It’s easy to condemn GIs for taking advantage of an often exploitative sex industry in places like South Korea. But as a soldier who runs ROK Drop, a popular blog about the military in South Korea, points out, it’s wrong to blame the soldiers alone. “Despite all the rhetoric by [United States Forces Korea] about fighting human trafficking, prostitution, and alcohol abuse,” he writes, “USFK’s own policies continue to ensure this type of activity will continue around the US camps.”1 It’s hypocritical, he says: training programs are “telling soldiers to drink responsibly and stay away from juicy girls, but what environment do we create for the soldiers to spend most of their free time in? A ville [camptown] filled with cheap booze and prostitutes.”2
The dearth of other recreational opportunities on Korean bases may be a factor. But at issue is also the broader American military culture, and the sexism and patriarchy found society-wide in the United States, Korea, and much of the world. The behavior of men who take advantage of exploitative sex industries is often excused as a matter of “boys will be boys”—as merely natural behavior for male soldiers. In fact there’s little that’s natural about the behavior. Men on military bases and women in camptowns find themselves in what is a highly unnatural situation, one that’s been created by a series of human decisions made over time (mostly by male military and government officials). Those decisions have created a predominantly male military environment, in which women’s visible presence is overwhelmingly reduced to one role: sex. When researchers studied GIs in South Korea in the 1960s, they found that “one of the forces exerting pressure on them to ‘try a prostitute’” was peer pressure from other Americans. Consider the powerful message communicated, for example, when a medical officer gathers a ship’s men before docking in the Philippines or Korea and throws condoms “as if they were Hallmark cards,” as one sailor recounted.3
Cynthia Enloe has helped show how this world of institutionalized camptown sex helps shape the identities and behavior of male soldiers as men and in the process helps the military to function. Institutionalized military prostitution draws on existing gender norms—cultural ideas about what it means to be a man and a woman—but it also intensifies these norms. It trains men to believe that using the sexual services of women is part of what it means to be a soldier and part of what it means to be a man. It helps shape what Enloe and others have called a “militarized masculinity,” involving feelings of power and superiority over women and a willingness to inflict violence on anyone deemed inferior.4
The ROK Drop blogger describes how these kinds of feelings and ways of seeing the world can develop. “You got 18–20 year old soldiers in a club with [a mamasan] pushing alcohol,” he writes, “and half naked Russian & Phillipino [sic] drinky girls on them making the soldiers feel like a king. A lot of them cannot resist the temptation at their age. So the soldiers drink, get involved with these drinky girls, and take this I’m king of the ville attitude with them everywhere else they go in Korea.”5
This “I’m king” attitude implies a hierarchy, of the kind that is fundamental to military training. Researchers have shown that one of the most difficult challenges militaries face is that of teaching human beings to kill other human beings, and that doing so requires dehumanizing others by promoting the belief that another human is somehow a “lesser” creature. As we will see, one of the central forms of dehumanization promoted by military training and the culture of daily life in the military has been the supposed inferiority of women—that women are less than men. Institutionalized military prostitution provides one important source for this dehumanization of women and the militarized masculinity that helps perpetuate it. In places where there is an ethnic difference between GIs and sex workers, military prostitution can also reinforce societal beliefs about supposed racial and ethnic superiority, and the naturalness of some people serving and others being served.6
Given the ubiquitous nature of camptown prostitution in South Korea in particular, men deployed to the country frequently have their ideas about what it means to be a man transformed—just as boys do in all-male boarding schools, summer camps, sports teams, and fraternities. Thus, when we try to understand recurring incidents of rape and sexual assault perpetrated by troops in places such as Okinawa, or the high rates of sexual assault and violence against women in the military, we cannot overlook men’s experiences in the camptowns. As one advocate for the victims of military sexual violence explains, “You can’t expect to treat women as one of your own when, in the same breath, you as a young soldier are being encouraged to exploit women on the outside of that base.”7
“I COULDN’T RAISE MY VOICE”
Yumi Tomita grew up near Kadena Air Base in Okinawa.8 One day, she was walking by herself home from high school. Along a sidewalk on a narrow side street near a red dirt ball field, she saw a car parked nearby. “The soldier in the car asked me for directions to his friend’s house,” she recounts. “I tried to give directions in my broken English, but he didn’t seem to understand what I said.”
“So I got closer to the window and tried to give directions again. Another soldier, who was hiding, came behind me, pointed a knife at my back, and said, ‘I can kill you.’” Being interviewed for a documentary some two decades years later, Yumi wears large black sunglasses to disguise her identity. During the Korean War, she says, the Kadena area had been turned into a bar district “to ‘protect’ Okinawan women because so many were being raped. Before that, armed U.S. soldiers often barged into people’s homes looking for women. Locals used to ring a warning bell whenever a soldier was nearby. People protected women by hiding them in closets whenever they heard the bell.”
The dangers didn’t go away after the war. When she was a schoolchild, Yumi said, “Sometimes I’d be walking down the street, and I’d be chased by a U.S. soldier. I had heard of women being raped in our area, but those incidents were not reported [to the police].”
On the sidewalk that day, the soldiers forced her into their car, took her to a nearby park, and raped her. “I heard people’s voices in the playground just beyond the trees,” Yumi said. “But I couldn’t raise my voice for the whole time. Later I managed to get up and go home.” She felt she couldn’t ask her parents for help. Eventually she talked to her brother’s friend, who was studying law. He told Yumi the police would take her back to the crime scene and would make her reenact what happened in front of male police officers. If the case went to court, she would have to repeat it again. “He asked me if I could do that. And I thought I couldn’t. So I didn’t report it to the police.
“When I heard that a sixth-grade Okinawan girl was raped by three U.S. soldiers near a U.S. base,” Yumi said, “I thought I was partly responsible because I didn’t tell anyone what had happened to me.”
Yumi Tomita’s case was one of around three hundred and fifty rapes, sexual assaults, and other crimes that GIs have committed against Okinawan women between 1945 and 2011, according to documentation compiled by the group Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence. (Since sexual assaults are especially prone to underreporting, this is likely an undercount of the true number of incidents.)9 The rape of the sixth grader that Yumi mentioned was the most notorious among these. On September 4, 1995, marines Rodrico Harp and Kendric Ledet and Navy seaman Marcus Gill grabbed the twelve-year-old girl at knifepoint off the streets of Kin Town, near the Marine Corps’ Camp Hansen. They threw her in a rental car, taped her eyes and mouth shut, bound her arms and legs, and then repeatedly raped her, discarding her bloodied body when they were finished.10
After the twelve-year-old dragged herself to safety, she gave a detailed description of the men and the car. Within hours, the three were taken into U.S. military custody. News coverage emerged slowly, but once it did, outrage grew. The commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, Admiral Richard C. Macke, further inflamed the situation when he said of the rape, “I think that it was absolutely stupid. I have said several times: For the price they paid to rent the car they could have had a girl.”11
Two of the perpetrators, Gill and Harp, received seven-year prison sentences. The third, Ledet (who claimed he faked raping the girl because he feared Gill), received a six-and-a-half-year sentence. Three years after the men were released from Japanese prison, Ledet committed suicide. Police in Kennesaw, Georgia, found him next to a former co-worker whom he had sexually assaulted, bludgeoned, and strangled to death.12
MILITARY SEXUAL ASSAULT
In addition to camptown-style prostitution, pervasive sexually objectifying entertainment in the military plays a role in the victimization of locals who have suffered rapes and assaults committed by the very people whose presence in their countries is supposed to provide security. Like the camptowns that grew around bases in South Korea and elsewhere, the “camp show” tradition dates to World War II. Under the auspices of the United Service Organizations, hundreds of musicians, actors, and comedians began going on tours designed to boost troop morale overseas. USO shows have since become an iconic staple at bases abroad, featuring the likes of Bob Hope, John Wayne, and Stephen Colbert, as well as “pinup girls” such as Marilyn Monroe, Rita Hayworth, and Betty Grable. In a 2005 USO show at Camp Victory in Iraq, Al Franken did a comedy routine about Army chow; then, two scantily clad Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders in their trademark short-shorts, halter tops, and cowboy boots took the stage to dance before throngs of troops.13
Along with Playboy Bunnies, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders rank among the most famous of USO performers. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now immortalized the tradition, showing a scene in which three bikini-clad Playmates perform for hundreds of cheering male GIs in Vietnam. Not long after the show gets started, to shouts of “Take it off!” and “You fucking bitch!” GIs storm the stage, forcing the women to retreat into a helicopter to escape the chaos.
