Marine Joseph Holguin sank to the floor, hugged his knees and told the polygraph examiner that fellow lance corporal Sally Fictum had said no.
Accused of raping Fictum, Holguin had maintained in previous interviews that the act was consensual. But he changed his story twice after the polygraph results showed deception.
“Holguin stated he continued through with the act … although she had told him to stop, because he felt ‘things had gone too far to stop,”‘ an investigator wrote in an Aug. 11, 1993, report. “Holguin stated he had made a mistake.”
Holguin was charged with rape. By October, however, his commander dropped the criminal case, using discretionary power granted under military law.
A retired Marine attorney who reviewed the examination results for The Denver Post said: “Based on the documents I’ve reviewed, they let a rapist walk.”
The 19-year-old Fictum faced her own punishment. She said her commanders humiliated her and deprived her of sexual-trauma counseling. She also was investigated for lying, even after Holguin’s admissions.
“How many young ladies’ lives have to be ruined before the military listens?” asked Fictum, who left the Marines after attempting suicide later that year.
Parallels to Fictum’s case emerged last February when dozens of U.S. Air Force Academy cadets stepped forward to report that they faced punishment, attacks on their character and intimidation after reporting sexual assault, while their attackers escaped criminal charges. Military officials said the troubles were limited to the Colorado Springs school.
But a nine-month investigation by The Post found that the academy scandal is part of a deeper problem.
All the armed forces have mishandled sexual-assault cases by discouraging victims from pursuing complaints, conducting flawed investigations and depriving victims of support services, according to interviews with military women and an examination of records.
Military officers often have ignored or hidden problems and findings related to sexual assaults.
The obstacles to pursuing justice are wrenching, more than 50 sexual-assault victims told The Post. Many fear retaliation, damage to their careers and being portrayed as disloyal. And those who do report are often punished, intimidated, ostracized or told they are crazy by their superiors.
“These people were supposed to be my family,” said Michelle Swanson, an Army intelligence specialist who said she was discouraged by a supervisor from reporting her sexual assault. “I was betrayed.”
The Post’s interviews and an analysis of records found:
Leniency toward sexual-assault crimes is routine. Over the past 10 years, twice as many accused Army sex offenders were given administrative punishment as were court-martialed. In the civilian world, four of five people arrested for rape are prosecuted. Nearly 5,000 accused sex offenders in the military, including rapists, have avoided prosecution, and the possibility of prison time, since 1992, according to Army records. The Air Force released only limited data, and the Navy and Marines gave out none. But civilian victim advocates say the trends are similar.
“The military system is like a get- out-of-jail-free card,” said Jennifer Bier, a Colorado Springs therapist who has counseled military victims.
Rape is widespread in the armed forces, where more than 200,000 women serve. Sketchy military record-keeping makes it impossible to quantify. The Pentagon puts the percentage of women raped in single digits, yet two Department of Veterans Affairs surveys in the past decade found 21 percent and 30 percent of women reported a rape or attempted rape. The comparable civilian figure is nearly 18 percent, according to a federal survey in 2000. During congressional hearings in 1991, witnesses estimated that up to 200,000 women had been sexually assaulted by servicemen.
Victims lack support services, and many are left vulnerable to pressure and intimidation from commanders and peers. Despite a 1994 congressional mandate to establish victim advocacy programs, the Department of Defense has a shortage of advocates to help safeguard women and navigate the military’s bureaucracy.
These problems take a human toll. Dozens of veterans told The Post that being assaulted ruined their careers and sent them down a destructive path, including addictions and suicide attempts. Many carry the scars for life. “When I looked at the American flag, I used to see red, white and blue,” said Marian Hood, a veteran who said she was gang-raped. “Now, all I see is blood.”
The Post also found that the military fails victims of another abuse – domestic violence. Soldiers who beat their wives or girlfriends usually avoid jail.
To investigate the military justice system, The Post interviewed victims, reviewed thousands of documents, including court records, databases, medical records and Defense Department memos.
