With heavy heart and a great sadness I must republish this piece I wrote in GI Special magazine a while back.
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Fellow military men.
I say this with the heaviest friggin’ heart I can ever have.
Rape in the military is out of control.
It has been out of control for a very long time.
Until all women have learned Aikido and made themselves capable of kicking our asses if/when they need to, it will remain OUR role to stop other men from raping them.
It is our burden to find out it is happening, and to stop it when we find out — before it happens if/when that is ever possible.
And it will forever remain our guilt whenever we know something is up and choose to STAY un-involved or worse yet, complicitous.
Why do I say this?
Let me put it this way.
It was 1988. I was stationed in South Carolina.
I was invited to a famous hotel near an even more famous golf course. I was told I could join a “train” if I wanted to.
YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT. It is time to discuss these issues head on. A train is when a drunk woman lays there and allows many different men she doesn’t even know jump her bones and rape her limp and lifeless body.
I was very young, and I was curious.
I looked ahead of the line I was invited to join, into the room to the open door and saw perhaps one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever seen in my life.
A woman about my age was a zombie with half open eyes. Buck naked and bruised all over her body. She was in the middle of having sex with perhaps the 20th soldier in this past hour. There was a line of a dozen or more people ahead of where I could have chosen to join in.
She was too drunk to have any idea what was continuing on. I have no idea if she consented to any part of this at all. I will never know that; and I will never know who she was. I’ll never even know if she was OK afterward. I left instead of joining that line; but I also did not do anything to stop it, or tell anyone about it for a few years.
When I finally did mention this to a few people many were not surprised, and some seemed to wonder why I even cared. Why it even bothered me
Many confided in me that they had seen these events as a fairly common weekend thing in the military.
Blame the victim, etc.
Anyhow, I’ll close just saying that I’ve reflected on that and so many other issues a lot over the years, and for whatever reasons, our United States society is perhaps the most violent in the world; and U.S. military society seems to be the worst of the worst, especially when you take into account what a young female soldier must go through day in and day out, BEFORE YOU FACTOR IN THESE TRAINS even.
So again I say, we need to figure out how and when we can help put a stop to this kind of bullshit.
I say this now AFTER Lance Corporal (goddamned it, she was the same rank as me!!!) Maria Lauterbach has been brutally murdered, and after Suzanne Swift has tried to get the Army to let her go home, and after Janis Karpinski testified to Congress, but hopefully BEFORE another rape occurs.
http://www.lavenajohnson.com
