As they are wont to do every few years, endless wars or no wars, women’s lobbies are once again making a big stink about “sexual assault” and “sexual harassment” in the US military and are demanding that such matters be removed from the military command structure and placed in the hands of a separate and independent mechanism, a mechanism staffed, it is presumed, by women. And, of course, various and assorted willfully ignorant politicians are jumping on their bandwagon. After all, how can one not be against mistreatment of women, or anyone else, in a taxpayer funded arm of the executive branch of government?
The “feminist” argument presumes, of course, that the most intimate aspects of the personal lives of military personnel in an all-voluntary force can be policed as if all those people were in a prison. It also presumes that those people involved with reprehensible behavior against others are somehow different from those in the larger civilian community from which they come. Since they are not, one must wonder why those women are not demanding the same separate police powers throughout all of American society, but are instead concentrating solely on the extremely tiny part whose members have relinquished many of their rights in order to serve their country and its citizens in the nation’s armed forces. It’s far easier to dictate to a captive population than to a theoretically free society, even though American “feminists” really excel at dictating, and most especially to groups that lack rights and lobbies and unions (such as America’s boys). Such cowardly “feminists” bully tactics, of course, slickly ensure that the only view that will be heard will be their own.
To be perfectly clear: I do not condone any form of violence, physical or psychological, perpetrated against any person, regardless of gender, unless that violence takes place in controlled training, sanctioned sports, or on the battlefield. Beyond that, I believe that adults are capable of making adult decisions and communicating just which non-violent behavior is acceptable to them or not. The US military does not employ children, and we do live in a society that supposedly sanctifies freedom of expression. That is one of the special things about our society which that very military is intended to protect and defend in the first place. Still, this is a topic that deserves much closer critical attention than it has to date received.
A report published by New York Times magazine in 2007, which surveyed women soldiers’ experience in the Iraq War (and was thus based largely on non-scientific anecdotal evidence), presented a significant incidence of post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) resulting from the combination of combat stress and “sexual assault”. About 15% of female veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who visited a VA facility after leaving the military were screened positive for “military sexual trauma”. These and similar sources are frequently quoted by women’s groups. They indicated what seemed like really huge numbers (selectively focused on women), but more recent reported surveys have indicated a virtual explosion of sexual assaults since 2010. What’s going on?
What Is “Sexual Assault“?
Used by women’s advocates, “sexual assault” can range from accidental “inappropriate touching” to forced rape. Between the two is an enormous range of behavioral actions.
Thus, according to women’s lobbies, sexual assault is any involuntary sexual act in which a person is threatened, coerced, or forced to engage against their will, or any sexual touching of a person who has not consented. Sexual assault, according to this view, takes many forms, including attacks such as rape or attempted rape, as well as any unwanted sexual contact or threats. Usually a sexual assault occurs when someone touches any part of another person’s body in a sexual way, even through clothes, without that person’s consent. Notice that this definition views such things solely from the side of the victim, not from the intent of the perpetrator. “A sexual way” is often interpreted to mean any touching “by a member of the opposite gender”. If I grab a woman’s arm before she accidentally triggers a loaded weapon aimed at another, am I really guilty of sexual assault? Just what was my intent? Have you ever ridden on a subway during rush hour, stood in a crammed elevator, gone through security screening at an international airport? (It’s no more unpleasant for women than it is for men.) Have you ever ridden in a baking hot armored combat vehicle over rocky terrain crammed full of sweaty stinky soldiers waiting for a thunderous explosion from below that will send the vehicle high in the air and extinguish the lives of half of them and permanently mutilate the bodies of the rest? How about a coach who slaps a player on the bottom as he goes by in acknowledgement for good performance? Have you ever tried to move around fast in a Los Angeles class US nuclear submarine, where hallways are only about 30 inches wide and three different people rotate use of a single bunk that bears some resemblance to one of a stack of shelves? Have you ever seen a woman, upset at something a guy said, slap him hard in the face? She has just committed the criminal offense of assault, and a case could easily be made that it was “sexual assault” – under popularly perceived definitions.
However, the US Penal Code, Sec. 22.011.(a) creates a much more carefully delineated offence of sexual assault. It views the offense from the point of view of the perpetrator’s intent – who can then be legally charged with a specifically defined illegal act. It states that a person commits such an offense if the person intentionally or knowingly:
(A) causes the penetration of the anus or sexual organ of another person by any means, without that person’s consent;
(B) causes the penetration of the mouth of another person by the sexual organ of the actor, without that person’s consent; or
(C) causes the sexual organ of another person, without that person’s consent, to contact or penetrate the mouth, anus, or sexual organ of another person, including the actor.
(Sexual assault of children is presumed by any such action, consent irrelevant.)
The popular perception, upon which women’s lobbies rely, of “sexual assault” is definitely not in synch with this legal definition, which actually is quite close to the definition of rape. Once you shift the focus from the perpetrator to the victim, to “me”, you have very dramatically altered the entire subject – in the “victim’s” favor – even though it is not possible to legally charge the victim or the perpetrator with anything. You have shifted the discussion from logic to emotion. Can I really be responsible for what women feel, even though I don’t begin to even understand how women think, or how they chose to feel or think at any given moment in time? (A thirty year old woman is not adult enough to tell an oaf to get lost, but a thirteen year old girl is adult enough to decide whether or not to bring a pregnancy to term?) Listening to those women talk about “sexual assault”, you’d swear that they were discussing solely forcible rape or something very close thereto. The truth is that “sexual assault”, as reported by women’s lobbies, is most often very far from such extremes, and could very well involve nothing more than a handshake held a bit too long, without consent. (One thing the new federal statute above does is finally make it possible to charge women with sexual assault (C), and especially against boys. This is not the case with many state and municipal statutes; see Footnote #1.)
The US Air Force Chief of Staff stated in June 2015 that the Air Force had a far-too-high incidence of 2,300 cases of reported “illegal sexual assault” (not further defined) among its 650,000 active duty personnel in 2014. He further stated that 1,300 of those cases involved female victims, and 1,000 involved male victims.
(Then, to thoroughly compound it all even further, there’s those asinine ever-shifting social fads in the larger community. For example, it seems that it’s no longer enough to shake hands like mature adults; you also have to hug and sniff and even kiss each other on the cheek like family members or flower children – each part of which can be classified as “sexual assault”.)
What Is Sexual Harassment?
Sexual harassment, on the other hand, is intimidation, bullying or coercion of a sexual nature, or the unwelcome or inappropriate promise of rewards in exchange for sexual favors. The legal definitions of what constitutes sexual harassment differ widely by culture, and the social definitions differ widely from victim to victim within the same culture. Sexual harassment includes a wide range of behaviors from seemingly mild transgressions to serious forms of abuse, and some forms of sexual harassment even overlap with sexual assault. Getting a firm grip on such topics is often akin to grasping smoke.
(In the US, sexual harassment is a type of discrimination which violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which is concerned with racial and gender discrimination in employment (in the workplace); it did not presume to regulate activity outside the workplace. As with all civil rights law, it applies equally to all citizens and does not single out any one group as “beneficiary”; many women don’t seem to understand that men are protected in the exact same manner as are women, and by the same legal precedents previously established by women. In the US military, however, it is often impossible to distinguish between the workplace and elsewhere, so applying the 1964 Act to a military environment is fraught with all sorts of very difficult challenges, most especially among the Regular “active-duty” forces. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 has been used mostly in class action law suits that are able to prove a pervasive pattern of employer-condoned discriminatory practices within a work environment. Another definition of “sexual harassment”, for example, states, “Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature that tends to create a hostile or offensive work environment,” which discusses a pervasive work environment “climate” as perceived by the victim. And the victim is no longer a group, but a single person. I know of no military officer who would knowingly condone such patterns in a work environment under his command, but policing subordinate behavior off the job is not an easy task for any commander, especially when it all depends on how each member of his unit choses to perceive things. It’s quite possible to reach a point where such policing itself represents aggressive sexual harassment and discrimination – of men.)
