Unbecoming by Anuradha Bhagwati

Author:Anuradha Bhagwati
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

CHAPTER 10

Unraveling

In 2007, three years out of the Marines, I was in the mental health wing at the Manhattan VA Medical Center, crying in an empty room on the second floor. I was on the phone with Eli Painted Crow, a retired soldier in California whom I met through a network of veterans opposed to the US war in Iraq. She and I bonded instantly, cussing up a storm and howling over everything from our mutual suspicion of institutions to the mistreatment of everyone without enough rank or testicles to matter.

As a cried into my cell phone, Eli played the part of Battle Buddy. She was the only reason I was here today in the first place, in this Mordor-like building with stark white walls and hundreds of dudes who look like battered remnants of human beings.

I would come to know Eli as the woman who saved my life. She survived Iraq, barely. I survived, well, I still didn’t know what. But she knew pain, whether it was the pain of her own tribal peoples or the pain of women who had been stomped on or cast aside. Though we came from different worlds, she didn’t deny my suffering.

Twenty years of soldiering (three of them on the drill field) and rabble-rousing for powerless troops made me trust her. Three thousand miles away, she calmed me down with words about how I needed this and how it would be good for me—anything to keep me from leaving the hospital.

I returned to the waiting area, where spirits were festering. Every being was in conversation with someone here or beyond. Some men lurked before office doors, demanding an audience. Others barked at the television set, cursing idiot anchors, Al Qaeda, or the Mets. Some sat alone, reciting lengthy monologues that were interrupted only by grunts of disapproval from some invisible arbitrator.

In these situations I was relieved to be unnoticed. But I made myself smaller still. A door swung open down the hall.

“Ann-uhr . . . Ann-you . . . uh . . .”

I did not need this attention. I stood quickly. Men’s voices, both real and imagined, paused. Eyes were watching all parts and angles of me, waiting for my next move. I armored, instantly, as I had learned so well to do in the Corps, and followed a woman’s quick footsteps down a hall and into a small room. No words were exchanged. No introductions made. I barely knew I was there.

I sat down with a chubby fiftysomething administrative aide. She stared into a computer screen, mindlessly dishing out a government mandated survey for new veterans, a verbal back and forth about why I was here and what may have screwed with my seamless reintegration back into society. The exchange was about as warm and comforting as a military pap smear. The pace, the coldness, and the automaton-like manner of this woman were starting to mess with the fragile sense Eli had built up in me that everything was going to be all right.

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