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U.S. Soldiers, sexual abuse – and the serial killer
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By David Usborne
The Independent (UK)
Monday, Nov 11, 2013
Sexual assaults have long been the US military’s dirty secret. And some
victims’ abuse was so sinister it has scarred them for life.
The acts themselves
usually didn’t take long. Michael Matthews had just left the “chow
hall” on base when he was pinned to the ground by two men and sodomised
by a third.
Jack Williams was violated by his drill instructor
three times, always at three in the morning. For Billy Joe Capshaw it
was different; he was raped so many times over so many months it became
one long brutal blur. He is, at least, alive. His assailant’s name was
Jeffrey Dahmer.
It’s dealing with what came after that took so
much longer for these men – and three other male victims of sexual
assault in the US military – who recently spoke out to The Independent.
For most it was years before they first tried to kill themselves.
Matthews, who was raped in 1974, wanted to hang himself from a door in
2000 but the frame snapped, sending him crashing to the ground. Former
Marine Jeremiah Arbogast, 32, was drugged and sodomised by a superior
while serving at Quantico, Virginia, in December 2000; he aimed a pistol
at his heart in October 2009 and fired, missing by a fraction but
sending the bullet spiralling into his spine. Today he is partially
paralysed and confined to a wheelchair.
The suicide attempts are
only part of it. Capshaw, who was 17 when he was assigned to a room with
Dahmer at Baumholder garrison in Germany in 1980, spent five years
locked in his bedroom when he got back home to Arkansas, unable to speak
of his experiences or socialise in any way. “I could not say I was
raped, I could not do that to my Daddy. He fought in the Pacific,” he
recalls now. That was followed by 26 years in therapy.
After
being forced to perform oral sex on a superior, former US airman Richard
Bode, now 58, drove into a car wash with the windows wound down and
later ate soap in the barracks showers. His first nervous breakdown
came 25 years later.
It’s hard to fathom the damage done to the
thousands of young Americans who chose to serve their country only to
find not just discipline and physical challenges once in uniform but
also pitiless predators. Their tormentors came at them as if out of
nowhere, and afterwards, commanding officers either didn’t believe their
stories of rape, forced fondling and beatings, or warned them to keep
silent or face other punitive consequences.
“They told me they
were the wages of my lifestyle, that I was a fucking faggot,” Williams,
65, recalls now. He finally sought protection after the third rape by
his drill instructor soon after arriving at Lackland Air Force Base near
San Antonio, Texas. “A piece of me died and it’s been like that the
rest of my life,” he says of that final assault. “I went to the showers,
tied some towels together and tried to hang myself, I couldn’t handle
being raped any more. But there was no way to get help. They called me a
pansy, a mama’s boy.”
With a sweep of white hair and a wispy
white beard, Williams, in common with some of the other men who talked
to us, still suffers physical disabilities because of what he underwent
so many years ago. He says he has fought to stay alive for one purpose
alone: to campaign for the day when America finally acknowledges the
sexual torture occurring every day inside its armed services and does
something to stop it.
Part of that wish, at least, may be coming
true. Since the Defense Department estimated last month that a
staggering 26,000 members of the military had suffered unwanted sexual
contact in 2012 – a jump of 40 per cent over two years – the issue now
has Washington’s attention. The top brass of the Army, Air Force, Navy
and Marines has, in recent weeks, been hauled to the White House and to
Congress to explain what has gone wrong and what can be done to fix it.
“Nothing saddens me more than to know this cancer exists in our ranks,”
the US Air Force Chief of Staff, General Mark Walsh, told members of the
Senate Armed Services Committee.
Public disgust was fuelled
further last month when it emerged that the officer in charge of the Air
Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office had been arrested
for allegedly groping a woman in a car park. Days later, a US Army
sexual assault co-ordinator at the Fort Hood base in Texas was relieved
of his duties under suspicion of running an on-base prostitution ring.
The rot appears to run deep.
What bothers Matthews, who has
dedicated most of the past two years to raising awareness about the
issue, is that it has taken this long for Washington to wake up. Even
now, he says, there is a host of misconceptions, including the common
assumption that sex-assault victims are always female. Of the presumed
26,000 victims in 2012, more than half were men. In most cases their
aggressors were also men, though female-on-male sexual assault is not
unheard of. Of the total, only 3,374 incidents were actually reported
and, dismally, only 302 of those resulted in prosecutions being pursued
under the military code of justice.
“They just don’t want to talk
about this as a man’s issue,” said Williams, who, with the other five
men, spoke while visiting Albuquerque to attend the premier of a
documentary. Called Justice Denied, all appear in it. The film follows
The Invisible Enemy, released last year, which also examined rape in the
services (and won an Oscar nomination) but focused on female victims.
“They can’t stop us making this movie and they can’t stop us from taking
it all around the country,” he says.