Notice that women are now shifting their focus of “sexual harassment” from a broad atmosphere in a continuous work environment affecting a group to actions taken by individuals in isolation at any given instant affecting only one person. Sexual harassment under the evolved social definition may now include leering, pressure for dates, pressing or rubbing against a person, obscene phone calls, bra snapping, wolf-whistles, lip-smacking, indecent exposure, sexual discrimination, displaying explicit materials, slaps on the rear, sexist jokes, unwanted grabbing, comments about person’s body, soliciting sexual services. Some such acts are far more clear-cut than others, but again, much of the severity of the behavior is determined by how the individual target of the behavior chooses to interpret it, not by what was intended by the individual perpetrator. Was an incredibly juvenile New York male politician committing sexual harassment when he sent pictures of his “wee-wee” to others? Some would say he was, while others would apparently disagree. (He obviously paid no price for his repeated lies on camera about his creepy behavior, and none of the women who received such photos filed a criminal complaint against the politician, yet this twisted jerk would presume to dictate such things in the US military in order to buy women votes. Now this pervert is even running for the Mayor of New York – based in no small part on the urging of his own wife, an influential “feminist” advisor and confidant to another self-serving “feminist” Hillary Clinton. And, of course, there was no “atmosphere” in a work environment involved, which was the focus of the 1964 civil rights act.) If a drill sergeant calls a tough infantryman a “girl” to induce him to try harder, is he guilty of sexual harassment? Some would laugh at that characterization, while others would not. If a women soldier feels pressure because she cannot meet the physical conditioning standards that all men meet, is this also “sexual harassment”? Do we have to keep lowering standards to avoid all sorts of “sexual discrimination” or “sexual harassment” charges – for another half century – simply because some women feel harassed by the standards?
Just what, exactly, is “sexual harassment” anyway? And why is it some sort of offense that can only be applied to one gender, whenever the other gender decides to do so, and always with powerful lobbies and thousands of bureaucrats and politicians and journalists standing behind that gender? Could it have anything to do with the fact that women have been the majority voting bloc in the US since 1980, have always had very powerful advocates in Congress who can dictate to the military, that men have become essentially road kill in the stampede to give ever our needy women whatever they demand for themselves? Could it have anything to do with the fact that it’s a million times easier to summarily fire senior military officers than it is to fire senior civilian bureaucrats, and most especially if they’re women bureaucrats?
The “harassment” doesn’t even have to be intentional; it all depends on whether the woman “feels” harassed. (Women’s lobbies are now imposing this same idiotic “feelings” nonsense on America’s college campuses, where women freely violate stark and very clearly stated civil rights law described in another amended section of that same 1964 civil rights act by commandeering twice as many student slots as men.) In other words, “sexual harassment” is whatever behavior any women decides to so label it. It’s offensive and viciously capricious nonsense, serving whining six-year old “me”, a half century on and running. Since there is no federal statute that defines “sexual harassment” from the point of view of the perpetrator’s intent, and we are left with a “standard” based on what the victim feels, there is now a very wide area where there exists little solid ground on which to make a legal charge against an individual perpetrator that will stand up in a court of law. This is especially true when those making the claims are supposed to be grown women trained as military professionals under one set of laws equally applicable to all. And women expect any military commander to negotiate that vague nonsense with actual humans and expect him to not disrupt the morale and effectiveness of his entire unit? The situation leaves any commander vulnerable to the same charge of “capricious” discipline as the women making the “capricious” claims of harassment. Any rights and choices women claim for themselves, of course, can also be claimed by men. Do women ever consider what their unpredictable feelings about male behavior do to the feelings men have about them?
I happen to feel sexually harassed every time a “feminist” starts pontificating with her totally self-serving view of the world, but as a thinking adult I would never attempt to censor or police her offensively sexist remarks. (Dealing with this unpredictable stuff every day of my life since the 1970s has provided me with very thick skin, but it has never engendered in me a feeling that I live in a free society populated by other actual adults. I suppose the smartest thing a man can do is avoid women in the military like the plague.)(See Footnote #2.) Definitions are important, but apparently not so important to “feminists”.
What About the Statistics?
It’s bad enough that sexual assault and sexual harassment can each involve a very wide range of nebulous behavior, from the petty to the grave, as perceived by the “victim”, but
1. Who exactly compiles the statistics and how do they do it? 2. What are the real motives of those reporting the statistics? 3. Have their methods been subjected to independent scientific analysis and peer review?
4. Are there significant statistical differences among the four services? 5. What differences were found among the National Guard, Reserves and Regular forces?6. What differences were found among those serving at home bases or when deployed? 7. Are the statistical results any different from those in the larger civilian community? 8. How many of those statistical instances were reported to the MPs, the IG, the JAG? 9. How many of those statistical instances were reported to women officers? 10. How many of those statistical instances were reported to medical facilities? 11. What precise definitions are used by those compiling and reporting the statistics?
12. Why are the statistics not broken down into specific types of behavior?
13. What investigative safeguards are taken to ensure acts reported are, in fact, truthful?
14. What external factors, including incentives, may be at play to influence the statistics?
There are, of course, more such legitimate questions, including whether or not male or female homosexuals in the unique US military world are a factor in the statistics. But the last one above is especially critical. Most such offenses do not happen “on the job”. There are a wide variety of reasons to claim that any of the behaviors occurred – besides the fact that they did, in fact, occur – including a disliked immediate superior, receipt of a bad performance appraisal, revenge for some other perceived slight, desire for reassignment, a mutually consensual relationship that results in an unwanted pregnancy, desire to change work or barracks partners, an affair broken off by one party, desire to avoid an assignment or deployment, etc.. Traumatic marital milestones such as extramarital affairs, separation and divorce are especially critical; there seems to be no limit to where each party may go to achieve a favorable outcome in such circumstances, especially if child custody and significant monetary benefits are at stake. (A Texas woman engaged in divorce proceedings involving children has just been arrested for sending letters to the President and the mayor of New York laced with the highly potent ricin poison – after she reported that her estranged husband had sent the letters!) Given such a very wide range of ulterior motives, any claim of sexual harassment or sexual assault is guaranteed to consume an enormous amount of time and effort on the part of military others trying to get to the ever elusive truth, all at the expense of the unit’s core mission. How does one go about separating actual cases from manufactured cases? Which of it is actually valid abusive behavior, and which of it is just socially acceptable whining of perpetual children or devious schemes with ulterior objectives? And what happens if the truth is that no assault or harassment took place, especially since manufactured cases taint all future cases, including legitimate cases? Are there penalties for lying? Do imposing such penalties require yet more time and effort apart from the core mission? Are there prohibitions precluding such manufactured instances from being reported in subsequent statistics?
It’s not hard to imagine a military commander fervently wishing he could simply wash his hands of the whole childish mess and get back to the days when soldiers were expendable interchangeable widgets who did what they were told, got the job done and could safely be screamed at with admonishments like, “If the Army wanted you to have a wife, the Army would have issued you a wife!” and “FEELINGS?! There’s no feelings in the Marines!” and “This is my rifle; this is my gun.“, back to the days before the US military became our society’s most hated and easily abused social Petri dish by self-serving sideline-sitting dictators who have little or no actual knowledge of what they are talking about. How much of the US military’s truly staggering cost is solely a consequence of a military constantly trying to accommodate such people? How much of it is just so other women may gain some unearned vicarious self-worth from the dabbling of a very tiny token few exercising their “rights”?
What Avenues Are Already Available?
Despite the public impression, military people do not live in a prison. There is always more than one option available to all military people when subjected to unlawful acts, including the military police, the IG, bypassing an intransigent superior to go to their superior, the JAG, going to a medical clinic, seeking the assistance of a female officer, writing or having a relative send a letter to an elected representative, etc.. (For example, is there any possible inference in medical records to substantiate the claim?) It is simply impossible to imagine a person in today’s Regular military being totally subjected to the will of a single person, or a single chain of command, in just about any circumstance, and most especially if some clearly illegal act is involved.
And the US military is not a day care center, either.
Ulterior Monetary Incentives
The “PTSD” factor has also become especially critical to such statistics. (See Footnote #4.) The VA has a back-log of over 900,000 claims from former military people for a very wide range of disabilities, including PTSD. And this is only the backlog, a fraction of the total disability claims submitted since 2001. It just boggles the mind that the enemy in these wars has been that effective against our armed forces. Just imagine: an impoverished and uneducated enemy fighting without one single ship, plane, tank, missile or drone, using nothing but hand weapons and home-made bombs, against history’s most powerful superpower – for twelve years of war! And just behold the staggering “disabilities” that such an enemy has inflicted on US forces! This is especially amazing when you consider that 98% of combat casualties over the past dozen years has been incurred by the Army and Marines, and then in only small parts of those two ground force services. But maybe it has more to do with a civilian population that simply doesn’t care that wars today have no end – as long as it’s someone else fighting them.
Or maybe it’s mostly about money, for “me”. Many of this massive flood of disability claims are entirely valid, of course, but many others are questionable at best. And very many of them have been winding their way through that giant civilian bureaucracy for a year or more. Just how does the VA define “PTSD”? Exactly who diagnoses it, and according to what universal criteria, with what documented evidence? When you include sexual harassment or sexual assault as an accepted cause for PTSD, does this affect the outcome of such claims? How does adding “sexual assault” to a claim affect the claim’s consideration and adjudication? Does it speed up the processing? Does it place such claims ahead of those veterans with missing limbs? What exactly are the monetary VA disability payments for allowed claims of PTSD resulting from sexual assault or sexual harassment? Is the incidence of “sexual assault” in PTSD claims any different from those claiming direct exposure to combat trauma for their PTSD? Since the vast majority of today’s military people, and especially women, never get anywhere close to actual combat due to the nature of this unending unconventional war, are “sexual assault” or “sexual harassment” easy substitute justifications for otherwise unjustified VA claims? (Since exposure to combat trauma is much easier to document than sexual assault, I am convinced that VA policies are a major reason behind at least so many men now also claiming to have been sexually assaulted while on active duty. Al Qaeda or your fellow soldiers; to some people it’s all the same.)
