As a female veteran, I have learned one thing very quickly and well. Male veterans wear their service as a badge of honor for the rest of their lives. For us female vets, though, it can often feel more like a rotten, stinking, dead albatross on a string around our necks. Male soldiers' reasons for serving are almost always seen as honorable, admirable even, whereas female soldiers' reasons for serving, even if identical to those of most male soldiers (travel, adventure, getting out of a crappy town, etc) many times draw suspicion. I once was totally berated by a military wife for my reasons for serving, only to find out that her husband enlisted for identical reasons. The military, my beloved Army anyhow, is an exercise in hypocrisy. If the soldiers are bad, and they are, the dependents are 100 times worse.
Well, hang on to your albatrosses, fellow female veterans, because the national news media has given dependent wives who feel threatened that their husbands serve with women one more reason to tar and feather those of us who did, at one point, answer the call to serve. Oh joy!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34842238/
I have NOTHING against the soldier in this news story. I think people are failing to see this situation for what it is. All they see is a female soldier who refused to deploy, and at that, every non-prior-service military dependent on the planet picked up a stone in each hand, ready to lob it. I've heard everything from "She knew what she was signing up for, and should have been ready to deploy!" to "I hope they put her UNDER the jail for this!"
Am I the only one who saw that this girl HAD a family care plan, as is required of every single parent in the Army, and that family care plan fell through just days before she deployed? I'm pretty disappointed to see that I appear to be among the only people who sees that this soldier was trying to do the right thing, DID the right thing, and then when the system failed her, resorted to desperate measures.
Do I agree with her decision to miss movement? No. I don't agree with it at all, and I think she handled the situation very poorly, but that brings me to my next point. Where was her squad leader? Where was her platoon sergeant? When I was in the Army, I couldn't eat chow, lace my boots, or gas up my car without my superiors needing a situation report on it, it seemed. My NCO's drove me nuts, but I remember them fondly for it, because they took really good care of their soldiers, and knowing what your soldiers are up to and what's going on in their lives is a big part of that. As a young soldier, I dated an NCO who was a single father, and I know what single parents have to go through to remain deployment ready. I know how often their leadership is supposed to check up and verify family care plans, and that it is COMMON KNOWLEDGE that if your family care plan falls through, the FIRST thing you do is tell your supervisor, and they will pass that higher so that the command can deal with it as they see fit. Usually, it will mean that you will not deploy with the unit, and will join them later when you have found arrangements for your kids. The other option is to get out. It is perfectly legal, honorable, and even common, to get out of the Army for lack of a family care plan.
This soldier had a choice, yes, and if it were me, I certainly would have seen the iffy nature of the family care plan at my disposal, and gotten out. This soldier, apparently did not, and this is the situation that resulted. If her squad leader knew about this, and did nothing, or used the old Army favorite, intimidation, to get her to shut up about it and feel like she had to fix it or resort to committing a felony (missing movement is a type of AWOL, which I believe is a felony), then the squad leader is the one who should face the charges for this. I feel like crappy leadership HAD TO have played a role in this situation in at least some small part. As a former soldier, I can tell you that not all soldiers are taken very seriously by their leaders when they raise a concern. If your leadership doesn't take you seriously, your problems will never be passed higher, to people who might be able to do something about it, and you'll basically be left out to dry. I've seen it happen 100 times, especially to female soldiers. For all the Army's talk of diversity and equal opportunity, there is a significant percentage of soldiers who really don't like us very much, and many times, we have to trust those very people to take care of us. Needless to say, it doesn't work very well. The other thing I see is that this soldier could have been too intimidated, scared, or distrustful of her leaders to take this concern to them. I don't even have to go into the reasons why a soldier can learn to distrust their leaders. They are too numerous to even list, and anyone with even a working knowledge of the military can certainly imagine the types of things that would cause that. One way or another, though, this soldier didn't get the help she needed from her leadership. If her leaders knew about this, her commander would not have been expecting her to show up that day, and there would have been a better plan in place for how she would proceed. The system failed this soldier, and now she is paying the price.
I'm not surprised by how the Army handled this. I'm not even surprised that the situation happened this way in the first place. I was a female soldier in a nearly all-male unit. I've seen everything you can imagine, and a lot of things you wouldn't believe even if I told you (the truth is stranger than fiction.) It is reasons related to this why I am happy to have married someone I served alongside, who knows what the Army was for me, and who asks for no explanation. This is the way of things for many female soldiers. The system exists because it has to, and it works great for some, but for the ones who need it most, every safety net is broken, and every leader who's charged with your well being and readiness can't be bothered. Adding insult to injury, the male soldiers and their wives who dominate the Army from the soldier and family side only see that you wanted special treatment, that you weren't ready to deploy when ordered, that you missed movement. Really, anyone who's ever put on a uniform more than twice should see that this situation was easily preventable.
Shame on this soldier's supervisors and command for failing to know her situation and deal with it properly. Shame on male soldiers for acting like they don't see what's really going on here. Shame on military wives who selfishly only see that their husbands could never get away with that same thing, and refuse to put themselves, for just one minute, in the shoes of a single soldier parent.
People, she had a baby. She didn't rob a bank. Let's put down the torches and pitchforks for just one second, and think. We might see that this is yet another case of a female soldier failed by the very branch she serves, and then demonized by the misogynistic military community. If nothing else, and I know it isn't much, THIS female veteran reserves judgment on the accused until the results of the court martial are published.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment