A Response to Eric Newhouse

By Jerri Bell

I’d been thinking about submitting work to The Journal of Military Experience, and a few nights ago I finally decided what to send. I curled up on the living room sofa with my phone to review the submission guidelines before heading up to my office to work on some last revisions. The second issue caught my eye: a great excuse to procrastinate for the rest of the evening. I settled down with the dog under my favorite afghan and opened the file, with a sigh of pleasure and deep gratitude for the editors who had collected and edited military writing for my reading pleasure. I opened the file and began reading Eric Newhouse’s introduction.

Read Eric Newhouse’s introduction here.

Halfway through, my amygdala went to General Quarters. I recognized the racing heart shallow breathing tingling skin prickling nerves that mean I need to fightfleefuckorfeed. I reread the offending clause and its paragraph twice to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood: “…we shouldn’t be sending our girls into conflict ever.” I looked up Mr. Newhouse’s biography on line to try to gain some insight into his reasoning. I tried a few deep yoga breaths. No joy. I was pissed, and my default setting is fight. I opened up my Facebook account and tried to pick a fight with the MEA President.

Even though I’d interrupted his Star Trek episode to rant and rave, and even though we barely know each other, he responded with patience and common sense. He reminded me that it is not our job as editors to censor material that makes us uncomfortable or with which we disagree. He also pointed out, not unkindly: “It’s not really natural to get that angry over something you read.”

His hint that I probably needed a little perspective was well taken, but ultimately I disagree. Words matter. Words, well written, engage our deepest emotions – including anger. Words on a page are the visible tip of an iceberg of propositions that a writer hopes to express. Here are the propositions that I perceive, correctly or incorrectly, to be underlying Mr. Newhouse’s clause about “girls” in conflict. First, he proposes that the females who enlist in the armed forces are “girls” and not “women.” Second, he proposes that he has enough authority to speak definitively about all women and all military combat (what I assume he means by the word “conflict”). Third, he proposes that involuntary limits should be set on the actions and choices of every woman, including those women who voluntarily enlist in the armed forces to defend the Constitution.

The proposition to restrict the military service of American women is an old one, and – unless there’s a return to universal conscription of men, a policy that Mr. Newhouse seems to recommend in his next sentence and one that strikes me as unlikely in the extreme – it’s neither realistic nor worth getting angry about. What really set me off was his tone, his attitude toward at least the women in his audience.

For a woman veteran with twenty years of active service, the propositions that seem to underlie Mr. Newhouse’s comment carry significant negative associations. Take the word “girl,” for example. For the first fourteen weeks of Naval Officer Candidate School, where I was the only female officer candidate in my company, my name was “Girl.” Military indoctrination is supposed to remove some layers of individuality and mold recruits into a warfighting collective. But while the drill instructors rendered to my male colleagues the small courtesy of using the surnames that would soon be preceded by “Ensign,” I remained a nameless, faceless representative of my gender, inferior and ineligible for even the tiniest scrap of respect accorded us in basic training. “Whitsett! Gillette! Dean! Girl! Drop and give me fifty!” If the DIs had called male officer candidates “Boy!” it would have been infantilizing and demeaning, like calling a dog: “Here, boy!”

Further underlying the sound of the word “girl” in my ear is the Navy’s early attempt to create separate-but-equal career paths for men and women. Until the mid-1990’s, the few female officers who trained in surface and air warfare were restricted to service on supply ships and in aviation transport and aggressor squadrons. The rest were designated General Unrestricted Line Officers – GURLs, correctly pronounced “gee-yoo-arr-ells” but mispronounced, when the intent was to belittle or demean, “girls.” GURLs served ashore in support positions: undersea surveillance, space and electronic warfare, and shore station management. The community’s flag billets could be filled by men who opted out of warfare communities. Despite PR to the contrary, General Unrestricted Line Officers simply did not have the same opportunities or respect as unrestricted line officers who commanded ships and squadrons. Although I was an intelligence officer – not a General Unrestricted Line Officer – my opportunities were even more limited. Sea duty was a prerequisite for selection to the few flag billets and fleet intelligence officer billets; the only intelligence jobs afloat were on combatants, and thus prohibited to women until 1994.

I carry all that baggage and much more into any discussion of gender equality in the armed forces. Under those circumstances, it was inevitable that I read Mr. Newhouse’s statement with a visceral feeling, one that began in my glands and ended in my fingertips and toes and scalp and the edges of my teeth, that his tone was condescending to women. That he had just devalued my twenty years of service, the combat experience of my female colleagues who deployed in Desert Shield/Desert Storm and OEF/OIF, and even the experience of several of the contributors to the JME issue he had just guest-edited.

