[News] Women at war: Sexual combat

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This story is taken from 
<http://www.sacbee.com/content/news/projects/women_at_war/v-print/story//content/news/projects/women_at_war>Women 
at war at sacbee.com.

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Women at war: Sexual combat





By Pamela Martineau and Steve Wiegand -- Bee Staff Writers
Published 2:15 am PST Monday, March 7, 2005

Gina W. went to Iraq, and came back with a different kind of war story. Her 
battlefields were in the barracks and the mess hall. The weapons were 
innuendoes and threats. And the enemy? Her own boss.

"When you go there, you have to be prepared for war," she says. "And then 
you have to be worried about being raped by your own people."

The former Army specialist is one of dozens of military women interviewed 
by The Bee who say they faced some kind of sexual harassment while in the 
combat theater in Afghanistan or Iraq.

Though publicity about sexual misconduct in the war zone has focused on 
rape, female soldiers said unwelcome advances, demeaning comments - and a 
feeling that being alone around male comrades in arms meant being unsafe - 
were far greater concerns.

"I think every female (soldier in Iraq) has been sexually harassed," said 
Sgt. Yolanda Medina of Long Beach, who is doing her second tour there with 
the California National Guard's 2668th Transportation Company.

The exact number of U.S. military women who have been assaulted or harassed 
is probably somewhere between Medina's "every female" and the number 
reported by the Department of Defense.

Defense Department numbers show that from August 2002 through October 2004, 
118 cases of sexual assault on military personnel were reported in Iraq, 
Kuwait and Afghanistan. But the Miles Foundation, a nonprofit organization 
that helps victims of military domestic violence and sexual assault, 
reports that it was contacted by 258 military assault victims in the combat 
theater during that same time span. That number rose to 307 through 
mid-February, according to the foundation.

A Pentagon official said the military would release more up-to-date numbers 
sometime this month. Yet military officials acknowledge their numbers don't 
reflect the true situation because many women are reluctant to report an 
assault. One study by the Department of Veterans Affairs found nearly 75 
percent of military women who said they had been assaulted did not tell 
their commanding officer.

No statistics are kept on cases of sexual harassment that fall short of 
physical assault, and none reflect what many women interviewed by The Bee 
described as a bawdy combat zone environment that made them feel like 
second-class soldiers:

Playboy magazines on sale at the Post Exchange. Porno films purchased on 
the Iraqi black market and pornographic pictures scrawled on the bathroom 
walls. Platoon leaders handing out condoms even though sex between soldiers 
is illegal.

And the reality of mostly young women, vastly outnumbered and surrounded by 
mostly young men, far from home in a highly stressful situation.

One of the standing jokes in Iraq, returning female vets said, was that on 
the 10-point scale some men use to rate women, female soldiers got two 
extra points just for being there.

Those bonus points came with bathroom-wall taunts like the one a female 
soldier remembered from an Iraq camp latrine: "All you queens will turn 
back into frogs once you leave Iraq."

The sexually charged atmosphere brought continual come-ons from male 
soldiers, leaving women feeling unsafe even inside the military camps. 
Virtually every woman interviewed by The Bee said that while she was in the 
camps in Iraq or Kuwait, she did not walk alone at night.

A common thread in tales female soldiers bring back from Iraq concerns the 
disregard for military rules against fraternization among officers, 
noncommissioned officers and enlisted personnel.

"There were affairs going in all directions, up, down and sideways, with 
command staff and lower ranks," said Elizabeth Vasquez, of Vallejo, who 
served with a California National Guard unit in Kuwait and Iraq. "It's 
almost like the Army helped to push the sexually charged scene."



Complaint does no good

Gina pushed back, challenging what seemed to be accepted behavior and 
filing a complaint against her tormentor.

The result was the end of her four-year Army career and a lingering fear 
that her accused would pursue her even in civilian life - a fear so intense 
she asked that her real name not be used.

One of about 100 women in a 500-member battalion, Gina said she began 
receiving unwanted attention from male colleagues almost as soon as the 
battalion reached Iraq.

