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Oorspronkelijk geplaatst door The Sunday Times
om The Sunday TimesApril 8, 2007
Battle of the sexes
Thousands of female US soldiers are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder after serving in Iraq - having been bullied, harassed and even raped by their male colleagues. Sara Corbett talks to seven women on the front line of a new conflict
On the morning of Monday, January 9, 2006, the 21-year-old US Army specialist Suzanne Swift went Awol. Her unit, the 54th Military Police Company, was two days away from leaving for Iraq. Swift had been home for less than a year, after a 12-month tour of duty, and they were heading back to Baghdad.
But in the weeks leading up to the departure date, she had started to feel increasingly anxious. She was irritable, picked fights with friends, drank heavily. “But I was also ready to go,” she tells me. “I was like, ‘Okay, I can do this.’”
The weekend before deployment, however, Swift drove south to her home town, Eugene, Oregon, to visit her mother. The decision to flee, she says, happened in a split second on Sunday night. “All my stuff was in the car,” she recalls. “My keys were in my hand, and then I looked at my mom and said: ‘I can’t do this. I can’t go back there.’ It wasn’t some rational decision. It was a huge, crazy, heart-pounding thing.”
For two days afterwards, Swift watched her mobile phone light up with calls from her commanders. They left concerned messages, and angry ones too. For the remainder of that winter, Swift hid out at a friend’s house, uncertain whether the army was looking for her. “I got all my money out of the bank,” she tells me. “I never used my credit card – in case they were trying to trace me. It was always hanging over my head.”
In April last year she finally moved back into her family’s home. Then, on the night of June 11, a pair of local police officers knocked on the door and found Swift inside, painting her toenails with her 19-year-old sister. She was handcuffed, driven away, and held in the county jail for two nights before being taken to Fort Lewis in Washington state, where military officials threatened to charge her with being absent without leave. As army officials pondered her fate, Swift was assigned a room in the barracks and an undemanding desk job.
She told army investigators that the reason she did not report for deployment was that she had been sexually harassed repeatedly by three of her supervisors throughout her military service: beginning in Kuwait; through much of her time in Iraq; and following her return to Fort Lewis. She claimed, too, to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Swift’s stress came not just from the war and not just from the supposed harassment, she told the investigators, but from a combination of the two.
In a written statement, she asserted that her station, Camp Lima, outside Karbala, was hit by mortar attacks almost nightly for the first two months of her deployment. She reported working 16-hour shifts, experiencing the death of a fellow company member in an incident of friendly fire, and having a close friend injured in a car bombing. What, Swift said, distressed her most, however, was a situation that involved her squad leader. She claimed that he propositioned her for sex the first day the two of them arrived in Iraq, and that she felt coerced into having a sexual relationship with him that lasted four months – the relationship consisting, she said, of his knocking on her door late at night and demanding intercourse. When she finally ended this arrangement, the sergeant retaliated by ordering her to do solitary forced marches from one side of the camp to another, at night, in full battle gear, and by humiliating her in front of her fellow soldiers.
As is often the case with matters involving sex and power, the lines are blurred. Swift does not say she was raped, exactly, but manipulated, repeatedly, by a man above her in rank – and therefore responsible for her health and safety.
In the wake of several sex scandals in the 1990s, the US military has tried to become more sensitive to the presence of women, especially now they fill 15% of the ranks worldwide. There are regular mandated workshops on preventing sexual harassment and assault. Each battalion has a representative trained to field and respond to complaints. Swift says she initially reported what she characterised as an unwanted relationship with her squad leader in Iraq to her equal-opportunity representative there, who listened, she claims, but did nothing about it.
Swift has blonde hair and green eyes. She swears, smokes and, when not in uniform, favours low-cut shirts that show off a flower tattoo on her chest. “Suzanne is not some passive little lily,” says her mother, Sara Rich. “She’s a soldier.” Rich is a social worker who specialises in family therapy. She was in frequent touch last summer with her daughter’s lawyers, who were negotiating to get Swift medically discharged for her PTSD – so she could avoid being court-martialled and convicted for going Awol.
The army’s investigation had determined that Swift’s charges against her superiors could not be substantiated because of a lack of evidence. (Both men denied Swift’s allegations.)
