Service men’s individual and collective shame is often well hidden, but it is palpable, and I know this partly because my otherwise garrulous male veteran friends go silent when the topic of violence against women comes up. We do not talk about rape. We certainly do not talk about the Far East. I’ve witnessed men speak clearly about the horrors of combat, both in public forums and in private conversations. But I’ve rarely seen a male veteran speak from the heart about the crimes and indignities forced upon women in and out of the military. Women deserve so much more than this.
Accountability might look like the Marines United equivalent of the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, in which US combat veterans publicly confessed to war crimes they committed or observed while serving in Vietnam. Institutions and societies do not move forward unless we confess the ways in which we have harmed others, whether in the past or present. In 2016, veterans joined Native tribes at Standing Rock in protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline that the government was threatening to construct upon sacred lands, potentially contaminating water and soil. Veterans went there explicitly to be human shields for the tribal peoples who had been shot at with rubber bullets and bitten by guard dogs. In a memorable moment, General Wes Clark’s son took a knee before the tribal chiefs, begging forgiveness for the crimes white settlers perpetuated against Native peoples. I was deeply moved.
What would it mean for male veterans, then, to acknowledge the way in which women have been harmed by men’s military service? Would such a ceremony ever be conceived to ask service women’s forgiveness, or the forgiveness of wives and children, or the forgiveness of tens of thousands of women and girls around the globe?
• • •
Young women and their parents often ask me this question: Would you encourage women to join the military? My answer is, vociferously, yes. We need more women in the military. And desperately so if anyone cares about the future of the armed forces. I get a rush of pride and optimism when I hear that women and girls want to join. But that rush is always tempered, not just by my own experience but by the continuing facts.
I want every human being to have a shot at health and happiness. While the military affords management experiences that are unparalleled for young people (I cannot call them “leadership” experiences until the military gets to the bottom of its ongoing misogyny), the quality of those experiences is vastly disparate across the armed forces. If success is measured in part by the level of workplace harassment within an institution, women simply have more chance at success in the Army, Navy, and Air Force than they do in the Marines.
This is a call to the Marine Corps as much as it is to prospective service women and concerned parents. Marines love to say they won’t fix what’s not broken. But the Corps itself is deeply broken. Will the Marines have the honor, courage, and commitment to finally fess up and, like a veteran in need of emotional or mental health support, get some professional help?
I think that the cost to men for participating in military misogyny is often the difficulty—or inability—to gently connect with loved ones and society as a whole.
The cost to women is both obvious and subtle. The cumulative denial of our harassment, a tool we’ve perfected to survive the trials of being so few, and the infinite ways in which we beat ourselves and one another up—these have long-lasting effects on our health and happiness, too.
It has taken me years to forgive my female peers for their abuse, jealousy, and antagonism. It took years to forgive myself as well, and I admit there are moments when I still get dragged down by voices of self-hatred that quickly morph into voices of hostility toward other women. It takes work, and support from women who deeply realize these dynamics, to realize that this is not our doing, and then to resist the forces that encourage division among us. Every woman who rises up to support another woman will change the face of the military. It is going to require an otherworldly courage and joining forces with guys who are willing to sacrifice some skin to do the right thing.
In the end, no man or institution was going to be able to take the hurt away from me. I had to learn to love myself and really believe that I was worth it. Feeling connected to people who show compassion when I falter and nudge me to find my feet again is where I most find my wings. Each veteran who lets her guard down and shows vulnerability ensures that I can let my guard down as well. It feels so much better without all of that armor.
* * *
I. Trump also seemed to think the military had no judicial system. But his legal ignorance was completely lost within his characteristic one-liners.
II. www.aol.com/article/news/2016/11/11/why-veterans-voted-donald-trump-swing-states/21603486.
III. www.military.com/daily-news/2016/11/02/survey-career-oriented-troops-favor-trump-over-clinton.html.
IV. www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/mcmaster-rebuked-by-army-in-2015-for-his-handling-of-sexual-assault-case/2017/03/02/e8421a8e-fe8b-11e6-8ebe-6e0dbe4f2bca_story.html?utm_term=.782036468152.
V. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/library/aberdeen/caution.htm.
VI. www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDxU4Y4aXPg.
VII. http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/facebook-threats-to-speier-probed/Content?oid=2349902.
VIII. http://taskandpurpose.com/sexist-facebook-movement-marine-corps-cant-stop.
IX. www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/facebook-revenge-porn-how-two-marines-helped-stop-it-w478930.
X. www.scribd.com/document/344880282/Actionable-Change?campaign=SkimbitLtd&ad_group=1025X498259X56f51715d2214dd61f4df2e6623e6ac4&keyword=660149026&source=hp_affiliate&medium=affiliate.
XI. www.marines.mil/News/News-Display/Article/673308/zero-to-twenty-plus-marine-develops-program-to-improve-pull-ups.
XII. www.c-span.org/video/?442268-1/hearing-focuses-domestic-violence-child-abuse-military.
Epilogue
It’s early 2017 and I’m crammed into a tiny professional kitchen with several other student chefs, dressed in a white chef’s hat and jacket, apron, checkered pants, and nonskid clogs. I’m covered in sweat, stirring three enormous pots of broth like a witch with a giant ladle. I’m in culinary school, just for joy. My team and I have planned a three-course vegan meal with ramen as the main course. It has enough mushrooms and ginger to kill cancer cells, and has so many layers of flavor that none of our instructors have been able to fully deconstruct it. It is the best damn ramen broth ever.
Alessandra has dug into her Italian roots and volunteered to make whole wheat noodles from scratch. She’s covered in flour and patiently winding the handle of the pasta maker, again, and again. Liana and Kristyna, eight months pregnant now, are reaching their arms into enormous vats to massage chiffonaded kale and seaweed for a raw salad. Kevin, the only guy in the group, a fifty-something looking for a second career, has been stuffing vegan dumpling wrappers with roasted kabocha squash and edamame filling. Marcelle, from Brazil, is still fine-tuning the presentation of chocolate cake with mousse made of sake and matcha powder. She’s staring down an empty white plate, with a bottle of blueberry coulis in her hand, waiting for design inspiration to strike.
Elyse is a professional vegan chef who I’m convinced looks about fifteen because of her plant-based diet. She and I have volunteered to lead the group in our preparation of a vegan dinner for one hundred people. It has been a slog of recipe testing, late-night editing, and laughing our heads off (Elyse makes Muppet faces when she cooks, which render me helpless). It’s my first time working with a group of mostly women—all of us on equal footing—on such an incredibly challenging assignment.
For weeks, my back has been hurting like hell from standing for hours on end with my neck bent over cutting boards, making me wonder what the heck I’m doing throwing myself into such rigorous work all over again. Two women loom large in my life. Chef Hideyo is a former sushi pro whose mission in life is to scare the crap out of new students at the Natural Gourmet Institute. We surround her when she takes her chef’s knife out. Her work is a thing of beauty
. She could be slicing a rubber tire and it would look like art. Her half-Japanese, half-English scoldings twist many of us into a state of panic, but mostly I smile. When she docks several points on every vegetable in the garden on my knife skills test, it’s hard for me to be upset. For the first time in my adult life, I embrace the experience. I am making matchsticks out of carrots, and it is thrilling.
Along with Hideyo, Chef Barb is the other woman straight out of Baughman’s rulebook. Barb is an extreme athlete, and I may be the only one who notices her muscles bulging under her chef’s jacket. Early on in training she gathers us around and tells us to get our hands out of our pockets. The other students are flummoxed, but I am impressed. I’ve been trained by the Corps to be able to grab a rifle in milliseconds because my hands will never be caught dead in pockets. Barb is tough and familiar, with a good dose of warmth.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think I’d fallen into another version of the Marines. I love the urgency and the attention to detail in this culinary universe. It is absurdly physical, fierce, and loud. Timidity has no place when you’re dealing with boiling water, sizzling pans, and sharp knives. It is a completely tactile experience that absorbs all the senses. It’s everything I loved in the Corps. It is fast paced and high octane. It feels urgent and satisfying—the flames bursting off the stove top, the risk of scalding and stabbing. The immediacy of delivering the best to customers who couldn’t care less about your feelings. The adrenaline is familiar and comforting. And yet something in me has shifted.
The difference here is that there is no need for harm, and no need to one-up the next person. As I work with the women in my school, I quickly realize the potential for women in this world to create something very different from the arrogance and abuse that are infamous in the world of fine dining and cable food shows. Men inexplicably control the world of restaurants, while women continue to nurture hearts and bellies in homes around the globe. It’s a world out of order. But I know things can be different. I know because my time in the Corps was also so out of order. We can create, and serve, with love. I’m eager to test this theory in everything I do.
Our final vegan dinner wows me. My entire extended family and several of my friends attend. Every last one of them is a carnivore, but no one misses the meat. People are happy, stuffed, peaceful. No animals have been harmed. And our team of chefs looks fulfilled. It’s such a rush.
My dad has been scooping bites off everyone’s plates. And Mom has been telling stories to everyone about Dad. They are the grand elders now, still stubborn as hell, but pretty adorable when they’re just eating chocolate cake.
Old age has softened them, a bit. Mom and Dad hear about my yoga trainings and silent meditation retreats, first three days, then ten, and then six weeks, and don’t get it. Dad’s disappointment is palpable, through his scrunched eyebrows and aborted attempts not to say anything to me, but the thing now is, he’s trying not to be so mean about it.
It helps me that the Indian prime minister practices yoga daily. Narendra Modi is directly responsible for getting my father off my back, at least a little. Dad will never admit it, but he knows I’m happier listening to myself and ignoring his harsh opinions, a practice that is eternal and that I am convinced will continue late into my life, and maybe even after he’s gone.
Dad still gets out of control, because he doesn’t know how to love me. I am forever the girl he wants to talk at. He writes hysterical emails, leaves melodramatic voice mails, reminding me of my mother’s fragility, wondering what I am doing with my day, or my life. He still occasionally calls me stupid. My new thing is to keep my distance and assert boundaries I was never allowed to have. Not as his daughter. Not as a girl. Not as an Indian woman. I don’t need to run to the Marines. I don’t need to run.
He’s more fragile than he will ever admit. His ego has never adjusted to not winning that damn Nobel, and I know that and infinite variations on never feeling good enough eat away at him by the hour. I remember that Dad has never had the gift of not needing titles or seeking praise, the gift of learning to love himself from the inside out. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. It makes me feel a deep love for the child he once was.
Mom has aged rapidly because of the trauma she’s never come to terms with, and I think, too, because of mine. It has happened so fast that our relatives and her colleagues tell me this with rueful voices and wrinkled expressions, as if aging is strange or unseemly. As if I can stop her mortality. The control she inflicts upon me, upon herself, is as fierce as ever. She eats like a mouse. She is skin and bones. “I’m going to get fat,” she says, at eighty-six, as if anyone would care if she had rolls spilling from her midsection. When we meet, she still only talks about big things far from here: the Russian economy, that fool Putin. She is retired, but every day goes to her office, a nice setup the university has arranged because it is what she knows best. We have rarely ever had a heart-to-heart conversation—about her, about me, about us. I am coming to accept the silence between us. I grieve for us both, because it is all I can do now. The best I can do is try to understand.
Listening was forced upon me when I was little. I had no idea that I had a voice, because the only voice that mattered was theirs. Now I realize that all of that listening can be precious. I have, without trying, turned it into empathy. It is exhausting fighting the forces that silence women and girls. It is painful. It is far too often self-harming work in which it is hard to remember what one is trying to change, because we are not being loved in the work that we are doing, and we are not loving ourselves. We have not healed from our own wounds enough to remember what change we want to see in the world or to imagine how we truly want to be in that world.
