Lies, Cover-Ups, and the Culture of Protecting Our Boys

by Ginmar—liberal pinko commie hippie feminist female combat veteran who loves zombies and werewolves and hates trolls, twits, and MRAs.

Col. Ann Wright has written a powerful piece about the murders of US military women being disguised as suicides. Several of these women were obviously assaulted and murdered by unknown assailants, mirroring the murders of military women at Fort Bragg by men they were involved with in some way; two of those murder victims were pregnant. The last case she cites, that of Spc. Kamisha Block, reveals how the military let down the soldier, her family, and everyone: Block was assaulted by the same soldier three times, though he was punished only once, permitted to stay in the same unit, and finally—no doubt encouraged by getting away with it twice—he killed her by shooting her five times and then killed himself in the same tent. Her family was told she was murdered by a shot to the chest, but noticed other wounds not mentioned in the report.

Reading between the lines, though, the thing that comes up is that by claiming all these deaths are suicides, the Army is in effect covering for these murderous soldiers, keeping them unpunished, keeping them in the ranks, and keeping women afraid for their lives. I don't think, at least on the part of some of these investigators, that this is an accident. It's a feature. It's an advantage.

I guarantee that while the military claims that they don't know what happened, the soldiers' companies know just about every detail, especially with murderers and rapists running free. Sexism in the military comes where and when and from whom you least expect it. When the military is good for women, it's better than civilian life ever can be; when it's bad, it's a lynching party for women.

The standard depends not on regulations, but on commanders, and there's subtle ways that they can show the (male) troops that the bitches don't matter. If your commander cracks down on sexist language without resorting to sarcasm, without blaming 'PC' or 'over sensitive people', you've got a keeper, and many men rise to the occasion because they see it as a simple matter of justice.

Those men and their regard for the women they serve with are being betrayed by others. Women are being raped, assaulted, and murdered, and men in power are letting them get away with it. What are they doing to Iraqis? What are they going to do to civilians when they get home? The clusters of cases at Ft. Bragg provides a clue; men get home, surrounded by the same people they served with and whatever secrets they have, and their wife—their underling, their possession, their servant—mouths off or something and they kill her.

It seems pretty apparent that men who don't regard women in this way don't do this kind of thing. It also seems pretty apparent in the way these cases surface and fade from the public consciousness that this is not a military problem, but a societal one. After all, we live in the culture these soldiers come from. The military might be a mostly boys-only club, but a lot of those boys come from single parent homes, and a lot of the men grow up loving and respecting women.

It takes a single voice to stop these crooked investigations. It took a single soldier to expose Abu Ghraib; now he's in hiding for betraying our guys, our patriots. The leaders are complicit in it, because in the military the buck stops at the top, even though it's lower-ranking enlisted or women in general who get punished. A drill Sgt. at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds was convicted of eighteen counts of rape and got six months. That's ten days per rape.

The public ate up the story of Jessica Lynch, who told the truth the first chance she got. Shoshonna Johnston, however—not so much. A WOC, with a kid, taken captive? Too many echoes there. It's not like black women have ever been taken captive before in this culture. Pat Tilman was killed by his own men, and coincidentally, a huge liberal who'd had disagreements with fellow soldiers before. It's a tragedy—but is it deliberate? When you look at the information the military suppresses, it's not merely fear of exposure that they're afraid of. In case after case, the investigators go to some effort to suppress, deny, and cover up. This is not the Army way of doing things, this is not what they tell you to do in Basic, what you look up to when you find yourself with military bosses who look out for you before you even know there's a problem.

This is a betrayal of everything everyone who loves the military loves most.

If the military were eager to avoid shame and repercussions, here's the way to do it. Announce what happened, punish the wrong doer severely, and care for the victim. Investigate fully and openly. Make sure the changes take. If you want an honorable military and stand-up soldiers, that's what you do.

However, this is a new military. It's still all-volunteer, but it's been run into the ground by two wars, and it's hurting for bodies. The military needs women to fill gaps, and even so they're still accepting recruits with criminal records. Add to that the unreconstructed sexism of our culture, which is intensified in a macho, nearly all-male environment, and you have a recipe for rape and harassment, and, yes, even murder.

Maybe especially murder, because these guys have sat through the same briefings I have, where rape accusations are discussed as if 15% of the soldiers—the women—were committing fully 50% of the assaults, and where lots of time is devoted to false accusations and those lying whores who make them. The military briefing urges 'people' to avoid alcohol, but it states that 52% of rapes 'happen' when alcohol is a factor. 48% is nothing to sneeze at—it's well within the margin for error—but that brings up the specter of the cold, calculating sober rapist, while everyone knows that soldiers drink and hahaha you should just keep to your barracks room if you don't want trouble. When soldiers (men, that is) drink, they just get a little excited. After all, they spend all their time doing hard jobs, what do you want?