And maybe it’s about money on the other end, too. These days our universities are churning out a huge excess of graduates with degrees in various social “sciences”, most of whom are women and most of whom are unemployable in their chosen professions without government programs willing to pay them. As is so often the case with other social “issues” in our society, of which there is now literally no end, one way to create an urgent “need” is to create public hysteria about an “epidemic” of sexual harassment and sexual assault – that doesn’t even have to be scientifically or legally proven – which needs urgent and prolonged high cost “treatment”, plus compensatory monetary payments to each of the victims.
Just how much is the current drive to vilify, defame, stigmatize and penalize all honorable men in uniform driven by a flood of easy fraudulent claims to the VA? Is this one of the reasons the suicide rates of those men keep climbing?
((On 29 March 2016, Vietnam Veterans’ Day, I received the following html e-mail general notice from the VA: “April is sexual assault awareness month! Join VA in supporting our Veterans’ recovery from Military Sexual Trauma – please pass the information in this email along to a friend, family member, or anyone in the community who works with Veterans. The VA uses the term “military sexual trauma” or “MST” to refer to sexual assault or sexual harassment during military service and has services available to assist Veterans in their recovery from MST. Veterans can receive free treatment for mental and physical health conditions related to their experiences of MST at every VA medical facility. Veterans do not need to have documentation of their experiences and may be able to receive care even if they are not eligible for other VA services. Veterans can also apply for disability compensation for any current difficulties that are related to their service, including difficulties related to MST.” The VA e-mail was addressed to an open public address, containing my true name, that I’ve used constantly for the past 30 years. The VA knows that I am also a Vietnam Vet. I have never in my life, including during or after my years of service in Vietnam, received any unsolicited notice from VA about any possible injury arising out of my decades of military service, including during wars. This notice is a first – which is, considering the 50 years I’ve been eligible for VA benefits, and the many hundreds of ways veterans during those fifty years have sustained serious injuries or death, a testament to the power of self-serving women’s lobbies and their relentless campaign against all those evil men out there. Considering that over the years I’ve seen male veterans endure years of bureaucratic torture trying to assemble the documentation required to prove to the VA that they lost that limb in actual combat, this insulting notice is just another reason why I avoid the VA, veterans’ benefits, and military women. VA did not define either “assault” or “harassment”. Am I allowed to view the VA e-mail as “sexual harassment”? You can always count on infantile American women to rain on any parade, jump on any bandwagon, suck the air out of any event, in which they are not the center of attention, including a day set aside to give a decades-overdue nod to drafted Vietnam Vets.))
Double Standards
Then there is the matter of double standards, not just between military men and women, but between civilian and military standards. There was a case back in the mid-1990s, for example, when a dozen or so junior Army women were found to be sexually involved with two or three of their sergeants on some sleepy base in the States (at Aberdeen, Maryland, I believe.) The men were arrested and tried for rape, and at least one is still in prison. The background? Those adult women were running a pool and placing bets on which of them could get which sergeant in bed first. It was a game, a competition, among the women, but it wasn’t rape or even sexual assault under civilian definition. Under the UCMJ, however, it represented a “misuse of power” offense for the slightly more senior men, which made the rape charge possible – despite the mitigating later testimony of the women, under oath in court. And, of course, all military women know this. Again, women’s lobbies, politicians and “journalists” went into full attack mode, demanding that the sergeants be charged with rape. Their argument was that the sergeants’ superior rank introduced elements of coercion and force into any such relationships which the “stupid and helpless” junior enlisted women were incapable of resisting given the “command power structure” of the military. Despite the actually truthful realities of the contemporary military environment, the rape charges carried the day. The catch? It all happened at the very same time that the commander-in-chief of those men was having sexual relations with an intern in the Oval Office. It’s just impossible to make a greater “misuse of power” than that, but no one ever considered charges of rape, or sexual assault or even sexual harassment, for the perpetrator. What made the difference? Women’s lobbies made a really big stink about the military case, while giving a total free pass to a civilian Clinton who did their bidding. With logic that only these “feminists” will ever understand, President Clinton was hardly even mildly chided (with a subtle wink and a tinge of jealousy) for his transgressions (which had repeatedly surfaced throughout his life in high office for decades). Apparently, the thing that saved a “cute” President Clinton from any criticism by women, much less charges of rape or “sexual assault” or “sexual harassment”, “depends on what your definition of “is” is.” It depends on what is in your own best interests at any given moment in time – with zero possibility of “blow-back”. (See Footnote #3.)
But what gets lost in all the emotion about the issue is the most fundamental double standard problem of all behind it: What makes anyone think that women who cannot defend themselves from a warped fellow soldier bent on doing them harm would be any more capable of defending themselves against a trained enemy fighter dedicated to killing them, eventually? The incidence claimed by women of “sexual assault” in the US military is implicit evidence of huge numbers of women in uniform being unqualified to wear that uniform. If they can’t fulfill the roles for which their positions exist, why, then, are they in those positions? Why can’t I expect them to back me up with the exact same force that they expect me to back them up? It’s just a matter of simple logic, of inexplicable double standards, like so many others, that have become permanently institutionalized ever since they were first introduced as temporary measures – 35 years ago.
And then there’s the twisted self-serving “rationale” to it all. “He got her drunk and took advantage of her.” On the face of it (assuming we are speaking of two adults each with at least a modicum of intelligence), this appears to be rather despicable behavior, and that is the usual initial conclusion reached from such a statement. But what does it really say? First, it assumes that we are NOT speaking of two adults, that one of the parties is a helpless child – a child who was somehow restrained while the other party forcibly poured alcohol down her throat in a sort of “water-boarding” technique. Second, it assumes that that party is not only helpless, but also stupid to have placed herself in such a position with such a person. Third, it assumes that the child is also a totally incompetent judge of character. And, fourth it assumes that the child has no responsibility for her own behavior, that anything negative that happens to her is solely the consequence of the actions of someone else. It would be interesting to follow such logic in the other direction – that anything positive that happens to her is solely the consequence of her own actions. How is she victim with no responsibility on the one hand, but beneficiary with full responsibility on the other? Unless she is responsible for her own behavior, how can she ever accomplish anything on her own merit? Either she is an intelligent adult responsible for her own behavior or she is none of these things. “I have rights; I do NOT have responsibilities. Everyone else has the responsibility to ensure whatever rights I decide to claim at any given moment in time.” Yeah, right. And you are also the very last person I ever want to have any authority over anyone, and especially children much less the lives of soldiers; all you will do is sacrifice them for your own expedient benefit. And these are the same women who are always demanding their “fair quota” of “leadership” positions? If you can’t be responsible for yourself, how can you be responsible for anyone else? What does it mean to say that “all are equal under the law?” Does it mean that women get all the rights, while men get all the responsibility? Just whose definition of “equality” are we using today? I’ve lived most of my life with stale stories of men in the company of women and booze who woke to find all their money and valuable possessions gone, but I never heard anyone blame the woman for the man’s stupidity.
Conclusions
I do not at all dispute the fact that very unpleasant and despicable things do happen within the US military, even though I personally have never witnessed such things. I do, however, seriously doubt that the incidence of those things is nearly as high as some purport, or that the incidence of them is even as high as that existing in the larger society. (In America, there’s Real Money to be had from wallowing in victimhood, paid for by “someone else”, of course. It should come as no surprise to anyone that staggering numbers of people in our society will lie as easily as they scratch their arm, even on a political podium in front of 100,000,000 people, and never bat an eye, either then or later. They can even actually believe their own lies! It’s now an integral part of our culture, firmly imbedded there by the value of “me”. Even worse, there’s no penalty for lying! “Always tell ’em whatever they want to hear.”) It should be remembered that the terms “sexual assault” and “sexual harassment” are never defined and that the statistics on both are generated by self-serving women on a captive military population in which all members can easily be held accountable. Further, since the military population is drawn from the top 20% of the broader American population, there is no reason to support any belief that whatever is occurring in the US military is any different from what occurs in that broader population; it’s just enormously easier to prosecute such causes within a captive and controlled population. Then there’s that whole vast area of ulterior incentives, including monetary compensation, for grossly inflating truth. (If you held me to the same standards of empirical evidence as women’s lobbies are held, I’d reduce the statistics for women by 85% and for men by 98%.)
