Formation

by Ryan Leigh Dostie

  “I don’t think we would have that here,” he says again, and I stare down at my hands as he punches in my information. “No,” he mutters. “No, I don’t see that.”

  “Where would I get it?” I want to be done with this conversation.

  “I don’t know…” He clicks some keys but I have the feeling he’s doing it randomly, not really looking for anything. “I guess if we had it, it would be here?” he finally admits, voice lilting at the end, as if questioning himself. “But I don’t have anything under your name—”

  I can’t take another minute so I wave one hand. “Thanks, that’s fine, I’m good.” I dart out of the hospital door and don’t look back.

  A little over a year later, Fort Gordon doesn’t fare much better when I try to out-process from them and active duty altogether. My palms itch as I wait on the other side of the counter on the ninth floor of Mental Health. I wipe my palms against my DCU bottoms. I’m this close to holding the report again and I might be sick. I breathe out, simultaneously hot and cold. I’m not sure if I’ll try to finish reading it this time. I shove around the thought, focus instead on how I’ll have it in my hands because maybe I’ll need proof of what happened one day.

  “Hmm,” muses the clerk, finger on the mouse and scrolling down. “I don’t have anything right now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He shrugs. “I mean that Fort Polk never sent over your records.”

  “What?” I blink at him, stunned. I don’t want the report, don’t want to have to touch it or read it or even know it is in my proximity, but I at least want to know it exists.

  “I can request for it, though,” he adds.

  “Oh,” I mumble. “Okay, that’s good. How long will it take?”

  He shrugs again. “Few weeks. Maybe months.”

  “But I’m out-processing now.” My voice rises a little and sounds suspiciously like whining. I clear my throat gruffly.

  “I can forward it to you once it gets here,” he offers. “Just give me a forwarding address.” I write down my mother’s address back in Connecticut and he smiles politely, as if just registering I’m there and I’m human. “We’ll send it over to you.”

  He never does. The report goes missing or lost or whatever happens to reports that no one wants to see or be seen. It is hiding somewhere out there with my rape kit.

  So when the VA goes to process my claim, I have no evidence, even though it should all be there. Nothing remains from Fort Polk, as if it were a black smudge so easily wiped away. Yet they award me 10 percent because although Fort Polk lost the rape report, although they lost the rape kit, there is a single piece of paper in my files, one tiny report where I once went catatonic in Iraq, after the death of Avery, when I happened to mention to a doctor that I was raped, and she just so happened to write it down, the only lasting evidence of what took place, preserved entirely by accident but at least just enough for them to know it happened.

  Just Say the Word

  The Veterans Affairs hospital decides fourteen weeks of cognitive behavioral therapy is the best option for me.

  It’s ghastly.

  The therapist sits across from me, one leg casually slung over the other, her shoe dangling off one foot as she bobs it up and down in time to music only she can hear. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about it.”

  It indeed. We’re walking circles around the word rape. I find colorful ways to get there. What Happened at Fort Polk, or The Thing That Happened, but mostly simply It. I hate the word. It’s a very concise word, no room for error, no ability to wiggle to the side and misunderstand or misconstrue. It’s brutally succinct. Sexual assault is softer. No one jerks in shock when they hear it. Instead their bodies melt forward, eyebrows drawn down, shoulders rolled kindly, sympathetically patting a hand. But rape jars people. They resent the reality laid bare. You have to have manners about this sort of thing. That’s what I tell myself.

  “After It happened—” I start, but she interrupts me.

  “You’re doing really well, Ryan. You are. But we’ve talked about what happened after the rape—”

  I flinch.

  “—I want you to talk more about the rape itself.”

  Goddamn it, woman, stop using that word! I sigh, cross my arms, look away. “Avoidance behavior,” she calls it. All of it. The inability to make eye contact when I speak about It, the inability to say the word at all. I’ll talk about my shame for sleeping with Andres so soon afterward. I’ll talk about how it felt standing in that formation, my commander sneering at me from the front. But not It. There’s nothing to say about It.