Swift was quickly becoming a symbol, though of what it was hard to say. Among the anti-war crowd, thanks in part to the fiery speeches Swift’s mother was delivering at local rallies and anti-war gatherings, she was being painted as a martyr, a rebel and a victim all at once. Meanwhile, others deemed her a traitor, a fraud or simply a whiny female soldier who’d been too lazy or too selfish to return to war.
Iraq is a chaotic war in which an unprecedented number of women have been exposed to high levels of stress. So far, more than 160,000 American female soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 7,500 in Vietnam and 41,000 who were dispatched to the first Gulf war. Today, one in every 10 US soldiers in Iraq is female.
Women are generally limited to combat-support roles in the war, but they are arguably witnessing a historic amount of violence. The Iraq war has virtually eliminated the distinction between combat units and support units in the military. “Frankly, one of the most dangerous things you can do in Iraq is drive a truck,” says Matthew Friedman, executive director of the National Center for PTSD, a research-and-education programme financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA).
There have been few large-scale studies done on the particular psychological effects of combat on female soldiers in the US. Much of what we know about trauma comes primarily from research on two distinct populations – civilian women who have been raped, and male combat veterans. But taking into account the large number of women serving in dangerous conditions in Iraq, and reports suggesting that women in the military bear a higher risk than civilian women of being sexually assaulted either before or during their service, it’s conceivable that this war may well generate an unfortunate new group to study – women who have experienced sexual assault and combat, many of them before they turn 25.
A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that nearly one-third of female veterans seeking health care through the VA said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service. Of that group, 37% said they were raped multiple times, and 14% that they were gang-raped. Perhaps even more tellingly, a study after the Gulf war suggests rates of both sexual harassment and assault rise during wartime.
Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the National Center for PTSD, says she worries that the conflict in Iraq is leaving large numbers of women potentially vulnerable to this “double whammy” of military sexual trauma and combat exposure. “Many of these women,” she says, “will have both.” She notes that though both men and women who join the military have been shown to have higher rates of sexual and physical abuse in their backgrounds than the general population, women entering the military tend to have more traumas accumulated than men.
So far, the VA has diagnosed possible PTSD in about 34,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans; nearly 3,800 of them are women. Given that PTSD sometimes takes years to surface in a veteran, these numbers are almost assuredly going to grow. With regard to women, nearly every expert I interviewed mentioned the reportedly high rates of sexual harassment and assault in the military as a particular concern.
The Department of Defense has made policy changes designed to address these issues. In 2005 it established a formal Sexual Assault Prevention and Response programme, and it trains “victim advocates” on large military installations.
The rules have also been rewritten: victims can now disclose sexual assaults confidentially in “restricted reports” that give them access to medical treatment and counselling without setting off an official investigation. In 2005, when this policy came into force, the number of reported assaults across the military rose by 40%.
But there is a pervasive sense among victims that reporting a sexual crime is 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 of them resulted in a court martial of the perpetrator. More than half were dismissed for lack of evidence.
Keri Christensen lives outside Denver with her husband and two daughters. Christensen is 33, blue-eyed, with an easy smile. She had 13 years of part-time service in the Wisconsin Army National Guard as a heavy-equipment transporter, prior to her deployment in Iraq. Her life, she says, had been a generally happy one.
But the stresses of deployment were manifest: she agonised over leaving her daughters, who were then six and two. Stationed in Kuwait, Christensen’s unit ran convoys of equipment back and forth from the port to inside Iraq. “It was really scary,” she says. Then, one day in February 2005, Christensen was accidentally dragged beneath a truck trailer and run over, breaking a number of bones in her foot and injuring her knee and back. She was assigned to a desk job. It was there, she says, that a sergeant – a man she’d known for 10 years – began making comments about her breasts, and at one point baldly propositioned her for sex.
Something inside her broke, she says. Christensen claims she was punished for even mentioning the situation to her company commanders: written up for small infractions; falsely accused, she says, of being intoxicated (for which she was demoted); and reassigned for duty to an airfield near a mortuary, where she occasionally helped load coffins of dead soldiers onto planes bound for the US. (The Wisconsin Army National Guard denied that Christensen was punished for making a sexual-harassment claim, and stated that the claim was investigated and dismissed for lack of evidence.) Christensen says a combination of war stress, harassment and the reprisals that followed were so upsetting and demoralising that she considered suicide on several occasions. Her military records show that during her deployment, she was given a diagnosis of depression and PTSD.
