While waiting for the season finale of SNL, I caught an episode of 48 Hours and the show was about a soldier who was murdered 2 days after coming back to the US from Iraq. The suspects were the 4 fellow soldiers from his unit that he was out with that evening, going out to a Hooters for dinner and a strip club afterwards. From the shows website:
At age 19, Richard Davis joined the military, following in his parent’s footsteps. After serving in Bosnia, Richard re-enlisted and found himself at the forefront of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Just two days after his return to the United States, Richard mysteriously vanished. What happened to him only came to light months later.
The end of the road appeared to be 2 of the soldiers that evening on trial for first degree murder (Davis was stabbed 33 times) and the other 2 later were tried for manslaughter and not reporting a crime, the Army didn’t even open an investigation for a month afterward as they listed Davis as AWOL despite his parents protests. There were diagnosis of PTSD amongst the soldiers and then toward the end of the program there were insinuations of the rape of an Iraqi woman. One of the soldiers denied the rape and said instead they had seen prostitutes and it was ‘common knowledge’.
My thoughts then turned to the subject of sex and our soldiers in Iraq. Our men have been there for 3 years now, stuck on long tours in a Muslim country where sex is not readily available. Where are the men dealing with sex? There are a percentage of female soldiers there but many of those women are married or dating soldiers already there and at home. I would think Iraqi women are particularly unavailable as any woman caught sleeping with the Occupying Army by the insurgents would be killed for collaboration and dishonor. I have read reports that Iraqi women are afraid to go anywhere alone for fear of rape but the inference was always that it was Iraqi men they were afraid of being raped by.
Since the soldiers mentioned prostitutes they must be there in small numbers but can you imagine prostitutes being tolerated by Muslims? Then, being curious I began to think about pregnancy and wondered if there would be a large group of soldier’s children like in Vietnam, only would this group be half Iraqi and half while/black/hispanic/asian? After 3 years there wouldn’t this all be happening for awhile now? I’ve seen absolutely no reporting about any of this yet it was not an unknown topic to the public in Vietnam. Also if there is sex and pregnancy does that mean there is abortion there as well? Is our government (via Halliburton et al) involved in all of this, supplying prostitutes, condoms, abortions etc.? If so it would be highly hypocritical of both Bush and the Fundies to be using public monies for this in Iraq while working to deny American citizens these very things. Any thoughts out there?
Given today’s climate, it’s surprising that a celibacy pledge isn’t required.
well, that’s one of the points i guess. In a society that has sexual images pushed at us constantly, we fail to even discuss or debate this part of things.
I never even thought of this!
well, it’s not like we haven’t had a ton of other stuff to think about! We’re on outrage overload just trying to keep up with the corruption and stopping the Neocon agenda.
I just kept picturing how a country even more sex-oppressive than ours deals with horny stressed-out soldiers on extended tours. And a place where there isn’t body armor to save their lives let alone condoms for they and their partners. Hell, there isn’t even regular electricity!
A friend’s theory is that the GOP is deliberately keeping us on overload so we keep wearing ourselves out keeping track of wtf is really going on.
I did a fast google and found a few things. I did mention that a year or 18 months ago I read of the young widow, a Baghdadi, who has turned to sometime protitution… but here is one article:
The Sex Lives and Sexual Frustrations of US troops in Iraq: An Ocean of Ignorance
ZNet.
From a US Labor publication agaisnt the war.
Marisacat
Thanks for those links Marisacat.
Wow, we not only give them faux-freedom but we gladly turn their daughters into our whores.
Still no mention yet of the bastard children. Can you imagine what half-breeds will be treated like as they grow up in Iraq? It won’t be pretty. We only have to remember the discrimination (and worse) that the children of American soldiers in Vietnam were subjected to.
Another quick Google of abortion in Baghdad, produces a Washington Post article from 2004, about a U.S. funded clinic opening t handle, among other things, pregnancies resulting from rape by U.S. soldiers.
Baghdad abortion clinic
oh that is fascinating… as our blighted congress (including Reid who was a YES vote) has banned abortion in mil hospitals. Everywhere, a nice global edict.
Here is the link, it’s an eye-popper:
http://www.lilithgallery.com/feminist/abortioninbaghdad.html
THE WASHINGTON POST: Saturday December 11th, 2004
A newly opened abortion clinic in Baghdad is offering abortions for free. Paid for by the U.S. military and the American taxpayer. The clinic is meant to help rape victims. Military spokesman Samuel Meyer declined to comment on the nature of the rape victims and why the military is paying for the abortions.
In Washington however, Democrats and Republicans are joined at the hip in wanting to know why the United States is paying for Iraqi abortions. On Thursday Jeff Sessions, the Republican from Alabama, stood up and demanded to know why the military is paying the bill. His voice was quickly joined by New York Senator Hillary Clinton, marking one of the few occasions where Mrs Clinton and Mr Sessions have ever agreed.
After almost 2 years of U.S. occupation, the overcrowded hospitals in Baghdad are dealing with a new problem: Pregnant women. After questioning a handful of the women that are waiting in the clinic’s waiting room, most of the women claimed they were raped by U.S. and British soldiers.
