A’tenthut!
Assault in the Military
Janet: Your sister has just announced that she has joined the Military. Everyone at the dinner table claps and celebrates this new and exiting career choice. As your parents try to figure out the complex address to send cookies and a birthday card, they get a message. Their daughter is in the Military Treatment Facility (MTF) with injuries. Your parents can’t get a straight answer. Their daughter finally calls and is vague yet reassuring. No big deal, all is fine, no problem, don’t worry.
But you talk to her, and she tells you. In a whisper she says she was assaulted by someone in her unit, and she can’t tell. It would break the chain of command, and damage her standing in her unit. No one would listen anyway. She tells you she sees him often. They live in the same building, eat in the same mess hall, and she’s terrified he will attack her again or tell some guys who will think she’s ok with it. Her tears are heartbreaking, and you frantically think that surely someone can do something!
FALL IN
you don't know why your dark blue skirt is so wet against your thighs as you walk
with him in the dark back to your barracks
you don't know how to answer when he asks why are you crying when he asks why are you so upset
you know how to wash your uniform in the sink you know how to hang it up to dry
how to press it so that each sleeve is perfectly creased so that the skirt is perfectly flat
how to clean the dirt and grass from your shoes
how to mix polish and water in a tin lid and buff them until they shine
how to put your name tag and your ribbon back on your shirt pinned exactly so
you don’t know how you will stop your sobs from gurgling out before you reach
the light of the barracks
how you will stifle yourself buck up and put on a smile
but come morning you will stand in formation shoulder to shoulder
with all those other airmen
at attention in the sunrise - Rebecca Danelly
Marie: The first veteran that I interviewed told me that it was so seldom that any women were around, that no abuse took place to his knowledge.
Another started by saying he had saved someone’s life while in the army. He went on to say that “he heard stories in the barracks of one soldier who ‘preferred the company of men’… and this stirred up a quiet fury. He called this one soldier into his office the following day and said ‘I’ve got your transfer papers completed here, and there is a train heading out today at 1pm. I strongly suggest you sign these papers and be on that train.’
‘I didn’t request a transfer sir.’
‘The decision is yours, but let me tell you that it is in your best interest to be on that train.’
I saved his life that day. They were planning to get rid of him. No question about it.”
Back to the first vet - when I explained that this issue is not just about women, that it involves men as well, he understood what I meant. He said “Oh, well. In my time, gays and cripples were exempt from enlisting. Gays and cripples were in the same category.” So, no. Nothing to report.
WE ASK?
Is that enough?
Approximately 20,000 U.S. military members are sexually assaulted annually. But only 7,816 reported those cases, and only in 350cases were perpetrators charged with a crime. President Joe Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin created an independent commission to examine possible solutions and endorsed its findings.
The Independent Review Commission, or IRC, made 80 recommendations, including remove military commanders from adjudicating sexual assault cases, better evaluate commanders for the climate they create, and victim advocates should be independent of the chain of command. -Nick Schifrin is the foreign affairs and defense correspondent for PBS NewsHour, based in Washington, D.C.
Marie: Nothing to report? Rebecca’s story is stunning – and understand this: we are in a place where we can put these events into words. The simple fact that this is out in the open is progress to be grateful for.
Those of you who have the courage to articulate these events are heroes of a very special kind.
Our Interview with Rebecca Danelly, Sr. Airman
Bio: Rebecca Danelly served as a radar operator for eight years in the United States Air Force. She knew well before being discharged that she wanted to study poetry to become a better writer. In 1999, she graduated with honors from the University of Houston where she studied literature and creative writing. Like many poets, her work is drawn in part or in whole from her own experiences, and the poem Fall In describes her response to being raped while in technical training in Biloxi, Mississippi. At that time, no one spoke of date rape. For years she felt that she was to blame. This poem was thirty-three years in the making.
OSV: You chose the military - why?
RD: The oversimple answer is “I was running away from home.” My stepdad proposed that I could do what he did and join the military to take advantage of federal education funding for active-duty members and veterans. It was 1983, the Cold War was cold, and a game that would never result in actual combat. Enlisted people in the Air Force didn’t go into combat (which I would learn was a lie). I enlisted in the USAF with a sense that he didn’t really love me, that if I tried hard enough, mimicked him enough, he would love me - all of which made me a willing complier with authority while secretly harboring a need to rebel.