  I automatically reach down, fingers searching for Dorian’s mane, then I remember she wouldn’t let me bring him here. I have to do this “on my own,” and without a crutch. The empty space by my feet is cold.

  She tilts her head, her dark bobbed hair swinging around her chin. She’s young and pretty and kind. She doesn’t push me. “So for your homework,” she says, changing the subject, “I want you to write about the rape itself. You need to get this out, Ryan. You have to let it out into the air somehow.”

  Fuck that. I clamp down hard, fingers wrapped around the bottom of my chair seat. I don’t have to do shit.

  She’s persistent. I’m stubborn. We dance for weeks.

  “It’s not your fault,” she says firmly. “You couldn’t consent. You didn’t consent.”

  I scrub my face with both hands. “But I don’t know. I didn’t say the word no exactly.”

  “You let him know in every way possible that you weren’t okay with what he was doing.”

  “But if I hadn’t been drinking…”

  “You’re allowed to drink, Ryan. You’re allowed to drink and get drunk without being raped.”

  “I know that, but…I should’ve just been sober.”

  “No. You shouldn’t have been raped.”

  “Yeah, well, I was.” I angrily fling my hands up in the air.

  “You were what, Ryan?”

  “I was—you know. And if I hadn’t been drinking, I could’ve fought him off. Or my command would’ve believed me. And they wouldn’t have just said I regretted it afterward or I was just embarrassed or I just made a bad decision while drunk or any of that shit. If I hadn’t drunk that night, none of it would have happened. Or it would’ve all ended very differently.” I feel the rage and the hurt and the helplessness burn at the back of my throat, like I want to scream and shake her and shake the whole fucking world because it’s so unfair.

  She leans forward, elbows on her knees, like she can taste a breakthrough. “But that’s on them. Your command. That’s their inability to understand rape, or face the reality of rape. That doesn’t change the fact that you were raped, Ryan. And no one has the right to take advantage of someone in a vulnerable situation. He targeted you for being drunk. He preyed on your inability to consent. He raped you. You know that.”

  “I know,” I hiss, teeth clenched, glaring out the window, tears streaking down my cheeks.

  “Just say the word, Ryan.”

  I glare at her then, resentful, grateful; this terrible, curative therapy. “I was raped.” My eyelashes flutter, my shoulders sag. My voice cracks. “I was raped and it’s not fair.”

  “No. It’s not.”

  But there’s nothing any of us can do about that, is there?

  * * *

  So I’ll say the word. I might dance around a little, twist my wrist round and round in a circle, gesturing for you to catch up and get the gist of the thing, but I’ll say rape. Cognitive behavioral therapy gives me this. It gives me back my mouth and my tongue and restores my glorious rage. I have a story that is a sword and I can wield it, cutting outward, not inward.

  Interim

  After therapy, college is an easy transition for me. Sergeant is traded for Professor, a simple exchanging of ranks. I’m comfortable with the hierarchy. I do what I’m asked; I follow orders well, I keep in my lane. I relish the order of the academic world.
>
  I enroll into Southern Connecticut State University in 2006, taking advantage of its free tuition for veterans, despite the fact this is the very college I tried to avoid a lifetime ago. But the classes are small, the professors serious and knowledgeable. I think I’m going to be an archaeologist, to dig down into the ancient world, stand in modern-day Iraq and find the veins of older things beneath the earth. I can’t shake that part of the world. But archaeology involves a lot of osteology, biology, and -ology in general, so I switch to history, because it’s the final product that I love the most anyway.

  One day my regular Western Civ professor is ill, and a different professor covers for him. This man’s lectures transform me; he plucks historical factoids from the air, spinning ancient history into a breathing thing, a fantastical creature that brushes up against this side of our modern world, relevant and alive. I fill page after page of notes until my fingers ache. Here I read Epic of Gilgamesh and the tale of Utnapishtim, the precursor of Noah, the story so similar, but older, so much older that how can one be true and not the other? And once again my axis tilts. What started in the streets of Iraq comes full circle in a history class about the ancient streets of Iraq. The last clinging bits of my Christianity are shattered; I’m more fascinated than I am dismayed.

