Maybe they got the idea from our former enemy, the Imperial Army of Japan. The Emperor Hirohito, you will recall, kindly saw to it that his troops were supplied with teenage sex slaves for the relief of those well-known male physical needs. Only there was a crucial difference between the Japanese army's "comfort women" and the young women trainees who have been abused by their brothers-in-arms in the U.S. military--a crucial military difference, that is. The comfort women of World War II were captives of war--so every assault they endured could be seen, by their assailants, as a humiliation inflicted on the enemy.
This doesn't excuse the Japanese, it just throws a particularly nasty light on the goings-on at Fort Leonard Wood and the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Generally speaking, sexual abuse is visited on women of the other side. One's own women are supposed to be sacrosanct; in fact, the most hallowed argument against having women in combat is that our men would be so busy protecting them that they wouldn't have time to do any serious fighting. When U.S. troops marched to the chant, "Two, four, six, eight,/ Rape, kill, mutilate"--which they did until well into the 1970s--they were not, presumably, thinking of their sisters and girlfriends and moms.
Rape, in particular, is now recognized as a war crime or--from a more chilling perspective--a tactic of war. Maybe it's more fun for the perpetrators than, say, lobbing artillery shells at some remote and impersonal target. But this doesn't mean rape can be seen as just another lighthearted form of R. and R. because the intent is still to defeat the other side. As the Bosnian Serbs understood so well, the best way to get the enemy steamed was to put their wives to work as latter-day comfort women.
Yet there is a tendency, even among respectable commentators, to treat the U.S. military's mushrooming sex-abuse scandals as a case of runaway hormones and boyish high jinks. WAR IS HELL, notes a New York Times headline, adding, wittily, SO IS REGULATING SEX. The article, which glides blithely from the topic of "relationships" to rape, quotes an Assistant Secretary of Defense explaining the debacle in terms of a "natural attraction between men and women." "Attraction?" "Sex?" Excuse me, fellows, but what goes on in your bedrooms?
All right, there can be a fine line, sometimes, between sex and the abuse of it. The officer who comments on his subordinates' good looks may be simply clueless and in need of retraining. The military couple who defy regulations to fraternize off base may be, for all we know, meant for each other. But much of the activity under discussion has nothing ambiguous about it, and certainly nothing fine. We're talking about having one's clothes ripped off and being passed from pawing hand to pawing hand (Tailhook, 1991). About being raped and then told by one's assailant that "if you ever tell anyone about this, I'll slit your throat" (Aberdeen Proving Ground, 1996). This is not about sex and its regulation or lack thereof. This is about war.