Serve your country. No matter what. Even if you're raped by a colleague. NYT:
Classified as AWOL, Lieutenant Says She Was Raped at Army Base.
A lieutenant in the New Jersey National Guard has been accused of going AWOL because she has refused for the last two months to return to an Army base in Mississippi where, she says, a fellow officer raped her.
UPDATE: The military morons somewhat came to their senses...she no longer has to report to the base where her attacker is -- Army won't send officer to site of alleged rape (NJ Star-Ledger). It's not clear that they really get it.
The update:
The Army has dropped its demand that an AWOL New Jersey National Guard lieutenant who said she was raped at a base in Mississippi report back to duty at the scene of the alleged assault. Instead, Lt. Jennifer Dyer was directed to report to an Army installation in New Jersey.
At the same time, the Army said it is conducting an internal review of how it responded to Dyer's claim that she was raped during training in August by a fellow officer at Camp Shelby, Miss.
Lt. Col. Richard Steele, a spokesman at First U.S. Army headquarters at Fort Gillem, Ga., said everything that took place after Dyer reported being raped on Aug. 8 is under investigation.
"Were there some things we did that shouldn't have been done? We're investigating," Steele said yesterday. "We're reviewing all of our procedures and that would include her treatment."
Dyer has said she felt mistreated by the Army after she reported the assault because her complaint was viewed with skepticism by her commanders and because she had to pay for her own medical treatment. Her alleged assailant, she said, told investigators the sex was consensual.
Dyer views the Army's offer to report to a facility in New Jersey with skepticism.
"This doesn't answer my questions," she said yesterday. "I could go to Fort Dix and they could ship me anywhere they want. It doesn't make me want to trust them."
Dyer, 26, a sheriff's officer in South Jersey, left Mississippi for New Jersey several days after the alleged assault and had refused the Army's orders to return to Camp Shelby after her convalescent leave expired on Aug. 30. She had been considered AWOL, or absent without leave.
Dyer agreed to be identified by The Star-Ledger after her name and details of her case were posted on the Internet.
The nine-year National Guard veteran had gone to Camp Shelby in April to train for deployment to Iraq with the 250th Signal Battalion of the New Jersey Guard. Four days before she was allegedly assaulted, she was transferred to the 278th Regimental Combat Team of the Tennessee National Guard, which is also slated to deploy to Iraq.
After details of Dyer's case were reported last week in The Star-Ledger and the Oregonian newspaper, the Army on Saturday issued a statement saying Dyer no longer needed to return to the Mississippi base and could stay in New Jersey.
"The Army understands that Lt. Dyer may feel threatened by her alleged assailant, so she does not have to return to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, at this time," the Army said in a statement.
Dyer's attorney, Frederick Klepp of Cherry Hill, said yesterday that the details of the Army's offer remained unclear. Although the Army released a statement to the media, Klepp said officials from First Army headquarters were unable to give him details yesterday beyond proposing that Dyer report to Fort Dix.
Dyer reported to a superior that she was raped in her barracks by a lieutenant from the 278th Regimental Combat Team. The superior officer called police and Dyer was taken to a civilian hospital near Fort Shelby because the medical clinic on the base did not have the equipment to process a rape victim.
Yesterday, Steele, the First Army spokesman, said the investigation into Dyer's allegation has been completed and forwarded to the commander of the alleged assailant's unit. Steele refused to say what the investigation uncovered.
The commander of the 278th would determine whether the alleged assailant should be prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Steele said. Calls yesterday to the commander's officer were referred to the First Army spokesman.
Dyer, who said she offered twice to take a polygraph test during the course of the investigation, was interviewed for eight hours over two days by an Army criminal investigator "who kept telling me that filing a false complaint would have a negative impact on my career."
She said yesterday that her only desire is to be allowed to leave the Army.
"I don't know how to make them understand that it's the only solution," she said. "I gave them ample opportunity to do the right thing and they continue to act as if I'm just a hindrance."
***
They initially gave her 2 weeks off to deal with being sexually assaulted. She's told to just buck up and move on.
From the original article:
The lieutenant, Jennifer Dyer, 26, says she was raped by a colleague on Aug. 8 while training for deployment to Iraq at Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, Miss., her fiancé, Edward Ottepka, said yesterday. Lieutenant Dyer would not discuss the case herself, Mr. Ottepka said, and is living in seclusion "close to people who are offering her care and support."
Mr. Ottepka, a police officer and former marine, said the Army granted Lieutenant Dyer a two-week convalescent leave after the attack, but then demanded that she return to Camp Shelby. Although she submitted several reports to the Army stating that "her mental health would suffer" if she returned - and even offered to complete her tour at another post in New Jersey - the Army classified her as AWOL when she failed to report for duty in Mississippi on Aug. 30, Mr. Ottepka said.
"She was presented with a choice of abandoning her sanity or taking a stand and taking care of herself," he said. "She's chosen to hopefully become a productive member of society, but it's made her an outlaw."
...After the attack, Lieutenant Dyer wrote, Army investigators secluded her in a motel room on Camp Shelby where she was interrogated for at least five hours. "I was made to feel," she wrote, "as if I should have never reported the incident at all and that I was the offending party as opposed to the victim in this case."
A few days later, she wrote, Mr. Ottepka flew to Mississippi and helped her get a blood test. In her statement, Lieutenant Dyer said the test "confirmed the presence of herpes type 2."
Then, on convalescent leave, she returned to New Jersey, where she visited the Atlantic County Women's Center, a private psychiatrist and a private doctor - all of whom counseled her not to return to Mississippi, she wrote. Mr. Ottepka said she gave her commanding officers these reports, which "stated clearly that going back would be absolutely disastrous to her short- and long-term mental health."
But the officers ignored the reports, Lieutenant Dyer wrote, and ordered her to return to Camp Shelby or face prosecution. One officer, Lieutenant Dyer wrote, told her "that two weeks was a generous amount of time for leave and that it is enough time for a victim of such a crime to be recovered and returned to duty.
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