The phrase “Support the Troops” always brings to mind for me
the flight home from Iraq on leave in the winter of 2003. A corkscrew take-off
out of Baghdad on a C-130, a series of disorienting short-layover flights from
Kuwait to Ramstein to Atlanta to Dallas, and when we deplaned at Dallas-Ft.
Worth, there were all these people lined up on both sides of the concourse,
forming a gantlet, cheering and handing out candy, reaching to shake our hands,
holding signs and shouting. We were jet-lagged from flying halfway across the
world and hadn’t slept well or much, so the crowds seemed surreal, even
hallucinatory. Santa Claus lunged out of the thronging bodies and pushed York
Peppermint Patties at us. A gentle, sincere woman with frizzy blond hair,
somebody’s mom, stopped me to tell me how brave I was, how much it meant, and how
grateful she was for my service. She pressed my hands in hers and her eyes got
misty. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you.”
I flashed back on some prisoners we’d taken one night, one
troublemaker and four guys in the wrong place at the wrong time, their faces wrapped
in abdominal bandages, their hands zip-stripped, all of them processed into the
labyrinth of the military prison system in Iraq. Did she know what she was
thanking me for, this American mom? She must have thought she did. I wasn’t so
sure.
That experience landing in Texas was the first of many such
encounters, with people on both ends of the political spectrum, over those two
weeks on leave, after coming back from Iraq several months later, and even
after getting out of the Army. I can count on one hand the number of people who
have been disagreeable after finding out I’d been in the military, or in Iraq,
while the many who thanked me and praised my courage are numberless. I’m proud
of their admiration and gratitude, even though all I’d done as a soldier was to
do my job, which wasn’t much to speak of, and even though what I’d seen in Iraq
had left me ashamed of American policy, pessimistic about how little people
back home understood the conflicts overseas, and deeply skeptical of the
public’s trust in the military.
As time has gone on, my skepticism about the public’s trust
in the military has grown into alarm as that trust has metastasized into
uncritical adulation. The deference and veneration that the public, the media,
and parts of the government show the US military—even if it’s often merely
sentimental—is corrosive and dangerous. In a recent article in the
Atlantic Monthly,
“General Failure,” Thomas
E. Ricks argues that society’s veneration of the military has helped obscure
how the Army’s top brass have failed again and again over the past decade, both
to complete their missions and to maintain professional standards.
“To a shocking degree,” he writes, “the Army’s leadership
ranks have become populated by mediocre officers, placed in positions where
they are likely to fail.” He goes on:
Ironically, our generals have grown worse as they have been
lionized more and more by a society now reflexively deferential to the
military. The Bush administration has been roundly… criticized for its delusive
approach to the war in Iraq and its neglect of the war in Afghanistan. Yet the
serious failures of our military leaders in these conflicts have escaped almost
all notice. No one is pushing these leaders to step back and examine the
shortcomings of their institution. These are dangerous developments.
Dangerous developments at every level, and responsibility
for the problem lies
as much outside the military as within it. America’s
cultural veneration of the soldier-hero,
Navy SEAL übermenschen, and the
august Petraeus reflect Congressional and Executive policy that bends to the needs of
the security-industrial complex, and help shore up an institutional culture
that hides its failures behind bureaucracy and machismo.
One of the most grotesque failures in military leadership has
been
in protecting its own soldiers from rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment.
According to the
Department of Defense, about one in three military women has been sexually assaulted. About one in five screen positive for Military Sexual Trauma, or MST.
And there should be no doubt that every single woman in the military has encountered
sexual harassment. The problem affects men as well: while the victims of
military sexual assault are predominately female, in the lower enlisted ranks, and
under the age of 25, one in a hundred men screen positive for MST, and men make
up 12% of the reported victims of sexual assault.
Recent charges against 82nd Airborne General Jeffrey Sinclair for forcibly sodomizing one of his female subordinates are
only the latest scandal to erupt from an institution that, like the Catholic
Church, has spent more energy protecting sexual predators than prosecuting them
. As the
British Daily Mail notes, echoing Ricks, “
It
is highly unusual for a senior member of the armed forces to be removed from
their position, investigated and face a court martial. There have been only two
cases in recent years.” It’s also highly unusual
for the military to investigate and prosecute reports of sexual assault, which is
unconscionable, but even more horrific when you consider the Department of
Defense estimates that only 14 to 16 percent of all sexual assaults in the
military are ever even reported.
Let’s look at the numbers from the DOD’s FY2011 Report on Sexual Assault: there
were 3,192 reports, out of more than 19,000 estimated sexual assaults. Against those
3,192 reports, only 1,518 cases were considered actionable. 240 of those went
to trial. Of those that went to trial, 191 were convicted "of charges," which could be any charges related to the case, not necessarily sexual assault. Doing the numbers,
we can see that if you sexually assault a fellow service member in the US
military, you have at least a 90% chance of getting away with it without serious
punishment. Conversely, if you’re assaulted, you have at best a 10% chance of
seeing justice.