I dig into my imagination, my experiences, my deep-listening skills. My parents are just human beings, clumsily finding their way. My mother may not have the language or the voice to describe what she went through. She may never understand that shame is not something neither she nor I needs to carry. But not everything requires words. And I can carry some of the speaking, and much more of the hearing, when and how I can. I know the wounds she has borne, intuitively, like I know now what I have borne. The things my mom did to survive and thrive. She’s a warrior, to the bone. No warrior sets forth without picking up scars. And I am cut from the same cloth as she is.
Acknowledgments
In 2007, I was fortunate to attend a writing workshop for veterans in lower Manhattan. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa, a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, read to us from his collection in the lower floor of a West Village brownstone, and seated in a soft leather chair, I felt safe and welcome, despite being surrounded by so many men. This was undoubtedly because of Yusef.
On that day, Yusef was just a man, which is to say, he was more than a veteran. Yusef was reading poems he’d written about Vietnam, but what he’d really written about was the texture of plants and the feel of the heat in Louisiana. About being Black in the United States of America. About fear and longing. He looked at us with warm eyes and told us: “After I came home, it took me fifteen years to write. Take your time.”
What a radical thing he’d said. My parents and the world had conditioned me for much more impatience than that. I was trying to piece together a life that would erase and explain my pain. I was rushing in order to save myself.
Like my own healing, this book wanted to be written on its own time. Like braising greens with maximum flavor and depth, there was no rushing this. I could not make sense of my life overnight. Taking one’s time is an act of resistance in this world. Stepping back to nurture one’s heart is even greater. It is an act of generosity and love, for oneself and others.
Fifteen years after I came home, I have many people to thank for the gift of this book:
Roger Rosenblatt, my first teacher out of the Marine Corps, for believing I could do this.
Robin Morgan, for sisterhood, and more pep talks than I can remember.
Jaclyn Friedman, for your kindness, generosity, and ins
ight.
My agent and secret weapon, Anna Sproul-Latimer. Thank you for nurturing me and this project, again and again.
My editor, Daniella Wexler, for believing in this book and encouraging my vision.
Gregory Jacob, for undying loyalty and friendship. You are one of the few good men. I wish there were a ribbon for that.
Shiva and Uma, for unconditional love and wisdom. May you rest together in fields of strawberries and kale with an endless supply of tennis balls.
Eli Painted Crow, for lifting me up, again and again, in the darkest of times.
Kate Germano, who fought and sacrificed for a better Marine Corps, and still does.
Marsha Four, Rick Weidman, Tom Berger, and John Rowan at Vietnam Veterans of America, for putting women and change before politics.
Master Sergeant Brenda Baughman, USMC, Ret., and Colonel George Bristol, USMC, Ret., for making me a Marine.
Sergeant Major Ray Mackey, USMC, Ret., and Master Sergeant Rodney Cain, USMC, Ret., for teaching, molding, and supporting me.
Sergeants Jennifer Katz and Miranda Hamby, for courage and inspiration, and the Marines of Hotel Company, Marine Combat Training Battalion, for getting it.
Everyone who poured their hearts and souls into SWAN, for transforming the military for generations of young Americans.
Ariela Migdal, Sandra Park, Michael Wishnie, Vania LeVeille, Duffy Campbell, Holly Hemphill, Larry Korb, and Eugene Fidell, for discernment, guidance, and compassion.
Lory Manning, General Pat Foote, Sue Fulton, Donna McAleer, and Allyson Robinson, for encouragement when I really needed it. Also Maricela Guzman, Marti Ribeiro, and Jen Hogg, for having my back.
NoVo Foundation and NY Women’s Foundation, for investing so deeply in women’s safety and leadership, particularly women of color.
My vipassana and yoga sanghas, and my many teachers, especially Swami Ramananda, Cheri Clampett, Kersten and Monique Mueller, Pascal Auclair, Anushka Fernandopulle, Gina Sharpe, Sally Armstrong, James Baraz, and Catherine McGee: thank you for holding my tender heart.
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