Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (25 page)

CAMIL: It wasn't like they were humans. . . . They were a gook or a Commie and it was okay.*

Lance Corporal Thomas Heidtman, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, ist Marine Division,
1966-1967,
described a sideline of the "Burning 5th Marines":

One thing that was more or less like a joke . . . and it would get a laugh every time from somebody, was if we were moving through a village and there was a woman present. Her clothes, at least the top half of her clothes, were just ripped. I've seen that happen, and done it several times, probably thirty, forty times I've seen civilians with their clothes just-just because they were female and they were old enough for somebody to get a laugh at-their clothes, the top of their clothes, at least, would be ripped. Just torn right down.
It
only takes one hand to rip those kind of cloth ing. They're real thin silk or whatever, and they would be shoved out into the ditch and we'd just keep going.

Sergeant Michael McClusker was with the Public Information Office, I Corps, ist Marine Division in
i966-1967,
"which meant that I was a reporter-photographer and spent all of my time out in the field.
It
was almost like watching the same film strip con tinually, time af ter time af ter time."

The next instance happened also in the same month of September when a squad of nine men, that was a Chu Lai rifle squad, went into this village. They were supposed to go af ter what they called a Viet Cong whore. They went into the village and instead of capturing her, they raped her-every man raped her.

*
From the testimony of Cami1 and others it becomes evident that the grotes queries and mutilations practiced by America's famous Boston Strangler ( see pages
200
to
206 )
were no different in concept and execution from those performed by American GI's in Vietnam.

As a matter of fact, one man said to me later that it was the first time he had ever made love to a woman with his boots on. The man who led the squad was actually a private. The squad leader was a sergeant but he was a useless person and he let the private take over his squad. Later he said he took no part in the raid, it was against his morals. So instead of telling his squad not to do it, because they wouldn't listen to him anyway, the sergeant went into another side of the village and just sat and stared bleakly at the ground, feeling sorry for himself. But at any rate, they raped the girl, and then, the last man to make love to her shot her in the head.

Sergeant Jamie Henry was nineteen years old in 1967-1968 when he served with the 4th Infantry Division. He told the confer ence that he had reported his information to the Army's Criminal Investigation Division. "I gave them names, dates, grid coordi nates, etc., but they'll probably say it's a lie."

We moved into a small hamlet,
19
women and children were rounded up as VCS-Viet Cong Suspects-and the lieutenant that rounded them up calJed the captain on the radio and he asked what should be done with them. The captain simply repeated the order that came down from the colonel that morning, to kill any thing that moves, which you can take any way you want to take it. . . . I looked toward where the supposed VCS were, and two men were leading a young girl, approximately
19
years old, very pretty, out of a hootch. She had no clothes on so I assumed she had been raped, which was pretty SOP, and she was thrown onto the pile of the
19
women and chi1dren, and five men around the circle opened up on full automatic with their M-16s. And that was the end of that. Now there was a lieutenant who heard this over the radio in our company-he was going nuts. He was going to report it to everybody. After that day he calmed down and the next day he didn't say anything about it.

Specialist/ 4 Joe Galbally, who served in the 198th Light In fantry Brigade, America! Division, 1967-1968, said, "I was a Pfc. in an infantry company, which meant that there was about seventy five of us turned loose on the civilian population in Vietnam."

These people are aware of what American soldiers do to them,

so
naturally they tried to hide the young girls. We found one hiding

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in a bomb shelter in sort of the basement of her house. She was taken out, raped by six or seven people in front of her family, in front of us, and the villagers. This wasn't just one incident; this was just the first one I can remember. I know of
10
or
i
5 of such incidents at least.

Sergeant Michael Hunter served two tours of duty in Viet nam, from i968 to i970. His first tour was with the ist Air Cavalry Division.

Now as far as atrocities, my company, Bravo Company, 5th of the 7th, when we were outside of Hue shortly after the Tet offensive, went into a village-and this happened repeatedly af ter wards-and searched for enemy activity. We encountered a large amount of civilian population. The civilian population was brought out to one end of the village, and the women, who were guarded by a squad and a squad leader at that time, were separated.
I
might say the young women were separated. . . . They were told at gun point that if they did not submit to the sexual desires of any
GI
who was there guarding them, they would be shot for running away. And this was put in the language as best possible for people who cannot speak Vietnamese, and they got the point across because three women submitted to the raping of the
Gls.

Specialist/ 4 Timon Hagelin from Philadelphia was assigned to the Graves Registration Platoon, 243rd Field Service Company, ist Logistics Command in i968-1969. He was sent to Dak To.