A “sexual offense” in the military is NOT the same as it is in the civilian community, and obviously doesn’t even apply to civilians who direct that military. Until the questions raised above, and many others, are independently and scientifically addressed by objective experts with nothing to gain, then all we are dealing with is just more of the usual self-serving propaganda generated by “feminists” and their plethora of powerful lobbies. “Sexual harassment” and “sexual assault” in the US military are very cloudy matters just begging for misuse by others for a wide range of ulterior motives – on a caged population that does not exist anywhere else in our society, the perfect patsy for our “eternal victims”. Furthermore, we are talking about policing and regulating not only behavior on the job, but behavior off the job as well. Military life is a 24/7 avocation, and most military men don’t like bully jerks among them any more than they like bully “feminists” ruling their lives. To many of these men, “sexual harassment” of women by bully jerks is no different from “sexual harassment” of men by bully “feminists”. “Your millions of rights and choices do not trump the few that I have left.”
If we can examine the case of “sexual assault” and “sexual harassment” in the US military on the national stage before Congress, then we can also address all those double standards in the US military, despite the visceral hatred “feminists” have always harbored for military men, not to mention all the discrimination they constantly throw against boys. As all “feminists” know so well, this first requires a lobby on the other side at least one-tenth as powerful as their own – which doesn’t exist. Still, if women, as a matter of choice, are not going to engage in the purpose for which they were specifically designed – to have and raise the healthy and well-educated children, of both genders, society needs to survive – then they are just more schmucks in the arena. There is NO “special” in equal. If such women schmucks cannot meet the exact same physical standards that men schmucks are expected to meet, then there is no justification for them to be in that military and drawing the same pay and allowances and benefits as men. There is also no justification for them to rise to positions above those men. (I, for one, would never trust anyone who claims far more rights for themselves than responsibilities, with full accountability, they willingly assume for others.) Those double standards may have had some justification back in the 1970s when women first started streaming into a peacetime military in large numbers, but we are now in the second and third generations of such women; it is long past the time to end the double standards. All women should be told: “These are the standards. They apply equally to everyone in uniform. If you can meet them, welcome aboard. If you can’t, then there are thousands of other things you can do to assist your society.”
Or, even better, why don’t we just close the military to those “inherently evil men”, and turn everything over to women, so they can fill the forces and defend their nation with their own, according to any rules they want to impose on themselves? That sounds about right to me. After over a half century of this stuff, many men, in and out of the military, have had enough of being forced into tiny boxes by those incessantly whining and demanding women. Besides, most men serve in the US military in order to defend the nation and its citizens from armed foreign enemies; if women and their emotional clones want to run around saving everyone else from themselves they can damned well go do it themselves. They’ll discover that sacrificing the lives of others for your own emotional “human rights” causes is a LOT easier than putting your own life on the line for those causes. (Yes, Virginia, there are whole emotion-based segments of our society who think we should turn the US military into one big Peace Corps, apparently because the Peace Corps is another inept US government agency incapable of executing its mission. And there are actually people in this country who will look a father straight in the eye and tell him that his son gave his life defending his country, when they know full well that is just bullshit – that he died playing World Cop for some emotional cause that had absolutely nothing to do with defending the country.) This “cause” nonsense is especially egregious when you have proven totally ineffective as “expert” civilian diplomats to get the UN, funded disproportionately by the American taxpayer, to step up to the very human rights responsibility for which it exists. It’s so much easier to order your dumb military widgets to run around playing World Cop in the name of royal “we”, and then blame those same dumb widgets when it turns out that you have no understanding at all about what you’re doing, that the only thing that matters to you is the size of your own domestic voting herd.
Just what entitles “feminists” to dictate to anyone, especially from the very safe rear? And why do such perpetual children always trot out these things whenever some actually valid social ill threatens to steal their spotlight? (We are now loosing far more male combat soldiers to suicide than to the enemy’s hands – a matter of grave concern for any fighting force, now effectively sidetracked by all this “sexual” stuff.) If “feminists” don’t want to live as full equals in the society they created, then they can go make their own twisted society free of those evil men. After all, due to all the rights women have and choices women make, only one in four American boys can count of a steady father through age 18, so most of those boys certainly aren’t learning their values from men. Women bigots won’t even grant boys a gender until they screw up! (and in that magic moment simultaneously “create themselves”, self-bestow the male gender, and neatly absolve all others of responsibility and accountability). It’s just incredibly stupid to complain about the “men” women create in their own image whom their daughters, and the rest of us, just love to hate.
(I have always been very cautious with women in the military, but that caution went into overdrive in 1991 when I and every other American had to endure the shameful circus that took place in the US Senate over the nomination of Judge Clarence Thomas for the US Supreme Court. That was without doubt the most disgusting event that ever took place in the US Congress, and mainly because women’s groups were afraid some guy was going to take away their “right” to kill their unborn children. The lesson for any man with half a brain was that, if this can happen in the US Senate, it can happen anywhere. Since no woman is worth risking my good name, my reputation, I will grant trust only after it has been fully earned, or if I am so ordered. (I have never met an American woman who earned my trust; they all assume trust is another of their “rights”.) Since 1991 I have never had a discussion in private, in confidence, or of a personal nature with an American woman in the military. And I have always stated on their performance appraisals exactly what I am supposed to say, regardless of my own professional evaluation. Assuming that they are five-year-old children made of the most fragile rice paper, I will not even shake hands with an American military woman. I also assume that any military man who gets involved with a sexual harassment situation without unimpeachable witness is simply too stupid to warrant my defense. Never close the door, maintain the greatest distance possible, never ever turn your back, and keep very good records. “Equality” is a fantasy; you are presumed guilty, so, despite the US Constitution, always be prepared to prove your innocence. Women are “special”; until men complete being re-engineered as childishly whiny women, you are NOT allowed to treat women as you treat men.)
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(See also “Women In Combat”, “Gymnastics Of The Mind” and “Don’t Ask”, posted separately.)
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P.S. Values are NOT “fluid”; values are constant, locked in stone. Absent that, all you have are ever changing self-interests; you stand for absolutely nothing, except “me”, at the expense of “someone else”. You are thus valueless – in every sense of the word. In the US military, where matters of life and death are inherent to the job, lying to a superior automatically withdraws trust, and without trust in subordinates no superior may grant responsibility to them without opening himself to legal charges of negligence and conduct unfitting of command. This is what makes lying a chargeable criminal offense under the UCMJ. How is it even possible that such a principle does not apply, at the very least, to the military’s Commander-in-Chief? Or to his national security team? Members of Congress? Just who judges such sanctimonious, holier-than-thou dictator jerks anyway? Apparently, these days, not even the American people.
Even so, trust can NOT be dictated; it must be earned, continually. Anyone who mandates the appearance of trust, usually through juvenile fear, is foolishly walking on very thin ice, with inevitable consequences. One leads by example, from the front.
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Footnote # 1. However, this is not the case with many state and municipal statutes. For example, a male police officer was recently arrested in Missoula, Montana, for pretending on line to be a young woman in order to meet with a male child – with whom he then engaged in a sexual relationship for over a year. The boy, seeking a heterosexual relationship with a female close to his own age, ended up in a homosexual relationship with a male adult more than twice his age. Under federal law the police officer, regardless of gender or sexual orientation, had committed felony sexual assault, but he was instead charged only with “having an inappropriate relationship with a minor” – specifically of “official misconduct” and “attempted unlawful transactions with children” – all misdemeanors. In June 2013 he was given a six-month suspended sentence and instructed to stay away from children. If the victim had been female, it’s difficult to imagine that he would not have been charged with rape, due in no small part to the “abuse of power” aspect plus the emotional nature of the public and its officials in law. Missoula is a college town where women are incessantly making demands for themselves, even to the point of calling in the US Justice Department from Washington DC. An honest person would have to conclude that the outcome of this case stinks of high favoritism, not to mention abject sexism, but not a peep of protest was heard, and most especially from women on campus. When are we ever going to end these incredibly stupid and disgusting double standards? All of these people – from the cops to the “justice” people to the women on campus – are the same genuine imbeciles who complain about all the twisted creeps who plague us all when they magically “create themselves” as adults. Boys in this country are just road kill – until (not unless) they screw up. (See “The Last Minority”, posted separately.)
At the insistence of women’s lobbies, arising out of a federal task force “investigating” the University of Montana in Missoula, the US Department of “Education” together with the US Department of “Justice” has now issued instructions about “sexual harassment” on college campuses that obviously are in direct violation of the right of freedom of speech. It follows on such asinine practices as encouraging vilification of Christianity while banning criticism of Islam. (It’s that old familiar fear factor.) Freedom of speech and expression in the US is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution (basic law) and by all state constitutions and most state and federal laws. While the freedom is not absolute, criticism of the government (including its currently ruling political party) and advocacy of unpopular ideas that some may find distasteful or against public policy are almost always permitted, upheld by Supreme Court rulings. This is true, however, only in the broader society, but in places that can be dictated to, that have no recourse, such as with the US military and on university campuses (dependent on federal funds), apparently the government may freely violate the First Amendment in order to buy votes from its incessantly whining majority women voters. And if you can censor free speech at our institutions of learning and in our military forces, what better way to gradually make it insidious throughout the broader society?