When I joined the Navy in 1988, women could react to condescension and devaluation in one of two ways.

(Center) On the helo deck of H.M.S. Sheffield with colleagues, deployed as US liaison to the Royal Navy in the summer of 1994. It was customary that the US liaison officer wear Royal Navy rank insignia.
(Center) On the helo deck of H.M.S. Sheffield with colleagues, deployed as US liaison to the Royal Navy in the summer of 1994. It was customary that the US liaison officer wear Royal Navy rank insignia.

Debating, arguing and complaining were out: we watched our shipmate Paula Coughlin go down in flames when she blew the whistle on Tailhook. So we kept our heads down and our mouths shut and thought “Fuck you, yes I can” and worked twice as hard as our male counterparts for the same recognition. (For twenty years, “Fuck you, yes I can” was my personal mantra.) Or we deflected the insults with humor.

As a lieutenant on USS Mount Whitney, I preferred standing in port quarterdeck watches with boatswain’s mates. They were rude, profane, and funny; they had the neatest uniforms, sharpest salutes and biggest hearts of any sailor afloat. I spent a four-hour watch one hot summer afternoon in Norfolk listening to the Messenger of the Watch and Petty Officer of the Watch, two of my favorite boatswain’s mates, evaluate the physical attributes and personalities of every female sailor who walked by on the pier below. Each was deemed ugly enough to scare the white off rice, and they all eventually fell into one of two categories: sluts (who would sleep with everyone) and bitches (who would sleep with everyone but them). Finally the Petty Officer of the Watch shook his head sadly. “Women in the Navy,” he said with a sigh of regret. “They ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of lyin, cheatin, smokin, drinkin, cussin whores.”

“Excuse me?” I said. “I beg to differ.”

They’d either forgotten either my presence, or that their Officer of the Deck just happened to be a woman in the Navy. They spun around to face me with the look of men who know that a woman holds them securely by the balls and hasn’t yet decided what to do about it. I could easily have written them up for disrespect to a commissioned officer and made the charges stick at captain’s mast.

They stammered and sweated and repeated the phrase “present company excepted, ma’am” a few times.

I smiled, and I hope it was not a particularly nice smile. “Gentlemen,” I said, “I have never in my life smoked a cigarette.”

Many women’s advocates would say that I should have written them up. That by making their comments into a joke I was perpetuating a culture of sexual harassment and permissiveness about sexual assault. Maybe that’s true. But aboard Mount Whitney from 1995 to 1997, among the first small cohort of female sailors assigned to naval combatants, the first priority was to prove that we could do the jobs. Women had to get in the door before we could try to change the culture of gender relations in the military. I felt – and I know that many of my contemporaries felt – that we had succeeded when women deployed to combat roles in OEF/OIF. Women were now almost fully sharing in the responsibility of defending our country. And because we were doing almost all the same jobs, we could finally compete for promotion on an equal playing field with men. Some harassment and extra work seemed, to many women in my generation, a small price to pay for that opportunity.

A few months after I joined the staff of the Veterans Writing Project in 2013, the news media renewed its coverage of sexual harassment and military sexual trauma. Veterans Writing Project director Ron Capps and I began to talk about why women veterans weren’t writing or speaking up about their experiences as much as men: we see this frequently in our seminars and workshops, and in the submissions to O-Dark-Thirty. (At the time of this writing, in two years and nine print issues of O-Dark-Thirty we have published poems from six women veterans, nonfiction from two, and short fiction from one. We have published work from only a handful more in our electronic journal. It’s not because we don’t want or like the work – there just isn’t that much of it coming across the transom.) In graduate school, I refused the fiction advisor’s suggestion that I write a Navy story from a woman’s viewpoint; I know exactly why so few military women are telling their stories. Mary Beard, professor of classics at Cambridge University, pointed out earlier this year in the London Review of Books that the tradition of actively or passively silencing women’s voices in public discourse goes all the way back to the Trojan Wars. Ovid says that King Tereus of Thrace raped his sister-in-law Philomela and cut out her tongue to escape denunciation; when we choose to remain mute for fear of denunciation and retribution, we cut out our own tongues. We become complicit with those who would silence us.

Twenty years of my silence and humor and hard work were not enough. Gender relations in the military have improved since 1988, and many service members have internalized more respectful attitudes. But the disrespectful behaviors of those who scorn change have simply been driven underground, and silence allows their actions to continue. The job isn’t done; the mission is not yet accomplished. It’s time for more women veterans to take the next step: to start speaking up and writing honestly about our experiences.