While I was on the base taking care of KIAs as they came through,
I
made friends with people in my company that
I
con sidered basically nice people. We used to get together at night and talk.
I
went down to a certain place where they all were and as
I
approached it,
I
heard a scream. Someone was obviously very scared. As
I
got down to the door,
I
ca11ed one of my friends. He punched this chick on the side of the head. The girl was, you know, Viet namese people are a lot smaller than American people. It doesn't take that much to hurt one of those people, you know? They gave her a couple of good shots and the girl finally started yelling, "Me do, me do, me do," and about seven of them ripped her off. I know the guys, and
I
know basically they're not really bad people, you know?
I
just couldn't figure out what was going on to make the people like this do it.
It
was just part of the everyday routine, you know.

Captain John Mallory, civic action officer for the 1st Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, ist Air Cavalry Division in 196cr-1970, testified with precision.

On one occasion a North Vietnamese Army nurse was killed by the 11th Armored Cavalry troops; subsequently a grease gun of the type used in automotive work was placed in her vagina and she was packed full of grease.

Specialist/ 5 Don Dzagulones, an interrogator with the 635th Military Intelligence Detachment, attached to the i 1th Infantry Brigade, America} Division in Quang Ngai Province in 1969, men tioned that "most of the prisoners we had were women.
It
wasn't uncommon to have a mother and daughter coming in the same group of prisoners."

Another time they brought in a woman prisoner who also was alleged to be a spy. They continued the interrogation in a bunker and she wouldn't talk. I don't think she even gave them her name. So they stripped off her clothing and they threatened to rape her, which had no effect on her at all. She was very stoic. She just stood there and looked at them defiantly. So they threatened to bum her pubic hairs. And I guess it wasn't done on purpose, I'm sure of that, but they lighted a cigarette lighter and she caught on fire. She went into shock. I guess she was unconscious, so they called the medics. The medics came and they gave the medics instructions to take her to the hospital under the pretext of being in a coma from malaria, which they did. And nothing was ever done about that.

As a matter of historical record, by the time The Winter Soldier Investigation had been convened, the feminist movement and the antiwar movement had gone their separate and distinct ways, each absorbed with its own issues to the exclusion of the other, with no small amount of bitterness among movement troopers whose energies, ideologies and sense of priority pulled them in one direction or the other. As a woman totally committed to the feminist cause I received several requests during this time to march, speak and "bring out my sisters" to antiwar demonstrations "to show women's liberation solidarity with the peace movement," and my response was that if the peace movement cared to raise the

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issue of rape and prostitution in Vietnam, I would certainly join in. This was met with stony silence on the part of antiwar activists whose catchwords of the day were "anti-imperialism" and "Ameri can aggression," and for whom the slogan-it appeared on but tons--"Stop the Rape of Vietnam" meant the defoliation of crops, not the abuse of women. Communications between feminist groups and antiwar groups were tense as they sought to raise our consciousness and we sought to raise our own. I am sorry that the peace movement did not consider the abuse of women in Vietnam an issue important and distinctive enough to stand on its own merits, and I am sorry that we in the women's movement, strug gling to find our independent voices, could not call attention to

t
this women's side of the war by ourselves. The time was not

right.

4

Riots, Pogroms and Revolutions

Uprisings, riots, revolutions and minor skirmishes with racial and political overtones all have provided an outlet, and some times even an ideological excuse, for men to practice rape on women. And sometimes, when it suited propaganda purposes, in dividual cases of rape were actually preserved in the form of deposi tions taken from the injured women, eyewitness accounts from unimpeachable observers, newspaper stories and agitational pam phlets-admittedly with partisan motive, and most rarely, long af ter the fact in official investigations.

The attitude of historians toward this kind of documentation has usually been to ignore it as tangential, inconsequential or as possessing dubious validity. Occasionally an account of rape slips into a history book as a bit of color, a paragraph of vivid, gutsy writing, but it is never treated as more than an isolated incident. And nowhere has this mob rape been equated with the everyday "domestic" occurrence, the kind that until recently was viewed as "aberrant" behavior. Instead, historical rape-rape connected with those apocalyptic events that try men's souls, etc.-has been equated with the nether regions of "atrocity" that af ter the
fact
is always suspect because it is so unpleasant, so shocking that we would prefer to consider it exaggeration. And too, as we know, the experience of women is always suspect, and discounted. Another reason for the relegation of rape to the area of suspect is that those who sought to expose it invariably had a political motivation; and

RIOTS, POGROMS AND REVOLUTIONS
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those who believed it or didn't believe it based their conclusions on their own political perspective. ( I have been guilty of this myself.) Only when all accounts of rape are collected and correlated does the true underside of women's history emerge.