Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (22 page)

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required the sexual use of women's bodies. Reporter Arnett saw the gradual acceptance of U.S. military-controlled and -regulated brothels as a natural outgrowth of what he called "the McNamara theory": "In 1965 the main idea was to keep the troops contented and satisfied. Ice cream, movies, swimming pools, pizza, hot dogs, laundry service and hootch maids. Th
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e hootch maids were brought in as maids, not as prostitutes. Sex with a hootch maid was a private arrangement, a relationship of convenience. A lot of hootch maids did become prostitutes, however, but in the early days if they were discovered at it, they were fired."

The hootch maids were the first step toward accommodation; bar girls and massage parlors soon followed. According to Arnett, the rear-area troops caused the most "problems": "There was a lot of discontent and boredom. The men were aware that they were soldiers who weren't fighting, who weren't getting any medals. They might drive into town to the illegal brothels, but for reasons of VD and security the brothels were off limits." ( Massage parlors, that vague gray area of sexual action from Saigon to New York City, were always considered legal. )

In 1965 the Marine Corps base at Danang began experiment ing with organized battalion trips to town on a once-a-month basis, but according to Arnett it was a disaster: "The men would hit town like animals, they couldn't cope, it was pure chaos." Af ter this early experience the Marine command decided to confine their men to the base camp, but the inviolate law of supply and demand went into operation. A shantytown of brothels, massage parlors and dope dealers, known as Dogpatch, soon ringed the base. "The marines would bust through the wire at night-the Marine com mand could live with that," the reporter told me.

It
was Arnett's opinion ( not shared by me) that the U.S. Army was "more enlightened" than the Marine Corps when it came to sexual accommodation. By 1966 the 1st Cavalry Division at An Khe, in the Central Highlands, the 1st Infantry Division at Lai Khe, twenty-five miles north of Saigon, and the 4th Infantry Division at Pleiku had established official military brothels within the perimeter of their base camps.

The Lai Khe "recreation area" belonging to the base camp of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division was a one-acre compound surrounded by barbed wire with American MP's standing guard at the gate. It was opened only during daylight hours for security

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reasons. Inside the compound there were shops that sold hot dogs, hamburgers and souvenirs, but the main attraction was two con crete barracks, each about one hundred feet long-the military whorehouses that serviced the four-thousand-man brigade. Each building was outfitted with two bars, a bandstand, and sixty cur tained cubicles in which the Vietnamese women lived and worked.

An individual cubicle contained little more than a table with a thin mattress on it and a peg on one wall for the girl's change of clothing. On the opposite wall a Playboy nude centerfold provided decoration and stimulation for the visiting soldier. The women who lived in the Lai Khe recreation-center cubicles were garishly made up with elaborate, sprayed bouffant hairdos and many had enlarged their breasts with silicone injections as a concession to Western fetish. The sexual service, as Arnett described it, was "quick, straight and routine," and the women were paid five hun dred piasters ( the equivalent of two dollars in American money ) for each turn by their GI clients. Americans always paid in piasters. For each trick she turned, a girl would get to keep two hundred piasters (seventy-five cents ) , the rest going to various levels of payoffs. By turning eight to ten tricks a day a typical prostitute in the Lai Khe compound earned more per month than her GI clients, Arnett advised me-a curious sidelight o a not-so-free enterprise system.
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Refugees who had lost their homes and families during the war and veterans of the earlier Saigon bar trade formed the stock of the brothel. They were recruited by the province chief, who took his payoff, and were channeled into town by the mayor of Lai Khe, who also got his cut. The American military, which kept its hands partially clean by leaving the procurement and price arrangement to Vietnamese civilians, controlled and regulated the health and security features of the trade. "The girls were checked and swabbed every week for VD by Army medics," my informed source told me approvingly.
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Military brothels on Army base camps ("Sin Cities," "Disney lands" or "boom-bo9m parlors") were built by decision of a divi sion commander, a two-star general, and were under the direct operational control of a brigade commander with the rank of colo nel. Clearly, Army brothels in Vietnam existed by the grace of Army Chief of Staff William C. Westmoreland, the United States Embassy in Saigon, and the Pentagon.

