SEXUAL COMBAT

By Pamela Martineau and Steve Wiegand -- Bee Staff Writers
Monday, March 7, 2005
www.sacbee.com

Second of four parts

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."

"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?'"

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.