The newspaper also spoke with two dozen Veterans Affairs sexual-trauma counselors across the country, who characterized the women’s stories as credible and part of a disturbing pattern.
Department of Defense leaders, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, declined to be interviewed for this report. Pentagon officials replied in writing to questions submitted by The Post.
They characterized the military justice system as responsive to problems and under constant review.
“It is a bit premature to say that we believe that changes need to be made throughout the Services in the handling of reports of sexual assault,” the Pentagon statement said.
“Obviously, the incidents at the Air Force Academy put the issues of sexual harassment and sexual assault in newspapers; so we try to remain attentive to the current policies and the needs for improvement.”
But overall the military has not solved its justice dilemma despite consistent evidence that one exists.
During the past 13 years, the military has grappled with sexual-assault scandals – from the 1991 Tailhook convention to the 1996 Aberdeen Proving Ground investigation to the Air Force Academy – only to be met by criticisms and findings of coverup and inaction. And studies and surveys showed a military culture that demeans women.
Even deeper problems emerge in the stories of women such as Sally Fictum, Michelle Swanson, Denise Arroyo and Jennifer Neal. Swanson was in the Army. Fictum, a Marine. Arroyo, Air Force. Neal, Navy.
All four not only survived the punishing rigors of boot camp, they loved it. Pursuing justice proved to be a crueler obstacle course.
Although they have never met, all said they faced threats of punishment and attacks on their credibility after reporting their assaults. Their attackers faced little or no criminal punishment. The military did not provide them with a victim advocate, forcing them to reach outside the armed services for help and support.
“Most of my clients’ cases are strikingly similar,” said Beth Hills, a civilian advocate who represented three of the women, as well as more than 100 others assaulted in the military during the past decade. “In terms of how harshly the military treats them, all you have to do is change the name on the case file.”
Like Joseph Holguin, thousands of accused sex offenders in the military have escaped imprisonment during the past decade, military records show.
Many of them avoided criminal prosecution through administrative actions that offer no possibility of prison or a criminal record. They faced job-related discipline such as reprimands, rank reductions, counseling and fines. Some were allowed to resign.
Since 1992 in the U.S. Army alone, the cases of 4,801 servicemen accused of offenses ranging from rape to indecent acts upon a child were handled administratively, according to records.
That is more than twice the 2,033 suspects who were sent to court-martial, the military’s version of a criminal trial, for the same offenses. In 1,283 other cases, commanders took no action, and for 1,555 offenders, Army commanders never reported the outcome.
Direct comparisons with the civilian world are impossible because the justice systems are different. But an analysis by the U.S. Department of Justice found that in 1990, civilian officials sought to prosecute 80 percent of people arrested on suspicion of rape.
Unlike civilian law enforcement, military officials rely heavily on administrative punishments as an option to prosecution. Military leaders consider, according to the Pentagon statement, “the effect of the decision on the accused and the command.”
In 1984, top military officials faced such a decision.
Fort Benning’s commander was trying to prosecute a chaplain, Capt. Robert Peebles, for molesting a 15-year-old boy who was found wandering the base partially clothed one night.
Peebles confessed to assaulting the boy, as well as to past sexual misconduct, court records show, and prosecutors were preparing the case for trial.
“I had the taste of blood in my mouth,” prosecutor James Willson testified in a lawsuit by the boy’s family nine years later against the military and the Catholic Diocese of Dallas.
The court-martial was derailed, however, by Delbert Spurlock, then-assistant secretary of the Army, according to Gen. James Lindsay, former commander of the base where Peebles was stationed. “Let him resign,” Spurlock said in a telephone call, according to a 1994 deposition given by Lindsay in the same lawsuit.
Spurlock was concerned about bad publicity because another chaplain had recently been accused of sexual misconduct, Lindsay said. “We have just gone through all of the trauma associated with the press coverage of this event,” Lindsay recalled Spurlock saying. “We really don’t need another one.”
Spurlock told The Post: “I don’t have any memory of it.”