The self-serving Thought Police are alive and well in America, and growing more powerful every day. It’s “Truth”, according to Queen “Me”. It’s actually mandating LIES. “Is it comforting to you that what you believe is really just enforced bullshit, that his pleasant smile simply conceals his seething hate?” (I haven’t met a man with brains in over thirty years who ever tells an American woman the truth about themselves; women don’t seem to understand that men are actually required to lie to them, and about them. Either that, or they are perfectly fine with the lies that feed their delusions. There is almost nothing that is honest in American society.) “So wallow in your eternal victimhood, and smother yourself in your delusions, because, in the end, you are nothing but thin air, signifying nothing. And THAT is the truth that you can’t handle, why you MUST censor Truth. Your censorship literally screams that the empress has no clothes.”
And, yes, a woman is just as guilty of rape as is a man when the other party is a minor. Those who try to rationalize such things usually try to contend that the under-age boy suffers no harm. Of course, they definitely would not try to make the same asinine contention with under-age girls – even though it is very much unsubstantiated that girls suffer any more harm than do boys. But what such morons miss is the simple fact that under our Constitution laws must be equally applicable to everyone, that they cannot be used to favor or disfavor any group of citizens. Once you start down that road you are
systematically undermining the very foundation of our society – its laws. Those laws ban discrimination. They treat everyone as equal. No one, not even the President, is above the law. There are no double standards in the American legal system. There is no “special” in equal. Anyone who believes otherwise is advocating a position that is inherently un-American, and illegal. Our society already has a million social double standards that are destroying it from within, and they all start with asinine rationalizations like this one. That most definitely is NOT funny.
The FBI says that approximately one of every twelve accusations of rape is a false accusation, but the FBI does not say how those false accusations were subsequently adjudicated. Were such women tried in court? Did they serve prison terms equal to what their accused faced, paid costs of investigating false crimes, had their names permanently entered in “sexual offender” databases? If there are little or no costs in making such false accusations, then they will only continue, and ALL charges of rape will have to be regarded with a healthy element of doubt. And this unjustly disadvantages those women who are actual victims of such a crime. And, if this is the number of false rape charges, it’s a safe bet that the number is even higher for charges of lesser acts of “sexual assault.” False charges are now even being used to tar whole groups of men. The University of Virginia had to back-track in 2014 after excoriating a fraternity for its complicity in a fabricated and widely reported crime, and two fraternities are being tarred at Brown in 2014 for what appears to be extremely specious charges of misconduct that did not involve any member of the two fraternities. In both cases, it appears that the fraternities were both targeted and set up, primarily for negative publicity purposes – in purely “guilt by tangential association” schemes that take advantage of herd hysteria and propaganda. Because they incur such low costs, false charges are becoming a tool for unjust social manipulation by twisted women fanatics. Whatever happened to the principles of “no one above the law” and “all equal under the law?” The notion that everyone else has the responsibility of ensuring whatever rights women decide to claim for themselves is just bullshit. If you can’t play fair, get out of the arena and go back home to mommy’s crib. If women don’t run the same personal risks as men, then what kind of “equality” is that? It’s just throwing stones from behind mommy’s apron – shamefully pathetic.
Footnote # 2. I, for one, do not find it at all surprising that so many American men greatly prefer to engage prostitutes than deal with all the insufferable hassles, pitfalls and costs now inherent to American women. I actually find it difficult to fault such men for doing so, especially considering that it’s now just one more activity condemned by American women and their clones in order to continue benefitting themselves, primarily through the “legal” prostitution in “marriage”. American women need to step back and take a good hard look at what all their whining and demands have been doing to our whole society for the past half century – which have not shown one tangible benefit to “all of us”. It is NOT all about “me”.
Footnote # 3. The Commander-in-Chief. The President of the United States of America is the Commander-in-Chief of the mighty US military global machine; this, and nothing else, is what makes the office “the most powerful on Earth.” He or she has the authority to launch the most destructive controlled force in the history of humanity – a truly colossal power that must be carried out by military personnel having full understanding of exactly what they are doing, and its consequences. They, in turn, must have unquestioned faith in the President’s totally mature and altruistic wisdom within a rock solid character as demonstrated throughout their entire life – just as he or she expects of them. Despite delusions in certain quarters, none of those military people are unthinking morons. On the contrary; many of them are among the nation’s most knowledgeable international experts and best global thinkers. Introduce grave doubt into that mutual equation, and you are flirting with disaster. One of the easiest ways to do that is to lie to the American people for self-serving political reasons. I will never forget that, during the height of the constantly very scary “Cold” War, when Armageddon always lurked just around the next corner, while behind the “Iron Curtain” I was informed that, for the first time in American history, my President had resigned as a consequence of lies – by a junior officer in the Soviet Russian Red Army, my sworn enemy. He knew it before I did. Laughing, he said, “America’s leaders lie just like Soviet leaders, but at least they can be forced out.” Apparently, even that is no longer true.
Footnote #4. PTSD (Post-traumatic Stress Disorder).
PTSD is a term that came into popular use in the 1970s in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam, but the disorder it describes has more history than that.
First, there’s the nature of war itself. Conventional war, such as World War II and Korea, are usually fast and fluid, with combat forces directly engaged along clear lines of major violence and supported by forces far behind those lines in relative safety. Unconventional wars, such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, are slow and static with no clear lines, so lower levels of violence, and its resultant physical injury and psychological trauma, can occur anywhere on the ground, even among support forces. Except for support forces restricted to fortress bunkers, there are no real violence-free areas or real focal points of violence in unconventional warfare. This raises the possibility of trauma occurring to military people who were not recruited, trained and equipped to face and deal with such violence.
PTSD is a far greater problem for ground forces of the Army and Marines than it is for air and naval forces. Unlike the past, Army and Marine personnel are now the people who incur incredibly over 98% of our war casualties. Today’s unconventional enemy does not own a single ship, plane, tank, missile or drone, so the only place actual war occurs is among ground forces up close and personal, but that war can involve comparatively smaller numbers of individual air and naval personnel deployed with ground forces, such as Corpsmen, Seabees, ground-air controllers and special operations teams.
Also, PTSD has been shown to be less severe among those who bought certain traits to the table before their wartime experiences; for example, those who came from a culture that emphasized “traditional” masculinity in raising their young seemed to experience less severe manifestations of PTSD. Men of the past were a lot more stoic than they are today, especially with internal pain. Up until the mid-1900s, men just accepted that life was tough, so you just sucked it up and moved on. War wasn’t much worse than trying to survive while slaving away in the mines or pushing railroad tracks through mountains or under cities. Men weren’t really interested in listening to others waste time whining about their troubles. If their behavior became troublesome, they were simply institutionalized, and largely forgotten. (Veterans hospitals still are essentially government warehouses with very highly paid stock boys.) Most veterans, however, just kept any internal wartime demons to themselves, trying as best they could to “fit in”, to be just like everyone else, steadily pushing any demons far to the back of their minds.
Very few Americans today grow up with even the slightest understanding of real stress, of instantaneous decisions made in hell on Earth that have huge life or death consequences. To me, what many contemporary Americans consider as stress is simply infantile, almost always of their own choosing, and I am often faced with the question of why such people even wanted to leave the womb, because they keep trying to re-create that earliest worry- and risk-free environment in the larger world around them, even build their own prison in the interest of their own “safety and security”. But, in the end, it’s all relative. If this is what people believe is stress, then, to them, it’s real and grave. To previous Americans it was just a part of life. When contemporary Americans are faced with situations that are truly stressful, situations that have always accompanied war, for example, they find that their society has given them very few if any tools to deal with it. On the contrary: as was taught in the larger society, especially by women, melt-down is then a common reaction. But, then, what gives a contemporary “therapist” the tools to treat the melt-down if they have no real comprehension of the true gravity that caused it, what its immediate impact was and what the subsequent ripple effects were – or what role their own society plays in it all?
This is not to imply that PTSD did not exist before the 1970s. War has always taken a terrible toll, especially on the ground combat soldiers who actually fight them, and that toll has always been both physical and mental. But it wasn’t until World War II that anyone decided to take a serious and systematic look at the non-physical tolls. Then, while the soldiers referred to the psychological problems as “shell shock”, military doctors called them “neuro-psychological” disorders, with a range of sub-group categories from minor to serious. For the most part, the objective then was to treat the observable disorder (as manifested by observable behavior) as rapidly as possible, usually during a brief period of “convalescence” with a variety of methods, and let the man go, to see if he would sink or swim in the larger community. Those who didn’t swim were usually bought back in and institutionalized in VA hospitals for quite lengthy treatment, which usually involved one or more of a range of experimental approaches. (Until the late-1970s military men were the nation’s primary guinea pigs, as a normal aspect of their “service”, voluntary or not.) (See John Huston’s “Let There Be Light” (USA 1946), which he directed for the US Army.)