After Christensen’s experiences in Kuwait, she allowed her military enlistment to expire, which, given that she was six years short of receiving military retirement benefits, added to her pain. “That was my career, and they stole it from me,” she says, sitting in the living room of her home. “They make you feel like you’re crazy. And I’m not the only one. There’s other women out there this has happened to. Why is the attitude always ‘Just shut up and leave it alone’?”
“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.”
There are women who feel at ease among the men in their platoons: this seems most common among reserve and medical units, where the gender ratios tend to be more even. Several women credited their commanders for establishing a more egalitarian climate, where sexual remarks were not tolerated.
This was not the case for Pickett, who arrived in Iraq in early 2003, having been sexually assaulted, she says, during a humanitarian deployment to Nicaragua less than two years earlier, when she was just 19. When I spoke to her by phone in December, she recalled being too afraid to report the incident, particularly given the fact that the supposed perpetrator was an officer. During her 11-month stint in Iraq, stationed mostly outside Tikrit in a company of 19 women and 140 men, Pickett claimed her male peers thought nothing of commenting on her breast size or making sexual jokes about her. Yet in a war zone the effect seemed more corrosive. “The real difference is that over there, there’s never a break from it,” Pickett told me. “At home you can go out with your girlfriends and get a beer and talk about the idiots who were cracking jokes. Over there, you’re a minority 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You never get that 10 minutes to relax or even cry. Sometimes you just need to let it all out.”
One night in autumn 2003, Pickett’s unit came under mortar attack. She spent part of the night tending to bleeding soldiers by torch light in a field tent. Once the experience was over, the memory kept replaying in her mind. “For a long time, I wished I had died that night,” Pickett told me. She returned home to Wisconsin “barely functioning”. A year after her deployment, a VA clinician formally diagnosed PTSD, which Pickett thinks stems from the stress of combat, harassment and the earlier sexual assault.
Joane Nagel, a sociology professor at Kansas University, is studying sex and the military. She has found that “when you take young women and drop them into that hypermasculine environment, the sex stuff just explodes. Some have willing sex. Some get coerced into it. Women are vulnerable sexually”. The spectre of childhood abuse in military men and women potentially adds another layer of combustibility to gender relations. Tina Lee, a psychiatrist who works with male and female PTSD patients, points out that traumatic experiences in childhood may increase the risk of developing PTSD when exposed to a trauma in adulthood. “You have young women joining the military who have the profile of being victimised, who don’t have boundaries sometimes,” Lee says. “Then you have a male population that fits a perpetrator profile. They are mostly under 25, often developmentally adolescent, and you put them together. What do you think will happen? The men do the damage, the women get damaged.” Being sexually assaulted by a fellow soldier may prove extra traumatic, as it represents a breach in the code of military cohesion – a concept that most enlistees have drilled into them from their first day. “It’s very disconcerting to have somebody who is supposed to save your life turn on you and do something like that,” says Susan Avila-Smith, the director of Women Organizing Women, an advocacy programme designed to help traumatised women navigate the vast health-care and benefits system.
Pickett, who since returning from Iraq has become active in Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan group, says: “You’re in Iraq, driving down Highway 1 with an M-16 in your hand. You’re thinking of 5,000 things at once, trying to be everything everybody wants you to be. And you still have to take the crap from the men. You’re 20 years old and growing into your own body, having an actual sex drive. But you’ve got 30 horny guys propositioning you and being really disgusting about it.” She adds: “Women are set up to fail in a very real way, in an area where they could get killed. If your mind isn’t 100% on the battlefield, you could die. That’s the bottom line.”
The Iraq war has created tens of thousands of female war veterans. Female soldiers have flown fighter jets, commanded battalions, lost limbs, survived stints as PoWs, killed insurgents and come home in coffins. And many, too, have begun to experience the psychological fallout of war. Keli Frasier, an army reservist, has been fired from three low-wage jobs and dropped out of college since returning from Iraq in May 2004. “Half the time,” she says, “I don’t understand why I lose the jobs.” According to her account, while driving a fuel truck in Iraq she watched her squad leader die in a roadside ambush, and another have his leg blown off. “In all those situations, your mind goes on autopilot, and you just do what you’re trained to do,” she says, sitting in a trailer she and her husband own. She bounces her baby son on one knee as she talks. “I didn’t really start having any mental issues until we got home,” she says, adding that it was four or five months before PTSD was diagnosed.