  My professor also talks of Inanna/Ishtar, the Sumerian/Babylonian goddess of war and sex. Her very existence rings through me. She should be contradictory—a woman at the helm of war, a war goddess who wears sex like a virtue. How had I not understood that war and sex were so tightly bound? How have we forgotten that these two entities are so deeply entwined, both turning us fierce and wild and alive? How could War be anything but a woman, for all her power and powerlessness?

  I tattoo her eight-pointed star on the inside of my wrist to remind myself of her duality, of both my parts: sex and war. I wear her as if I can claim both, not yet realizing that I’m still conflating sex with trauma, and that one has dramatically complicated the other. I think I am triumphant, embracing the icon of a goddess who is more similar to me than any god, and not realizing that indeed the worst is yet to come.

  * * *

  It’s easy for me to enjoy college, sitting among students who are mostly younger and a little less experienced. In one of my first English classes, the professor asks us to introduce ourselves with three interesting facts. I listen to the kids just out of high school talk about their majors and hobbies; when it gets to me I lean back, embracing my masculine persona with one foot resting on the other knee, arm flung over the back of the chair, and say, “I was a Persian-Farsi linguist, with a proficiency in Japanese, and I was in Military Intelligence for the Army. I was deployed during the initial invasion into Iraq.”

  “Jesus,” one of the students breathes. “This is literally like one of those National Guard commercials where everyone is like blah, blah, and then there’s you.”

  I raise my eyebrows at him, smug.

  “I guess I won’t be talking about politics anymore,” the professor laughs nervously, obviously regretting her earlier anti-Bush rant. I shrug and smile.

  In another English class, I sit next to a girl in a hijab. She’s from Baghdad, she says.

  “Oh, I’ve been there!” I say with delight, thrusting out my hand to shake hers. “I was there with the Army. Operation Iraqi Freedom I and II.” I grin, so enthused for this connection, expecting her to brighten, smile, embrace me.

  Instead her dark brow curls and she stares at my hand. “So I’m supposed to be happy you’re one of the ones who invaded my country?” She turns back toward the professor, shoulder pressed against the table, body tilted away so all that I can see of her is her straight spine.

  Well, fuck you, too, I inwardly snarl, deflating, dropping my hand into my lap. What does she know, I sniff, crossing my arms aggressively over my chest. She’s here in pretty America, what does she know? The truth is I should have asked, because maybe she knew a lot. It was so easy to be proud then, though.

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I snap at another student on campus, getting in his face at his own rally, standing closer than he’d like, and he leans back just slightly, the sign he’s holding overhead flagging. “I was there when grown men dropped to their knees, sobbing with joy, when Saddam was captured. They begged to hang him. I was there when his sons were killed. I saw how they celebrated in the streets.” I quiver with fury. “I know the stories of what Saddam did to his people. I heard them firsthand.” And I had. I’d heard the stories of what his sons did to women in the streets, of the kidnappings and the murder, the torture of citizens, how citizens feared bullets in the head for something as inoffensive as having the wrong accent. It was so easy to be proud then, when we helped stop all that. “So don’t you tell me we’re over there slaughtering innocent people, that we’re killing women and children, because you don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. It’s the insurgents killing all those people.”

  The student scoffs. “Why would they kill their own people?”

  I’m stunned into momentary silence. “Are you—seriously, do you not—Shi’ite versus Sunni? Civil war? Do you have no idea what’s happen—no, no, fuck you.” I turn dramatically on one heel. “Just fuck you.” Because they’re fucking kids behind computers who have no idea what they’re talking about—

  “I’ve read the accounts of soldiers who were there—” he calls after me.

  “I was there.” I turn back. I don’t know if he can’t believe me because I’m wearing a skirt and heels, or because I’m here and not there, but it’s really starting to piss me off.

  “—and they said it happened all the time, where soldiers killed civilians. It happens all the time!”

