“The understandable and natural
impulse to honor sacrifice, and award valor, has mutated into a cover story for
high levels of violence against innocent people, especially women. It has
become nearly impossible to travel anywhere in the United States, or go a few
days, without hearing maudlin amplification of tributes to the “heroes” of the
American military. Many active duty servicemen and women, and combat veterans,
are certainly worthy of praise and gratitude, but the insistence on treating
every current and former military member as a secular god, as ritual in the ongoing
glorification of the military, allows horrific problems of rape, sexual abuse,
and domestic violence to fester and bleed.
The tragic irony is that the victims of America’s societal
negligence on military scandals are military members themselves,
along with the closely related group who sacrifice in silence – military family
members.
It
is hardly a surprise that the television media has emphasized Micah Johnson’s
connections with black militancy, rather than his status as an Army veteran.
Clearly, Johnson was not a good representation of the military, and he was not
the typical veteran. There are millions of veterans in the United States, and
the problem with assigning the honorific “hero” to each one is that it denies
the human and historical reality that any collection of people – large or small
– usually contains the ethical and the
evil; the kind and the cruel. Johnson, because of his slaughter of innocent
people, is among the worst of the worst, but there are elements of his past
that, as uncomfortable as it makes people, are not foreign to American military
culture.
Those
elements deserve scrutiny, rather than shadowing. The need for an honest
evaluation of the military’s flaws and failures becomes an imperative for those
with a sincere and substantive desire to “support the troops.”
Superiors
of Johnson accused the deceased murderer of “egregious sexual harassment,”
while he was serving deployment in Afghanistan. They recommended he receive a
dishonorable discharge, but for reasons unknown to them, he left the military
with an honorable discharge. Sexual harassment, and even assault, is a crime
familiar to many women veterans, and the consistent ability of assailants to
escape any and all consequences for their sinister acts of sadism, is a
continual source of suffering for women who have already endured pain and
trauma.
Recent research from the Department of Veterans
Affairs indicates that two out of every
five military women experience sexual trauma during service. An inquiry into the crisis of sexual assault from
former Congresswoman Jane Harman found that in one California veterans
hospital, four out of every ten women
were raped by fellow soldiers. When sexual violence against men becomes
part of the calculus, there are an estimated 38 rapes in the
military every single day. Following
the physical assault, there is often a bureaucratic rape of emotional and
mental health. The RAND Corporation discovered that
62 percent of women who reported their victimization to military superiors experienced professional and social
retaliation.
Public
discussion of the sexual assault epidemic in the military is rarely audible
over the cacophony of phony patriotic imbecility, disguised as indignation. The
cheap “How dare you criticize our
heroes” sentimentality deflects
attention away from the reality that “our heroes” are the ones whose lives
undergo destruction at the hands of the minority of sexual predators in the
military, and the institutional bias and corruption shielding them from
punishment. Genuine patriotism would provide protection for the
military members who, in their voluntary duty, experience the worst form of
violent and bureaucratic betrayal….”
Food
for thought:
It appears the debate on the Military’s Rape and
Sexual Assault Epidemic is circling around again. Let’s hope this time around it gains enough momentum
to properly address ongoing Civil Rights and Human Rights violations committed
against our service members, for decades!!
This issue deserves more than mere public
discussion, it deserves Concrete
Law, to hold senior Pentagon officials accountable for the health, comfort
and welfare of ALL personnel assigned to their unit.
Equality is paramount throughout all facets of our
daily lives, occupations and especially in the workplace. No
different than the equality message that is being amplified during the ongoing Black
Lives Matter Movement; Veterans’ Lives
Matter!!! And ALL American citizens deserve blanketed protection under a nationwide
Human Rights Law!!
