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

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.