  “I’m telling you firsthand experience, not something from something you read somewhere!”

  He shakes his head at me and I flip him the bird before storming off. Of course, there was that one time when a group of Marines raped those two Iraqi teenagers, one literally to death, and the other was later honor-killed by her family, but that doesn’t occur to me until several steps later and I’m not about to go back and tell him that.

  Then there are the young women who look at me strangely, in awe or horror, as if they don’t know how to process me. I stand outside their boxes. They can’t decide if I’ve bravely defied the machine or if I’ve been cowed and indoctrinated by it. “Is it even anyplace for a woman?” some ask. “Would you suggest I join?” ask others. One particular woman stands before me, face open and bright, staring up at me as she says, “I’m thinking of joining the Army. Like becoming an officer. What do you think?”

  I think I feel old as I look at her, she who is young in more than just physical years. I open my mouth but nothing comes out. How do I answer this? Whom am I loyal to? Do I side with the pride of the uniform, the love for the service, for those years that made me hard but strong? With the love of flag and country and the brothers and sisters I stood and fought beside? Or should I be loyal to my sex? Should I tell her about the darker side of being a woman in that uniform while standing with those brothers and sisters? Should I warn her about what the love of flag and country will cost her?

  Instead I stutter, “It’ll either be the greatest thing you ever do, or the worst.” Which isn’t an answer at all, and the girl knows it. She tilts her head at me, frowning. “It’s…hard,” I clarify lamely.

  “I don’t mind hard,” she shoots back, lifting her chin in defiance.

  “You have to be able to handle a joke and you can’t be sensitive.” I’m already subconsciously training her on how to conform. “Like not at all.”

  She practically rolls her eyes at me. “Obviously. I grew up with three brothers. I’m used to hanging around guys.”

  Which isn’t the same at all, but suddenly I don’t want to scare her away. “Honestly?” I say with a sigh, deflating. “I loved it.”

  Because I did. Overall, by and large, I loved it. And knowing what I know now, if I could go
back to the girl I was and stand over her shoulder as she leaned over a contract, readying to sign her name, I don’t think I could whisper in her ear, Don’t do it. I don’t think I would take it all away. I’d lose running along the beaches in Monterey, flutter kicks in the tall grass of Soldier’s Field, my drill sergeant finally smiling at me, the one night in the Iraqi desert as it grew colder and colder and the sky was a blanket of unadulterated stars, all the good and all the bad. I’m not so sure I could change me.

  She grins because it’s what she wants to hear. I’m just here as her confirmation bias.

  As she walks away, I feel a little guilty. I don’t think I properly prepared her. I feel like I lied somehow. But the Army needs good women. It needs strong women. It needs those of us who have no interest in white picket fences and traditional domesticity. We have been around for thousands of years, us women who don’t want to conform, and they need to get used to us being there. We’re not going away. We’re not going to let them win this one.

  * * *

  It was so easy to be proud and cocksure then. But that was years ago. That was before we broke a region, like a toddler playing with a delicate toy, growing uninterested in the shattered bits when they don’t work anymore. Ask me now, “Are you proud of your service over there,” and I’m not so young and arrogant.

  I’m proud of my intentions, at least, of the hope I had that we would all watch Iraq rise from the ashes and flames. I had dreamed of returning one day with my daughter or son, to see a bustling metropolis, rich with both history and innovation. I envisioned it thriving like any world center, with us standing under the Gate of Ishtar or burying our feet in Babylonian soil. I wanted to crouch down and whisper in my future child’s ear, “I helped make this,” a dream I recognize now as so terribly naive and arrogant. I was proud of the desire to better this world, of wanting to end a dictatorship that only terrorized and murdered. But can I still be proud if nothing is left to speak over, just a nation plunged into further civil war? What have we done for Iraq? What has been left now, as the region deteriorates, as ISIS slips in, stealing what was once meant to be great? What did we kill for? What did we die for? I don’t know. The individual soldiers, those of us in the bottom ranks who sacrificed the most, at least our intentions were pure, though.