Few Americans today, including many in those sciences, know that modern medicine, psychology and sociology all owe the advanced state of their sciences to the very solid foundations that were established by the 1960s for each science by tens of thousands of very large controlled studies, surveys and experiments that were conducted on millions of American military men who served before, during and after World War II – on just about any aspect of the human condition you can imagine (including direct exposure to nuclear radiation). Those studies also involved even much larger numbers of men who were exhaustively examined, tested and disqualified during pre-induction screening processes. And many of those studies were really huge, so huge as to be highly accurate and representative of much larger populations; such large studies today would in most cases simply be cost-prohibitive (or illegal). The large size of those studies, and the fact that permanent official files on each participant were always available for further and subsequent research and “follow-up”, helped establish rules of probabilities in statistical analysis, as well as predictive success in a wide range of endeavors, applicable to the entire nation. Until the late-1970s, the US military could pretty much do what it wanted with its men, and keep track of them, so none were compensated for participating and most were never even informed that they were test subjects, often in several different studies. (Even when informed, almost none objected, viewing their participation as just another aspect of their “service to nation”.) Still, the vast body of scientific knowledge of the human condition they helped establish was just one more gift to their nation, and to all of mankind, of America’s Greatest Generation. The slightly younger and quite small Silent Generation men who served during the Korean War continued that tradition, as did those who served in Vietnam.
After Vietnam, however, when the Draft ended and pay and benefits were raised significantly to support an all-volunteer force, women suddenly flooded into the peacetime armed forces in significant numbers. Their first order of business was to rearrange things to better suit themselves. In the late-1970s, among a range of other matters, they objected to being used unknowingly and uncompensated in scientific studies. So Congress established a set of rules that must now be followed with military personnel. One effect of the changes has been to drastically increase the administrative costs, which has required the use of much smaller study groups. And in many cases the results are dramatically affected by the participants knowing they are under scrutiny and volunteering to participate in that scrutiny; this has significantly reduced the number and size, reliability and applicability, of such studies. The huge studies conducted earlier at very little or no cost on many millions of American military men remained, and those men could be tracked via medical and VA records all the way to their natural deaths. Many of those studies, in fact, formed the basis of many highly respected western text books.
The changes demanded by women in the late-1970s, however, had the effect of short-changing women, since they did not have huge previous studies specifically oriented to their gender. (American women have rights; they do not have responsibilities. And sometimes this can be detrimental – to women. But they nevertheless can always be counted on to shift blame to “someone else”.) Medical and other research, including that conducted by government, universities and commercial companies, continued to be heavily reliant on the basics formed by the earlier studies conducted on men, and the assumption was made that their fundamental findings also applied to women – unless specific human physiology obviously demanded otherwise (i.e., such as with breast or ovarian cancer). In some cases beyond the obvious this recently has proven to be a false assumption, that there are in fact some very important differences between male and female biology down to the molecular level, so now women, naturally, are complaining about “discrimination”. One area involves the apparent fact that some common drugs do not have the same effects on female biology that they do on male biology. Such unexpected findings will now inevitably raise the cost of future research that must now take gender into account in all medical research, including that concerned with PTSD. (American women fully embrace “uni-sex”, especially with children – UNLESS it can be beneficial to them not to. Since all research money now goes into girls and women, the effect is to make the presumption that findings about females must also apply to males. Get it? It’s no longer a matter of non-availability of test subjects (guinea pigs); it’s now a matter of enforced self-serving dogma.)
The greatest benefit to the nation and to all of mankind still does, however, result from studies and experiments on injured US military personnel, especially combat personnel, in the very wide field of medicine, especially those medical aspects involving the treatment of physical and mental trauma, including revolutionary methods of surgery, various types of prosthetics, a wide range of neuroscience, and prescription drugs, including psychotropic drugs. Today Americans care far more about $100-million dollar football players getting injured on a manicured carpet than they do about $10-thousand soldiers being dismembered on a filthy battlefield, but those gold-plated football players will benefit from medical research conducted on those expendable soldiers. US military combat personnel are still the nation’s best captive medical guinea pigs.
It’s important to remember that until the 1980s, just thirty years ago, the average American combat soldier was single and young; in Vietnam he was not yet 19 years old. (Because WW II required such huge numbers of men, their average age in that war was higher.) It was believed that young men not yet burdened with the responsibilities of family would be more willing to risk their lives in extremely dangerous situations than would older men worried about continuing to meet their family obligations back home. If such young men survived, any post-service “support structure” available to him in the civilian community was usually limited to his parents, if they opted to accept him, without professional help. (The average US soldier today is a well-paid volunteer and considerably older than those who served up to and in Vietnam; he is also much more likely to be married with children, a fact that brings the very loud voice of women into the equation. And their wives are always surprised when he comes back with a different outlook on life, as if he had been away on a weekend camping trip with the boys at the office, as if she herself had not changed her own outlook at least three times since the marriage, and twice since he left.)
It might interest readers to know that the practice for Army soldiers serving in Vietnam, twenty years after Korea, was to pull them off the line when their tour was up, put them on a contract airliner to Travis Air Force Base in California, bus them over for administrative processing through a center established at the National Guard Armory in Oakland, hand them an airline ticket to their next assignment or, if their military service was concluded, to the city where they came in. It was all a single non-stop conveyor-belt process following a rigid check-list, from Asian battlefield to American Main Street. A soldier could be trying to stay alive in a jungle fire-fight for his $2.00-a-day pay on Wednesday morning, and on Thursday night find himself a civilian standing on a street corner in his home town with maybe $100 pay in his pocket. That’s just the way it was, when men – your father, your uncle, those inherently evil oppressors of women – were still expendable. Widgets. Spare parts. All young, most quite smart, some college graduates.
It should also be remembered that wars like the Civil War, World War I and World War II involved really huge numbers of America’s young men, a majority of males in their age group, so there was a common assumption that all had similar experiences. So there wasn’t much there that was worth making a big deal about. Then there was the matter of relative impairment. In the past, deaths for ground soldiers were far greater than they are today. Body bags and small tombstones are enormously cheaper than missing limbs and painful prosthetics. The most important new equipment available to today’s combat soldier is not any weapon but rather that fantastically great body armor; combat deaths have dramatically declined, but at the expense of a dramatic increase in survivors with missing body parts. Combat soldier casualty rates for wars today are comparable to Vietnam, but with a dramatic swing in the types of casualties. The number of soldiers who survive with major wounds, including missing limbs, has significantly increased the follow-on costs of America’s wars; the numbers who survive with severe physical trauma is now matched by those who survive with severe psychological trauma. In the past, the smaller number of men with severe wartime physical injuries were a much greater problem – for themselves, their families and for society – than those who were simply walking around with “unpleasant memories”, which was actually a better (“luckier”) outcome than it could have been. There wasn’t a lot that could be done for men with severe disfiguration or missing limbs, so such readily observable disability is where most concerted attention went. Perhaps the best way to overcome unpleasant memories, on the other hand, was hard work, a dogged determination to devote oneself to a big difficult project and see it through to completion, usually with men of similar wartime experiences. Just working hard with reinforcing others who share common experiences is itself therapeutic (and probably the most effective “treatment”). Most such men eventually died natural deaths after a chosen hard civilian life without ever mentioning their wartime experiences to others except in occasional casual comments. The parts they remembered, that were always with them, were of the men who didn’t make it back.
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“This story shall the good man teach his son; … From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be remembered – We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother.” ― William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act IV, Scene III – spoken by a soldier king, to the men he led, from the front.
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In those days wars were seen as the nation’s gravest priority; men served in them until the wars were over or they could no longer contribute, and they also served in their military units for as long as the units were still viable fighting forces. Wars were not seen as jobs for temporary effort, for six months or a year of service, or as sacrifices borne solely by “someone else” of no concern to the vast majority of citizens. Nor were wars elective endeavors involved with playing “world cop” to pump up the self-esteem of those sitting on the sidelines; they were supposed to be grave unavoidable endeavors solely to defend the nation. In those days, the nation drafted into service as many men from all walks of life as perceived necessary to prosecute the war as rapidly as possible while also replacing war casualties. Most of those drafted men went into ground combat Army and Marine units, jobs with very high casualty rates for which fewer men were willing to volunteer. (The draft also served to encourage men to volunteer for safer military jobs before the draft made the decision for them and put them where they were most needed – in ground combat – which was and remains the primary purpose of the draft.) During WW II, for example, when our population was half that of today, over 11,000,000 young American men were drafted into service and another 6,000,000 volunteered; it was not until the wars in Europe and in the Pacific were both over five years later that those still alive and fit began to be released from their military service. But all citizens were expected to contribute their fair share toward the greater objective, either as members of the military prosecuting the wars or as citizens contributing measurably to the war effort at home, often through significant sacrifice. With wars universally impacting literally everyone, it was inconceivable that wars in a democracy would ever be allowed to drift aimlessly and vaguely, with gradually “evolving” objectives, under incompetent and changing civilian “leadership” for years and years until they had become largely forgotten by those not directly involved, and then ineptly “ended” without ever achieving and locking in place their original objective.
