for a sexual predator. He is all scowl, with narrowing eyes and swollen lips.
“So,” Doc said one day during a session. “I’m thinking of starting a support group just for women who were Marines. Are you interested?”
It still felt agonizing to let my guard down in front of other women veterans, so I didn’t know who was more surprised when I told her, “Yeah. Definitely.”
While Doc scrambled to hide her enthusiasm, not wanting to jinx my response, I started thinking.
“Doc, are we different? I mean, women, in the Marines, are we different from your other patients?”
How many of us has she seen? I wondered. Thousands? Each of us thinking we’re the only ones who’ve been kicked out, rejected, or beaten down. What would we even do with ourselves if we healed and organized and, god forbid, hit back together?
She paused, then replied, “Yes. You’re much harder on yourselves.”
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