We were different from the other Marines in additional ways. The smell of death permeated our clothes, hair, skin, and fingers, and the remains permanently stained our uniforms. Our cammies smelled different. They were stained differently, in different patterns in different places and shades. Because we sat alone, together, in the chow hall, forcing down food, the other Marines could easily spot us there too. They stayed away. They didn’t want to be around us and we didn’t want to be around them. Some thought we’d bring them bad luck, and we didn’t want them thinking that. We especially did not want them to know what we knew.
The Marines who shared my tent weren’t mean to me, but they weren’t my friends either. There was simply nothing there, nothing at all between us. They didn’t ask me to go to chow with them. When they went to the PX, they didn’t invite me along. When they went to the head or to the chapel, they would ask others to go with them, but never me.
There was one Marine in my tent, Corporal Dennis, who did try to befriend me and, initially, we did do things together. We went to chow, ran, practiced martial arts. I was offered friendship, but, more for Dennis’ sake than my own, I refused to accept it. Still, the Corporal kept trying. At one point, I was gone from the tent for three straight days processing remains. On that third night I walked back to the tent alone, covered with death’s odor and haunted by its gruesome images. I stumbled to my cot and braced myself to fall onto it when I saw a note on the sleeping bag. It was from Dennis, who, despite my many rebuffs, was still trying to develop a friendship with me. The note asked if we could talk. The previous three days had been trying ones for the Marines of Mortuary Affairs, and here was someone obviously willing to listen … wanting to listen, offering me the opportunity to talk. But I did not want to talk. I didn’t want to hear myself describing what I had just gone through. I didn’t want to fuel the images still fresh in my mind. Nor did I want Dennis to hear about it, to see it, or to even begin to know what I knew. I hit the rack.
Because there were only two females in Mortuary Affairs, they lived in Tent City with the general population. They had to deal not only with the stigma of being in Mortuary Affairs, but with the many challenges of being a female too.
For example, when a female Marine has chow with a male Marine, there’s a good chance his objective is not company or a meal, but sex. The assumption made by all who see them at lunch will be that they are involved sexually, and that’s what these observers will tell their friends. If she watches a DVD in a male Marine’s tent, the same sexual motive is likely present, and the same gossip will follow, even if she is only one of five people gathered around the laptop’s screen. If she agrees to PT (physical training) with a male Marine after he swore that he had no ulterior motive, he’ll try to persuade her to do a series of squats or another exercise that simulates a sexual position. Of the hundred or so possible exercises they could do, he wants her to drop down as she bends her knees, as her legs open and her shorts loosen and fall away from her thighs. Onlookers will interpret that as a sure sign that they are sleeping with each other. In no time at all, she’ll be labeled a slut and placed into the same category as her tent mate who agreed to sleep with every male member of the platoon, in the order in which their beds were arranged in their tent, and who went ahead and did just that. The male Marines who want to sleep with her, but are not, are insulted and perhaps furious. After all, there is no policy prohibiting it and she’s already sleeping with everyone else, they believe, so why not with them?
It’s unlikely that a female Marine will find much solace or safety or strength among the other females, as so many of them have given into the pressure and have accepted the label. If this young woman doesn’t join in on the game, the female Marines will, like their male counterparts, label her too. They’ll stigmatize her as a “bitch” or “dyke” or a “prude” or a “religious nut,” and they’ll find additional evidence of her deviance in her unwillingness to color her hair, to do her nails, or even to apply make-up at 4:30 a.m.— while holding a flashlight in the darkness of the tent.
If working in Mortuary Affairs can be relatively lonely for a female, life in the Marines can be extremely lonely. A woman might be the only female in her platoon, and that fact alone makes her popular, because all the male Marines want to hang out with her. They want to know where she’s going for lunch and what she’s doing after work. And she wants to give in even though doing so leads to problems. Every day she wants to give in. Every day she wants desperately to go to lunch with them. She wants to party with them. She wants to drink with them. They are her platoon, her Marines, and they are all going out together. A deep loneliness flows through her and not giving into it is hard. It is a terrible pain, an awful existence.
I knew several female Marines who tried to navigate their way through this tangle of derogatory labels and differential treatment by faking having a boyfriend. One carried around a picture of a former boyfriend and talked about him as though he was still in her life. An other found an actual boyfriend, more or less, a Marine, one who was fairly close by, was big, tough, and Hispanic, and was in a leadership position. “Let the male Marines screw around with me now!” she would say. “Let the female Marines talk badly about me now!” she would add. “In either English or Spanish!”
Meanwhile, the male members of the unit had their own tent, one that was not in Tent City, which meant it was farther from the bunker. They were secluded from the general population. They too kept to themselves, and for the same reason. It was easier, especially for the other Marines, for the Mortuary Affairs people to remain apart and it was better for us to stay together. Apart and together. Apart, we didn’t have to talk to the other Marines about what we were doing. Among ourselves, there was no need to talk because we already knew. While we were all Marines, our experiences with death differed: most of the others might not have spent a single minute with a single Marine from our camp who died in Iraq.
