A Peculiar Version of Friendly Fire Female Troops Face Double Danger
Hukill, Traci
A Peculiar Version of Friendly Fire Female Troops Face Double Danger By Traci Hukill Illustration by Sterling Hundley Shortly after arriving in Iraq in April 2003, Sergeant Kelly Dougherty was...
...One night, he hit on her...
...But this is not why they got their promotions...
...And I said, 'I don't want to go anywhere,'" Machmer recalled...
...If they really took seriously that there is a wide variety of forms of misogyny, harassment, and outright assault, then they would have to spend time thinking about it...
...We don't know for certain, but we suspect those things might have an impact on incidents of sexual assault...
...At night, Dougherty found the camp an unnerving place...
...That was in Kuwait...
...After Swift broke it off, the squad leader punished her with write-ups, humiliations, and special workouts for minor infractions...
...But that's probably just a fraction of the real number...
...Why bother reporting if nothing will happen to the perpetrator...
...She later said she couldn't face the sexual harassment and coercion she'd experienced on her initial tour...
...He] literally singled me out to be the person that he was going to have sex with during the deployment," Swift told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now...
...Sexual harassment and sexual assault are common enough in the military that the Veterans Administration has a new acronym...
...No one wanted to stand out...
...First, it was a platoon sergeant coming on to Swift, then nineteen and a lowly specialist in a military police unit...
...If she hoped for help from the platoon sergeant in charge of her squad, she was soon disappointed...
...He was finally rotated out, to Swift's relief...
...From the moment she set foot in Kuwait, where she and other women were warned never to walk to the showers alone, she had the uneasy feeling that she wasn't safe among her fellow soldiers...
...Dougherty never spoke up about the blatant sexism around her...
...She told them she didn't want to see any of it...
...Few women did...
...There's hostility and anger toward the enemy, and sometimes that gets displaced onto the female soldiers who are there," she says...
...This time, when Swift notified her superiors, the man was reprimanded and reassigned...
...Suzanne Swift is facing jail time and a dishonorable discharge following her ordeal, which has left her with a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that civilian doctors have diagnosed but the Army won't...
...The commander wrote her assailant up and docked his pay...
...Machmer was given a medical discharge for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder...
...And the car was turned off...
...Once stateside, there was a final episode...
...There's huge pressure not to complain" about sexual harassment or assault in the military, says Clark University professor Cynthia Enloe, author of Does Khaki Become You...
...This is not what I want at all.'" Machmer reported the incident immediately, and to its credit the Army found sufficient evidence to move forward with the case...
...Jennifer Machmer knows too well the Army's inability to discern degrees of coercion...
...There is a dazzling array of places to lay the blame for this mindset: crappy television, bad schooling, pervasive neglect of boys' emotional development...
...In Machmer's account, her assailant is astonishingly oblivious to her fear and disgust, pausing several times to ask her what was wrong and implying that they might get together on another night...
...Her squad leader, another sergeant, started behaving toward her in a proprietary way, warning her away from the company of other soldiers...
...I told him numerous times, 'I do not want this, you know...
...Some 130,000 women have been deployed since 2001 into two combat theaters where the conflicts are dragging on, seemingly without end...
...It's perpetuated in the military, where even some in the leadership continue to deny what is going on...
...Amy Street, a clinical psychologist with theVAworking on treatment methods for Military Sexual Trauma, is cautious about making the link between war and sexual harassment...
...A friend in an all-male unit related a story in which an obligatory equal opportunity class devolved into a rant against servicewomen, who "always" said they'd been raped after regrettable drunken liaisons...
...I fell for it, and for months I was like his little sex slave, I guess...
...Machmer described to MSNBC's Deborah Norville how the man, who was driving her to and from the airport on the day of the assault, tried to kiss her, how he unbuckled her seatbelt and fondled her as they drove down the road, and how he grabbed her as she was getting out of the vehicle afterward, saying, "Let's go somewhere...
...A VA report dated October 2003, never officially released but leaked by a House staffer in September 2005, estimated that among military reservists, 60 percent of women and 27 percent of men had experienced Military Sexual Trauma...
...A sergeant told Swift she was to report for duty "on [his] bed, naked...
...But the subtler ways in which a power imbalance distorts sex between two people may be lost on the average nineteen-year-old recruit...
...The term for this all-too-common phenomenon is command rape, because the victim agrees to sexual relations out of fear of retribution by a superior officer...
...She'd just walked into the common tent shared by her ten-member military police squad to find two lower-ranking guys watching porn, which is against the rules but ubiquitous in Iraq...
...She reported him to the equal opportunity officer, but the complaint went nowhere...
