The increase in the number of women serving in the armed forces and changes in personnel policies to encourage recruiting and retention of women inevitably stoked tension between women and men. When the numbers of women serving were lower and women were inclined to accept discrimination and harassment as the norm, little was made of discriminatory policies and crimes prejudicial to morale and even deeply damaging, such as sexual assault and rape.
The 2013 documentary film The Invisible War brought renewed attention to the problem of sexual assault in the military. Partly in response, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-New York) proposed legislation to remove the decision to prosecute serious military crimes out of the chain of command. Under the proposed law, an independent cadre of military prosecutors would handle sexual violence allegations. Serious military crimes and all crimes punishable under Article 15 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice would remain with the chain of command. Debate on the bill has continued through two sessions of Congress with no resolution to date. Recent press reporting has focused on chain of command retaliation against victims who report assault and rape—including the practice of labeling victims with a personality disorder diagnosis and separating them administratively or under other than honorable conditions (so-called “bad paper” discharges).
The incidents described in this chapter do not represent the experiences of every woman who has served in the armed forces. Nor is it possible in a work of this scope to give examples of every group of women that has faced discrimination in the military, or to do justice to the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation that further complicate the picture. Individual women also react differently to harassment and discrimination. However, for those who have experienced these issues, the ramifications can be serious and lifelong. Resolution is difficult. The effects of gender discrimination and gender-based violence are now understood to contribute significantly to the incidence of substance abuse, trauma-related disorders, and homelessness in the women veteran population. The experience of military women in America cannot be fully understood without an appreciation of stories of discrimination, harassment, and sexual assault—stories that were once, and are still too often, silenced.
LouAnne Johnson
(n.d.–)
U.S. Navy and Marine Corps
We first introduced Vietnam-era veteran LouAnne Johnson in chapter 8. Accounts of gender-based harassment appear in the writing of women veterans who served in almost every era, but Johnson’s depiction stands out for its candor. Harassment begins for many women in accession training. Military women respond to verbal harassment in different ways: some ignore it, some file complaints with their chain of command, and some fight fire with fire. This excerpt is taken from Johnson’s memoir Making Waves: A Woman in This Man’s Navy.
I wasn’t feeling very friendly. . . . Everywhere we had gone that day, the men screamed and whistled and hollered at us. But, if we even looked at them in response, we got demerits. It wasn’t ladylike to respond to vulgar overtures, we were told. Men didn’t exist as far as female recruits were concerned. In fact, they were referred to as “trees” by our CC.
“We don’t talk to trees,” she would remind us.
The men in one company managed to find out the name of a particularly pretty girl in our company. . . .
“Hey, Morgan!” a male recruit had yelled as we marched by that afternoon. Morgan automatically turned her head to look at him. Within seconds, a petty officer handed Morgan a report chit and she had to spend her rest hour that evening standing at attention in the middle of the sidewalk in front of the barracks, wearing a sign that said “I’m Stupid. I Talk to Trees.” After that humiliation, she got five demerits. Twenty demerits meant a girl got recycled to a new recruit company. . . . Morgan was a popular girl, so our whole company was mad at men in general.
That evening, the same company of men entered the chow hall just ahead of us. We had to stand beside their tables as we waited for our turn to be served. They undressed us with their eyes, which was bad enough, but they also made comments about every nasty thought that entered their dirty little minds.
“Look at the tits on that one!”
“Mmm. Mmm. How’d you like to eat that candy, boys?”
“That’s why I joined the Navy—to ride those Waves!”
I could see the red face of the girl in front of me and I knew my own face was blushing just as hard, but we were forbidden to respond to the taunts. It wouldn’t be ladylike. By the time we sat down to eat, I was completely humiliated, but inspiration struck. I whispered to the girl next to me to stare at the men’s crotches as they filed past on their way out of the door. She passed the word down the line and soon we all sat, staring wide-eyed and innocent, at their crotches. It was hilarious. At first, the boys grinned, but when we didn’t say a word or move our eyes from their private equipment, they started fidgeting and blushing, checking their zippers to see if they were down. We kept staring. They began dancing around, trying to stand so their backs were toward us. Their CC finally gave them the order to move out and started yelling that this one or that one was going to get demerits for fidgeting in line because he had been watching them.
They protested loudly, as our company was called to attention and mustered to leave. As we started to march off, I heard their CC yelling at our CC, “Hey, hold it! My men say your ladies were hassling them in the chow hall!”
Carol Barkalow
(1958–)
U.S. Army
Carol Barkalow, from New Jersey, was one of the first 118 women to attend the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. She graduated in 1980 as a second lieutenant in Air Defense Artillery. Three years later, she transferred to Transportation Corps and, among numerous positions, served as a division transportation officer with the Twenty-Fourth Infantry Division during Operation Desert Storm. In 2002 Lieutenant Colonel Barkalow retired after twenty-two years of service. Her awards and decorations include the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Bronze Star, the Army Meritorious Service Medal, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, Army Commendation Medal, National Defense Service Medal, the Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal, the NATO Medal, and the Parachutist Badge. The following are excerpts from her 1990 memoir In the Men’s House.