The military says
the problem is a few bad apples, and that they’ve got the situation under control. New policies have instituted higher-level supervision of “important”
cases, and the Department of Defense has a campaign to raise awareness about
sexual assault, accentuating service members' responsibility for each other: if
you see a buddy pressuring a reluctant woman to go home with him, their ads
suggest, you should step in and distract him. We can’t afford to be naïve about
any of this. Institutional supervision and lackluster PSAs are no solution at
all. In the words of my Drill Sergeant from Basic Training, it’s the wrong
answer.
The real problems are structural and cultural. Since unit commanders are responsible for judicial
decisions, and even for deciding which cases are worthy of investigating, a
woman raped by a superior often finds her chain of command working against her.
Some evidence suggests that as many as twenty-five percent of the women who
don’t report sexual assault refrain from doing so because the commander they’re
supposed to report to is the very man who assaulted them. What’s more, the
risk-averse culture that Thomas Ricks describes gives unit commanders little
reason to investigate rapes and assaults. Prosecuting sexual predators makes a
unit commander look bad, because it makes his unit look like a problem. This
kind of logic runs up the chain, until it combines with the sense of privilege
that comes with rank, and produces a creep like General Sinclair.
Women who do
report are often subject to hazing and further assaults, while their assaulters
are often protected by old-boys networks and collective chauvinism. In some cases,
in fact, it’s the victims who wind up being punished, threatened with charges,
or driven out of the armed forces. Consider Air Force Sergeant Marti Ribeiro,
who was raped at Bagram Air Force Base, then told if she pressed charges she’d
be charged herself with dereliction of duty because she didn’t use her weapon
against her attacker. Or Sergeant Rebekah Havrila, an EOD specialist and
veteran of Afghanistan, who was harassed and assaulted by her team leader, then
raped by a fellow soldier. After three years of investigation, the military
dropped her case. Or take Claire Russo, a Marine lieutenant and Iraq war
veteran who was raped by a superior officer, then told by her chain of command
that because she was sodomized they could not press charges. It’s only because
she was raped off-post and her case taken up by civilian authorities that her
rapist was eventually caught. These are just a few of the thousands of reported
and tens of thousands of unreported sexual assaults that happen every year in the military. Reports of gang
rapes, institutionalized harassment and obstruction, reprisals, and top brass
who seem to think they live outside the rules of society are going to keep popping up until military leaders are held accountable.
Make no mistake:
although the problems of sexual assault are systemic, and military culture is
rife with misogyny, male chauvinism, and a CYA mentality that gives officers
and NCOs more incentive to hide problems than deal with them openly, there is a
lot the military gets right. I was proud to hear Prof. Grafton’s remarks this
morning at the chapel on the virtues of the US military, such as its real
camaraderie, meritocratic ideals, valorization of education, and professional
ethos. The military often holds itself to a higher standard, as it should,
since the armed forces are public servants in the highest trust: given the
power to use deadly force in the nation’s name, our military officers and NCOs bear
the gravest responsibility. But it’s precisely those officers and NCOs who need
to do a gut-check and quit believing their own press. Military leadership shouldn’t
ever get a free pass. It needs to earn the trust the public places in it,
and keep earning it, day after day, with every decision.
Civilian
leadership and the American public, on the other hand, need to leaven their
respect for the military with critical oversight. When it comes to “supporting
the troops,” the most crucial thing we could do today is to bring greater
scrutiny and pressure down on the military leadership that failed us in Iraq
and Afghanistan, and that continues to fail the thousands of service members
every year who are sexually assaulted by colleagues and superiors. “The troops”
have been left out in the rain again and again, none more so than the women who
brave sexism and enemy fire to serve
their country, only to be preyed on and degraded by the very leadership that
depends on them.
Representative
Jackie Speier, of California, has sponsored legislation that would help. HR3435, the STOP Act, would establish a Sexual Assault Oversight and Response
Council in the DOD, assign a Director of Military Prosecutions, establish a
sexual offender database, and, most important, take sexual assault cases out of
the chain of command, placing them under the jurisdiction of the Sexual Assault
Oversight and Response office. HR 3435 has 133 co-sponsors, is currently in the
House Committee on Armed Services, and should be supported.
This is a good
start, but we need to do more. Allies such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and
Australia have taken sexual assault out of the military chain of command
entirely, establishing external agencies and civilian oversight responsible to
no military commander’s career, but to service members at large. We need to do the same. In the meantime, organizations like Service Women’s Action Network
and Protect Our Defenders are fighting for the rights and safety of our
soldiers, marines, sailors, and Air Force personnel, and need your help.
Broadly, in the way we think and talk about the military, we need to check our
uncritical adulation, and remember that the US military is in the public
service, staffed by fallible, self-interested human beings, and entrusted with immense
power and responsibility. Whether we’re dealing with General Ricardo Sanchez,
who issued the memoranda that made Abu Ghraib possible but let a handful of
Specialists and Privates take the fall, or with General Jeffrey Sinclair,
charged with assaulting and sodomizing his subordinates, or with the countless
mid-level officers and NCOs who make local decisions to let criminals go
unpunished, sweep problems under the rug, and cover their own asses, our
military leadership must be held accountable.
On this Veteran’s Day, marking the ninety-forth anniversary of the end of a war in which generals
threw men at each other like meat into a grinder, the best way to support the
troops might just begin with critique.