Peebles, who declined to comment to The Post, took a job with the Dallas diocese after leaving the Army. He resigned in 1986 amid accusations he had assaulted another boy, according to court records. The civil lawsuit was settled. Peebles now lives in New Orleans and has worked as a lawyer.
Such leniency is made possible in large part by a system created by Congress exclusively for the military.
In the civilian world, prosecutors decide whether to investigate and try accused offenders. In the military, soldiers’ bosses – commanders – make those decisions.
The philosophy behind the system is to keep soldiers in line so they know they must answer to superiors with the power to convict if they choose not to go to battle. The approach has been used by other countries such as Britain and Canada, though both scaled back commanders’ powers in recent years.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice has been adjusted periodically, sometimes giving the accused greater protections. Commanders still retain broad powers, including whether to even send a soldier to prosecution. The system has defenders and critics.
“We have found the UCMJ is perfectly capable of dealing with any kind of rape allegation,” said Col. Craig Smith, chief of the Air Force military justice division. “I am completely confident that my military law lets me get at any conduct that’s going to arise.”
Officials say administrative punishments give commanders useful options.
But in 2001, the Cox Commission, a panel formed on the 50th anniversary of the UCMJ, noted that “the far-reaching role of commanding officers in the court-martial process remains the greatest barrier to operating a fair system of criminal justice.”
The commission focused on the rights of accused soldiers but also said its review stemmed from “a near-constant parade of high-profile criminal investigations and courts-martial, many involving allegations of sexual misconduct, each a threat to morale and a public relations disaster.”
Even serial offenders are allowed to resign with administrative punishments. And, they can slip back into the civilian world with no criminal record. Peebles, the military chaplain, is one example.
Another is former Airman Dane N. Bogle. Two Air Force women testified in a hearing that Bogle sexually assaulted them two days apart at Dover Air Force Base, Del., in spring 2001. One of the victims, 19-year-old Denise Arroyo, now a civilian, accused him of entering her room and raping her after she had been drinking with friends. The other victim also said Bogle sexually assaulted her in her room.
Bogle was headed for a court-martial, but instead his commanders allowed him to resign. Maj. Gen. George N. Williams approved an “other-than-honorable discharge” at the request of Bogle and his wing commander, Scott Wuesthoff, military court records show.
Wuesthoff noted “inconsistencies” in Arroyo’s story because she had been drinking, records show. The other victim, citing religious beliefs, asked only for an apology, records show. She could not be reached by The Post. Both women supported Bogle’s resignation.
Arroyo said she did so only after months of pressure from officers under her commander, Col. S. Taco Gilbert III. She said they threatened to charge her with alcohol violations, but didn’t. While Arroyo was on leave recovering from her attack, she said, squadron leader Russell Cutting told her that he planned to put her to work in the same dining hall as her attacker.
“I didn’t want to go back there. All I could think was that I would be raped again,” Arroyo told The Post, adding that Cutting’s remark persuaded her to quit the Air Force.
Gilbert, who later went on to become commandant of cadets at the Air Force Academy in 2001, was accused by several cadets of derailing their cases and pursuing punishments against them. Gilbert denied that.
Bogle, who now lives in New Jersey, did not respond to requests for an interview. Dover officials and Arroyo’s former supervisors, including Gilbert and Cutting, declined to be interviewed. The Pentagon issued a written statement for Gilbert, saying:
“The Air Force did not discourage Ms. Arroyo from pursuing this case in any way. We took several extraordinary steps to care for Ms. Arroyo’s (safety) needs in this case, including allowing her to take extended leave.”
Marine Sally Fictum’s experience with military justice began after a run on the beach with Joseph Holguin outside Camp Schwab on Okinawa. It was July 29, 1993. When Fictum stopped to rest, she said, Holguin threw her to the sand and raped her.
This was the account Fictum said she gave military police after she rushed back up the beach, struggling to get a foothold in the loose sand in her military boots.
She ran crying into her barracks room past her roommate and into the shower stall. The roommate called authorities.
On Aug. 10 Holguin was wired to a polygraph machine as an examiner asked if he had had sexual intercourse with Fictum. He said no. “Deception was indicated,” according to a report of the interrogation.