I’m wrestling with my own baggage in fiction. Gender relations in the military, like many things in life, are complicated and messy – traits that make the best kind of fiction. The questions about men and women serving together in peace and during conflict have not been resolved; there are no easy, definitive answers of the sort that Mr. Newhouse proposed when he wrote “we shouldn’t be sending our girls into conflict ever.” That’s why publications like The Journal of Military Experience and O-Dark-Thirty are so important. They provide dedicated space for veterans of both genders to explore the essential, complicated, and controversial issues at the heart of both military service and our humanity. Through fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry, writers who happen to be veterans can grapple with the heart of life in twenty-first century America: its beauty, its ugliness, its triumphs and tragedies, and most important of all – its complexity.

And so I would like to challenge Mr. Newhouse to explain here what propositions actually underlie the words that he wrote about women and conflict in the second issue of JME. Perhaps I’ve ascribed to him ideas and an attitude that he didn’t intend. I’d like to know what he encountered in his work with veterans that led him to make such an absolute statement about women and conflict, especially in a journal that promotes and publishes the experiences of all veterans regardless of gender. Women veterans, I challenge you as well: let’s break the silence. Let’s discuss gender relations in the military and our experiences of war and trauma – in all their complexity, chaos and uncertainty – in publications like The Journal of Military Experience and O-Dark-Thirty. Let’s write and publish our stories and essays and novels and poems. Let’s take life and make it into art.


With her husband, David Bury, at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball at the US Embassy, Moscow, Russia, 2001.
With her husband, David Bury, at the Marine Corps Birthday Ball at the US Embassy, Moscow, Russia, 2001.

Jerri Bell served in the Navy from 1988-2008. Her fiction has been published in Stone Canoe; her nonfiction has been published in The Little Patuxent Review and the Charleston Gazette-Mail, and on the Quivering Pen and Maryland Humanities Council blogs; and both her fiction and nonfiction have won prizes in the West Virginia Writers annual contests. She is currently the managing editor of O-Dark-Thirty, the journal of the Veterans Writing Project.

Are Budget Cuts the Culprit Behind the V.A. Scandal?  

By Tom Kauffman, Veterans PTSD Project

Patty MurrayA few weeks ago, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., said in an interview that Washington’s cost-cutting culture helped spark the growing Veterans Administration hospital controversy by encouraging V.A. officials to understate their financial needs both internally and to Congress.

Murray, a top appropriator and former chairwoman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, had strong words for a department that she said not only faces chronic management issues but also consistently underestimates its funding needs and how many veterans will seek care each year:

“[It’s] an environment where everybody is told, ‘Keep the cost down. Don’t tell me anything costs more.’ It creates a culture out there for people to cook the books,” Murray said in an interview with Yahoo News[1].

Administrators learn to “hide the facts, because they don’t want to be told by their bosses, ‘Don’t tell me you need more money, because we can’t say that,’” she added.  “Well, in the V.A., if they need more money, they need to be able to tell us, because how else are we going to solve these problems,” Murray said. “So we have to change that culture and mindset.”

For the upcoming fiscal year, current Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders, Independent-Vt., has requested an additional $1.6 billion above the Obama administration’s medical services request.

According to an April letter Sanders sent to the Senate Budget Committee, which Murray runs, the V.A. “doesn’t take into account changing factors, such as the looming reduction of forces by the Department of Defense,” which removes members of the armed services from the active duty military health care system and permits them to rely on the V.A.

But wait, Sanders and Murray aren’t alone.

Sen. Harry Reid, D-NV, claimed late last week that more resources would solve the problems at the V.A.[2]

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-IL, said the V.A. needs more money to effectively serve our veterans.[3]

Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, we need to get the V.A. the money they need to fix the inherent problems.[4]

Joe Violante, the legislative director for Disabled American Veterans, estimated that the V.A. has been underfunded by billions of dollars over the last decade.[5]

Based on the above information you would be lead to believe that budget cuts are to blame for the issues with veteran health care.  If funding for the V.A. has not kept up with inflation and patient growth, there might be a legitimate argument to be made.  But that’s not what happened; take a look at the chart [6]:

Whether you adjust for inflation or not, the increases for the V.A. budget have exceeded inflation and the increase in the number of patients. The dollars involved have increased from $45 billion in 2000 to $124 billion in 2012. The spending for 2013 was $139 billion, $154 billion for 2014, and the request for 2015 is $165 billion.

Hopefully, Eric Shinseki’s successor will be someone skilled in the proper allocation of funding within the healthcare environment.  The Inspector General report from 2012 found that V.A. Health Centers did not even have a system in place to determine proper staffing levels[7].  As usual, the cry that budget cuts and funding are the root causes of the V.A. failures is completely false.