According to the logic of the Fourth Class System, hazing was a necessary crucible for bringing would-be West Pointers up to speed. In its ideal form, hazing was specifically related to performing tasks, memorizing required information, and, most important, learning the time-management and self-disciplinary skills that would enable a potential officer to function in a high-stress military environment. Harassment was meant to be aimed only at those individuals who were not seen as meeting the “standard”—but never directed at their gender, religion or race. If misapplied, however, the Fourth Class System could be twisted into very cruel contortions. As with any draconian system entrusted to human hands, misapplications were inevitable.
Women, in particular, became a target group for special hazing, though certainly men were not exempt. The difference was, men had to prove themselves weak before they became subject to this kind of harassment; women had to prove themselves strong before they were spared it.
In one company, I’m told, the men had formed a secret committee that would target one female cadet a month and harass her until she quit, or just make her miserable while she was trying to stick it out. . . .
Hazing was constant, emotional, mental. It was like a form of terrorism, because we never knew when it was coming and where it was coming from, whether the upperclassman walking behind us would leave us in peace or start making foul remarks about our mothers. The worst part of it was, we were completely defenseless, and there was nowhere to turn for recourse. We realized very quickly that we had to make it on our own.
“Turn and face the wall,” an upperclassman would tell a female new cadet. “You’re ugly.”
Even the simplest social exchange could become an occasion for contempt. If a female new cadet pas
sed an upperclassman in the hall and said, “Good morning, Sir,” she might be greeted in return with cool civility. Then again, she might hear back, “Good morning, bitch.” Or, “It was a good morning until you got here, whore.”
One disgruntled fellow snuck into the women’s locker room one night and discovered an anonymous way to express his feelings on the subject of women at the Academy. The next morning, my classmate found her bathing suit sticky with his opinion.
• • •
A woman at West Point was judged not only for the inescapable fact of her sexuality but for how she projected it, and always according to what was deemed appropriate—however arbitrarily—by men. We seemed to be continually stuck in a tiresome stereotype—if we were not socializing heavily with male cadets, then it meant we must be lesbians. If we were socializing heavily with male cadets, then it meant we must be whores. The rumor mill at the Academy turned so thoroughly and well, that the slightest innuendo about a female cadet took only minutes to traverse the entire Corps.
• • •
Press Day, Lake Frederick. The Academy had refused to allow any media to film us during our training because they had wanted us to concentrate on the training itself. So they set aside a Press Day when anybody who was anybody could come. And they certainly did—cameras, reporters, the whole nine yards. The entire day was designated for interviews. The scene reminded me of people flocking to a Macy’s sale right after Christmas. There were camera crews running! And where did they run to? The women, of course. And did it sit well with the guys? Hell no.
Every reporter brought the same bag of questions:
“Why did you come to West Point?”
“How are you adapting?”
“How does it feel to be here with all these men?”
“Are you being discriminated against?”
Our answers would be equally pat:
“I wanted to be an officer, and this was the best place to go.”
“We’re not being discriminated against; some guys don’t like us being here, but we expected that.”
But my favorite question was, “Do you feel that you’ve lost your femininity?” As though femininity were an umbrella, or a hat. Some of the women said, when they wanted to feel more feminine, they’d put on makeup or a skirt. For me, femininity was not a matter of how I looked or what I wore, but how I felt that counted. Because no one could take that from me.
Soon, nearly everything we did came under scrutiny. Outside West Point, the press attention was overwhelming. Inside, it became an excuse for further divisiveness. When my classmate Fran Boyd was once quoted in the newspapers, men she didn’t even know would come up to her and say, “You’re Cadet Boyd, and you said such and such in the New York Times, and I don’t agree.” Officers would not return her salutes. Upperclassmen spat insults at her. Much of the backlash against the media attention was sour grapes on the men’s part, but this time we understood their resentment—some women even felt it was justified. The possibility of coming to West Point had always existed for these guys. Many of them had been looking forward to it since they were kids. They had worked hard to get there. Yet the only thing people wanted to hear about was what the women were up to. And there wasn’t a damn thing we could do about it.
The Public Affairs Office would refer reporters to women who were doing well at the Academy and would present a positive image. A few were outspoken—they’d comment frankly on the guys’ immature behavior and how they felt we were being mistreated, statements for which all of us were held responsible. Some of us turned ourselves inside out trying to distance ourselves from this remarks, to prove that we weren’t the ones who were deliberately trying to stand out. We’d sit around with our male classmates and bad-mouth those women, not to mention the press.