Holguin changed his story the next day, saying he and Fictum had consensual intercourse. Again, “deception was indicated.”
It was then that Holguin crouched on the floor and admitted Fictum had said no. He signed a statement detailing the events that night, records show.
But two months later, in October, Col. J.W. Smythe dropped the criminal case against Holguin.
“They let a rapist walk,” Pat Gallaher, a military prosecutor for two decades who now is in private practice in Buffalo, N.Y., said after reviewing an official report on the examination. “I would have prosecuted him.”
Gallaher said the Holguin case qualified as rape because Fictum said no.
Smythe, now retired, said he did not recall the case. He said advisers would have helped him make the proper call.
“I can’t make a decision like this without advice from lawyers,” Smythe said, adding that his job is fighting wars. “We know how to blow up tanks.” Smythe also said that he would have considered the “character” of the alleged victim in deciding whether to prosecute Holguin.
Reached by telephone in California, Holguin said, “I have nothing to say for your story.”
Fictum said she was never told about Holguin’s admissions. But she was investigated for allegedly making false statements. During a meeting called by investigators two months after she reported the rape, Fictum was told that her roommate accused her of lying about it.
“But, I’m telling the truth,” Fictum recalled saying.
Back at her barracks, she began gathering every pill she could find from friends and swallowed a handful.
She awoke in the hospital the next morning with tubes running from her nose and stomach.
Released from the hospital, she resumed a recent assignment as an aide in the battalion commander’s office. Alone one day, she noticed a brown file cabinet labeled “NIS,” for Naval Investigative Service. Inside was a file with her name on it. She flipped through it.
She discovered the account of the polygraph examination showing that Holguin admitted to forcing intercourse. Her anger boiled. She copied the file.
She and her parents began a letter-writing campaign asking military officials to investigate the handling of her case. They said they never got results.
Several months later, Fictum said, she was granted a medical discharge due to psychological trauma from the rape. The charges of lying were dropped, she said. Marine officials refused to release records of the case.
Years later, Fictum said, she forgave Holguin. What she couldn’t forgive, and struggles with today, is how the military treated her.
“He (Holguin) admitted his wrong,” Fictum told The Post, recounting her story publicly for the first time. “They never did.”
Last year Fictum, now a third-grade teacher, stood in the glare of her backyard fireplace, tossing papers into the flames. The medical records went into the fire. So did most of the criminal-case file.
But Fictum saved Holguin’s polygraph admission.
“It’s been my sense of validation.”
On June 14, 2001, Navy sailor Jennifer Neal, who ranked near the top of her engineering class, went to a cookout at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Ill.
When Jessie R. Capers, a fellow petty officer, asked her to get him a beer from his room, Neal agreed. Capers followed her in.
He grabbed her by the throat, pinned her to the bed and raped her, Neal said. Neal then did everything a prosecutor would want her to do.
She immediately reported the rape.
She went to a hospital, where doctors collected DNA evidence and investigators took photos of her bloody and torn clothing and the bite marks that covered her chest and neck.
But despite all those steps, Neal was threatened, intimidated and deprived of basic assistance from the military that a woman in civilian life could expect, said Beth Hills, the civilian advocate.
Neal’s experience underscores another defect in the military justice system, according to the Miles Foundation, a Connecticut-based nonprofit victim advocacy organization that has helped more than 5,800 victims of military-related sexual assault since its founding in 1987.
“These women, over and over again, go through psychological evaluations, punishments, and character assassinations,” said Christine Hansen, the foundation’s director. “Everything from, ‘You sleep around’ to ‘You’ve got mental problems’ to ‘You’re a lesbian.’ And in the majority of our cases, there has been no justice for the victim.”
After the 1996 Aberdeen scandal in Maryland, in which Army drill instructors were accused of raping trainees, defense officials formed a committee to examine sexual misconduct.
The next year the committee, known as the Senior Review Panel, held confidential Pentagon briefings on the issue. Joan Furey, director of the VA Center for Women’s Affairs, was among the first to make a presentation.