Few have questioned the effects of these government-funded shows. But in a series of articles on “Women in the Battlefield and the Barracks,” the environmental health expert H. Patricia Hynes notes that these forms of sexually objectifying entertainment have helped shape the epidemic of sexual assault and harassment now roiling the military. The pervasive pornography found in the armed services—a soldier told me that pornography was so valued by troops in Iraq, it was like currency—has had a similar effect.14
The problem officially known as “military sexual trauma,” or MST, has been particularly acute during the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. During these wars, despite their unprecedented role in direct combat situations, American women have been more likely to be raped at the hands of a fellow member of the military than killed by enemy fighters. Estimates suggest that as of 2012, seventy thousand women had been victimized, almost all of them on bases in and around the two countries.15 As one woman said, “The mortar rounds that came in daily did less damage to me than the men with whom I shared my food.”16 Another female soldier said, “They basically assume that because you are a girl in the Army, you’re obligated to have sex with them.”17
At Camp Victory—the base where the two Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders performed with Al Franken—several women died of dehydration in their barracks during the first years of the occupation of Iraq. They died because, despite 120-degree heat, they stopped drinking water every afternoon. They stopped drinking water because they feared being raped by other GIs while using the unlit latrines at night.18 Hynes and others call it a “war on two fronts,” in which women in Afghanistan and Iraq have had to fight “a second, more damaging war—a private, preemptive one in the barracks.”19
Around two thirds of incidents of unwanted sexual contact take place on military installations, and the problem has become a veritable pandemic.20 According to a 2003 Army-funded study of female veterans who were in the military between the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf War, almost one in three was raped during her time in the military. That’s almost twice the rate found across the United States over women’s entire lifetimes, even though the women veterans were in the military for, on average, just two to six years. Of those reporting an experience of rape in the military, 37 percent reported having been raped two or more times; 14 percent reported having been gang-raped. And 80 percent of female vets across the military have reported being the victim of sexual harassment.21 The most recent Pentagon data show that in the 2014 fiscal year alone, an estimated nineteen thousand service members experienced a sexual assault. That figure represents 4.3 percent of female and 0.9 percent of male service members (although these statistics include neither sexual assaults committed by intimate partners nor assaults committed against children).22
Overseas bases seem to be particularly dangerous for women. Although only about 17 percent of U.S. military personnel were posted overseas (including those in war zones) in 2013, approximately one quarter to one third of all sexual assaults in the armed forces reported that year took place abroad.23 Sexual assaults on bases in and around Afghanistan and Iraq were particularly prevalent, but even outside war zones, bases overseas appear to present a greater risk of sexual assault than bases in the United States. Some in the military suggested to me that unaccompanied postings like those in South Korea, where troops are far from family members and home communities, make crimes of all kinds more likely.24
In 2011, the Service Women’s Action Network held a conference to address the problem of military sexual trauma. One of the speakers was retired brigadier general Thomas Cuthbert, who has advised the military services on the issue. During his presentation to an audience of survivors of military sexual trauma, other veterans, and members of the media, Cuthbert said military law “works pretty well.” Audible laughs and hisses erupted from the crowd.
A few minutes later, the general mentioned two decades of Navy and Army sexual assault scandals. He said of the women involved, “Nobody had taught them properly how to say no.” This elicited more groans and widespread head shaking. When Cuthbert added that people need to report sex crimes to their supervisors, a chorus of loud objecting coughs went around the room. An audience member asked angrily what someone should do when a supervisor says, “When you get raped, don’t report it.”
“The other thing you do is go to the CID,” Cuthbert responded. The reference to the widely criticized Criminal Investigation Command spawned a burst of laughter and sarcastic clapping. In 2011, less than half of assaults reported to the CID were considered suitable for disciplinary proceedings. Less than 8 percent went to trial. An estimated 10 percent of the accused were able to escape prosecution entirely by resigning from the military.25 And along with these low rates of prosecution and conviction, there is widespread evidence of retaliation against women reporting assaults or harassment.26
Much of the military’s male leadership appears to have been unable to grasp the nature of the sexual assault problem, to take steps to protect female troops, and to enforce its own laws. In 2012, after numerous female Air Force cadets were sexually assaulted by their instructors, the Air Force considered allowing only women to train women—instead of making male trainers comply with rules, regulations, and laws on sex.27 In a similarly revealing moment, the Wisconsin Army National Guard introduced an “Ask her when she’s sober” campaign; a spokesperson said that this approach will “avoid legal trouble (for the initiator).” As Patricia Hynes points out, the implicit message is that the men don’t have to be sober to discuss sex, and that “the military’s top concern is how to prepare a male soldier to defend himself in a rape charge, not how to prevent rape and protect women soldiers.”28
At the conference, a man in the audience received loud applause when he asked why the military isn’t locking up perpetrators and putting them on sexual offender lists. Why, he said, doesn’t the military have an ad on TV saying that rape is not acceptable? “How are we going to police the world,” he asked, “if we can’t police our own people?”