All this began to change with Korea, especially by those of the Greatest Generation who had lived most of their lives until then suffering through one great adversity after another and were now dedicated to far more productive endeavors, to ensuring for their children all that they had been denied and much more before they ran out of time. Most didn’t even want to think about yet another war on the other side of the globe, especially one that their President was calling a “police action” that seemed to present no threat to the United States. But men of the small and younger Silent Generation did nevertheless stoically answer the draft call for Korea when it arrived just as American men before had always done, and joined the small cadre of career professionals for whatever was needed of them, for as long as it took. Even though Democrat President Truman refused to label it a “war”, the Korean War was just another of those ways in which responsible adult men contributed to their society, to “all of us”, and for their women and children back home. The unresolved war in Korea later left bad feelings in those directly involved, including the families of the more than 52,000 who never came home from a “police action” on the other side of the globe, but the years of duration and the numbers of soldiers involved were rather small, so the impact on the nation was not great.
The Vietnam War, however, saw a great dichotomy between that minority of men who had experienced war and the great majority of men and women of the same age group who had not. (Vietnam was another war that “materialized” without ever being debated fully by the American people or their representatives in Congress, one that gradually evolved from a small US Army Special Forces operation under President Kennedy to a full-scale war under Democrat President Johnson after a “resolution” was approved.) When the war didn’t go as planned, the decision was made to simply pull the plug. Baby Boomers seem to have no problems at all in ending “unpopular” wars in such a manner as to render the deaths and maiming of their own soldiers and allies that occurred in them totally meaningless. A major factor in Vietnam War PTSD was, in fact, the culture to which a small minority of its young men came home. Most men who remained in the military after their service in Vietnam, with similar others, and just kept on working on new projects and new challenges, experienced only minor psychological difficulties, if any. PTSD had a far greater impact on those who left the military after their wartime service.
There are now also those who believe that PTSD is a bigger problem than it actually is because it’s become an easy societal characterization for a small minority of Americans and because there is now so much money available for a burgeoning body of civilian “professionals” who treat such disorders.* It can’t be a privileged and callous society, a Baby Boomer society worshiping “me”, so it must be the war – or so the “thinking” goes. It’s undeniable, for example, that our society over the past half century has become far more overtly emotional, effeminate, self-involved, than it was in the past. The “standards” now are set by women, and especially the women who “raise” the overwhelming majority of our children with only very minor, if any, meaningful input from masculine men. American women, who accept responsibility for nothing and are accountable to no one, are now the arrogant “experts” – on men. (For American women it’s all about their rights, about what “I” want, from “someone else” – who will pay the bills, take the blame and do the hard stuff, for “special me” – all of which they teach to their clones by example from birth onward without mention of “my” responsibility – and then try, as professional “experts”, to so also indoctrinate male combat veterans.) Take it from someone who knows both: There are really huge differences between other-directed earlier generations of Americans and the me-involved Baby Boomer generation.
I’ll never forget a stark example of that Vietnam-era dichotomy, the very deep rift in American society, that I witnessed in Stockholm, years after that war had come to an end. During the Vietnam War many young Baby Boomer men exercised a wide variety of methods to avoid military service, including running away to other countries to avoid the draft. This action was actually a federal criminal offense, a federal crime that would become an indelible stain on a man’s lifetime record, and these men were wanted by US federal law enforcement (military and civilian) for criminal prosecution. Very many Americans, and especially those who had stood up and answered the Draft call, wanted those men – who in effect had sent “someone else” to war in their place, perhaps even themselves or their dead or maimed buddy – to pay a price for such a supreme act of cowardice. Then Democrat President Carter in 1977 issued a presidential pardon, an amnesty, to all those who had fled the Draft over the previous fifteen years. While many millions had employed a variety of slick and barely legal “deferment” mechanisms, approximately a quarter million Baby Boomers had overtly violated the Draft laws. It was these specific law violators that President Carter’s amnesty addressed. “We’ll give these jerks a pass on sending “someone else” to war in their place so they can later throw their sons in prison for smoking a weed.”
The amnesty granted to overtly illegal draft-dodgers, while perhaps necessary to begin healing deep wounds in American society, was also the first deep chink in the American “system”, in the sanctity of “all men equal under the law” and “no one above the law”, the incubation of the notion of “special” people, the beginning of “acceptable double standards” (like “acceptable levels of collateral damage”?), of the slow gradual unraveling of a wide range of previously hallowed American principles of justice and equality and fair play, even the very re-defining of “fathers” and “family”. It marked the shift from a society ruled by logic to one ruled by emotion. President Carter’s executive order began to make it possible to bend or ignore laws for political purposes, for expediency, to benefit “special” groups, even for self-aggrandizement. Families of dead and maimed soldiers naturally were outraged. While those who had honorably served and survived stood there looking like suckers, those who had avoided the draft, legally and illegally, paid no price at all. Still, they did have to engage in all sorts of self-serving rationalizations and other mental gymnastics to try to justify their actions, to themselves and to others. This, in turn, undermined their very standing in society, made it impossible for them to object to similar societal trends quickly following in the same vein elsewhere, without exposing their own hypocrisy. Once you lose the moral high ground, you set loose all sorts of unintended negative consequences, and your society begins to unravel. The Draft had ended, but the damage was done. The first order of business therefore was to denigrate those who served, denigrate even the very concept of military service, so that your own cowardice wouldn’t seem so cowardly. And this very many did, with a vengeance.
(This process had begun several years earlier, when American soldiers returning from Vietnam were actually attacked and vilified by large mobs of their own citizens, including women – a process that has been embraced throughout the 20th century most warmly by those on the left side of politics, who view soldiers as dumb expendable widgets who exist first to serve their far superior civilian liberal masters and second who can be cavalierly committed to wars unilaterally by a Democrat president whenever he feels like it, usually to pursue emotional missions of little or no consequence to the security of the nation, mainly for self-aggrandizement and domestic political gain. And then, after the hard stuff is done, soldiers can just be tossed on the trash heap and the money spent of far more worthwhile domestic vote-buying purposes.) After the draft-dodger amnesty, everyone was formally free to regard soldiers as no longer honorable “us”, but rather “those idiots too stupid to make it” in the civilian society, “baby-killers”, “right-wing Nazis”, “nut cases”, inanimate “troops”. It was mostly driven by guilt and self-loathing.
Just fifteen years later Americans, and especially “special” American women to whom none of this was ever of the least concern, had taken their rationalizations to such an extreme that they could even elect a draft-dodger as President, and have him assume the role of ‘commander-in-chief” over the very military he himself was too cowardly to join. In the epitome of “we versus them’, this commander in chief had been quite content to send some “lesser” human in his “special” place to war in the very military he now oversaw. Just as bad, people of a similar ilk throughout his administration delighted in treating military personnel worse than their domestic servants. (The women who voted for him were no better. While these self-serving “feminist” jerks were successfully insisting that male soldiers engaged in mutually voluntary sexual relations with subordinates on a sleepy remote base be sent to prison for rape, they gave a complete pass to their commander-in-chief for the exact same behavior in the Oval Office, primarily because they viewed him as their obedient stooge.) (And then the first Baby Boomer jerk in the White House typically lied about it, which the soldiers did not.) Today American society is based on little more than propaganda, lies, rationalizations, censorship, and interest group bullshit; it’s all fake. Today you can rationalize anything, including favoritism, double standards and bigotry.
(In fairness, Barack Obama was too young to be affected by the Vietnam Draft, but his Republican opponent Mitt Romney had avoided the draft for ten years (1965-75) by going off to France (1966-68) at age 18 and then returning to college and getting married at 20; he used college student deferments until he passed the draft age of 26 in 1973 and the draft ended in 1975. He is said to have supported the war, but not enough to actually serve in it.** The 2012 election was the first in all of American history in which not one of the four main candidates for President and Vice President had any military experience. This cleared the way for one of our “entitled” women to now ascend to the throne on the basis of quotas, certainly not on the basis of anything she’s ever done for any group but her own, much less for her country. A fifth candidate, the Silent Generation’s Ron Paul, did serve in the military (1963-68), but he is considered “unelectable” because he’s far too smart, honest and logical.)
