Women and War

War is hell, especially for women. The January 2004 issue of Harper's republished testimonies of a U.S. Army tribunal addressing the atrocities committed by the American special unit "Tiger Force" during the Vietnam War in the year 1967. Witnesses recounted such gruesome stories as raping a 13-14 year old girl, killing her by slitting her throat, gang-raping the young wife of a suspected Viet Cong member and then shooting her, cutting off and collecting ears of civilians, slitting the throat of an infant. After the army's four and a half-year inquiry, no one was ever charged of committing war crimes.

I shiver with injustice when I read this. Speech is lost. Rage and sadness are tangible. This is not something in the distant past. The people who committed these crimes and the people who protect them probably still live. They probably receive pensions from taxpayers or may still "serve." They could even be your representative in government. They may be your neighbors.

The testimonies are unlikely to be an anomalous. In the autobiography, Valley of the Green Ghosts, the Burmese author's love interest investigated the politically-motivated murder of her father and is then gang-raped, tortured, and later murdered by members of the ruling government. It's he, the author, who makes it out of Burma while his love interest was brutally punished and murdered for her courage in facing the fascist Burmese dictatorial government and all he can say about her was that she was beautiful. In the Philippines, militias trained by the CIA utilized similar practices. The U.S. is very much involved in the Philippines and has a special unit active in the country.

Women and girls are tortured for the sake of being born female and being born on the wrong side of a conflict. Historians have documented the particularly violent case of lesbians in Nazi concentration camps. SS Officers would bring female "asocial" (i.e., lesbian) prisoners to male concentration camps where they would be gang-raped by prisoners.

In addition to the torture experienced by other victims, women — and in this specific case, homosexual women — experience an extremity of torture that most tortured men do not experience. In this particular case, tortured/imprisoned men actively participated in the victimization and torture of women. The torture women experience is often more extreme than the most extreme torture one can imagine: the concentration camp.

All too often battle songs and war movies praise the brave deeds of men and the gallantry of war; some woe their post-war shell-shock. Yet, rarely are the experiences of women acknowledged for what they were and are. Sickly in our society are such acts consumed and somehow enjoyed as rape scenes in Vietnam war movies that have mass attendance. We are told to blindly support our troops despite the crimes they may commit.

I want no part of this pathology. I refuse to be a member of this audience. I do not want to see the Return of the King nor the Return of the Jedi. What I do want to see is the return of old school feminism, to be able to use the bad "U" word and say that war is universally atrocious for women and girls.

I've come of age in a post-modern, post-colonial feminism where I learned that there is no such thing as a universal woman's experience, where I was suspicious of white bourgeois feminism telling women to unveil themselves in the East and speaking for instead of with women from different communities. Recently, I was confronted with this naivete, which borders on ignorance, when I read letters from women who sent vibrators to women in "post-war" Iraq. Access to clean water and safe living conditions are much more important than achieving an orgasm and the senders would certainly know that if they were ever to have such a harrowing experience. Too often American women's concern about the welfare of women abroad is concentrated on what happens "there" and not on what happens "here" — namely the decisions made by those who define American foreign policy.

The United States needs accountability for its actions. As an American citizen, it is my responsibility to address American atrocities abroad because I am accountable for the crimes the state commits in my name. American democracy is a farce when it lacks accountability for the injustice it perpetuates.

As the case of the "Tiger Force" U.S. Army inquiry shows us, achieving justice in American military tribunals is certainly questionable. For these reasons, I feel it my civic duty to urge American participation in international war crime tribunals, to decrease military spending, and to emphasize diplomacy over violence. It is my hope that these same demands are shared and expressed by you as well.