Furey told panel members that women veterans increasingly were seeking sexual-trauma counseling. VA counselors across the country were consistently reporting disturbing trends from their cases.
Furey described more than a dozen ways women were discouraged from reporting crimes and derailed from pursuing justice, according to her report, obtained by The Post.
“Supervisory personnel stating no one will believe them,” Furey wrote.
“Threatened with bodily harm.”
“Referral for psychiatric evaluation.”
“Refusal to pursue complaint.”
“No forensic medical exam.”
“Lack of support advocacy within the command.”
Military women faced intimidation and punishment from commanders, Furey said, and were vulnerable, in part, because they had no victim advocates.
Furey said her research found that victims were isolated and blamed after their attacks. Victims also were given disciplinary or psychiatric discharges.
Furey ended her report by urging the panel to recognize the need for victim advocates, ideally female service members. She said the approach should be modeled after civilian police programs in which advocates assist victims in obtaining legal help, counseling and preparing safety plans.
During Furey’s presentation, the chairman of the Army panel, Maj. Gen. Richard Siegfried, expressed concern, recalled Dr. Leora Rosen, then a scientific consultant to the members.
Yet as soon as Furey left, Siegfried pulled some panel members into his office and moved to contain what he considered a public-relations bombshell, Rosen said.
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“He told us to make sure this doesn’t come out,” Rosen recalled, adding that Siegfried seemed “concerned that this would reflect negatively on the Army.”
Siegfried told The Post he did not recall Furey’s report or the meeting afterward. He said he did not seek to hide information out of embarrassment, and characterized Rosen as “mental.”
“The Denver Post shouldn’t be writing about this,” Siegfried said. Other panel members said they couldn’t recall the meeting or declined to comment, citing confidentiality agreements.
Rosen, now a senior analyst for the U.S. Department of Justice, said: “I can fully appreciate that Gen. Siegfried might not remember every little sidebar that occurred seven years ago. People tend to remember events that they perceive as particularly salient. That meeting certainly got my attention, and I kept notes.”
Furey said she isn’t surprised that the panel did not pursue her findings. A Clinton appointee, she no longer heads the women’s affairs center but still works for the VA.
“The military doesn’t agree these are issues, that this is a faulty system,” Furey said. “Therefore, they won’t take responsibility for it. The question is, how do you get a society like the military to change if they don’t acknowledge these problems exist?”
Four years later, another military panel raised publicly one of the findings Furey presented in vain.
Though Congress in 1994 required the military to set up advocacy programs, today the majority of installations still lack victim advocates, according to Deborah Tucker, co-chair of the domestic violence task force, which advised the military to address the shortage in 2001.
The Pentagon is providing services to victims as “defined in the law,” according to the statement to The Post, and intends to expand the victim advocate program as funds become available.
Most of the women who told The Post they were sexually assaulted in the military said they were discouraged from reporting or they were too scared to report their assaults.
Commanding officers were often the culprits. Fifteen women said they were assaulted by a member of their command or a higher-ranking colleague, heightening their fears of retaliation. In the majority of the cases the Miles Foundation has handled, the assailant had a higher rank, executive director Hansen said.
Even when their cases are prosecuted, military rape victims say, they face mistreatment from commanders and others.
The situation becomes “psychological warfare,” said Hills, the civilian victim advocate. “After their rapes, they are in no condition to deal with these pressures. The commands take advantage of them.”
Neal says that happened to her.
After his arrest, her attacker, Capers, was released. Though Neal says she was told his movement would be restricted, he was able to roam the base freely, and she was afraid to leave her room to eat at the dining hall.
On July 12, Neal requested a meeting with her supervisors, one of whom threatened to have her committed to the psychiatric ward, she said.
“They kept telling me I was crazy,” Neal said. Unable to find a victim advocate on her base, the 20-year-old Neal turned to Hills for help.
A Navy medical board began the process of discharging her for being “unable to adjust to military service.”
