Harassment Is Old Battle for Many Army Women

FT. LEE, Va. —  If the Army wants to find evidence of sexual harassment, it need look no further than the Pizza Hut on Route 36, just a stoplight or two down the road from this picturesque collection of brick buildings and aging white clapboard barracks nestled along Virginia’s Appomattox River.

Here, over the $4.49 pizza-and-salad buffet special, it was possible this week to strike up a noontime conversation with three veteran female sergeants. They are not foolish enough to use their real names, so they will be known as Anita, Lenore and Sarah.

Hardly a day goes by, says Anita, 40, without a man making a lewd remark or gesture. Sex between soldiers of different ranks, although prohibited, has long been a part of Army life, says Lenore, 37; when she was a new recruit, her roommate was sleeping with the drill sergeant.

But it is Sarah, 29, who has the most chilling tale: Three years ago, while her husband was overseas, she was stalked by a sergeant who repeatedly begged her to sleep with him. When she filed a formal complaint, the fallout was devastating.

“My name was just dragged through the mud,” she said. She was reassigned during the investigation to a job in which the sergeant became her immediate supervisor. Eventually, she said, he was reprimanded and she switched posts. The ordeal was so stressful that, at one point, she tried to kill herself.

“I was to the point where I was crying all the time,” she said. “I just wanted to make the pain stop.”

If the Army’s own statistics are any guide, the experiences of these three women are not unique. In a 1995 survey, about 61% of Army women reported that they had been the victims of sexual harassment--ranging from teasing to fondling to rape--during the previous year.

But these soldiers’ stories--told against the backdrop of an investigation into sexual harassment of young Army recruits at training facilities--reveal more than the prevalence of sexual misconduct. They shine a harsh spotlight on a society that has a strong commitment to equal opportunity on paper but in practice remains very much dominated by men.

Twenty-three years after the military switched to an all-volunteer force and women began joining in record numbers, female soldiers constitute just 14% of the Army’s rolls and 13% of its officers. The physically demanding eight-week basic-training course was integrated just two years ago, and the decision to train men and women together remains hugely controversial.

Meanwhile, the long-standing prohibition against women in combat--a rule that public opinion polls indicate the American people strongly support--means that female soldiers are barred from one-third of all Army jobs. Women can hold certain combat positions in the Navy and Air Force, and in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, they have been permitted to fly Army helicopters. But they cannot become infantry soldiers--the backbone of the Army.

That effectively caps most women’s careers and keeps men in the seat of power, according to David Segal, a University of Maryland sociologist who has advised the Army on gender integration.

Just six of the Army’s 307 generals are women. The two highest-ranking Army women are two-star generals. One works in intelligence, the other in personnel--both considered rear-echelon support functions for combat units.

“The people who get to be the senior generals in the Army,” Segal said, “are officers who come up through infantry, armor and artillery. They are the warriors. If you say women aren’t going to be warriors, then you are saying we are not going to have a woman who is chief of staff of the Army. . . . What you are doing is building a glass ceiling.”

And while female soldiers may break some molds simply by joining the Army, once they are there they tend to be channeled into fields that are traditionally the province of women.

More than a third of them go into administrative jobs and about one in six enter medical occupations. A quarter become supply clerks or communications specialists. Just one in 10 joins occupations traditionally seen as men’s work, such as electronics, craft work and infantry support.

Within this context, it is not surprising to experts that sexual harassment persists. Of the four branches of the military, the Army has the second-highest incidence of sexual harassment behind the Marine Corps, according to last year’s survey. And Army women reported the highest incidence of superiors seeking sex in return for other favors.

“We’ve got a long way to go,” acknowledged Ed Dorn, assistant secretary of defense for manpower. But he adds that preventing sexual harassment is particularly difficult for an organization with as much turnover as the Army.

“Every day,” Dorn said, “we start over with a few hundred new people in the force. Every year we start over with 200,000 new recruits on active duty, and 150,000 into the [National] Guard and Reserve. Every year, we have hundreds of thousands of new people to give this message to.”

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What is particularly troubling about the current investigations--both to the Army’s top brass and outsiders--is that they involve soldiers who had been entrusted with the supervision and training of young recruits who, fresh out of basic training, were getting their first real taste of Army life as they learned the rudiments of military careers.