We were to a degree more like the Marines we processed than we were like those who were still alive. The bodies wore our uniforms and haircuts, were our age, more or less, and did not fear or avoid us. And unlike the men and women who were still breathing and fighting, these Marines now understood clearly and accepted completely what we knew.
I believe that every Marine thinks that they are going to die, that it will be a heroic death, one that saves the lives of others. That, however, is a glorified notion, an abstract idea, a vague picture in the mind, a blurry image from a half-remembered movie. We want to save lives, but we haven’t grasped what that will entail, and we don’t want to grasp it because it may keep us from doing what we have to do. Knowing exactly what our dream involves will make doing it even harder. Well, we, the Marines of the Mortuary Affairs platoon, are the reality to that collective hallucination. While other Marines continue to carry around the dream, we clean up its reality.
8
Pushed
NEW YORK—U.S. female soldiers in Iraq were assaulted or raped by male soldiers in the women’s latrines, and an alarming number committed suicide, Col. Janis Karpinski reportedly testified before an international human rights commission of inquiry last month.
“Because the women were in fear of getting up in the darkness [to go to the latrine], they were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon,” Karpinski testified, according to a report on Truthout.org. “In the 100 degree heat, they were dying of dehydration in their sleep.”
The latrine for female soldiers at Camp Victory wasn’t located near their barracks, so they had to go outside if they needed to use the bathroom, Karpinski told retired U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth in a September 2004 interview, Cohn reported. “There were no lights near any of their facilities, so women were doubly easy targets in the dark of the night.” It was there that male soldiers assaulted and raped women soldiers.
Karpinski testified that a surgeon for the coalition’s joint task force said in a briefing that “women in fear of getting up in the hours of darkness to go
out to the port-a-lets or the latrines were not drinking liquids after 3 or 4 in the afternoon, and in 120-degree heat or warmer, because there was no air-conditioning at most of the facilities, they were dying from dehydration in their sleep.”
From: “Rape Fears Lead Women Soldiers to Suicide, Death,”
Vermont Guardian, February 8, 2006
If the Mortuary Affairs Marines were to some degree ostracized, the two females in the unit may have been pushed further from the mainstream of life at the Camp than were their male counterparts. While there are female Marines, the subculture of the Corps remains strictly masculine. Values like physical strength and emotional toughness are associated with men and Marines. Values like brotherhood and the attendant belief that we are a “band of brothers,” are thought of in terms of a group of men who are as close as those who share the same parents, not as an alliance of men and women, of brothers and sisters. The rules that regulate our interaction, that descend from and support those values, are those that emerged long ago, from a society dominated by men and a Marine Corps consisting only of men. All of us, including the females, dress in men’s clothing, express emotions through men’s curse words, communicate through their deep and curt Marine voice and their forceful Marine gestures. Marines bark to each other. They engage in PT competitions with each trying to push their bodies further than the next guy. The word “fuck” is inserted into any word or phrase at any given time. Even when an officer is present, this is the nature of the game, which gives it an official stamp of approval.
The culture inside the females’ tents contrasted with that inside the male tents enough to remind the females that they were still living in a man’s world from which the tents provided a refuge. Cursing wasn’t as prevalent and the atmosphere was more relaxed. Much more of the talk was about relationships—with one’s kids or parents, or with the staff sergeant one tent over. This last example would be discussed with the emotional interest that would have taken place in a college dorm among the classmates of a young woman who was carrying on an affair with her teaching assistant. While the men watched DVDs that glorified war and hyper-masculinity, the women were glued to a season of Sex and the City episodes. Each episode would trigger long conversations about fashion—the latest styles of clothing and shoes—and the clubs in which it was modeled.
Outside the females’ tents, on the base at large and in the Corps in general, the topics of conversation are men’s topics—sex, usually, and cars or sports. The DVDs we watched most often were men’s favorites, boys’ videos, really, like Super Troopers. Eight months of Super Troopers. Two-thirds of an entire year during which we all, men and women alike, continually peppered our conversations with lines from that movie, testosterone driven, sophomoric adolescent boys’ lines, like, I am all that is man!
The eight-count cadences that motivated us and coordinated our marching and running in formation, were created by and for men. Cadences like, “Momma and poppa were lying in bed, poppa rolled over and this is what he said, ‘Give me some! PT!’” They are straight out of an amped-up masculine world, yet the women stomp and march to them too, alongside the men. And they march along to cadences like:
See the lady dressed in black, she makes a living on her back,
See the lady dressed in red, she makes a living in her bed,
See the lady dressed in brown, she makes a living going up and down,
See the lady dressed in green, she gives out like a coke machine,
See the lady dressed in gray, she likes to make it in the hay,
See the lady dressed in white, she knows how to do it right,
Another lady dressed in green, she goes down like a submarine.