“Clearly … what (Neal) is unable to adjust to,” Hills wrote in notes she kept on the case, “is being raped by a shipmate on base, and discovering that this criminal has more rights, freedoms and protections than she does as a victim.”
Neal said her commander informed her that charges against Capers could be dropped because she had “voluntarily entered his room.” The Post was unable to locate the commander.
Hills intervened, complaining to superiors on Neal’s behalf. Among her complaints, Hills said, was that investigators interviewed Neal without an advocate present and had not made plans to provide an escort to the trial.
On Dec. 18, 2001, Capers was convicted of rape at a court-martial. He was sentenced to a reduction in rank, a forfeiture of pay and three years in prison.
Neal took little satisfaction in his punishment. She had planned on a military career. The rape took that away, she said.
“Before the rape, I felt like I was in this big balloon and I was sky-high; I was so happy,” Neal said. “Then he crashed my balloon.”
The military has been dogged by criticisms that its investigations were flawed, tainted or incomplete.
In 1992, a Pentagon report assailed the Navy’s investigation into Tailhook for “attempting to limit the exposure of the Navy and senior Navy officials to criticism.”
In 1999, a National Academy of Public Administration panel said problems abound in sex-crimes investigations. “Improvements … are needed from the unit to the departmental level.”
The NAPA panel, requested by Congress, called for better training, organization and recruitment of women as investigators, and the addition of sex- crime specialists.
Panel members also raised concerns about commanders’ influence, saying allegations of interference persist. They called on the Defense Department to “vigorously enforce guidance” against improper influence.
Four years later, the Pentagon has yet to act on the recommendations, said William Gadsby, director of management studies for NAPA. Defense officials say they have taken steps “to ensure that appropriate changes have been made.”
The Post also found examples of shoddy investigations. U.S. Army intelligence specialist Michelle Swanson faults botched treatment of her case as a factor in her attacker’s light sentence.
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The assault occurred on Jan. 18, 2002, after Swanson returned to her barracks room at Camp Red Cloud in South Korea from a night of drinking with friends. Sgt. Jason L. Douglass walked through her open door, pinned her on her bed, removed her tampon and sexually assaulted her, she said.
“He weighed 200 pounds. I was drunk,” she told The Post. Swanson said she fought him off and screamed. She immediately went to a supervisor, who told her to “sleep on it,” she said. “He said, ‘This will affect your life and his,”‘ she remembers.
Swanson didn’t take his advice. She wrote a statement about what happened and told another supervisor, who reported the crime to military police.
Swanson said investigators questioned her that day but failed to collect the tampon for fingerprint analysis, or collect DNA evidence. Swanson and her mother say the additional physical evidence would have strengthened the case and led to a tougher punishment.
Douglass was sentenced to four months in prison, documents show. The Post could not reach him for comment.
Swanson said her commanders were more focused on punishing her for drinking before the assault. Despite promising they would not take disciplinary action against her, they did, Swanson said.
“They were blaming me.”
Her commanders did not respond to interview requests from The Post.
As a young combat medic during Operation Desert Storm, Sharon Mixon carried litters of wounded soldiers, wiped patients’ blood off her hands, ran at the shrill whistle of an incoming bomb and saw children die.
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None of it, says Mixon, now 33, was as devastating as when fellow American soldiers gang-raped her in June 1991 and a military police officer rebuffed her effort to report it.
Mixon, a former member of the Colorado National Guard, has been in counseling for more than two years. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, a mental illness caused by trauma, she receives VA disability benefits.
During the past decade, thousands of women have streamed through the doors of VA hospitals and veteran centers, seeking help in dealing with the trauma of their rapes. They bring stories of devastation and loneliness, of being unable to hold down jobs or maintain relationships. They are haunted by fear. Many sleep with weapons.
For those who never found support in the military after their rapes, the VA is, finally, a haven. They can find not only professional counseling but group therapy with fellow veterans who they say have shared a special kind of hell. Dozens of VA counselors told The Post that the trauma for veterans is uniquely devastating because they believed they were in a safe, supportive environment.