“That is especially bothersome,” Dorn said, “more bothersome than locker room talk or even the one-on-one harassment we hear about all the time.”

At Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., one sergeant has already been given a dishonorable discharge and sentenced to five months in jail for having consensual sex with three students. Two others await courts-martial on similar charges.

At the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, three men--a captain and two drill sergeants--face charges relating to sexual harassment. Two of the men allegedly threatened their victims to keep them quiet.

The investigations have touched off an Army-wide inquiry into possible abuses at all 16 facilities where recruits are trained. Officials at Ft. Lee disclosed Thursday that they are looking into charges “of a sexual nature” brought against a drill sergeant and an instructor.

In all these cases, the victims are among the most vulnerable soldiers in the Army. They are young, many of them still in their teens. Half of all Army enlisted women are younger than 20. Often, they are living away from home for the first time.

Like most of today’s enlistees, female soldiers are more likely than their civilian counterparts to come from working-class families. Most do not have enough money for college. The promise of getting an education with government funding is one key factor what draws them to Army in the first place.

To listen to these young women is to hear unbridled enthusiasm and excitement, a stark contrast to the women who have served for years. In dozens of interviews Wednesday at Ft. Lee, young female recruits--being trained in a vast array of specialties, from packing parachutes to cataloging weapons--talked about their experiences, their smiles wide, their eyes aglow.

“I always had the highest respect for anybody in the military,” said Pvt. Heather Caspers, 18, who is training as a cook and who has uncles and a father in the service. “They always looked so sharp and acted so sharp. I wanted to be a part of that. Now when I go home, people are going to be looking at me like I looked at them.”

Says Pvt. Brenda Green, 19, who is learning to set up portable laundry and bath facilities for wartime: “They don’t discriminate. What’s good for the men is good for the women.”

Yet experts say these female trainees have a very fragile support network. They may spend as little as four to six weeks in training before fanning out to other posts. Without the opportunity to form the strong bonds that are so characteristic of military life, they can find the Army a particularly isolating place.

“Several things happen to the very young enlisted woman when she gets into the military,” said Judith Stiehm, a military scholar and the author of “Arms and the Enlisted Woman.”

“One is that she is in an environment in which she is really under other people’s control. It is also a very male environment.”

Stiehm says women who spend their careers in the Army eventually discover that if they are going to advance, they must take their lumps and put up with harassment without complaining.

This rings true with Anita, the 40-year-old sergeant eating lunch at the Pizza Hut. She describes how she responds when a man tries to give her a hug: “It depends on your maturity. If it seems like it’s genuine, either you can respond by giving a hug, or you can say, ‘I don’t think so.’ ”

Younger women, Stiehm says, are less likely to know how to negotiate such awkward situations. This may account for a striking finding of last year’s survey: Most of the Army’s sexual-harassment complaints came from younger enlisted women.

“When boys are growing up, they know that if they get into a bad situation you have to fight your way out, but you never tell on anybody,” Stiehm said. “Girls are taught that if something is wrong you have to tell the authority and they’ll take care of it, they’ll set it straight. But when you get into a guys situation, if you tell you’re in big trouble.”

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This was precisely the lesson learned by Sarah, the sergeant who said her name was “dragged through the mud” after she complained about sexual harassment. She was a 26-year-old specialist and had been in the Army three years.

Sarah’s story--including her suicide attempt--follows a pattern seen in a better-known case that now sits before a panel of civilian judges in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans.

That case involves former Army Sgt. Alexis Colon, who in April 1992, shot herself to death at the age of 26 after enduring months of lewd remarks and sexual suggestions from two supervising sergeants in the Army health clinic in which she was a dental hygienist.

When the Gulf War veteran reported the harassment, according to court documents, she was promised that the men would be transferred. But that move was blocked by the captain who ran the clinic, and the threats and explicit sexual suggestions against Colon escalated.

Eventually, Colon was told that she--not the men she had accused--was to be reprimanded for harassment. Leaving a note saying that she was “too weak and ashamed to live,” Colon committed suicide two days later.

The Army, in a letter to Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo), later admitted that Colon’s office “was not a healthy work environment and may have exacerbated her stress and depression.” But neither of the men Colon accused was punished. Her family has since filed a wrongful-death lawsuit.