In the Corps, we are told from the first day of bootcamp that we are not black or white or brown or yellow or red or purple, but green. We are equal. This is drilled into us. We are treated equally. We are all one. We are all green. But the green we march to goes down like a submarine, and she is a woman, like six percent of all Marines.
The marching and running cadences also served to maintain a way of life and a way of seeing things that encouraged even top notch Marines to be perceived as female Marines. Several were entirely offensive to the sensibilities of many, but particularly women.
See those kids over by the river drop some napalm and watch them quiver. Cause napalm sticks to kids! Napalm sticks to kids!
Several of the specific exercises we were ordered to do reinforced the male dominated subculture, with even legitimate ones being sexualized. “Hello Dollies” had us on our backs, spreading our extended legs, like scissors, to the leader’s rhythmic count, “One, two three,” to which we would shout, “One!” He would shout back, “One two, three!” and we would respond, “Two.” This would continue until the leader decided to stop. That exercise was a different experience for the two women in the group than it was for the men.
Young men want to have sex and there is little preventing them from doing so in the Marines. Technically, a Marine is not to have sex with a subordinate, as that would disrupt the chain of command and call into question the motives behind personnel decisions. There, on the ground, during a deployment, that would create a mess. Otherwise, most Marines will try to have sex whenever they can, with whichever females are available.
A female not interested in these advances may keep her hair short and her cover on, go without make-up and decline company at lunch; she won’t watch the DVDs and pretends not to hear the jokes. She shows no reaction at all to the pornographic image on the monitor and refuses to drink water after late afternoon so she won’t have to walk alone to the head in the middle of the night.
But young women enjoy feeling desirable. For some female Marines, it’s a pleasant surprise to suddenly learn that men want them. Many men. In the civilian world, weeks or months may have gone by without a hint of interest from a man. A seeming eternity of weekend nights out with girlfriends, afternoons alone in coffee shops, talking on a cell phone to let observers know that, yes, she does have friends. Here, that world is turned on its head. Here you are a movie star, a rock star, and a porn star all rolled into one. All the male Marines want her, and with a relentless intensity that makes it seem real, that makes her feel like the most beautiful woman on earth.
It’s hard for a woman to resist the continual onslaught of sexual overtures. She’s far from home, and maybe for the first time. She’s experiencing the relative deprivation of life during a deployment. She may be surrounded by death. She is lonely and wants the acceptance of male Marines who see her as a second class Marine. Peer pressure is strong from other female Marines who are having affairs or who are simply sleeping with many men. She has been socialized since childhood to gauge her worth, to some extent, by the amount of attention she gets from men. The civilian culture from home, from the college campuses housing young women her age, is in her, including those norms that tell her that sex with random guys, sex without intimacy, is understandable. Not only does the masculine subculture of the Corps push her toward these encounters, there is a penalty awaiting her if she refuses to give in to the pressure.
You could push back on the system in small ways, but it usually wasn’t willing to budge. It was like trying to push back the ocean with your hands. You could make the effort, you could do something, you could extend your arms and open your hands, lean forward and push outward, but without any discernable effect. You were trying, but you were standing there alone, pushing back on a huge social fact, hundreds of thousands of people big, and a couple of hundred years old.
I tried pushing back once or twice, but without success. Once, we were marching to the cadence:
Momma and Papa were laying in bed, Momma rolled over, this is what she said, Give me some, PT! Good for you, Good for me,
In relative terms, this lyric may seem benign, but why is the male the one who is taking care of (some need of) the woman? Why isn’t the man rolling over on his side and asking? Asking, not telling or just assuming?
; On this one occasion when we were running and I was leading the cadence, I transposed the genders. I fell out of formation and turned around and sang my own version. Instead of singing, “momma and papa were lying in bed …,” I switched it to, “papa and momma were lying in bed, momma rolled over and said….” I placed the female in the more dominant role, and I changed up some of the other words. That sounds innocuous enough, but I caught hell for it anyway. After we returned from a run, one of the sergeants approached me and said, “Goodell, you know that kind of language is unacceptable.”
“But it’s acceptable for Marines to say that about females?” I asked.
“It’s disrespectful,” he replied. “These cadences have been around for a long time. Who in the hell are you to change them?”
Some of the other Marines chimed in and added that back in the old Corps they could chant whatever they wanted, without having to worry if it was going to offend some female.
How, though, could it be otherwise? Gather men together, young men full of testosterone, pump up their masculinity, remove them from the constraints of normal, mainstream society, away from their parents, their pastors and priests and rabbis, away from their wives if they are married or their girlfriends if they have them, and then toss a few young women in among them and watch what happens. If two women were assigned to a floor in a male dorm for the four years of their undergraduate education, would their experiences with men be unlike those of female Marines during a deployment?
Jessica Goodell & John Hearn Page 5