Under President Carter’s directive, which the Defense Department was required to execute, those living in other countries had to report to the local US Embassy and be formally “repatriated” – a paperwork exercise that essentially allowed them to return to the US without fear of criminal prosecution, their “slates wiped clean”. Those executing that formal “repatriation” process were young career US military officers selected for temporary assignment to appropriate US embassies throughout the world. Most of these junior officers really hated the duty, which lasted for years, but they were operating under a stringent set of protocols that prohibited any disrespect to be conveyed to those seeking to return to the US.
Like Canada, Sweden had been a favored country of destination for these overt “draft dodgers”, so there were a lot of “long-haired” American Baby Boomer “men” hiding out there. The officer selected for Stockholm had the appearance of a sterling example of the “perfect” US military soldier – tall, good-looking, trim, fit, wearing a uniform that seemed perfectly tailored to his body and resplendent with a chest-full of medals and ribbons, plus important pins, chevrons and badges. This was a bona fide Airborne Infantry Ranger hero, the kind of guy who looked like he just stepped out of an Army recruiting poster. When their names were called by a sergeant in the waiting room, each man rose and entered the officer’s small and sparce office and closed the door. With no available chair, he remained standing as the officer, seated behind his desk, asked a long series of questions and noted the responses on a form. The process took about fifteen minutes. Only when he was finished did he look up at the standing man and asked if he was ready to resume his place in American society. Then he stood up and walked around the desk to hand the man his “repatriation” papers. With his left hand braced on his desk, he shook the guy’s hand with a very firm grasp while staring straight down into his eyes. Only then, before the man was motioned to a side door for exiting the embassy, did it become apparent that the officer was missing his left leg.
It was all perfectly according to the rules. I never found one of those repatriated draft dodgers who was willing to accurately describe what he was feeling at that moment. It was probably something like, “Better you than me, Sucker.” If it were me, I would have melted away and vanished in humiliation, never to be seen in public again.
PTSD is sometimes in the eye of the beholder. To me, there is something exceedingly despicable about any adult, of either gender, who consciously and deliberately sends someone else in their place to face great danger, possibly even death or dismemberment, not to mention the loss of at least two and perhaps three or more years from their normal life. Even the Silent Generation’s Elvis Presley when he was on top of the world was man enough to answer the call when it came and defer many millions of dollars of income for two years (1958-60); a “special” Casius Clay (Mohammad Ali) in 1967 was not. (I began my own military service in Vietnam after college that same year.) But then, in 1992, Baby Boomer Americans, and most especially women, had no problem in rejecting the most internationally qualified president in American history – a man who served throughout World War II as a Navy pilot, had served as an elected member of the House, Ambassador to China and the United Nations and Director of the CIA, and who as Commander in Chief had just won the fastest and most decisive war in American history – for an “academic” Baby Boomer draft-dodger who fled to Europe to play privileged protest student and thus avoid the Vietnam Draft, as their peacetime President. This was a guy who, raised by women, had simply perfected the talent of “always tell ‘em whatever they want to hear”. That was enough to send a guy like me right over the edge. PTSD? You betcha. (But I got over it.)
It was not so much their wartime experiences that aggravated their memories and gave rise to PTSD as much as it was the sick society to which those honorable soldiers came home. If you’re a military professional dealing with war reality and the American people today, you can easily go nuts, or come down with PTSD. “War’s just fine, as long as it doesn’t involve “me”.”
Guys like me who began our careers with multiple tours in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, traveled the back alleys of the world’s hellholes and meccas for decades, and wound up with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere have a tendency to rage more against the stupidity and ignorance of mankind’s delusions than against the carnage and destruction of mankind’s inhumanity. We have seen far too many fall by the wayside for high principles along the path. I, for one, tend to view that inhumanity in many different forms, all of which are self-serving and myopic and perpetrated by those who somehow perceive themselves as “special”, as “entitled” – the most dangerous kind of human there is. The only people who are “special” are those who compete as equals on a level playing field with only one constant set of very high standards and rules applicable equitably to everyone, and still manage to battle their way to the top, or just to survive honorably. Beyond that, it’s primarily a question of responsibilities for others superseding rights claimed for the self – so that all of us can benefit from the successes and sacrifices of the few. Nowhere in such an equation are matters of race or gender or caste or class or religion or politics or any other artificial label selected or imposed for ulterior purposes. In the end, each of us stands or falls alone on the basis of our own personal record, our own decisions, our own actions, our own behavior, of what we have contributed to the whole equation. Those with no sense of responsibility for others, who are unwilling to put their own life where they want others to put theirs, who consider themselves “superior” and “entitled”, should just get out of the way of far more worthy humans. To me, they aren’t worth the dirt beneath their feet.
The reader might like to look over a separate post titled “August 1969 – The Dividing Line”.
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* It’s that old “Build it, and they will come” thing. With American universities churning out a million more social “scientists”, mostly women and their clones, than any reasonably healthy society could possibly need, the result is an enormous number of unemployable college grads with huge college loans they can’t pay off. So the magic solution is to create another whole navel-contemplation industry to give them something to do – paid for, naturally, by money confiscated from “someone else”. The icing on the cake in this case is that they get to wave the flag and claim it’s “for the veterans” (similar to that crap that it’s “for the children”). That none of these women have any more idea of what those veterans really experienced than a micro-organism on Mars does is totally irrelevant. All they have to do is what they’ve always done, just as they do with America’s boys, and completely unchallenged: impose their own ultra-superior view of things on their lowly victims – and get them even more screwed up than they were to begin with. (If that doesn’t work, there’s always a whole pharmacy of mind-altering drugs available. “One way or the other, they WILL become “me”.”) These people can find another “social ill” that needs their attention under every rock. Based on all that navel contemplation, it’s impossible not to conclude that American society is the most mentally unstable society in the history of mankind – made that way by arrogant American women determined to re-engineer it all to suit themselves. (Of course, anyone with a brain would ask what it is about our society that results in so many “disorders”, but that would be intelligently focusing on causes and results when the only thing that counts anymore is process – and all those millions of herd people diligently toiling away in that process, totally unconcerned about the bigger picture, the results. Here’s just one simple fact that should tell anyone with a brain that there’s something really sick about American society: The United States has a larger portion of its population in prison (94% male) than any other society in the history of humanity, including the Communist states of Soviet Russia under Stalin and China under Mao.)
There are few things more asinine in American society than arrogant privileged women with a string of academic titles using “behaviorism” and similar self-serving theories to “treat” men, including combat soldiers (or black inner city males, males in prison, etc.) – by first getting them to blame themselves, primarily to shift any responsibility away from women. (Women have rights; they do NOT have responsibilities.) These women “social science” “experts”, who have spent their entire lives studying their own glorious navels in the safe and comfy womb of socialist academia, can and do rationalize literally anything in their favor. As an actual man, and an Irish-American man to boot, I’d rather try to build a self-sustaining colony on the Moon and then see what unimaginable opportunities that opens for even greater accomplishments and adventures for generations of my sons to come. If anyone wants to study my mind, they can wait until I’m gone, when I haven’t got any more far more worthwhile endeavors to challenge me. I have never found my navel the least bit interesting, worthy of even a minute’s contemplation; I am far more fascinated by everything beyond “me”. I am satisfied with the masculine man I am, and I have never felt the urge to “re-invent” myself. Why would I? Only perpetual children who never figured out who and what they are entertain such absurd notions. I have never felt a need for crutches like drugs, excuses, rationalizations, blame-shifting, hand-outs, special programs, plastic surgery. I don’t need to shave my head or grow a mustache or mutilate my body with tattoos or wear expensive clothes and fancy shoes and glittering jewelry to convey some perverse notion of “masculinity” (“femininity”?). I don’t need a lot of extra junk to validate “success”, a herd of superficial “friends” to prop me up, a fake universe of mandated lies and dictated speech to avoid damaging my fragile “self-esteem”. My dad didn’t leave me a dime, but before he died as a young man he gave me all I needed as a young boy, and I have continued to build on that core value superstructure all my life. Life is tough; I deal with that reality as I find it, and keep on marching. The only thing that pisses me off is willfully stupid people – inexcusably in America. The only thing I need to sustain me is the record of my honorable life. Only a first class idiot would ever let an American woman, with all their built-in whining, dependence, blame-shifting, arrogance and “me-ism” that has been infecting our whole society, anywhere near his mind.
** For the record, I supported the war in Vietnam during the early 1960s when it was being fought mainly by US Army Special Forces – working with and training indigenous people in the region – but I became strongly opposed to the war after it began to be prosecuted by men like General LeMay, General Westmoreland and President Johnson, men I regarded as war lunatics, with massive conventional forces and tactics, and I even joined demonstrations in Washington DC against the war. But I still served in Vietnam, in Southeast Asia, beginning in 1967, and much more.
Invincible Probity 