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Venereal disease, mostly gonorrhea, was a major preoccupa tion of the military in Vietnam. One official brothel outside Saigon had a sign on the wall of the bar that read
"GIRLS WITH TAGS ARE CLEAN."
Lest the declaration failed to make its point, a sign on the opposite wall spelled out
"GIRLS WITHOUT TAGS ARE DISEASED."
It
was mandatory for all units to report their incidence of VD to the higher-ups, since it reflected on military discipline as well as on the health of the soldiery, and a high VD count was charged against the merit rating of a battalion. "Most units lied about their VD count," Arnett believed.
It
was also his understanding that the reported VD rate "was high from the beginning" in relation to other wars and to a normal civilian population. ( In 1969 GI's contracted venereal disease in Vietnam at a reported rate of
200
cases per l,ooo persons; the United States rate at the time was
32
per l,ooo. ) Company commanders of ten wen t to ingenious lengths to lower their counts. One commander, Arnett told me, boasted that there was no VD at all in his company. His method of protecting his men was highly enterprising: "He didn't allow them to use the official brothel, he didn't trust it.
It
turned out he kept six girls sequestered on his part of the base and had them shot full of penicillin every day."

I am sorry that it is not within the scope of this book to explore the lives of Vietnamese women who became "Occupation: prostitute" as a direct result of the foreign military presence in their country.
It
is a story that should be told in detail, from the tremendous source of revenue that prostitution provided their be leaguered country, to accounts of Saigon brothels filled with ten year-old girls, to the incidence of work-related deaths from tubercu losis and venereal disease, and with a special nod of recognition to those who survived. I have dwelt on official U.S. military prostitu tion, and the concomitant concern for control of venereal disease, because it is necessary to understand the military mind before proceeding to an examination of GI rape.

Except for the Marine Corps, which attempted to enforce a relatively strict moral code, the use of women's bodies on the base camps was seen as a way to "keep the boys happy." Officers were not expected to engage in whoring; the institution was made avail able for the foot soldier, or "grunt," the fellow with the least to gain from being in Vietnam, the one who needed to be mollified

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and pacified-perhaps because he was fighting a war he did not understand and because he daily faced the possibility that he might be killed. As Arnett cautioned me to remember, "These guys were always thinking, 'I'm gonna get screwed tonight-this may be my last.' "

It was this mollification aspect, and not a belief that soldiers req uired the use of a woman's body out of some intrinsic male urge, that motivated the U.S. Army to get into the prostitution business. A regular tour of duty in Vietnam consisted of a one-year stretch, not an unconscionably long period of time to be without a woman, and relief from sexual tension could be, and I presume routinely was, accomplished by masturbation. As one GI prisoner of war remarked upon his repatriation in February, 1973, "This stuff about not being able to live without sex is nonsense. Wha t I dreamed about was food and medicine." And while the military's emphasis on avoidance of venereal disease is certainly commend able, for all the anti-VD training films and for all the concern about merit ratings, there was no comparable cautionary training against committing rape.

At peak strength the United States had slightly under
550,000
men in South Vietnam, twelve divisions of infantry and marines. Nine men were required to back up and service one man in the field, so there were never more than sixty or seventy thousand men available for combat at any given time and only one-fif th of these men were operating in highly populated areas. From what we already know about the rape of women in war, we can say that no more than fourteen thousand Cl's in Vietnam at any given time had the two prerequisites: access and opportunity.
It
stands to reason that there would be fewer incidents of rape, overall, in the highlands because there were fewer Vietnamese people in this forbidding terrain. In contrast, the two divisions that worked in the heart of the population-the 9th Division in the Mekong Delta and the America} Division ( to which Lieutenant William Calley belonged ) , which operated along the central coast-had particu larly bad reputations for atrocity.

Despite the intense propaganda throughout the long war, our American soldiers did not believe that they were "liberating" any one, nor were they perceived as liberators. Men in the field were perpetually in a tenuous, frustrating semicombat situation. As

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Arnett described it, "There were no fixed targets, no objectives, no highways to take-it was patrol and repatrol, search and destroy. Anything outside the perimeter of the base camp or the nearest government-controlled village was enemy territory, and all civilians were treated as enemy.
It
was so easy to rape on a squad level. Soldiers would enter a village without an interpreter. Nobody spoke Vietnamese.
It
was an anonymous situation. Any American could grab any woman as a suspect and there was little or no recourse to the law by the people."

Raping and looting go hand in hand in warfare but there was little to loot in the villages of South Vietnam. Arnett believed that the juxtaposition of fragile, small-boned Vietnamese women against tall, strong American men created an exaggerated mascu line-feminine dynamic that lent itself readily to rape (a similar situation had occurred in Bangladesh ) . He thought that the Americans participated more in gang rape than in individual as sault, the style of the South Vietnamese Army, "because the Americans were trained in the buddy system, for security. They were warned against the dangers of individual fraternizing on oper ations." The likelihood of sexual assault diminished, he believed, "if the company commander was prese
.
nt-a career officer, a cap tain or a lieutenant. The noncoms and soldiers had less at stake." His final observation, shared by his Vietnamese wife, his wife's family and others he knew, was that whatever the incidence of atrocity from
1965
on, "the Americans' personal conduct was far better historically than the French, their mercenaries, or the