The men blame ignorance
and resistance to change, pointing as an example to comments made during
one recent hearing by Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican. The
crisis, the senator intimated, stems from natural friskiness. “The young
folks coming in to each of your services are anywhere from 17 to 22 or
23,” he offered. “Gee-whiz, the hormone level created by nature sets in
place the possibility for these types of things to occur.” It also has
to do with victims, especially men, being unwilling to report rapes,
because of feelings of shame. And then there is that fear of being
punished for speaking out.
On that, at least, some relief may be
coming. Late on Thursday the House of Representatives overwhelmingly
passed a first-time “whistleblower” law that would require the armed
services inspector general to investigate whenever a person claims to
have faced reprisals for reporting having been a victim of sexual
assault. “Before we can truly understand the scope of sexual assault in
the military and how best to confront it, we have to find a way to
encourage more victims to come forward,” said its sponsor – and Indiana
Republican – Jackie Walorski.
But the biggest problem may be that
under the military code, victims can only report assaults to their
superior officers. It is up to unit commanders to decide whether to
prosecute or even to listen. They are often loath to do so if incidents
of sexual assault among their men risk hindering their own careers.
Arbogast
reported his rape quickly and officers with the Naval Criminal
Investigative Service, NCIS, sent him back to the off-base home of his
assailant wearing a concealed recording device. The other man was heard
admitting to the rape but admonishing, “there ain’t nothing you can do
about it”. In fact, he was arrested and charged on six counts. “But
this is the kicker,” Arbogast says. “Because of his 23 years of service,
they told him: ‘We will give you a bad -conduct discharge but you are
not going to get any jail time,’ even though he could have faced life in
prison. They ordered him to be finger-printed, but he chewed all the
skin off his fingers. And then they said he had to register as a sex
offender and he said, ‘No I don’t’. In the end they just let him walk
off base. He walked away a free man. I don’t where he is. The son of a
bitch could move in next to me.”
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In January 1979, Jeffrey Dahmer enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he trained as a medical specialist at Fort Sam Houston before, on July 13, 1979, being deployed to Baumholder in West Germany where he served as a combat medic. There were a number of brutal unsolved murders of young German men in the vicinity of the US military base while he was there. While at Baumholder, the Army reported hew was "average or slightly above average" but later deemed him unsuitable for military service. On March 24, 1981, he was was sent to Fort Jackson for debriefing and provided with a plane ticket to travel anywhere in the country and given an honorable discharge from the U.S. Army. He went to Miami Beach, Florida, where he worked in a sandwich shop and is suspected of more murders including that of 9 year old Adam Walsh. In 1991 he was convicted of rape, murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys. He is suspected of having killed many more during is travels around the country. - Axis of Logic
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Not expected were the references made by not one but two of the men to Jeffrey Dahmer, the “Milwaukee Cannibal” who had raped, murdered and dismembered 17 men and boys before he was convicted and sent to prison in 1992. Two years later he was beaten to death by another inmate at the Columbia Correctional facility in Portage, Wisconsin. He had killed once before he enlisted and was shipped to Germany in 1979. He was assigned to work in a medic unit with Preston Davis. Today, Davis, 54, believes he was drugged by Dahmer inside an armoured personnel vehicle. And then it happened. “I was raped by Jeffrey. I am just thankful to be alive to tell the story.”
Davis left Baumholder and was replaced by the 17-year-old from Arkansas, Billy Joe Capshaw. The two are now friends, bound together as the two only two known survivors of Dahmer’s assaults.
For Capshaw it began the day he and Dahmer, an Army medic, were put into a room together. The assaults began at once and, eventually, he leapt from the third-floor window to escape. “I had probably been raped eight to 10 times, I don’t know. He was tying me to the bunk with motor-pool rope. He took all my clothing from me. He would either beat me before he raped me or he would beat me after.” Eventually, Capshaw was taken to the dispensary for a test with what they called a rape kit to see if he was telling the truth. The doctors did nothing and he was sent back to the room. “I was there for another 17 months with Jeff being raped and tortured.” He learnt 10 years later that the rape kit and the results had simply been discarded. “They threw me to the dogs,” he says. Dahmer eventually was pushed out of the Army for alcohol abuse – with an honourable discharge.
Billy Joe, Jeremiah, Preston – all these men agree: the only way to end this scourge is to take the handling of sexual assault in the military out of the chain of command, either by giving cases to an independent panel of military prosecutors or even to civilian outsiders. With so much publicity about the issue this summer, is it possible that – at last – Congress will pass a law to make this happen? Capshaw believes so. The others are less sure. “We are watching Washington and anything that is making it out of committee does not take the investigations or the prosecutions out of the chain of command,” laments Williams. “When this drops out of the headlines, they will all go back to the same ways. We have to keep the spotlight on this. It’s the only way it’s going to change.”
And the only way for that to happen is for men like these to step forward and speak up just as loudly. And bravely.
Source: The Independent
Image captions added by Axis of Logic, taken from the following referenes:
1. Wikipedia
2. Jeffrey Dahmer's Dirty Secret w/ Arthur Jay Harris and Billy Capshaw
3. US History: Jeffrey Dahmer
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