WARTIME IN THE BARRACKS

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Maybe they got the idea from our former enemy, the Imperial Army of Japan. The Emperor Hirohito, you will recall, kindly saw to it that his troops were supplied with teenage sex slaves for the relief of those well-known male physical needs. Only there was a crucial difference between the Japanese army's "comfort women" and the young women trainees who have been abused by their brothers-in-arms in the U.S. military--a crucial military difference, that is. The comfort women of World War II were captives of war--so every assault they endured could be seen, by their assailants, as a humiliation inflicted on the enemy.

This doesn't excuse the Japanese, it just throws a particularly nasty light on the goings-on at Fort Leonard Wood and the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Generally speaking, sexual abuse is visited on women of the other side. One's own women are supposed to be sacrosanct; in fact, the most hallowed argument against having women in combat is that our men would be so busy protecting them that they wouldn't have time to do any serious fighting. When U.S. troops marched to the chant, "Two, four, six, eight,/ Rape, kill, mutilate"--which they did until well into the 1970s--they were not, presumably, thinking of their sisters and girlfriends and moms.

Rape, in particular, is now recognized as a war crime or--from a more chilling perspective--a tactic of war. Maybe it's more fun for the perpetrators than, say, lobbing artillery shells at some remote and impersonal target. But this doesn't mean rape can be seen as just another lighthearted form of R. and R. because the intent is still to defeat the other side. As the Bosnian Serbs understood so well, the best way to get the enemy steamed was to put their wives to work as latter-day comfort women.

Yet there is a tendency, even among respectable commentators, to treat the U.S. military's mushrooming sex-abuse scandals as a case of runaway hormones and boyish high jinks. WAR IS HELL, notes a New York Times headline, adding, wittily, SO IS REGULATING SEX. The article, which glides blithely from the topic of "relationships" to rape, quotes an Assistant Secretary of Defense explaining the debacle in terms of a "natural attraction between men and women." "Attraction?" "Sex?" Excuse me, fellows, but what goes on in your bedrooms?

All right, there can be a fine line, sometimes, between sex and the abuse of it. The officer who comments on his subordinates' good looks may be simply clueless and in need of retraining. The military couple who defy regulations to fraternize off base may be, for all we know, meant for each other. But much of the activity under discussion has nothing ambiguous about it, and certainly nothing fine. We're talking about having one's clothes ripped off and being passed from pawing hand to pawing hand (Tailhook, 1991). About being raped and then told by one's assailant that "if you ever tell anyone about this, I'll slit your throat" (Aberdeen Proving Ground, 1996). This is not about sex and its regulation or lack thereof. This is about war.

What does it mean when soldiers start treating their comrades-in-arms as if they were members of an enemy force? For one thing, and this is the bright side, it means we should be hearing a lot less of the sanctimonious argument that women don't belong in the military because they occupy a "protected" category. Not that that argument was ever anything more than patriarchal propaganda. When the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, for example, they slaughtered every resident--man, woman, child and pet--and waded, triumphantly, in the knee-deep blood. Nor have civilian women ever been entirely safe from their own "protectors." The subjects of Gilgamesh, the first warrior hero of recorded history, complained that "his arrogance has no bounds by day or night...His lust leaves no virgin to her lover."

But the other lesson of Aberdeen is that the U.S. military may well be, to use the classic military terminology, fubar, or screwed up beyond all recognition. Some forms of abuse--like sexual harassment--have been defined by the law as criminal. But the soldier who turns on his comrades with savage intent commits a far graver category of crime. Whether he shoots them in the back or assaults their bodies with his own, he's confusing his fellow soldiers with the foe--and the word for this is treason. When a woman can't trust her drill sergeant, neither can the nation.

We may have to concede at last that the experiment with a sexually integrated military has failed. Some no doubt saw the end coming when three American G.I.s shamed their nation by raping a Japanese schoolgirl in 1995. Others, more prescient, must have realized years ago that in the modern age of "peacekeeping," a military that runs on testosterone is about as useful as a platoon armed with maces and pikes. So enough of this indiscriminate mixing of the genders, any realist will conclude, it's time to shift to an all-female military.