OSV: Did you admire someone in the military?
RD: I was the child of somewhat progressive parents in the 60’s and 70’s. I remember a friend of his who visited once when I was 4 or 5, a Vietnam Vet who had a prosthetic hand. I was fascinated. We never saw him again after that. I had more of a tendency, reinforced by my mother’s (and society’s) classist ideas that enlisted people were often criminal and more often, unintelligent - to think of soldiers as beneath me. In this way, though my father manipulated me into enlisting, I rebelled. I somehow knew such generalizations were wrong, and I was going to prove it to myself, if not my mother.
OSV: When you stepped into the first enlisted day, how did you feel?
RD: Everything about my enlistment, after talking to the recruiter, terrified me. MEPS, where they examine you and test you and swear you in was nightmarish in the way I was instructed to get around the station, where I had my first ever gynecological exam, where I swore an oath that I wasn’t sure I could keep, because I wasn’t sure I believed in its premises. Once I started though, there was no backing out. Every moment thereafter from the bus to Basic Training in San Antonio, the bus to Keesler AFB for training to be an early warning radar operator was exciting, but the fear never stopped nibbling the back of my mind. The trip in a 747 from St. Louis to Alaska to my first assignment in the Philippines was so scary, I didn’t sleep the entire way across the Pacific. This was after the rape at Keesler which I thought was my fault. It was 1984. No one I knew would have called that incident rape. As horrible as it was, I didn’t think of it that way…. quite. I say that to emphasize that I went to the Philippines terrified by my powerlessness.”
OSV: What drove you every day in your job?
RD: Survival. Appearance. Showing up and proving those guys wrong. I was strong. I was smart. Being a woman didn’t make me less than. The longer I was in, the more it was about being tough. I made a lot of good friends later in my service and sometimes it was just hanging out and being with them. This was the cold war. It was a lot of hurry up and wait. A lot of deep secrets shared in the Ops Room late at night waiting for the radar servers to come back up. I made very tight bonds with a few people, male and female.
OSV: Did you ever suspect other women were being assaulted?
RD: I knew they were. What we shared in the day rooms of our barracks, stayed there. Reports were rare.
OSV: Did you ever hear of anyone reporting assault?
RD: No one I knew personally. People talked. The accusers were never taken seriously in card-table conversations during breaks between radar duties. When I was in the service in the mid-eighties to the early nineties, there was an expression the old timers frequently used, ‘Only sluts, dikes and crazy bitches enlist. Which are you?’ I was tough. I was capable. I was smart. And I think many of us had the same response. We would prove the misogynists wrong by never showing weakness. So, no – I never reported what happened to me, even when the term, “date rape” came out in the late 80’s. I wouldn’t show weakness. And I knew what would happen to me if I did. I already had enough trouble with my reputation as someone who liked to sleep around. Can you sense the bind I was in? No one would believe me.
OSV: What freedom have you experienced writing about your assault?
Taking the blame was a coping mechanism. If I hadn't felt I bore some responsibility, I would have felt too powerless to go on at all. My father had warned me about the men in the service and how they would try to take advantage of me. I knew better and though taking the blame hurt me in the long run, that night, that following early morning I needed to feel as if I had some control. 1984, I was 18 and still a virgin for spiritual reasons and because I wanted to have just the right connection with the man, I first had sex with. On the walk back to the barracks, the shame engulfed me. My skirt was wet, and I felt filthy. In formation, I felt like everyone could see how tainted I was. The anger at myself let me keep going. It wasn't at all healthy and damaged my psyche in ways that have taken years of therapy and work to heal. I know now it was not my fault. As you know, the psyche doesn't just step in line with the facts.
OSV: Would you recommend other women in the military come forward and share their story in writing?
RD: I would recommend that if they have trauma, they get help. If, in the act of processing that trauma, writing and sharing about it feels like a way to heal themselves AND if speaking about their experience to help other people struggling with similar trauma is a path toward a new perspective, a new sense of agency, and mental health, then, yes.
I am so grateful to Our Silent Voice for their call and their commitment to ending violence by making a place where our voices can be heard. I look forward to hearing Kate Germano and reading her book.