“I was not scared a single day I was in Iraq; that’s what baffles me most,” says Kate Bulson, a 24-year-old former army sergeant. She developed PTSD after completing the first of two tours in Iraq, she says, adding that she had not experienced sexual trauma. “I did everything the male soldiers did: I kicked in doors, searched people and cars, ran patrols on dangerous highways,” she says. “Over there, I would hear an explosion at night and sleep through it. Now I hear the slightest sound and I wake up.”
The VA recognises the need for stepping up programmes for treating PTSD, but of about 1,400 VA hospitals and clinics, currently only 27 have inpatient PTSD programmes, and of these, just two serve women exclusively. According to the VA, several more women’s residential treatment programmes are in the planning stages. But the Bush administration recently announced that while it will increase veterans’ health-care financing by 9% for 2008, it has proposed consecutive cuts of about $1.8 billion for 2009 and 2010. Meanwhile, the federal health-care system built to serve soldiers and veterans is sagging under the load of those who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan: the VA has a reported backlog of 400,000 benefit claims.
The larger question is: how will this new crop of female war veterans respond, recover or act out the traumas of their military experience? While it is still too early to know, small stories, usually in local newspapers, may indicate the early flickers of a larger fire. There is the story of Tina Priest, a 21-year-old soldier who, according to army investigation records, shot herself with an M-16 in Iraq last March, just two weeks after filing a rape charge against a fellow soldier.
Then there is Linda Michel, a 33-year-old navy medic who served under stressful conditions at a US-run prison near Baghdad. Returning home last October, she struggled to fit back into her life as a suburban mother of three in a quiet housing development near Albany in New York state. She shot and killed herself within three weeks of the homecoming.
More recently, there’s Jessica Rich, a 24-year-old former army reservist who, one night in February, climbed drunk into her Volkswagen Jetta and drove south on a northbound road out of Denver. She slammed head-on into a 4x4, killing herself and injuring four others, after a nine-month tour of Iraq in 2003 and – according to former soldiers who’d been in group therapy with her – having been raped during her service. “She was having nightmares still, up until this point,” one says. “She said it was really hard to get over because she couldn’t get any help from anybody.”
The Women’s Trauma Recovery Program is tucked into a small building on a sprawling veterans’ health-care campus in Menlo Park, 20 miles south of San Francisco. Inside, there are five dorm-style bedrooms, each with a pair of twin beds. Next door there is a larger and more established 45-bed programme for male active-duty soldiers and veterans with PTSD.
Some of the women I visited there last July served in previous decades and were only just dealing with their PTSD. They recognised themselves as harbingers, as cautionary tales of how bad it could get for the current generation of female soldiers if they left PTSD untreated.
One of the two vets of the Iraq war on the campus was Kathleen, a 37-year-old army nurse. She said she never suffered any sexual assault and arrived at Menlo Park courtesy of a programme sponsored by the Department of Defense. Kathleen was a first lieutenant and a registered nurse. She was evacuated from Baghdad on medical grounds.
Sitting in a chair, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, Kathleen, speaking in a soft drawl, described being stationed at a combat-support hospital inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, working 15-hour shifts in the intensive-care unit, often tending to burns patients. “I expected some death,” she said. “I was realistic. What I didn’t expect was that we would be taking care of so many civilians, and those civilians would be children.” She paused to add that she had five children of her own – all daughters, aged 9 to 18, who were back in Oklahoma with her husband, himself an army man who’d been deployed to Iraq twice.
She also mentioned a young boy named Mohammed who died in the Green Zone hospital early on in her time in Iraq, saying only that she felt responsible for his death. “I can’t say more about that,” she said, shaking her head. She then described caring for another young Iraqi who’d lost his legs because of complications from a gunshot wound. She talked about a creeping feeling of powerlessness. “You get to a point when you can’t take care of everybody,” she said, her voice quavering. Then, one day, Kathleen’s superiors barred her from visiting the man who had had his legs amputated, suggesting she was becoming too emotional.
