There are more women in the U.S. Armed Forces now than at any time in our history. Like their male counterparts, there are different reasons why they decide to commit years of their life in order to serve their country. No matter their reason for serving, they do so with honor and courage which makes it all the more sickening that these women are resorting to carrying weapons with them when going to the latrine in order to protect them selves from the fellow male servicemembers.
Link.Spc. Mickiela Montoya, 21, who was in Iraq with the National Guard in 2005, took to carrying a knife with her at all times. "The knife wasn't for the Iraqis," she told me. "It was for the guys on my own side."
A DOD financed report stated that one-third of a sample of female veterans seeking V.A. health care reported being the victim of a rape or attempted rape. 37% of that group reported that they were raped multiple times and 14% reported that they were gang raped. Link
In her in-depth Salon article, Helen Benedict examines and drives home the epidemic proportions of sexual assault in the Unites States military and just how little is being done to stop it. In 2004, Donald Rumsfeld ordered a task force to "investigate" the problem. Unfortunately, it was under Rumsfeld's watch that this sickening situation spiraled out of control and his own incompetence sealed the fate of any attempt to put an end to this issue. In fact, the military is nowgranting waivers to those with criminal records including domestic abuse in order to meet recruitment goals.
Yet according to the waivers, just four days earlier the Air Guard's national headquarters had approved the enlistment of a California recruit who had been charged in October 2003 with "assault by means likely to produce great bodily injury." True, the recruit was a 17-year-old juvenile when he committed the crime for which he was later convicted, but that date was less than two years before he was admitted to the Air Guard.
Other examples from the Air Guard files suggest a wider problem:
- After his parents filed a domestic-abuse complaint against him in 2000, a recruit in Rhode Island was sentenced to one year of probation, ordered to have "no contact" with his parents, and required to undergo counseling and to pay court costs. Air National Guard rules say domestic violence convictions make recruits ineligible -- no exceptions granted. But the records show that the recruiter in this case brought the issue to an Air Guard staff judge advocate, who reviewed the file and determined that the offense did not "meet the domestic violence crime criteria." As a result of this waiver, the recruit was admitted to his state's Air Guard on May 3, 2005.
- A recruit with DWI violations in June 2001 and April 2002 received a waiver to enter the Iowa Air National Guard on July 15, 2005. The waiver request from the Iowa Guard to the Pentagon declares that the recruit "realizes that he made the wrong decision to drink and drive."
- Another recruit for the Rhode Island Air National Guard finished five years of probation in 2002 for breaking and entering, apparently into his girlfriend's house. A waiver got him into the Guard in June 2005.
That is unbelievable. At a time when women soldiers are living in fear of sexual assault, the military is granting waivers to allow violent offenders to join the U.S. Armed forces.
The stories told by female soldiers are sickening to hear:
You walk into the chow hall and there's a bunch of guys who just stop eating and stare at you. Every time you bend down, somebody will say something. It got to the point where I was afraid to walk past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. It really gets you down.
There are only three kinds of female the men let you be in the military: a bitch, a ho or a dyke," said Montoya, the soldier who carried a knife for protection. "This guy out there, he told me he thinks the military sends women over to give the guys eye candy to keep them sane. He said in Vietnam they had prostitutes to keep them from going crazy, but they don't have those in Iraq. So they have women soldiers instead.
Pickett herself was sexually attacked when she was training in Nicaragua before being deployed to Iraq. "I was sexually assaulted by a superior officer when I was 19, but I didn't know where to turn, so I never reported it," she told me.
My team leader offered me up to $250 for a hand job. He would always make sure that we were out alone together at the beginning, and he wouldn't stop pressuring me for sex.
Many of these women, our mothers, our daughters, our sisters are not only returning home and having to deal with PTSD like male soldiers, but they are also returning home having to suffer the effects of rape, sexual abuse and a constant stream of sexual harassment.
So just what is being done to combat this horrific situation faced by female servicemembers? Well, there is a website set up to advise women what to so if they are assaulted. It instructs women how to report a rape, however, a lack of rape kits makes the sexual assault more difficult to prove. The DOD insists that it's "reforms" are working and point to the fact that substantially more rapes were reported in 2005 (2,374) than in 2004 (1700). However, according to those interviewed by Benedict, there is a large gap between what the Army promises to do and what they actually do.
The case of Army specialist Suzanne Swift shows just how absurd and criminal the Army's handling of this situation has been. In January 2006, Swift went AWOL just days before her unit was to return to Iraq for deployment. Her reason for refusing to delpoy with her unit - she had been continuously sexually harassed by three of her superior officers during her last tour in Iraq. As her next deployment neared, she became increasingly stressed out and began to suffer high levels of anxiety.
She claimed that he propositioned her for sex the first day the two of them arrived in Iraq and that she felt coerced into having a sexual relationship with him that lasted four months - the relationship consisting, she said, of his knocking on her door late at night and demanding intercourse. When she finally ended this arrangement, Swift told me, the sergeant retaliated by ordering her to do solitary forced marches from one side of the camp to another at night in full battle gear and by humiliating her in front of her fellow soldiers.
So how did the Army deal with Swift's situation? They courtmartialed her - stripping her of her rank, imprisoning her for a month and then re-assigning her to Fort Irwin where she must serve for two more years and face the possibility of future deployments. The men who assaulted her received letters of reprimand.
It's amazing how General Peter Pace feels the urgent need to proclaim that homosexuality is immoral, yet he knows full well about the horrors faced by female servicemembers and doesn't think that this issue deserves any mention or attention at all.