THE MILITARY'S WAR ON WOMEN
THE WRONG STUFF
By Tod Ensign

U.S. Navy officers letting it all hang out at Tailhook '91.

"When you want to create [solidarity in a] group of male killers, this is what you do: you kill the women in them."
         -George Gilder, Men and Marriage

THAT OBSERVATION goes a long way toward explaining the controversy currently raging over the Pentagon's double standard in handling sexual misconduct cases. The armed forces' deep ambivalence about the role of women in active service has fueled a witch-hunt mentality that kicks in as soon as female GIs are suspected of adultery or related crimes.

An unspoken but pervasive belief among many combat commanders holds that men must bond with other men before any really serious killing can take place. When you're around the 82nd Airborne Division or the elite Rangers, you can smell the macho, feel it, hear it. To be called "STRAC"-straight, tough and ready for action-s a great compliment. It means that you're ready to climb out a window, rappel down the side of a building and kill someone with a pencil. One of the most important and guarded tenets of the military is the need to maintain that hyped-up sense of maleness.

Breaching the Ramparts
Until the creation of the "all-volunteer force" in 1973, women served only in segregated units, performing mostly clerical and health-related jobs. But the Gates Commission that designed the all-volunteer force foresaw that a significant proportion of the "new" military would have to be female if the armed services were to maintain a standing strength of one-and-a-half million volunteers.

Partly in response to the concerns of military traditionalists, Congress adopted "combat exclusion" rules that forbade women from serving in military jobs that might involve them in actual combat. However, as female GIs proved their dedication and ability, those barriers began to erode, and slowly more and more career fields opened up to them. The Clinton Administration further relaxed the rules in 1993, making the vast majority of service jobs available to women. Today, only fighting units of the infantry, armor, artillery and submarine forces remain off-limits to women.

Predictably, those seismic shifts had an enormous impact on an institution that is, by its nature, highly traditional and conservative. Many male commissioned and noncommissioned officers waged active campaigns against the new female GIs, whom they regarded as interlopers diluting the military testosterone level. In the hoariest all-male bastions, such as combat pilot outfits, women were harassed so mercilessly all but the most determined were driven out. When F-14 pilot Lt. Karen Hultgreen crashed during a 1994 attempted aircraft carrier landing, male pilots seized on the crash as an example of lowered standards, although nine male F-14 pilots had crashed their planes in the preceding two years.

The Harassment Epidemic
Unable to ignore the problem, the Pentagon conducted large-scale studies in 1988 and 1995 of sexual harassment of female GIs. The second involved responses by 50,000 women-from all service branches-to a confidential questionnaire. A staggering 56 percent of the women reported that they had experienced at least one episode of sexual harassment (ranging from cat-calls to rape) during the previous 12 months, a rate representing only a slight decline from the 64 percent harassment rate reported in the 1988 survey. The category that registered the largest decline-a drop of 15 percent-from the first to the second study was whistling and cat-calls, which is also the most easily detected activity. Rape/assault went down only one point, from five percent to four percent over the seven-year span between the two studies.

As more and more independent, successful women climb the military ladder, commanders appear to be intensifying the prosecution of such life-style-or "crimes-of-the-heart"-offenses as adultery, "fraternization" (social contact between officers and enlisted personnel) and sodomy. In the Air Force, criminal prosecutions for adultery have quadrupled over the past decade, with 1996 registering the highest number yet. Air Force women are now four times more likely than men to be tried for fraternization. (High-ranking Air Force and Army generals caught in adulterous affairs are transferred or denied promotions-but never court-martialed.)

Boys Being Boys
The Navy's Tailhook Association hit the headlines in 1991 when its members ran riot, attacking and harassing women at its Las Vegas convention. "Tailhookers" are an elite and ultra-macho group of Navy pilots who fly their jets off the decks of aircraft carriers. Although their barbarous behavior shocked many, not one of the 140 individuals investigated was ever court-martialed, although some were given non-judicial, administrative punishment.

But few people know that the Air Force pilots maintain a similar organization, the Command Barstoolers Association. As its name suggests, the secretive, all-male organization sponsors stag gatherings at which members drink, carouse and engage in sexual high-jinks. Founded in Korea in 1955 and currently based in Tucson, AZ, the group claims about 1,100 members, roughly divided between active-duty and retired career officers. Membership is by invitation only and is limited to "Rated Officers"-Air Force pilots and navigators.

The Barstoolers maintain an "official" newsletter, "Drink Booze News." Reading it, one finds that members-who include two- and three-star generals-address each other by nicknames including "Boner," "Bam-Bam," "Tits," "Alley Cat," "Cunning Linge" and "BatFuck." One member, an officer named Harder, goes by the nickname "Poker."