This kind of stress often is found in military sexual-harassment inquiries. Sarah says she learned quickly such investigations are not kept confidential. When she filed her complaint, “it split my directorate in half.” While the sergeant she accused was able to view her statement, she was not permitted to see his response.

Working for him was particularly difficult. Once, she says, he locked himself in her office and angrily denounced her. The final straw came when she relocated to a new post and learned that her new bosses had already been warned about her. She took an overdose of pills and landed in a military hospital for two weeks. A military mental health counselor, she says, helped her out of her depression.

“I’m more mad now than anything,” she said. “I’m past the hurt and I’m just angry now. I’m angry that it happened to me and angry that it’s still happening. So many times it gets pushed under the rug and nobody ever hears about it.”

Doris Besikof, the Denver attorney who represents the Colon family and is an expert in military law, says she has seen similar patterns many times.

“The problem is that these people are very isolated when these things happen,” she said. “They’re in a unit where they have been told to stay strictly within the chain of command. And they have no avenue for reaching out for help.”

Indeed, just this week, during the court-martial of Sgt. Loren B. Taylor of Ft. Leonard Wood, a military judge asked one of the victims why she acquiesced in her sergeant’s kisses rather than reporting them immediately.

“Who,” she asked the judge, “was I supposed to report this to?”

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To be sure, harassment occurs in civilian life just as it does in the military--witness this year’s scandal at a Mitsubishi auto plant in Illinois, where authorities alleged that hundreds of female assembly-line workers were routinely groped and subjected to lewd graffiti and comments.

But there is an important difference between the Army and civilian life--even in professions dominated by men, notes Lawrence Korb, an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan.

“People in civilian society can go home at night,” Korb said. “They can quit the job. They can get out.”

Enlisted women, because they have signed a contract to serve, cannot simply get out--except by going absent without leave. That is exactly what some victims at the Aberdeen Proving Ground did, according to officials there. Some of the 19 women who have come forward to say that they were sexually harassed were tracked down by Army investigators looking for women who had gone AWOL.

Others simply stick it out, says Stiehm, the military scholar. “One of the things about the military,” she said, “is that people rotate jobs and bosses and locations so frequently that, if you just hang on, you’re going to get a transfer.”

Some say the answer to sexual harassment is more integration. Retiring Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.), who has been an ardent champion of women in the military in 24 years on Capitol Hill, says women will fare better “the faster we get them mainstreamed and the faster we get them promoted.”

Others say just the opposite. Rep. Steve Buyer, an Indiana Republican who sits on the House National Security Committee, argues that it might be wise to scale back the Clinton administration’s efforts to integrate Army basic-training units. So far, men and women train together at just two Army posts--Ft. Jackson, S.C., and Ft. Leonard Wood.

“We’re going to proceed,” Buyer told the Wall Street Journal earlier this week, “but not at the beck and call of Pat Schroeder.”

At the same time, the Army has received praise--even from some critics--for its forthright handling of the crisis. The military’s top brass, starting with Army Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, who chairs the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of the Army Togo West Jr., have vowed to rout out the offending soldiers and have insisted on a “zero tolerance” policy of sexual harassment.

For the most part, the three sergeants at the Pizza Hut find that comforting. While Sarah is skeptical--”Is this just because a captain got caught?” she asks bitterly--her friends take a more optimistic view.

“At this other post I was on, it was common for drill sergeants to get in trouble,” Anita said, “and they handled it internally. But this, where the Congress is involved and the president is involved, [the top Army brass] is going to have to handle it.”

“I believe that they’re putting up a good effort,” Lenore added. “This is a good step forward, to say ‘zero tolerance.’ Maybe this will help the younger trainees to know that they don’t have to put up with this treatment.”

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Harassment in the Military

Percent of military women saying they had been sexually harassed at work during the previous year.

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1988 1995 Army 68% 61% Navy 66% 53% Air Force 57% 49% Marine Corps 75% 64%

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Percent of women in 1995 who reported various kinds of sexual harassment, whether on or off duty and whether on or off their base or post, during the previous year.

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Army Navy Air Force Marine Corps Any Type 82% 77% 74% 86% Sexual Assault 8% 6% 4% 9% Sexual Coercion 18% 11% 8% 17% Unwanted Sexual Attention 47% 40% 35% 52% Sexist Behavior 67% 62% 59% 78% Crude/Offensive Behavior 74% 68% 65% 78%

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Source: Defense Manpower Data Center