"Most of the men who would hit on me were senior enlisted, warrant officers 
and officers," she said. "They feel they can do anything to you and nothing 
will happen.

"They can't go to the bar on weekends to let off steam, so they look to the 
female soldiers. (But) I wasn't exactly in the mood to be picked up. I was 
in a war zone."

That didn't matter much to her sergeant, she said, who unleashed a steady 
sex-tinged bombardment. It began with comments about her appearance, then 
graduated to questions about which sexual positions she preferred. The 
comments grew increasingly lewd.

Finally, Gina said, he got physical, grabbing her and trying to kiss her.

Tired of the weeks of harassment, Gina filed her complaint. Another woman 
in her unit, who said she also had been harassed, joined her. But other 
female targets stayed quiet.

"Some people either got scared, or they were worried about their own 
careers," Gina said.

The complaint was passed from the unit's Equal Employment Opportunity 
Office to the battalion commander - who was a friend of the sergeant's.

"He thought it was minor," Gina said of the commander's reaction. But he 
did assign an officer from within the battalion to investigate.

The sergeant, meanwhile, threatened to beat up Gina and the other woman for 
filing the complaint. He began making crude comments about them to other 
soldiers and spreading gossip about how Gina and the other woman had 
received "irregular" results from their pre-deployment Pap smear tests for 
cervical cancer.

If she had threatened the sergeant the way he threatened her, Gina said, "I 
would have gone to prison."

In the end, no charges were filed. Instead, the sergeant was passed over 
for promotion and received a letter of reprimand.

When her hitch was up, Gina left the Army in disgust.

"Basically, it's fair game on women soldiers, and nothing's going to 
happen," she said.

"You're a piece of meat."



No escape from abusers

Echoes of Gina's complaints about a look-the-other-way attitude by military 
leaders reverberate through the combat theater.

Testifying before a congressional women's caucus last summer, Army Capt. 
Jennifer Machmer said she was assaulted by her jeep driver in Kuwait, 17 
days before the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

After reporting it, she told the panel, she was forced to work in the same 
unit as the man and was threatened with fraternization charges. Her 
assailant, who never was charged, eventually was promoted.

Machmer, a West Point graduate, was forced to accept an early retirement 
when she developed post-traumatic stress disorder.

"Every time you turn around, you're re-victimized and re-traumatized," 
Machmer told the caucus.

Even cases that don't involve physical assault send shudders through female 
soldiers.

In one such instance, the commander of a National Guard military police 
company from Contra Costa County, who was stationed outside the infamous 
Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, was accused of snapping pictures of three women 
in his unit while they showered.

Caught with copies of the photos stored in his laptop computer, the 
commander was allowed to resign rather than face a court-martial.

Even though no one was assaulted in the shower photo case, word of it 
spread through the ranks. For many women, the daily hygiene routine became 
a potential combat patrol.

"It was really dark around the camp," said Elizabeth Vasquez, then serving 
in Kuwait. "We had to go quite a ways for our showers, and we had to be 
escorted all the time ... . It was upsetting, because we were supposed to 
be a family."

Of course not all of the women soldiers involved in sexual activity are 
blameless victims. Some pursued the affairs as zealously as the men. For 
some, the distraction and intimacy of sex helped them ward off their fears.

"You got to the point where you didn't know whether you were going to be 
alive tomorrow," Spc. Alexandra Cerda, 21, said of some female soldiers' 
rationale for engaging in sex.

A female soldier in Vasquez's unit was known as the "woo hoo girl," because 
that's what she would yell after having sex.

"She would have sex in the back of a Humvee, have sex standing behind the 
trailers," Vasquez said. "She had the most pleasant personality, but she 
loved sex."

One female platoon leader said such encounters sometimes interfered with 
work. More than once, she said, she had to switch out soldiers who were due 
to drive in a convoy together because of a lovers' spat.