“We know the soldiers get bored. Rape is an effective way of increasing troop morale. What they do during their off-time is none of our business as long as it doesn’t interfere with the war effort.” -Unknown U.S. Marine Officer, 1991.
oops, sorry Kidspeak! I just saw the link at the bottom of your previous post.
in knowing about the Baghdad abortion clinic. I googled and read the article but the rape statistics from the first Gulf War that they give seemed impossible to me only because we know so many people who were over there and they weren’t over there long enough or given exposure to enough rape opportunities for these figures to even be close to being real. The article claims to be from the Washington Post December 11, 2004 but I can’t find anything when I search the Washington Post archives online. I’m not posting this in defense of our soldiers, but before anybody runs with this we need more thorough confirmation on this. It isn’t ringing true for me and I can’t find the actual article in the WAPO archives!
i just tried but the WaPo archives search engine was awful. On one search i put in “Iraq, December 11, 2004” and got only 3 responses, 2 were from 2006 and one was from 2003!
about everything….and even a few Army wives I know do too. Lots of masturbation…..let’s face it, particularly among the young guys (ever know many young guys who didn’t do that lots?). At Al Asad it drove my husband crazy to go in the bathroom to take a shower from the fragile plumbing on Al Asad that he had worked so hard to get up and running and usable only to discover that the shower had weathered who knows how many late night showers before sun up and it was pretty spoogey. I don’t know how to sum this up nicely. It isn’t that our soldiers are pigs either because they are in constant hypervigilance and I guess they tend to often eat like dogs bent over their trays….and if they are hungry enough and there isn’t anything else they will eat food half full of dirt too on a bad day. They are very desensitized. My husband spent about two weeks during his off hours installing lights and fans in the outside portapotties so that people could at least see their masturbation material if they needed that and hopefully the smells would be tolerable long enough to get the job the done and maybe he could get up in the morning to take a shower and not slip on someone elses drip. He was at Al Asad but it was still early in the war and prostitutes were not common there at this time, that certainly doesn’t mean that they aren’t now though. Pornography is supposed to be banned but the soldiers pass around what they have to each other for those special portapotty moments and the command turns a blind eye usually. Lots of affairs between soldiers, most of them extramarital and lots of them tearing lots of families apart when they get home and people find out. I see most of that as fragile human beings attempting to survive and feel some sort of love in a very loveless situation. Lots of rapes of female soldiers happening and not being tended to as they once were. Rape isn’t about sex though…..it isn’t a sexual act…….it is an act of violence and power.
I was going to take a shower, but now I think I’ll wait a while.
Being a gay man and having lots of roommates as well as tons of teenage male nephews over the years (big family) you are describing what life is like living with men in general. And this isn’t in a hellhole even… well some of it ocurred in Texas 🙂
whether it was trying to get them to eat without leaning into the plate and scooping it up to getting them to wipe down the showers afterwards you realize what an uphill battle it is. Teenaged male hygiene is so bad i used to think the only reason they took showers to begin with was so they could masturbate in private.
But masturbation is a given for most men, just a stop-gap measure and is no substitute for the real thing. They can masturbate every day and still go crazy for ‘lack of sex’.
I don’t think they see it as real sex and would never work as more than a short term solution (a very short term).
even Dr. Ruth says so 😉 Rape is not a sex substitute though for men who aren’t Ted Bundy. I think that Ted is far from the norm……even in the military. So here’s some more Tales from the Crypt. If your husband has a bit of rank he might have access to an office phone……he might even have a whole group of friends who have access to an office phone and an agreement that when the door is closed that means absolute privacy!!!! Too bad for Mr Militarytracy though cuz Tracy don’t do phone sex. Other people, they somehow get by on it and then they all laugh about it all later. I can’t get beyond the fact that I’m caressing a phone and it’s all over after that. Can you imagine the guys in Kuwait listening in doubled over laughing? Thank God for R&R. When I asked my husband what he wanted to do first when he got home he said “You naked with a beer in your hand!”
Phone sex is even less filling than masturbation. The demise of most of those 976 lines proved that (i think the ads in the back of magazines all go to the same 10 phone banks!). I called one once when they first came out and all i could do was laugh uproariously which didn’t help the mood!
That said i didn’t bring up rape in my last post because rape has zero to do with sex, it’s a different beast entirely.
That would be a whole new scandal, soldiers calling phone sex numbers from Iraq on the tax payers dime! Phone sex with someone who you have had sexual relations with in the past……maybe lots of sexual relations……..someone who knows all of buttons and switches, silly. I wonder if the Christian Right knows that they have paid for a whole bunch of sexual relations that will never create a child? It’s like a new form of birth control that we’re making them pay for because of their Iraq War. Bawahahahahah!
Then there were the reports of American women soldiers dying of dehydration… they’d stop drinking water or anything else after lunch, despite the heat, because that would mean a trip to the port-a-johns after dark… and they were afraid of being accosted and raped by their fellow soldiers.
Rape isn’t about sex. It’s about power, insecurities and anger. But there’s a lot of anger and insecurities going on over there also.
The current administration has made a shambles of any sense of military order, proper procedures, behavior, oversight or discipline — the most brutal acts are overlooked or even encouraged from the top on down. Add sexual tension and young male hormones to that mix, and the combination is volitile.