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By Bill Turque
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Sgt. 1/C Harvey Bush grabbed his crotch and posed the question to his audience, 40 enlisted men and women at Fort Sill in southwest Oklahoma. Why do men, who normally keep their hands at their sides, or wave them when they talk, place them elsewhere when they see a woman? "Why do you have to pick it up and make sure it's still there?" asked Bush, who was running the army base's 19th class of the week on sexual harassment. Bush uses the gesture to provoke candid discussion. He is not disappointed. When several men praised the importance of male bonding and their desire to serve with men only, the women jeered and shouted. Pfc. Roberto Ybanez described women as "a thorn in my side." Another trooper said he felt "uncomfortable and angry" when a female co-worker recounted her sexual exploits.
Two years after their triumph in Desert Storm, the armed services sound more like a dysfunctional family than a mean fighting machine. Earlier this month Marine Commandant Carl Mundy, concerned about spiraling divorce rates in the corps, ordered a ban on enlistment of married recruits after 1995. He also required those already in uniform to seek counseling before marrying. The Pentagon reversed Mundy within a day and faced a torrent of ridicule for the notion. During a hearing last week as part of the navy's foundering Tailhook prosecution, navy Lt. Paula Coughlin recounted her nightmarish experience running a hotel-corridor gantlet of drunk, groping aviators at the infamous 1991 aviators convention. Both events are part of a larger turbulence within all the uniformed services. Commanders are under pressure to bring the military into line with the emerging norms of civilian culture. In a speech last month introducing the "don't ask, don't tell" compromise policy for gay recruits, President Clinton said the military "must reflect the society in which it operates."
That means, among other things, a family-friendly workplace and a politically correct code of sexual etiquette. Can the Pentagon create what amounts to a New Age warrior, combat-ready yet sensitive on the job and emotionally available at home? No one can say it isn't trying. At bases like Camp Pendleton, John Wayne would scarcely recognize a generation of jarheads supplementing their training drills with stress-management seminars and couples-communication classes. And history suggests that the military is pretty good at change when it takes it seriously (chart). In the 1970s, after a series of violent episodes, the Pentagon decided that racial tensions were a threat to readiness. Using a rigorous meritocracy and group sessions similar to the one at Fort Sill, the commanders imposed a system of equal opportunity that has put the military ahead of many private employers.
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It's not yet clear whether commanders are mustering the same resolve to deal with gender tensions. At Patrick AFB near Cocoa Beach, Fla., hundreds of officers receive up to 15 weeks of training each year at the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). Founded in 1971 to help defuse racial problems, DEOMI has been offering seminars on sexual harassment for a decade. But as DEOMI commandant Col. Ronald Joe concedes, "We were not as proactive on the issue as we should have been." Since Tailhook, demand for DEOMI's services by commanders has escalated dramatically. Role-reversal exercises are a staple of the curriculum. In the "sexual-meat-market exercise," women assume power positions and ask the men to flex their muscles, touch their toes or comment on a pair of tightfitting pants.
But some experts are dubious about the lasting impact of seminar theatrics. "I'm skeptical of their utility," says military sociologist Charles Moskos, who adds that better-quality recruits will do more to limit sexual harassment. And it is clear that the military is still finding its way on gender politics. Earlier this year the navy published a booklet that broke down sexual harassment into red-, yellow- and green-light "behavior zones." Polite compliments were green; rape had red-light status.
University of Michigan law professor James White, a former air force pilot, argues that the worst offenders in incidents like Tailhook should have their wrists slapped, but that society must accept some antisocial behavior from soldiers trained to sacrifice their lives for each other. Others object to such rationales for "unit cohesion." "Tailhook is showing us the underside of the cohesion argument, where guys stick together no matter what kind of mischief they've been up to," says political scientist Judith Stiehm.
In the Marine Corps, it's the cohesion of marriages that has commanders worried. The divorce rate has more than doubled since 1983. Troop reductions have meant longer and more frequent deployments for those who remain. Marine brass believe the demands are straining young marriages (40 percent marry within four years of enlistment) and possibly jeopardizing readiness. Some marines say the corps sends mixed signals about marriage. Cpl. Lastra Brown, 25, says superiors tried to discourage him from marrying after boot camp in 1991. He did it anyway. Although he and his wife are currently in couples-communications classes after a serious fight, Brown insists he has no regrets: "The woman the marine cares for might be the whole key to his success."
Although Mundy's proposal was widely derided, traditionalists say it was a rational response to an era of reduced budgets. "Should he be faulted for wanting to put the money into troops and weapons rather than into the dependents and daycare centers?" former assistant secretary of defense James Webb asked in a New York Times op-ed piece last week. Americans both inside and out of the services don't expect the military to be a model of democratic freedom. But at the same time they are uncomfortable with a warrior class that drifts too far from the civilian mainstream. Right now, the military needs a therapeutic breakthrough to find an acceptable middle ground.
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