Grappling with a new reality

While consensual sex may have contributed to problems of fraternization, 
the problems of assault and harassment are rooted in a military culture 
still coming to grips with a two-gender fighting force, a culture that 
until recently lacked even uniform definitions for "assault" and 
"harassment," and is still struggling to differentiate between predators 
and prey.

"There were so many men over there and so few women," said Sandy Moreno, a 
single mother from Sacramento who served in Iraq as a psychiatric 
technician in one of the Army's "stress units," established as refuges for 
troubled soldiers.

"A lot of the (harassment complaints) we took with a grain of salt," she 
said. "We would ask the women, 'What do you think happened? How do you 
think you could have changed things?' "

Moreno said the women's complaints often concerned things like "slaps on 
the butt," or unwanted kissing.

"I'd say to them, 'Because of the situation we're in, maybe you shouldn't 
smile at him, maybe you should just ignore him.' One thing about the 
military, when you go to war, you really bond. Sometimes you make friends 
with the opposite sex, and sometimes there are misunderstandings."

But Kate Summers, a sexual trauma expert and director of services at the 
Miles Foundation - which advocates for women who are sexually assaulted or 
harassed in the military - said that a female soldier's uncomfortable 
feelings about a male colleague's comments or actions should not be 
discounted or chalked up to misunderstandings.

"It's not about whether she wore her camouflage shirt one button or two 
buttons open too much," Summers said. "What's at issue is the victim may 
have been describing a pattern of manipulation that is going to lead to 
assault.

"My reaction would have been entirely different. I'd say, 'Let's talk about 
the other encounters you've had.' "

Aside from the questionable efficacy of avoid-eye-contact counseling, the 
military is wrestling with trying to weld a zero-tolerance policy about 
sexual harassment onto soldiers' traditional code of silence about one 
another's behavior - particularly while at war.

In a combat zone, said Medina, the National Guard sergeant from Long Beach, 
"the rules change within the unit." On her first tour in Iraq, Medina 
herself was offered money for sex by another soldier. She turned him down 
but never reported it.

"If you do something to discredit your company, it's on your ass," she said.

Medina offered another reason women in the war zone were hesitant to file a 
harassment complaint against fellow soldiers.

"You don't know if that person will save your life out there," she said.

Fears of coming forward were heightened, other women said, by the 
possibility that neither they nor their assailants would be removed from 
the unit.

Standard military policy has been to give commanders wide discretion in 
separating accused and accuser, or deciding whether charges will be filed, 
or even investigated.

In testimony at a congressional hearing on sexual assault in the military, 
Gen. George Casey Jr., the Army's vice chief of staff, acknowledged that 
when a female soldier files a complaint against someone in her unit, it is 
strictly up to the unit commander to decide if anyone should be transferred 
- even if the accused is the alleged victim's commander.

"We don't dictate that," Casey said. "We leave that up to the commander on 
the scene to make an evaluation."

Critics of the military's attitudes point to problems that range from a 
shortage of rape examination and HIV testing kits in the war zone to 
encouraging women to use an injectable contraceptive called Depo-Provera so 
they won't menstruate during their tour.

"One woman rape victim in Afghanistan was given high doses of antibiotics 
after a rape and told, 'This will kill anything,' " said Summers, of the 
Miles Foundation. "It took her two weeks to get to a hospital."



 From study to action

The U.S. military's problems with sex certainly didn't start with the war 
in Iraq.

After the Persian Gulf War, the Army acknowledged that its male personnel 
had committed at least 34 sex crimes, many of them rapes of female U.S. 
soldiers.

Graphic testimony by female Gulf War vets before a congressional committee 
prompted one senator to charge that during the brief conflict, U.S. female 
troops "were in greater danger of being sexually assaulted by our own 
troops than by the enemy."

In 1991, Navy and Marine pilots at a convention in Las Vegas molested at 
least 26 women. In 1996, it was revealed that dozens of female recruits had 
been sexually assaulted while training at the Army Ordnance Center in 
Aberdeen, Md. In 2003, an investigation found that 142 female cadets at the 
Air Force Academy alleged they had been assaulted during the previous nine 
years.

