Veterans Decry Institutional Sexism in Military

"I joined the military to defend my country, not my integrity and self-worth." So said an eight-year veteran of the National Guard named Abby Hiser on day three of the Winter Soldier hearings outside Washington, D.C. Speaking at a packed morning session titled "Divide to Conquer: Gender and Sexuality in the Military," her fellow panelists were mostly female vets slated to address everything from the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy to sexual assault within the ranks. But rather than personal recollections of sexual humiliation or violence -- and in sharp contrast to horror stories told by previous speakers describing their slaughter of Iraqi civilians -- the testimonials that morning revealed more about the kind of institutional sexism that, as an intractable power dynamic, defines the lives of women in uniform.

As soldiers, then as veterans, and, even now, as members of the anti-war movement, women in the military are still fighting to be taken seriously. "It's hard to be a veteran of the war and a woman," said Iraq vet Patty McCann. "... A lot of times my experience gets boiled down to what I experienced as a woman -- and I don't get to talk about some of the things that I experienced as a soldier."

Wendy Barranco couldn't agree more. Trained as a combat medic and deployed in Tikrit between October 2005 and July 2006, she worked in a medical unit where the gender ratio was "about 50/50," mostly male doctors and female nurses. ("A traditional hospital setting," she joked.) On the panel, she had described being sexually harassed nearly every single day of her deployment by a high-ranking surgeon who had fulfilled her request to be moved to the operating room. Feeling she owed him something in return, "this person would catch me alone or push up against me," she said -- but he stopped short of getting too physical. As she put it, "he knew exactly what he was doing."

Wendy never reported him -- "I knew command wasn't going to do anything about it, so there was no point" -- in no small part because it would end up being her word against his. Besides, she said, "are they gonna get rid of the guy whose making decisions and saving lives, or me, the disposable specialist?"

On the panel, describing the dread she felt going to work every day knowing that she had to be constantly watching her back, Wendy had briefly broken down, frustrated, muttering, "I hate to be the girl." Later, when asked about the sense that she was viewed first as a woman rather than a soldier, she said, "It's definitely true."

"You're seen as, like, the 'weight,'" she said. "The weakly being." Even in its less egregious forms, sexist attitudes were often the norm. "There's a sense of, oh, now we've got a woman, now I've gotta pick up her baggage and mine." Yet it was rarely discussed. Wendy called the sexist power dynamic in the military "the big pink elephant in the room."

Fellow veteran and Iraq Veterans Against the War member Jen Hogg agreed that the attitude of male soldiers could range from condescending to outright sexist. As a mechanic on reserve duty, she often had to work with cumbersome equipment that invited perceptions that she was weaker and less capable. If male soldiers tried to help, "they weren't trying to be rude" -- but it did play into a power dynamic that leaves female soldiers treated like second-class citizens.

A staunch opponent of the invasion -- "I was at a protest the day the war started" -- Jen never deployed to Iraq. She signed up for the Army National Guard in Buffalo, N.Y., in March 2000, was activated to enter Manhattan following 9/11, and got out of the military in April 2005. Having given a brief introduction to the gender and sexuality panel that morning, Jen went into far more detail later on, when asked about the ways sexism is codified within the military. She described women sergeants struggling to gain the respect of the men under their command.