Army Spc. Rebekah Lampman
had fallen asleep after drinking two beers with another soldier a
couple of weeks before Christmas 2011 in a coed barracks at Fort Hood
when she awoke to find him on top of her, naked.
She recalled
pushing him off, throwing on her clothes and rushing to an office at the
barracks to report the sexual assault, triggering an Army investigation
that would lead to his conviction.
Her case was one of 200
sexual-misconduct reports filed at Fort Hood over the past 20 months,
part of the growing crisis of sexual assaults in the military.
The reports don't break down how many of the cases occurred at Fort Hood
or off the post. The complaints ranged from sexual assault to sexual
harassment.
The Pentagon announced this month that an estimated 26,000 troops were victims of
sexual assaults last year, an increase of 35 percent over 2011. Yet only
11 percent of the victims reported the assaults, much lower than the
civilian reporting rate.
Troops surveyed by the Defense Department
said they didn't report the crimes for a variety of reasons, including a
fear of retaliation, and many didn't think the military would prosecute
the offenders.
After a seven-month investigation, the San Antonio
Express-News reported this week that assault victims from across the
armed services often were forced out of the military after they reported
the incidents to their superiors.
In thousands of cases over the past decade, many of the victims were declared mentally unfit for service and booted out.
The
crisis has reached epidemic proportions, with members of Congress
drafting legislation to remove prosecutions out of military control and
President Barack Obama demanding the Pentagon to hold offenders accountable.
On Friday, Obama told Naval Academy graduates the surge in assaults could erode public trust in the military.
At Fort Hood, Lampman, a two-tour veteran of the Iraq war, said word of her December 2011 rape spread quickly.
She said commanders initially didn't believe her, and her attacker, Spc. Christopher Tatum, was allowed to stay in her barracks for another eight months.
Lampman
reported her assault to Fort Hood's Sexual Harassment Assault Response
& Prevention office. But she said the program failed miserably.
“I refused to go there anymore,” Lampman, 25, said about the program. “I felt like that trust, that bridge, was burned.”
She said a SHARP representative charged with acting on her behalf with
superiors, “treated me just as badly as my first Army commander as far
as just trying to shooing me away, making it not a big deal when it
really was a big deal.”
Lampman was an Army broadcast journalist
who traveled in her job while posted to southern Iraq from 2008-09. A
second tour, this time in Baghdad, followed the next year. She came
under fire and later was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder
stemming from combat.
On the night of her attack, Lampman was on
anti-anxiety medication, a common prescription for troops back from the
combat zone. She and another soldier were with Tatum in his room
drinking beer and hanging out. When the other GI left, they stayed,
watching TV.
Lampman said she drank a little more than two beers
before falling into a deep sleep. When she awoke early Dec. 8, 2011, she
said, “He was raping me.”
Rushing out, she went to the charge of
quarters desk and reported what happened. Her first sergeant came there
and took her to the Darnall Army Medical Center ER at Fort Hood. A victim advocate was called, as was the post's Criminal Investigation Command.
Lampman was taken to Scott & White Memorial Hospital in Temple, which she said did a rape kit. By the time she got home, word of the incident had spread.
“My
phone was blowing up with, 'Hey, uh, is this true? I heard about
blah-blah-blah. Hey, is this true? Blah-blah-blah. Within 12 hours, like
your whole entire personal business is put out there,” Lampman said.
Things got worse.
“It
kick-started a drinking problem. I was drinking all the time, I didn't
feel safe anywhere, I didn't trust anybody, I was really paranoid,” she
said.
Nancy Parrish, founder of the victim advocacy group Protect Our Defenders, said Lampman's story is “all too common.”
“Rebekah
stood tall, reported the crime and the perpetrator was convicted, yet
she faced retaliation,” said Parrish, whose group helped coordinate
testimony before a congressional hearing earlier this year on the
sex-abuse scandal at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland. “For a commander to allow this to occur on their base is rotten.”
Tatum was convicted in March and sentenced to a year in jail and a bad-conduct discharge.
Disciplined
for a drinking problem she admits was out of control, Lampman said
she's now on an anti-anxiety drug for trauma stemming from her rape.
Friday was her 50th day of sobriety. But she is haunted by an exchange she had with one NCO a month after the rape.
Saying
she wanted him to see things from her point of view, Lampman said he
told her, “'I do not sympathize or empathize with you at all. You are a
soldier and you need to get up and move on.'”
Beyond Lackland courtroom, a victim's suffering
When Air Force basic training instructor Peter Vega Maldonado cut a plea bargain and went on trial a year ago this week, some may not have seen what was coming – a series of seemingly endless trials.
But another basic training instructor faces a special court-martial today, and after Staff Sgt. William Romero is tried, two others will follow this month.
He could get a year in jail if convicted of having illicit relationships with four women in technical training as well as committing adultery, but there is more to the Air Force’s worst-ever sex scandal than the banging of a gavel and a judge’s ruling on guilt or innocence.
Ask Virginia Messick about that.
Or her parents.
Now living in California, Messick is 21 and wrestling with demons that resemble combat PTSD, but were born in Air Force basic training. Her training instructor, then-Staff Sgt. Luis Walker, was supposed to be a role model for every recruit, the very embodiment of the Air Force’s core values of integrity, service before self and excellence.
He wasn’t.
Busted to the lowest rank and now doing 20 years at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., he preyed on 10 women in basic training, one of them Messick. He lured her to a vacant dormitory, where they had sex. Messick now says she was raped, but the allegation wasn’t made at Walker’s trial last summer and he wasn’t convicted of it.
Whatever happened, she’s a much different person these days.
Messick doesn’t get out much. A shut-in much of the time, she carries a knife in her purse. She won’t answer the door if someone knocks. She notices if anything in the house has been moved.
And in addition to hyper-vigilance, a classic PTSD trait, she has trouble sleeping. And there are nightmares.
As a child and later a teenager, Virginia Messick was the kid no one worried about, a cheerleader at Baker High School in Florida who made friends easily.
“She was the one you didn’t have to worry about when she went to school. There was never going to be a question of her grades. She got it, she picked it right up,” said her father, retired Air Force Tech. Sgt. Tracy Simmons, 49, of Midwest City, Okla.
“She could make friends in a heartbeat. She was bubbly, she was happy. She didn’t become a cheerleader by being a wallflower. She was outgoing, she was scared of nothing.”
After basic training, she was lost, disillusioned angry and sometimes out of control.
“In one act by one person, she went to the complete opposite end of the spectrum,” her dad said.
Marla Simmons described her daughter as strong and self-sufficient, and proud of following her father and a grandfather into the Air Force. But she could tell something was wrong even when Messick was in technical training. Things later got so much worse, Simmons wanted to commit her daughter.
“Jenny went though all the stages of being raped. There was denial and then there was shame, then she wanted to hurt herself. She was angry,” said Simmons, 47, of Baker, Fla.
“It’s all come in stages and my daughter, you d never have to look at her and wonder if she was happy until after it happened. Then you could see would be OK one minute and then she would be completely unglued the next.”
Original link here: http://blog.mysanantonio.com/military/2013/04/beyond-lackland-courtroom-a-victims-suffering/
Posted at 02:05 PM in AETC, Air Force, Basic Training, Blogs, Commentaries, Crime and Punishment, Joint Base San Antonio, Lackland Scandal, Military Justice, Military Sexual Trauma ("MST"), MTIs, PTSD, Survivors | Permalink
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