David A. Passaro’s first ex-wife says he used to hit her when he got drunk.  His second wife filed court papers saying that he was “verbally abusive and threatening.” Passaro, a CIA operative, stands accused of beating an Afghan man named Abdul Wali to death while Wali was in custody.

Charles Graner’s ex-wife filed for three protection orders against him over five years. In the last one, she stated that he had dragged her out of bed by her hair and pulled her down the hallway.  Then he banged her head into the floor while her children sat in their bedrooms. Army Spec. Charles Graner now faces charges of inmate abuse and misconduct for his behavior as a guard in Abu Ghraib.

In 2002, four military wives at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, were murdered by their husbands in a span of six weeks. Three of the perpetrators had recently returned from active duty in Afghanistan.

Violence against women is an epidemic in the military, and not just behind the front lines. To date, more than 100 incidents of sexual assault have been reported by service women in Iraq and Afghanistan. The statistics and stories flood the Internet, and finally — thanks to the prominent scandal at the Air Force Academy — the Department of Defense is beginning to take its problem seriously. Re-entry counseling is now required for all military personnel returning from active duty, and all military branches are rewriting their domestic violence and sexual assault protocols.

Is that enough? The cases of David Passaro and Charles Graner beg the question: Does the military make its servicemen and women controlling and violent, or does its system attract individuals with a tendency towards aggressive, unchecked behavior? Probably both.  

Changing response protocols to sexual assault or incidents of domestic violence and providing support groups isn’t going to change the military culture that both breeds and accentuates abusive characteristics in its members. Men and women will still return to civilian life carrying violence and trauma with them. We will still send “bad boys” to the army, hoping it will straighten them out. The need then, is to change the way the military teaches its recruits to think about violence and its use.  

In her piece, What Abu Ghraib Taught Me, Barbara Ehrenreich says,  

In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

A feminist infiltrated army sounds eerily close to Dennis Kucinich’s “Department of Peace,” and about as farfetched. The military doctrine is ancient. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would look like if turned on its head. Doing so would mean not only radicalizing military training, but also the ways we use our army, since teaching men and women to think about violence is probably not conducive to operating as a smooth-running, terrorist-killing machine.  

But then, neither is raping the woman standing next to you in line for the latrine.

llouison