Double Standard
The GI/veterans' rights advocacy organization Citizen Soldier is currently helping in the defense of 28-year-old Air Force Lt. Crista Davis of DeKalb, IL, who is charged with "conduct unbecoming an officer" and other offenses related to an off-base affair she had with her boss, a married superior officer. If convicted of all charges, Davis could receive 10 years in prison and a dishonorable dismissal. The major, who fathered Davis's son Cristoph, has not been charged with any crime, although an Air Force panel recently found him "mentally unfit" for duty.

Davis's Air Force Academy classmate Lt. Kelly Flinn, the first female B-52 pilot, received a barrage of media attention in May when she was charged with adultery and lying under oath about an off-base affair. (Flinn was eventually allowed to resign with a general discharge.) But Davis's story is even more telling than Flinn's; it not only illustrates the double standard in action, it also shows what happens when a Black servicewoman blows the whistle.

According to Davis, the major routinely referred to female Air Force Academy graduates as a "coven of witches." "He told me that he'd gone through communications school with female grads who were trying to get men kicked out by saying they'd been harassed," she recounted. He also told her that the Black syndicated columnist Clarence Page "deserved a good, old-fashioned Mississippi ass-whipping."

Offended by his remarks-and by a pattern of unfair evaluations-she filed a formal complaint against him through the office of the Air Force Inspector General. Not much later, she was hit with several court martial charges.

Where Do the Barstoolers Stand?
Davis's Brookline, MA-based defense lawyer, Louis Font, petitioned the military court June 4 to call 15 Air Force generals-including Lt. Gen. Richard Swope, the Inspector General of the Air force and a confirmed Barstooler-to investigate what role, if any, that secret, alternative chain of command has had in the prosecution of her case.

Two days later, Gen. Joseph Ralston, a candidate for the office of Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff-and another suspected Barstooler on Davis' proposed list of witnesses-was being scrutinized intensely for the Joint Chief's position in light of an earlier adulterous affair. Abruptly, the Air Force postponed the pretrial hearing in Davis' case. Were things getting a little too hot for the party-hearty generals?

For generations, the all-male U.S. military tolerated-or virtually condoned-extra-marital sex and consorting with prostitutes by GIs.

Condoms were routinely issued, along with warnings about sexually transmitted disease, whenever the Navy arrived at a new port of call. The huge Navy base at Subic Bay in the Philippines was infamous for its off-base "workforce" of ten thousand poverty-stricken Filipino women and girls. And thanks to a long-standing rule that prevented servicemen from taking along family members on one-year assignments to Korea, a whole industry of "yobos"-Korean comfort women-grew up around the military bases there to keep U.S. soldiers and flyboys company during the long Korean winters. Yet former Army lawyer Luther West of Baltimore, who served from 1951 to 1968, doesn't recall ever trying a single case of adultery during his long career.

But once independent, successful women began to climb the military ladder, their consensual off-duty activities became fair game for military prosecutors.

What Now?
Feminist author Linda Bird Francke is pessimistic about the military's capability for real change. "In such a group-driven, male culture, the Pentagon's directives on sexual harassment were doomed to sink like stones," she has written. In her new book, Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military (Simon & Schuster, 1997), she argues that "a group dynamic centered around male perceptions and sensibilities ... drives the military." Given this toxic brew of testosterone and assumed privilege, "harassment is an inevitable by-product."

And, despite last spring's intense public debate over sex and the military, no one asked a related question: Are the warrior values that commanders believe are essential in getting soldiers to kill uniquely or predominantly male?

Or, as one retired three-star general recently complained to the Washington Post, "If we're hiring saints, will we get the soldiers who will do the gory things soldiers have to do?"

For help or information on GI or service-related problems, contact Citizen Soldier at 175 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10010; (212)679-2250.

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
July-August 1997: [Editorial: Murder By State] [After the Bulldozers, the Rebuilding] [The Wrong Stuff: The Military's War on Women] [Activist News] [WRL News] [Activist Review: Power Lines]

The Nonviolent Activist is published bi-monthly by:
WAR RESISTERS LEAGUE
339 Lafayette Street, New York, NY 10012. (212) 228-0450, fax (212) 228-6193, e-mail:wrl@warresisters.org.

EDITOR: Judith Mahoney Pasternak. PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE: Virginia Baron, David McReynolds, John M. Miller (production), Lisa Miller, Judith Mahoney Pasternak (editor), Mary Jane Sullivan. NVA ADVISORY BOARD: Robert Cooney, Kate Donnelly, Larry Gara, Carol Jahnkow, Andy Mager, Matt Meyer, Craig Simpson. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Free to members, individual non-members of WRL $15 per year; institutions $25 per year; overseas airmail add $15 per year. Send check or money order to WRL. MANUSCRIPTS: Inquiries welcome via postal or e-mail. Paper manuscripts will not be returned unless accompanied by a SASE; poetry by assignment only. Letters to the editor, inquiries, advertising rates, etc. to the address above.