“If I was captured, I would have been mentally prepared,” Mixon said. “If you got shot, everyone would be there to sew you up, to take care of you.”
In many cases, victims told The Post, no trauma counseling was made available. Some rejected counseling because it is not confidential.
“A lot of them wait anywhere from 10 to 30 years” for therapy, when they are out of the military, said Claudia Chavez, a VA sexual-trauma counselor in St. Petersburg, Fla. “There is a stigma of mental-health-care counseling in the military. You can be discharged based on your mental-health record.”
Since 1999, the VA has provided free counseling and treatment for military sexual trauma. VA officials, who spent $6 million on the treatment last year, estimate it will cost more than $100 million through 2015. Because of the stigma surrounding sexual trauma, said Carole Turner, director of the Women Veterans Health Program for the VA, “the information is a gross under-representation of the magnitude of the problem.”
Sexual trauma does not qualify as a disability that brings compensation. It is, however, recognized as a cause of post-traumatic stress disorder, which does qualify. The VA defines PTSD as “psychological symptoms that may occur after a person experiences a traumatic event” such as a physical assault, severe accident, natural disaster or combat. A 1998 VA study says that sexual trauma may be harder to cope with than the effects of combat.
Yet because many sexual-trauma victims don’t report their assaults, they struggle to live with the debilitating effects of PTSD on their own, experts say. Many abuse drugs or alcohol in an attempt to numb their pain. They isolate, unable to trust anyone. They have problems sleeping and eating, and may develop physical ailments including stomach, heart or gynecological disorders.
“They’ve often experienced years of trying to cope with it, years of anxiety they’ve not understood and cannot explain to themselves,” said Carol O’Brien, director of sexual-trauma services at Bay Pines VA Medical Center in Florida.
Mixon presented a brave face to the world until 1999, when she began having flashbacks. The tears would not stop. She began cutting herself, not in a suicide attempt but to distract herself from the emotional pain.
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The memories flooded back.
Mixon was 21 and waiting with other soldiers to process out of Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, after seven months there. In an apartment building, soldiers played cards and talked about going home.
Someone had bootleg liquor in a water bottle, and Mixon took a drink. “The next thing I remember is waking up facedown on a cot. Somebody was on top of me, penetrating me.” She was disoriented, as if under anesthesia. She remembers two men holding down her arms. They told her, “We’ll kill you if you talk about it.” But she did.
Hours later, Mixon reported her assault to a military police officer. “He said, ‘What did you expect, being a female in Saudi Arabia?”‘ she recalled. “When I told him it was fellow American soldiers, he told me if I knew what was best for me, to keep my mouth shut. I was too dumbfounded to even react. I just felt defeated. The other feelings and the anger came afterwards.”
Today, she cries at the memory.
“You know, I was awarded for valor when I was in Desert Storm, so it wasn’t like I was a coward. I was a good soldier.”
After her breakdown in 1999, Mixon enrolled in a residential treatment program at Bay Pines.
“This program lifted the world off my shoulders,” she said, “because I was treated with respect.”
Two years ago, Army veteran Marian Hood sat down at the desk in her living room in South Boston and wrote a letter to each of her four young daughters, to be opened when they turn 21.
Hood’s mother had been Army, her father Air Force.
She wants the legacy to stop.
There may be no better example than Hood of the human toll exacted by sexual assault in the military. Like her, thousands of female veterans are believed to have suffered in silence after being raped by fellow servicemen. Either they did not report, their story was never taken seriously or, like Hood, they were too broken to pursue it.
It is a prison Hood is determined her girls will never know.
She tells them she wants them to go to college instead of following her path.
“I told them it’s because Mommy was hurt really bad by some really mean people, and I don’t want that to happen to them.”
She was 18 and had just graduated from basic training in December 1987. To celebrate, Hood said, she and some girlfriends rented a room at a motel near their base, Fort Dix, N.J.
Her friends left to go shopping. Hearing a knock, Hood said she assumed they had forgotten something, and opened the door.
