By Jerri O'Bell, O-Dark-Thirty @ MilitaryTimes.com, April 15

[....] Long before she earned the Eagle, Globe and Anchor, Bhagwati was a daughter born to a pair of brilliant economics professors who emigrated to the United States from India.

Her father in Unbecoming rarely seems satisfied with her accomplishments: athletic prowess on the basketball court, entrance into Manhattan’s academically prestigious Stuyvesant High School and a degree from Yale before shipping off to Quantico’s Officer Candidate School.

Anyone who has experienced military indoctrination will nod knowingly at her descriptions of the physical and mental suffering at OCS — and her awed descriptions of a revered drill instructor, Staff Sgt. Brenda Baughman, who pushed women to meet standards set for male Marines. “DIs had a way of imprinting themselves upon a human being’s deepest layers of consciousness — infiltrating dreams, altering language learned at birth, reprogramming basic bodily functions and priorities, desires and fears,” she wrote.

But Bhagwati learns other lessons in OCS that unfortunately sound all too familiar to many women in uniform [....]