PENETRATION AND DOMINANCE
Military sexual trauma does not affect women alone. Although the odds of any particular man being sexually assaulted in the military are much lower than for a woman, in absolute terms, more men than women are victimized.29
Aaron Belkin, an expert on sexuality in the armed forces, was once told by a U.S. Naval Academy professor that male students at the academy rape each other “all of the time.”30 Belkin initially assumed she was speaking metaphorically, but the professor insisted, “I meant what I said.” Years of subsequent research by Belkin, at the Naval Academy and elsewhere in the armed forces, graphically confirmed the truth of that assertion. “Male American service members,” he writes, indeed “penetrated each other’s bodies ‘all of the time.’”
They forced broom handles, fingers and penises into each other’s anuses. They stuck pins into flesh and bones. They vomited into one another’s mouths and forced rotten food down each other’s throats. They inserted tubes into each other’s anal cavities and then pumped grease through the tubes.31
The prevalence of these various forms of abuse suggests how central penetration—with all its complex connotations of dominance—is to the military, and thus part of the unseen world of life on base. On bases throughout the world, penetration and dominance are central to an ideal form of military masculinity, one that’s prized and actively groomed among troops.
In the context of military training, where troops are drilled to overcome societal prohibitions on killing, leaders generally equate penetration and dominance with men and masculinity while they equate penetrability and subordination with women and femininity.32 A soldier who shared his diary from boot camp with me recorded a telling incident.
We got a semi time-killing/inspirational speech by a drill sergeant today. He had some hilarious jokes. He said that all men had a clit until graduation and as graduation got close our clit moved faster and faster as we got more excited and finally at graduation our clits turned into penises and we became Men. What an eloquent analogy.
The speech demonstrates the close relationship in the military between ideas about being a warrior and ideas about gender, sex, and sexuality. To become a soldier, according to the drill sergeant, is to shed all that is feminine, making a grunt into a man in one orgasmic process of transformation.
Men are not naturally rapists, and the majority of men in the military—whatever their degree of obedience—do not commit sexual assault. But across human societies, certain conditions enable rape and make sexual assault more likely. These are the conditions generally found in the U.S. military and on bases worldwide. This is an environment where females are considered inferior; where women are frequently reduced to sex objects in camptowns, in pornography, and in USO shows; and where men are trained and encouraged to enact a masculinity centered on demonstrating one’s strength and dominance over others who are considered weaker, inferior, and deserving of being dominated.
There’s no ambiguity about the general disdain for all that’s female in a military where words like “pussy,” “bitch,” “dyke,” and “girl” are common insults.33 During the war in Vietnam, Hynes notes, the military appears to have “deliberately infused” training with “misogynist language and imagery and phallic allusions to weapons … to build battlefield aggression and improve the rate of weapon use.” In many ways, little has changed. As Hynes points out, “when sexist epithets and misogynist chants are used in drill exercises, and when women are singled out and harassed by drill sergeants, it gives license to male recruits to do likewise, and it seasons the recruits and sets the culture for future military sexual harassment and assault.”34
This conditioning, this kind of unofficial training that men experience in the military, is reflected in statistics showing that men who have spent time in the U.S. military are much more likely than their civilian counterparts to be imprisoned for sexual offenses. This is particularly striking because, compared to adult males without military experience, male veterans are much less likely to be imprisoned for other violent crimes, theft, robbery, and drug offenses. Sex crimes are the one exception.35 There appears to be something about what happens on base and in the barracks that makes it significantly more likely that a man will sexually victimize another person.
The risk of rape in such a culture of misogyny is only compounded by the fact that a disproportionate number of men in the military have themselves been the victims of violence. In two studies, half the men enlisting reported having suffered physical abuse, and one in six reported sexual abuse. Eleven percent reported both. Assorted research shows that victims of abuse are more likely to become abusers in turn.36 This makes it unsurprising that, beyond sexual assault, domestic violence rates in the military may be five times civilian rates, according to one study. One in three Army families may be affected.37
The problem of sexual assault appears to have been exacerbated by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. There were simply too few troops to fight two wars, so the armed forces relaxed many of their standards to draw in more recruits. By 2006, the military had issued “moral waivers” to one in five enlisted troops, including those convicted of sexual assault and domestic violence.38 A growing epidemic of substance abuse in what is a stressful work/life environment has also contributed to the problem of physical and sexual violence.39
While the amenities and rituals of life on base make many of them look and feel like idyllic 1950s-era Mayberry, closer examination reveals a reality more akin to the dark suburban underbelly seen in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Simply put, bases are dangerous, unhealthy places to be.