A Former Marine Looks Back on Her Life in a Male-Dominated Military

UNBECOMING
A Memoir of Disobedience
By Anuradha Bhagwati

As a young woman at Marine Corps Officer Candidate School in 1999, Anuradha Bhagwati received a letter. “I fear I am the reason you joined the Marines,” her father wrote. Indeed, Bhagwati was fleeing the demons of a harsh upbringing. But the answers to her existential questions were more complicated than she’d anticipated; in the Marine Corps, Bhagwati found a culture of entrenched misogyny and sexual violence. She became not only a Marine, but also an activist.

Bhagwati’s memoir, “Unbecoming,” offers a distinctive lens on the Marines: She is South Asian, bisexual and a forceful, frank writer. The daughter of two well-known Indian economists, she graduated from Yale and dropped out of graduate school at Columbia, where her parents taught. In the Marine Corps, she held posts in Okinawa, Thailand and Camp Lejeune, and excelled as a marksman and runner. She also faced vicious sexual harassment. When she tried to get the Marines to address it, she ran into bureaucratic cover-ups and was thwarted by the conventions of chains of command.

Bhagwati writes beautifully about the body, describing everything from the pleasures of the basketball court to martial arts training in the Marine Corps with brutal clarity. (This book also has some of the best descriptions I’ve read of what it is like to be the only woman of color in a roomful of white men. “In the national security world,” she writes, “my Brownness and my gender were so loud and obvious in a sea of white dudes that it often felt like I was screaming even when I said nothing. The Marines had prepared me well for this.”) Although she does not see combat — a fact that haunts her — training leaves her with numerous injuries; the creeping physical toll of her service is undeniable.

But Bhagwati’s book stands out most as a chronicle of overcoming psychological trauma. She assesses the authorities with a matter-of-factness that excludes neither the emotional pain of discrimination nor the persistent pull of those in power. When she eventually files and wins a case against one of her tormentors, the victory is hollow: Marine chain of command means that little happens to the perpetrator. In her fight to make sure other women have real recourse, she leaves the Marines and leads the Service Women’s Action Network to lobby for change. The job is energizing and exhausting by turns. She is as careful an observer of civilian hierarchies as she is of military ones, and raises important questions about inequality, activism and storytelling. Navigating the media and Capitol Hill are additional trials.

Misogyny and gender segregation in the military make violence against women possible around the globe, she argues. What lessons are men absorbing through the military’s double standards? She extends her empathy to fellow servicewomen, the families of veterans and foreign civilians, especially women interacting with the United States military. “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 servicewomen’s forgiveness, or the forgiveness of wives and children, or the forgiveness of tens of thousands of women and girls around the globe?” she asks.

Bhagwati is interested in forgiveness; she is generous, earning our trust by offering understanding — and a scrupulous detailing of good works — even to those she criticizes, a varied list that includes First Lt. Dan Choi, Representative Jackie Speier, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand and Joe Biden. She offers critiques of politicians, the military, her fellow veterans and the media. But she does not lapse into self-righteousness because she does not spare herself. The book is at its most powerful when she writes about who she became in response to the violence the military trained her to commit. Ultimately, “Unbecoming” is a chronicle of letting that violence go.