Women are never accepted as soldiers in this milieu, in this discussion, just the way they're missing from the public discussion of soldiers, combat, and treatment. Female soldiers are discussed in terms of attractiveness, marital status, and reproductive results, but male soldiers are never identified as someone's husband. Making women second class citizens is what the culture at large does to women, so why is it any surprise that men do it in the military? Once you're second class, well, you're an acceptable victim. When you speak up, you're confusing the paradigm, so the best thing to do is sweep aside the accuser and forget about it. The word soldier these days is short hand for 'he doesn't need to rape', and if he doesn't need to rape, he doesn't need to torture, either, even if those brown-skinned terrorists ask for it.

The military response to Abu Ghraib is instructive. Exposed by a specialist, the accusations were horrifying and all too true, but the military concentrated on damage control. One female general and a bunch of lower-ranking soldiers took the fall, but the face of the scandal was not the higher-ranking people but one female soldier: Lynndie England, who got hit by a double whammy; being a torturer was never in doubt with her, and besides, she was a woman and women are supposed to be more decent than men, didn't you know?

This pedestal technique, which hit England twice—once on the way up, so to say, and once on the way down—is a way of extorting more work from women while shutting them up silently. England was judged by the standard and founding wanting, then subjected to more criticism because she failed to meet it. She was a single mom, but Specialist Charles Granger was a wife beater who somehow evaded the military's prohibition on wife beaters, and also avoided becoming the face of the scandal. England had a child with him, but he was never referred to an unwed dad or a 'single father'—the far more complimentary term applied to men with children.

In fact, Granger's alleged history of a wife-beating should have been the subject of an investigation by itself, but it surfaced briefly and disappeared. So do a lot of these accusations. Wife beaters in the military are supposed to be restricted from contact with weapons, which ends a lot of careers. Because the military is based on men and men's needs, not a lot of careers are ultimately damaged by these regulations. If being a 'pussy' or a whiner is the worst thing you can be, then tuning up such a person is no big deal and might in fact represent a public service.

If your family isn't safe from you, then how safe is the general public? How safe are Iraqis? How safe is anybody, when service members leave the service with its pesky UCMJ regs and become members of the lawless, gun- and rape-happy Blackwater?

The military has said all the right things, but the execution is lacking. Take, for example. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmet, talking about Abu Ghraib:

The first thing I’d say is we’re appalled as well. These are our fellow soldiers. These are the people we work with every day, and they represent us. They wear the same uniform as us, and they let their fellow soldiers down…

So far, so good.

Our soldiers could be taken prisoner as well. And we expect our soldiers to be treated well by the adversary, by the enemy.

And here he veers off into base practicality, which ought to be beneath someone discussing the honor of the military.

And if we can't hold ourselves up as an example of how to treat people with dignity and respect…

This needs no justification, so why is he justifying it? Why does he need reasons to behave this way? Such as this:

We can't ask that other nations to that to our soldiers as well. [...] So what would I tell the people of Iraq? This is wrong. This is reprehensible. But this is not representative of the 150,000 soldiers that are over here [...] I'd say the same thing to the American people... Don't judge your army based on the actions of a few.

It took Hugh Thompson, the hero of My Lai, thirty years to find recognition for doing what all soldiers should be doing: protecting the helpless and doing the right thing. Kimmet's justification for not using torture is an attempt to find a reason for decency, as if it's not its own justification.

If a general needs a reason, then imagine some low life who joined the military from a white supremacist group or a drug gang's thought processes: no justification needed. It's just okay to attack women. (One thing that continually surprises me is how the sexism of these two groups is completely invisible. Racism is an official or group activity, but sexism is a private one, every man to his own standards, so it's okay.)

The military, of course, has regulations against rape and wife-beating, but though the wife-beating rate in the military is estimated to be twice that of the civilian population, punishments do not match the percentage. I use wife-beating, by the way, because so many military spouses are not in the military, and therefore have no standing if the husband's attacker is sexist.

Recently, the DOD defied a a subpoena and refused to allow a key sexual assault expert to testify before Congress. This not the mark of a department that wishes to clean house and fix the problem. This is desperate ass covering, and the worst thing about all this, all of this, is the suspicion that they're covering their asses not with the general public but with their own soldiers.

If regulations against sexism and its offspring, rape, abuse, harassment, beating, and murder were enforced, many male soldiers in the military would simply defect or quit. (Of course, many would simply shrug and go back to their jobs because this is what they'd been doing all along.) Still others now have the option of joining Blackwater, for huge salaries, unlimited ammo, and no checks whatsoever on their behavior.

This is the same thing threatened when the military desegregated itself, but there's a difference. The people who integrated the military were men. A man can look at another man and see another person. Too many men, civilian and military alike, see a woman and do not see a person. Why change the military on behalf of non-persons who aren't in combat, who aren't real soldiers, who are just there to get some money and get out, and who by their very presence are distracting and detrimental to unit cohesion?

Why indeed?

Every time the military covers up a murder as a suicide, they are answering that question: We won't. Every time a military briefing about rape is given over to sexist slurs against women—"They just lie about it anyway; go to a whore instead; you pay for sex no matter what; they just change their mind afterward"—military men get the message that all the regs in the world don't matter one bit on the ground, that it's business as usual, except in the military it's easier.

The message isn't being sent to the public. It's being sent to men, both in and out of the military.

Evidently, it's being received, loud and clear.

(Crossposted.)