The Iraq War Bush doesn’t want us to see
There’s an absolutely horrifying in depth NY Times article on The Women’s War, an article every woman should read. It’s about how women soldiers perceive Iraq, their experiences, their tales, and the fact that more of them are coming home with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome than are men. Why? Not only are many of them in high risk jobs in Iraq (like transport.) Most of them have been sexually harassed, many severely so, and many have been raped by US male soldiers– their comrades in arms. What’s especially disturbing is that the so-called remedies the US Army has taken to stop this sort of abuse has not done a thing, because the offenses are never brought to court martial, instead the offender is transferred away or dealt with in other ways that do nothing to punish.
“A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking health care through the V.A. said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service. Of that group, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times, and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped. Perhaps even more tellingly, a small study financed by the V.A. following the gulf war suggests that rates of both sexual harassment and assault rise during wartime. The researchers who carried out this study also looked at the prevalence of PTSD symptoms - including flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbing and round-the-clock anxiety - and found that women who endured sexual assault were more likely to develop PTSD than those who were exposed to combat. . . . If Suzanne Swift’s why-bother approach to telling her superiors about the harassment in Iraq initially struck me as curious, it began to make more sense as I spoke with a number of other female Iraq veterans. There was a pervasive sense among them that reporting a sexual crime was seldom worthwhile. Department of Defense statistics seem to bear this out: of the 3,038 investigations of military sexual assault charges completed in 2004 and 2005, only 329 - about one-tenth - of them resulted in a court-martial of the perpetrator. More than half were dismissed for lack of evidence or because an offender could not be identified, and another 617 were resolved through milder administrative punishments, like demotions, transfers and letters of admonishment . . .Many of the women I spoke with said they felt the burden of having to represent their sex - to defy stereotypes about women somehow being too weak for military duty in a war zone by displaying more resiliency and showing less emotion than they otherwise might. There appears to have been little, too, in the way of female bonding in the war zone: most reported that they avoided friendships with other women during the deployment, in part because of the fact that there were fewer women to choose from and in part because of the ridicule that came with having a close friend. ”You’re one of three things in the military - a bitch, a whore or a dyke,” says Abbie Pickett, who is 24 and a combat-support specialist with the Wisconsin Army National Guard. ”As a female, you get classified pretty quickly.””
Before reading this article I already knew the war was wrong, built on a lie to fill the pockets of buddies of the Bush Administration. Now I’m shaken to the core. We need to get out. Now. For the sake of the Women Soldiers.
Technorati Tags: Iraq, Surge, Women’s War, US Army Women, US Women Soldiers
