Fighting Sexual Harassment…and Suicides

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ASHLEY GILBERTSON / FOR TIME

One of the Texas recruiting offices plagued by recruiter suicides.

“I’m under a lot of pressure to have sex,” explained the young Hispanic Army sergeant. She then named the company’s senior non-commissioned officer, an Army master sergeant, as the culprit who was sexually harassing her. “He’s always pressuring me for it.”

The female sergeant and I were talking about her problem in a quiet spot in the small coffee shop on the Texas State University campus in Houston in late February 2009. We had just finished manning a recruiting booth in the school’s small student union.

Maybe she felt I was the only one she could confide in. I could see the enormous strain on her face and in her world-weary mannerisms. I could feel her pain… but then she made clear she wasn’t alone:

“Everyone in the battalion is getting pressured by the other enlisted recruiters for sex.”

I had not expected this problem.

The Army had hired me a a civilian contract recruiter several months earlier. The idea was that civilian recruiters, in business attire, might have more success signing up recruits than someone in a U.S. Army green uniform.

I did expect recruiter suicides, but not sexual harassment.

You see, Houston’s Army recruiting battalion had become notorious for having four suicides in the prior four years. There was a lot of emphasis by Army Recruiting Command on suicide prevention, and so our battalion was on everyone’s radar screen.

This string of tragedies garnered outside interest after repeated official inspector general probes failed to find a root cause. Frustrated families contacted Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, and asked him to look into the matter. My own investigation soon found that was the station commanders, senior NCOs, who were the problem with their relentless, grinding pressure to fill the Army’s monthly manpower needs.

My assignment to the Friendswood, Texas, recruiting station in did not start well. The station commander – a sergeant first class – was, in a word, tyrannical. Although the recruiting office had been “making mission” — recruiting enough applicants for enlistment each month — there was enormous daily stress and pressure placed on the recruiters by the station commander. He used micromanagement, threats, fear and bullying as his tactics.

As events deteriorated and the abuse became intolerable, I filed an IG complaint against the station commander. Not surprisingly, when eventually questioned by the IG, none of the recruiters backed me up. The station commander had them cowed into being loyal to him, not the Army. But he was just following an old standard military practice – hide the problem, protect the service, then deny everything.

The sergeant prevailed. Ultimately, the Army ended the recruiting program, putting 400 civilian recruiters out of work.

My first reaction to such events is always: “Where are the supervisors?” The answer is always: “In their offices, with their feet up on their desk, drinking coffee.”

With more than 40 years of military and civilian service as a manager and supervisor, I have found that serious problems too often occur simply due to lack of direct supervision, or even command interest.

The problems of military sexual harassment and suicides cannot be solved in the White House, or the Pentagon, with edicts and pronouncements.

It can only be solved in two ways.

First: end what some have called the “Oriental Messenger Syndrome.” This is where the person bringing up the problem becomes the problem — and consequently must be eliminated. Anyone in the service knows that to declare oneself a victim of sexual harassment or suicide-prone means they are risking their career. The system is rigged to punish troops with personal problems with bad performance reports.
Even a less-than-satisfactory evaluation can be a career-killer in the military’s personnel fairyland where, like at Lake Woebegone, everyone is above average. Conceding one has a problem – being sexually harassed, or depressed, or suicidal, perhaps – stacks the deck against further service.
Second: each level of supervisors will have to get down into the “weeds” represented by their lower-level supervisors. That means all levels of supervisors, starting from the top, are going to have to get out from behind their desks and do their jobs. In other words, actually supervise.

There needs to be a sea change initiated at the highest levels designed to shatter the static attitudes that have allowed sexual assaults and other ills to persist inside the U.S. military.

Yes, the problem is grave, but not insurmountable. It will require attention, commitment and leadership.

But the bottom line is simple, and reflects the truth of the military ethos: generals may issue the orders to attack, but it is the privates who do the fighting. In the same way, the orders to halt sexual assaults in the ranks will have to be come from the top, but carried out by those below.

Leonard H. Le Blanc III is a Bangkok-based author. His most recent non-fiction work is Afghanistan: Lashkar Gah — Home of the Warriors.