During the early months of the Iraq war, a new type of “friendly fire” was cheerfully revealed by the media to be sidelining troops: female soldiers were being taken out of action by pregnancies conceived while on mission. But the tales revealed in a front page New York Times article last week were altogether different. A headline announced: “Military women reporting rapes by U.S. soldiers-Senators angry at lapses; Allegations are the most extensive to confront the service in years.” The article told of female U.S. military personnel sexually assaulted by their brothers-in-arms in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kuwait.
To make matters worse, many of the victims had no access to medical treatment and had been threatened for coming forward. In Congressional hearings our representatives grilled military officials for their “lapses” of discipline. With typically tough wartime rhetoric, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) declared “No war comes without cost, but the cost should be born out of conflict with the enemy and not because of egregious violations by some of our own troops.”
Because earlier reports of the female soldiers’ experience had been largely positive, Senator Collins undoubtedly felt especially betrayed. When a female cook was captured by the Iraqis, held as a POW, and shown in steely suffering to television audiences across the country, one of her female comrades stationed in the United States told a reporter, “It wasn’t like I was proud. But it was kind of like ‘you go girl.’” Days later, America was treated to the supposedly heroic, but largely fictitious, story of Jessica Lynch, which further bolstered the image of the woman soldier. The New York Times Magazine ran a special feature of photographic portraits of women soldiers in full battle regalia, and the image of “Rosie the Riveter” as the quintessential dutiful wartime woman was replaced by the high-profile generation of Lara Crofts.
Operation Iraqi Freedom has been lauded extensively as a great progress for women who serve in the U.S. military, and these women unquestionably deserve due credit. What has not been discussed in this war is another valuable, if controversial, role traditionally provided by women in wartime: prostitution. One of the many failings of Islamic societies-along with their stubborn refusal to support American hegemony-is that they tend to frown on explicit prostitution. Therefore, the storied tradition of willing foreign hosts for American R&R weekends, from England to the Philippines, would certainly not be continued in the Gulf. What effect might his have? In last week’s New York Times, I found part of the answer.
Prostitutes have been such an essential accoutrement of the modern soldier that French Premier Clemenceau, preparing to receive the first batch of two million U.S. doughboys who would arrive in France during World War I, sent a cable to the White House offering to set up a brothel to service the servicemen. Clemenceau viewed the establishment of official brothels as a great improvement in the history of French warfare, because regulated prostitutes could be screened for venereal disease. But, then as now, Americans were much more moralistic than Europeans about such matters, and an aide to President Woodrow Wilson hastily discarded the message lest the President be so offended that he would recall the troops. Clemenceau was perplexed by this rejection, and if he had lived to see the countless brothels supported by American servicemen in Southeast Asia generations later-some of which cleverly advertised “No VD, No VC!”-he would have recognized the hypocrisy of the official American aversion to prostitution.
As the nation engaged in what passed for a debate in the months leading up to our current war, we asked many questions. How much will it cost? Bush’s economic advisor Larry Lindsay presciently estimated upwards of $200 billion; he was fired. How many troops will have to stick around to rebuild an armed and complex country of 23 million? Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki astutely said it would take more than 100,000. Rumsfeld said that was “widely off the mark” and condemned Shinseki into a hurried and markedly unattended retirement ceremony. How many civilians will die? Most Administration answers focused on precision weaponry; many news reports recently have focused on exploding mines.
Here’s a question nobody asked: What is the consequence for women of taking hundreds of thousands of testosterone-laden men, removing them from their wives, girlfriends, communities, and social structures, and placing them in a situation that alternates between terror and boredom? The men who serve in our armed forces are no better or worse than any others. Most of them are probably better than this author. The point is not their character. The point is the reality of the psychological experience of war. Soldiers must dehumanize their enemy, fight off boredom, face death, and feel both invincible and forgotten. In doing so, otherwise good men are led into human behavior that in our better moments we recognize as wrong. Clemenceau offered an outlet, prostitution, that this country is unwilling to confront publicly but that is so common in wartime that it is recommended in “How to Make War: A Comprehensive Guide to Modern Warfare in the 21st Century,” a book frequently assigned in Georgetown courses.
But prostitution is a wretched practice that preys upon degraded women in conditions bordering on enslavement. I imagine that anyone in the Pentagon who espouses the idea that the best way to protect the female troops would be to provide brothels for the boys, whatever merits the argument may have, will find himself fishing with Larry Lindsay and General Shinseki pretty quickly. The U.S. government will never openly embrace prostitution as a necessary evil of war, nor should any decent citizen accept it as such.
For public consumption the Pentagon brass on the Congressional hot seat assured their interrogators that their “lapses” will not be repeated and that all incoming soldiers will be pressed into sensitivity training. But what of all the efforts along those lines undertaken since the Navy’s Tailhook scandal over a decade ago? To pretend that such training will eliminate the problem is foolhardy, no better than pretending that simple abstinence education will stop the spread of AIDS.
The Iraq War was undeniably a war of choice. To pretend that we chose a war, but that its attendant rapes are the unforeseen result of “lapses” that will be avoided in the future through “sensitivity training,” is to be blind to the truth of our actions and the nature of our enterprise. The questions of how much the war would cost and what danger Iraq presents may have been met with evasive half-truths and outright lies. But the question of how many women would suffer at the hands of men driven to antisocial violence was never even asked. The only way to avoid the headlines of last week is not faith-based sensitivity training, though that may do a bit of good. It is honest appraisal and heightened judiciousness when considering war in the first place.
Jason Maurice is a first-year member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He voted for The Station Agent for Best Picture.