...Some commanding officers recognize the reality...
...That may have helped shed light on a dark corner of military life...
...Given its broad parameters, that might be easy to explain away, except that the same study found the prevalence of actual sexual assault-"unwanted sexual contact of a physical nature"-to be 23 percent among female reservists...
...Two years ago, following a public outcry over media reports of rape in CENTCOM, the Pentagon sought to correct that with a policy change: Victims of sexual assault would be able to seek treatment without filing a formal complaint...
...The real figures are very likely much higher...
...One of them apologized, but her squad leader overheard the exchange and stepped in...
...I feel guilty now," she says, "because it's that environment where if you let the small derogatory comments or pornography go, it contributes to that larger atmosphere that leads to the harassment and rape of women...
...But it is Swift who is awaiting court-martial in early January for going AWOL last year...
...It was disgusting and it was horrible, and I didn't know what to do...
...One reason the crime still goes unreported may lurk in the annual report: Last year, just seventy-nine servicemembers were court-martialed for sexual assault...
...They don't want to understand the gray area," says Enloe...
...The pressure on female troops to preserve their place on the team is even greater during war, when it's a matter of survival...
...Women now make up 15 percent of the active duty force...
...A woman in Dougherty's unit who stayed behind the initial deployment because she was pregnant showed up in Iraq four months later after an abortion-and was congratulated by the platoon commander on getting "the first confirmed kill in the unit...
...Her mother, Sara Rich, angry and worried about her daughter's declining mental health, told The Progressive: "They allowed her to be sexually used and abused...
...No one argues that a woman who was ambushed, beaten, and forcibly penetrated was not raped...
...Traci Hukill is a freelance writer in Monterey, California...
...They're just going to throw her away...
...She can be reached at tracihukill@yahoo.com...
...Carol Burke, a professor at the University of California-Irvine who studies cultural change in the military, says the alternating pattern of boredom and stress among troops in Iraq and Afghanistan makes for trouble...
...There is intense pressure to prove you're part of the team...
...Unwanted, uninvited sexual experience during military service" is officially known as Military Sexual Trauma, or MST...
...The danger faced by female troops is not in dispute...
...In Iraq, things got worse...
...To get to the showers or the telephone, she walked past "row upon row of tents full of people you didn't know...
...A Peculiar Version of Friendly Fire Female Troops Face Double Danger By Traci Hukill Illustration by Sterling Hundley Shortly after arriving in Iraq in April 2003, Sergeant Kelly Dougherty was stunned to find herself in an argument with her squad leader about pornography...
...It's a blanket term that spans a wide range of experience, from off-color jokes to rape...
...There's never been as many women in armed conflict as there are now, and units have never been as gender-integrated," Street says...
...Female soldiers, she soon learned, were called "bitches," "sluts," and "dykes...
...If there's no skin under her fingernails, the more common thinking goes, she wasn't raped...
...And, you know, I did...
...This is not the sort of thing that makes them feel like real commanders...
...At the same time, the pumped-up atmosphere of the combat theater seems to be giving women more reason than ever to fear...
...Many members of the military subscribe to an outmoded and simplistic definition of sexual coercion...
...He wanted to argue with me, so I was forced to defend why I didn't want them looking at women engaged in acts of sex when I'm in the tent," Dougherty says...
...Last year, the Pentagon received reports of 2,374 rapes or attempted rapes from all of its bases worldwide, about 40 percent more than the year before...
...It was a minor incident during a year of service in Iraq in which the Colorado native came to understand what it means to live as a woman in a decidedly masculine environment...
...Once installed at Tallil Airbase near Nasiriyah in southern Iraq, American service-women were instructed to go on their daily run in pairs because someone had been raped on the base...
...But five months later, when an exhausted Machmer was asked to choose between a court-martial and letting the brigade commander handle the case, she chose the latter...
...Rape is a notoriously underreported crime...
...The sergeant was four ranks above her...
...The twenty-two-year-old was arrested in June for desertion after refusing to return to Iraq for a second tour of duty...
...In the military, filing a report for it is perceived as a career killer...
...He watched porn in the tent, too...
...I would call it a particular version of friendly fire...
...Since 2002, the Pentagon has logged 546 cases of sexual assault in Central Command (CENTCOM), the administrative territory encompassing Afghanistan and Iraq...
...Machmer, an Army captain and West Point graduate, was assaulted in Kuwait in March 2003 by a noncommissioned officer whom she'd known for two years...
...She didn't like him, but she didn't think she had much of a choice...
...I was nineteen...
...He made the conscious decision to turn the car back over and drive behind a bush and continue to assault me...
Vol. 71 • January 2007 • No. 1
