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.

Image Anuradha Bhagwati, 2011. Credit... Cliff Owen/Associated Press

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.