In each case, Pentagon officials launched task forces and studies, and 
promised reforms.

"Over the past 15 years ... we have had 18 major studies on sexual 
assault," said an exasperated Rep. John McHugh, D-N.Y., during a hearing 
last June on a Pentagon task force report on assault and harassment 
problems in the Iraq combat zone.

"That's more than one a year. And yet ... to put it kindly, we've got a 
long way to go before we have in place the kinds of programs, in terms of 
both prosecution and prevention and response, that are necessary."

Stung by such criticism, the Defense Department has announced a series of 
initiatives in recent months.

In October, Brig. Gen. K.C. McClain, an experienced Air Force command 
officer and educator, was appointed to head an eight-person team called the 
Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response.

In January, the task force announced new policies for all military branches 
that include more support for victims and more training for everyone in 
uniform, along with the Pentagon's first-ever definitions of sexual assault 
and harassment.

Officials acknowledge that the lack of precise definitions has led to 
haphazard investigations and prosecutions.

"We're off to a good start," McClain said in announcing the policies, "but 
I need to be clear ... this is not a silver bullet. There is no overnight 
solution, and to do this right, it is going to take time."

McClain and other Pentagon officials acknowledge that all the policies in 
the world won't make much difference if commanders in the field don't 
implement them.

The sentiment is emphatically emphasized by military women, who say the 
level of sexual tension and the number of incidents within a unit depend on 
that unit's commander.

"It starts with the command," said National Guard Sgt. Sharon Stallworth. 
"He sets the tone."

Capt. Torrey Hubred commands Stallworth's unit, the Sacramento-based 2668th 
Transportation Company, which is currently in Iraq. According to Hubred - 
and troops serving under him - the unit has been largely free of sexual 
harassment problems.

Hubred attributes it to the "three golden rules" he lays down. The first is 
to treat others the way you would be treated. The second is to make 
decisions you wouldn't be ashamed to see in the headlines tomorrow.

"And the third," he said, "is ask, 'Would you do this if someone you love 
is watching?'"


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DEFINING THE CRIME

The first formal Department of Defense definition of sexual assault, 
announced Jan. 4:

* Sexual assault is a crime. It is defined as intentional sexual contact, 
characterized by use of force, physical threat or abuse of authority or 
when the victim does not or cannot consent.

* Sexual assault includes rape, nonconsensual sodomy (oral or anal sex), 
indecent assault (unwanted, inappropriate sexual contact or fondling), or 
attempts to commit these acts.

* Sexual assault can occur without regard to gender or spousal relationship 
or age of victim.

* "Consent" shall not be deemed or construed to mean the failure by the 
victim to offer physical resistance. Consent is not given when a person 
uses force, threat of force, coercion or when the victim is asleep, 
incapacitated, or unconscious.



TWO VIEWS

"What does it say about us as a people, as a nation, as the foremost 
military in the world, when our women soldiers sometimes have more to fear 
at the hands of their own fellow servicemen than from the enemy?"

- Sen. Susan Collins, D-Maine, Feb. 25, 2004, during a hearing of the 
Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel.

"The contemporary culture is more promiscuous in recent years ... and 
people who come to the academy reflect the contemporary culture ... so it's 
not a climate at the Air Force Academy or a climate in the Air Force, 
there's a climate in the nation. You watch halftime shows at the Super Bowl 
or 'Girls Gone Wild' or whatever the heck is on MTV, you can see what 
today's youth brings to whatever they do."

- Gen. John Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, talking to reporters on Dec. 
15 about the 142 reported sexual assaults at the Air Force Academy between 
1993 and 2002.



About the writer:

The Bee's Pamela Martineau can be reached at (530) 757-7119 or 
<mailto:pmartineau at sacbee.com>pmartineau at sacbee.com. The Bee's Steve 
Wiegand can be reached at (916) 321-1076 or 
<mailto:swiegand at sacbee.com>swiegand at sacbee.com.

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