• • •
With the arrival of the new Fourth Class in the summer of 1977, the women of my class were confronted with the task of administering what little authority we had over a younger version of ourselves. I, for one, tried to make it my policy to use hazing as a means to correct plebes, not to harass them. Most of my female classmates behaved in similar fashion, but there were dissenting opinions. Others, once free of the shackles of the Fourth Class System, flatly refused to participate in hazing of any kind. In another group there were some very enthusiastic female participants, a number of whom went overboard harassing younger women—ordering them to do rapid-fire changes of uniform, summoning them into their rooms for questioning like Grand Inquisitors, grilling them relentlessly on their memorization of trivia. A few of these women claimed they needed to be demonstrably tougher on female plebes so no one could accuse them of showing favoritism. I believe these women suspected—and rightly so—that our newly acquired upperclass status did not unanimously assure our position within the Corps. Even as the ranks of women cadets gradually swelled from one glassful to two, many of us remained in separate camps. At best, we observed each other from a distance—across a divide of diffidence, misunderstanding, and fear.
From the beginning, there was a wedge between our class and those who came later. Some of the younger women seemed to regard us with awe, because they knew we had broken the ice and made their lives a little easier. At the same time, we were still the Amazons, the guinea pig class, the weirdos. The new girls coming in fresh off the street didn’t see themselves that way. They were not icebreakers, they were part of a “normal” class. They felt that they belonged. . . .
“My classmates and I still feel that the men and women from our class bonded together well, that there was not a lot of hostility between us,” [said member of the Class of ’81 Traci Reid]. “But we felt, and I know I always felt, that the class of ’80 men disliked their women. And the feedback we were getting from the Academy seemed to confirm that. In lectures or in surveys, all the statistics seemed to point to the women in our class as being better than the class of ’80. So there may have been something close to resentment between the two classes of women. The upperclassmen, especially, were trying to get us to hate our predecessors. But, of course, we didn’t hate them. We just said, ‘Fine. We’ll take all their hard lessons learned.’”
• • •
It was fairly easy to anticipate that in the early years of women’s integration at West Point, contact with female officers was going to be hard to come by. To fill the gap, a new position was created within West Point’s chain of command. Before our arrival, four women were brought in by the Academy to be SATOs—Special Assistants to Tactical Officers. The SATOs were intended as role models for women cadets and advisors to the male tactical officers on “women’s issues.” However, no doubt because of their auxiliary status, the SATOs were relatively ineffective. Once Beast Barracks was over, it was recommended that their positions not be reinstated. Instead, it was magnanimously suggested that women be made full-fledged tactical officers. And so they were—all two of them.
There were other female officers on post, but just a scattered handful. Colonel Mildred Hedberg (now a retired general) was chief of staff of the U.S. Corps of Cadets when we were at the Academy, but we saw her only at official functions. We knew Colonel Hedberg had begun her military career in the pre-integrated Army—in the Women’s Army Corps—and we wondered sometimes how her early experiences compared with ours as cadets. Unfortunately, she was too high-ranking and remote for her presence to have any impact on our daily lives. . . .
Lieutenant Kim Rorbaugh was one of the few military females at West Point I knew personally. A hard-core Army officer, she was five feet seven and muscular, with freckles and strawberry blond hair. Lieutenant Rorbaugh had a dog named Smaj, which was short for sergeant major. That’s how gung-ho Army she was. We rarely, if ever, got to see her human side. West Point officers often remained aloof from cadets, but this was particularly true of women officers—especially with regard to women cadets—to avoid accusations of showing favoritism, or, even worse, charges of fraternization. There was more than a touch of paranoia about such char
ges at the Academy. At practically every moment you had to stop and check your behavior—was it correct? Given half a chance, almost anything could, and would, be taken for impropriety.
Although it never occurred to many of us until much later, the most disturbing thing about all this was that we really needed contact with women officers. We needed their experience, their advice and their example. We needed to be able to talk to them without suspicion or fear. We needed to be brought up the way men at the Academy had been brought up by their own for almost two hundred years.
• • •
Within the cadets’ inner circle existed a system of enforcement—we’d sense who would survive and who would not. Those who were weak would be hounded and hunted, pushed to the limit to see how much they could stand before they broke down and quit. Among the women, the drive toward perfection was consuming, not only for oneself, but for everyone. . . . The tiniest infraction by one woman reflected on us all. It would spur any number of men to comment, “Look at that one. I told you females don’t belong here.” Flawed men were glossed over as exceptions. So were stellar women. In the minds of these men, one “bad” woman would obliterate twenty “good” ones. Yet, as talents emerged, they inscribed their own futures. A woman who could make the runs, who could pitch a tent, who could fire a rifle well, who didn’t snivel or cry, this woman would earn friendship and support. But if a woman was incompetent we would destroy her—even quicker than the men would—because she threatened all of us.
Some women felt that the most compassionate thing we could do for a female who couldn’t cut it at West Point was to help her to leave. Not to “help” her in a negative way, but to say, “Look, these are the realities of this place. You’re a valuable person; if you stay here you’re going to end up hurting yourself.”
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