“I went crazy,” she said. “I had a major panic attack. I felt like I couldn’t get enough air.” On the night it happened, she climbed the stairs to the hospital’s roof, which overlooked the Green Zone. When a doctor turned up, Kathleen began to cry. The doctor fetched the senior nurse on call. Believing Kathleen was contemplating suicide, the nurse had her evacuated.
Everything that happened to Kathleen – her compassion for her patients, the powerlessness she felt in trying to save them, the depression and breakdown – all very easily could have happened to one of her male colleagues. “We were all facing these struggles,” she said. “There were people breaking down crying; nobody was sleeping well. There were a lot of nightmares.” Yet it was Kathleen who was helicoptered out of the war on a stretcher last year and returned to Oklahoma, to her five girls and her husband.
Leaving Iraq and going home, Kathleen felt an instant change in her relationship with her daughters. “It was very difficult for me to see them,” she told me. “I thought I would be excited and run to them and tell them I loved them, but instead I was scared. I was scared for them to hold me, to touch me. I don’t know why, because I wanted to really bad. I was afraid for them to see me shake or stutter, not being able to communicate.” She said that it was hard to reconnect with one daughter, who has dark hair and brown eyes, because “she looks like she could be Iraqi”.
Two weeks after arriving in Menlo Park, she was still baffled by how excruciating family life had become. When her nine-year-old daughter had started shouting playfully while being chased by her 11-year-old, her mind flashed instantly to Iraq. “It just goes through me and brings me right back. I have a lot of flashbacks. And then I’d have nightmares, afraid
that they’d hear me talk in my sleep or yell out, moaning.” She added: “Me and their dad have had nothing but conflict after conflict, because he wants me to be a certain way, and I can’t.” Her children, she said, had begun avoiding her in order not to upset her, asking their father to drive them places, speaking quietly in her presence.
And then came a turning point. One day, when her husband was not around to do the driving, she had the girls in the car on their way to team practice when her 13-year-old daughter tried to offer some encouragement. “She said, ‘Mama, you can get through this; it’s not like you killed anybody,’” Kathleen recalled. “I started crying, and she goes, ‘Oh my God, you killed somebody!’ I went into a panic attack right in front of my kids. That was enough for me. I was like, I’m ready to go [to Menlo Park].”
Kathleen left Menlo Park after one of her daughters was involved in a car accident. “I left treatment because my children were more important than my needs,” she said.
What is striking about female Iraq veterans grappling with PTSD is their isolation. Most are on antidepressants and receiving counselling through the VA, but few had a sense that their symptoms were going away. Recently, after months of waiting, Keli Frasier, the mother in Colorado who had been struggling with depression, finally managed to schedule an appointment with a VA psychiatrist to obtain new antidepressants. Across the state in Denver, Keri Christensen says she is still haunted by nightmares and unnerved by driving. And finally there is Suzanne Swift, who in early December was given a summary court martial at Fort Lewis, a hearing normally used for small offences. She pleaded guilty to “missing movement” and being absent without leave. Her rank was reduced to private, and she spent the next 21 days, including Christmas, in a military prison in Washington state. The army ruled that in order to receive an honourable discharge, Swift was duty-bound to complete her five-year enlistment, which ends in early 2009. After finishing her time in prison in January, Swift says, she checked herself into an inpatient psychiatric ward for a few days, but ultimately was released back to duty. She was trying to ignore the PTSD, but had taken to drinking in order to get by.
“I kind of liked the army before all that stuff happened,” she says, on the phone from her barracks at Fort Lewis. “I was good at my job. I did what I was supposed to do. And then in Iraq I got disillusioned. All of a sudden this army you care so much about is like, well, all you’re good for is to have sex with and that’s it.” She adds, “I really, really, really don’t want to be here.”
The army had issued an order for Swift to be transferred to a base in California later this year. Swift is unhappy about the change, because it would take her further away from her family in Oregon, but she is also considering other plans. “Did you know there’s some programme near San Francisco that’s just for women who have PTSD?” She pauses, surrounded by the silence in the barracks at Fort Lewis, then says: “I’m thinking about trying to get in there.”
©Sara Corbett 2007
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11 april 2007, 21:53
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