Right now one of the things that is in the news is the number of sexual assaults in the services. As usual congress is going to direct the services how to eliminate them and as usual congress is likely to screw things up to a fare-thee-well.
There is no excuse for a sexual assault and it is as simple as that. None. Saying that a woman asked for it is blaming the victim. OK, we have that established.
Women in the service were fairly rare until about 35 or 40 years ago. Now they are pretty much a part of the wood work and most of them do a pretty good professional job according to a lot of people I have spoken with over the years.
My experience with the fairer sex back in the day was likely more limited than the GIs of today. Mostly there were commissioned nurses, enlisted administrative types, a couple of commissioned administrative types and Katie who was a horse of a different color.
Katie doesn't count. She was a character and one of a kind. God love her. The woman had the heard and soul of a grunt but was a mechanic and was damned good at it.
Most of the female soldiers I dealt with at the time I had brief contact with. If I had to have an administrative thing taken care of or a payroll problem I would sometimes have a female soldier take care of it.
Because I was sometimes sent to Central Issue facility as an errand boy I would deal with female soldiers there. I remember one that was pretty professional and easygoing at CIF and she was pretty good about helping me square up property issues.
She was there when I cleared post and saved me an awful lot of grief when I went to turn my stuff in. I wound up clearing CIF in a few minutes instead of it taking hours like it generally did.
I'd done her a couple of simple favors and got paid back in spades. I think that over the time I knew her I had dropped off a couple of cans of coffee and gotten her some damned thing she needed. I don't remember what it was but I do remember she was grateful.
I was pretty unaware of sexual assaults back in the day. Not because they didn't happen. They did. I was simply in an all male artillery unit and didn't think about it at all.
As to be expected there were a few rumors floating around about this female soldier or that one. Most of the rumors about some of these women were pretty raunchy. This isn't one-sided. It is interesting to note that there were a number or respected women in the admin offices and the guys stuck up for them.
I had to deal with a maintenance company from time to time and there were a number of women assigned there. While most were respected a lot of them were considered to be shammers that hid behind their sex to get out of things they didn't want to do.
This wasn't limited to the maintenance company. A friend I went through basic with was at Carson and we met and he and his friend said that at the time there were a number of women that were shammers. When it came to anything but office work they were full of excuses.
I did have to deal with one of these one night when I was on CQ. She wandered into the barracks and went straight into the dayroom which was legal. It was the only place women were allowed in an all male barracks. She lasted about two minutes before I threw her out as she was plastered and simply had dropped in to pick up a couple of guys for sex.
She was followed out by a couple of the younger guys that reported she had serviced them sexually later when they returned to the barracks. I recall I logged that a female Pfc had come into the day room and had misbehaved and had been ejected. The next day the First Sergeant asked me about it and told me I had acted properly.
I guess she had created some headaches a few weeks earlier in a couple of the firing batteries, but Top didn't go into any detail.
Still, looking at the problems identified by the services today I wonder about a few things in the back of my mind.
Sexual assault is generally more about power and humiliation than it is sex.
I would like to know which females are generally the victims of these sexual assaults. While I suppose that women of all categories are victims of assault, I'd just bet that the majority of the victims are not the competent women that enlisted with the intention of getting with the program and serving. I won't get into why that is but it more often than not happens that way.
My guess for what it's worth is that a pretty good sized chunk of the victims of these sexual assaults are the substandard female soldiers to begin with.
Now for the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity.
Good soldiers do not sexually assault people. It's as simple as that. Any GI that sexually assaults someone is a substandard GI.
It seems to me that congress doesn't need to do a whole lot and that just about all they are going to do is pass a bunch of dopey rules and regulations and force a bunch of stupid mandates down the DoD's throat.
It would just be a whole lot easier, smarter and more efficient to tell the services to cull the substandard service members of both sexes. If they simply did that the overwhelming majority of sexual assaults would simply disappear.
Of course that isn't likely to happen because some substandard female is likely to call her congress critter after getting booted out and there is likely to be a big investigation and the usual gang of liberal do-gooders in congress will come charging in trying to make a name for themselves.
In addition to that the services all would show a marked improvement. Instead, congress will get involved and the morale and effiency of the services will likely decline.
To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html
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