Her drill sergeant stood there. He smashed the door into her face, she said, bloodying her nose. Behind him stood four other men. Dressed in fatigues, they pushed their way into the room.
The men took turns raping and sodomizing her, Hood said. They beat and kicked her, fracturing her ribs, right knee, nose, right cheekbone and spine. They urinated on her, burned her with cigarettes, split her lip and spit on her, while threatening to kill her.
Hood would later recall it seemed as though her spirit left. And so, detached, she watched her body suffer.
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The men ransacked the motel room, taking money and traveler’s checks, before filling the bathtub and dumping Hood in. They dunked her head under water, she said, until her drill sergeant said, “We’re done.” Then they left.
It had been dusk when Hood answered the door. It was deep into darkness when her friends returned to find her lying in a bath of blood and water. “I remember laying on the stretcher and looking up at the stars. I remember them putting me into the ambulance,” Hood said. “Everything sounded muffled.”
At the military hospital, Hood said, she heard a nurse tell a doctor she thought Hood has been raped.
“Oh, we have girls come in all the time and claim this. She probably just got into a fight with her boyfriend,” she recalled the doctor saying.
Military police arrived.
“They came in, looked me over, and said they’d be back the next day,” Hood said. “The MPs didn’t come back at all.”
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Her drill sergeant did. Her second day in the hospital, Hood said, he brought her yellow daisies.
“He said if I told, no one would believe me,” Hood said. “I flipped out.”
Reporters and military officials could not locate him for comment, so The Post is not using his name. A senior officer at Fort Dix at the time did not respond to requests for comment.
She was hospitalized two weeks before calling her mother to say she was coming home. “She asked why, and I said, ‘I don’t want to tell you,”‘ Hood recalled. “I begged her not to come see me because I didn’t want her to see my face.”
DeLois Hood had been in the Army. Yet, she would never talk about it and didn’t want her daughter to enlist.
“I believe she was raped,” Marion Lane, 65, Marian Hood’s father, said of DeLois Hood. During their two years together, Lane said, DeLois Hood would often lapse into despair.
Marian Hood, eager to leave Columbus, Ga., joined anyway. “I wanted to move away,” she said. “The most exciting thing was to go down to the riverbed and drive trucks through the mud.”
Basic training was a breeze except for her drill sergeant, who pressed Hood for sex, she said. She refused and reported him, but said a supervisor told her she was delusional and gave her extra duty. “I was young and naive,” she said. “I wanted to be all I could be, and he didn’t see me that way.”
The rape, and her powerlessness in reporting it, she said, “changed everything.”
She spent two months in the hospital. “When I got out, they gave me a bus ticket, discharge papers and sent me home,” Hood said.
She arrived home in February 1988. She never told her mother what happened, Hood said, “but she knew.”
Seven months later, her mother put a .38-caliber revolver in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Hood has struggled with guilt over her mother’s suicide.
“For a long time, I felt like that was my fault,” she said.
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Now 34, she lives with her daughters, ages 4, 7, 9 and 14, in government housing.
Her body is a litany of scars. She has had four surgeries on fractured vertebrae that painfully press nerves in her legs. Hood’s medical history is consistent with her account of a brutal attack and rape, her orthopedic surgeon said. And records show that her severe back pain began then. The VA diagnosed Hood with PTSD “due to the in-service stressor of a sexual assault.”
There are other reminders of the rape: a chipped bone on Hood’s right knee, seizures from a blood clot in her brain, rectal problems, a scar on her lip.
Then, in 1998, Hood faced a new heartbreak. She was diagnosed with cervical cancer, which this year spread to her intestines.
“They’ve given me a time limit – three years if I don’t do the surgery,” which she refuses to have, as it would leave her with a colostomy bag. “That would take away what dignity I have left. Death I can deal with. Living has been harder.”
Her instructions for her daughters are explicit. “I have a will. They join the military, they get no money.”
And although she is a veteran, she refuses to fly an American flag.
“The red represents the blood I’ve shed. The blue represents my bruises – the way my face looked. I was beaten and raped for my country. That should be enough.”