Sources

[1] Sen.Murray interview Yahoo News, May 27,2014

[2] Senate floor, May 22, 2014

[3] Senate floor, May 22, 2014

[4] McCain interview, Barry Young Show KFYI radio, May 29, 2014

[5] Dave Autry, VA Calls on Congress to Strengthen VA Budget, May 15, 2014

[6]  Office of Management and Budget, Dept. of Veterans Affairs, Bureau  of Labor Statistics.

[7] VA Office of Inspector General, Report 12-00900-168, April 23, 2012, Recommendations.

Million Records Project Leaves Questions Unanswered about Veterans’ Educational Success

By Sarah E. Minnis, PhD and Shane P. Hammond, EdD

The Million Records Project report released in May by Student Veterans of America (SVA), in conjunction with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the National Student Clearinghouse, provided a much-anticipated review of veterans’ pursuit of higher education.  Using data not previously available, including some data from the National Student Clearinghouse, to examine the completion rates for roughly one million veterans attending college, this report offers a new look at where and how student veterans are succeeding in higher education.

What the report detailed, both in how the data was collected and the study results presented, provides a high-level overview of what is purported to be veterans’ progress in achieving education.  It also highlights the need for ongoing efforts to promote research on veterans in higher education along with support veterans using their education benefits to earn a certificate, diploma, or degree.

The report states that 51.7 percent of veterans are completing the higher education goal for which they are using their benefits and taking 4-6 years to do so. The statistic is based on a sample of veterans in higher education using the Montgomery GI Bill, the Post 9/11 GI Bill, or both in the years 2002 to 2010 and drew comparisons between veterans and populations identified as similar such as non-traditional students and students with disabilities.

Because of the sample selected for examination, other populations of veterans were excluded – reservists using the Reserve Education Assistance Program or active duty service members using tuition assistance – which may have impacted the rate of completion.  But that figure isn’t comparable to other graduation rates like those calculated by the Department of Education.

Not only does SVA’s approach mean that graduation rates cannot be compared to any one completion cohort constructed by the Department of Education, but the graduation results are likely overstated compared to the typical formula the Department uses (McCann, 2014) Additionally, failure to factor in the greater dollar value of the Post 9/11 GI Bill, which makes it a more desirable benefit, and uncontrollable delays in veterans’ time to completion due to deployments in addition to the resident versus non-resident rate of tuition difference could lend to discrepancies in the data.  As well, making simple comparisons to other non-traditional students and those with non-military related disabilities leads the reader to an inaccurate picture of the veteran experience and potential to achieve in higher education.  In all, based on flaws in how the data were collected and what the numbers do not tell us, the reader is left with more questions than answers regarding how veterans are faring as they pursue higher education.

The report sets out the review of literature in two frameworks: one highlighting the reasons veterans would not be expected to persist to completion by making comparisons to these other student populations without making significant note of the ways in which veterans are different from them, and another that assumes educational completion based on previous research data and historical comparisons.

In setting up the argument in this way the author has overlooked previous research on the current veteran experience in higher education and has failed to recognize key factors that may lead to their success or lack thereof.  Veterans do experience higher education differently than their traditional-aged and non-traditional counterparts in school (Vacchi & Berger, 2014).  And while they may have disabilities, seen or unseen, from their military experiences, veterans are unlike most others with disabilities on campus (Madaus, Miller II & Vance, 2009).

Data has not been collected in any sort of systematic way by any entity, which would allow an easy comparison between sources to draw conclusions about who veterans are and whether they are completing education.  The term “veteran” is not defined by the entities collecting data, which the report cites, and there is no one source that is noted as being the best.  In the report, the author recognizes this and the “contradictory results” as a challenge to the current research.  Moreover, as the report points out, lots of veterans take unconventional paths through college—sometimes starting school later in life or leaving mid-year for one or more deployments before returning.

There can be little doubt that more recent veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the increasing numbers of National Guard and Reservists who serve combat tours, are taking winding roads to graduation. (McCann, 2014)

The National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit organization that helps institutions meet federal reporting requirements, serves the institutions above all other audiences. This means it will not publish data at the institutional level, meaning neither students nor policymakers can identify those schools for improvement, leaving more unanswered questions in the report (McCann, 2014).

In the end the Million Records Report offers statistics based partly on conjecture and wholly on data, which cannot be viewed as complete or accurate.  The author makes mention at multiple points that outliers are likely influencing the numbers and concedes that numerous other veteran-related factors, such as stopping out of school to deploy, are contributing issues as well.  Most significantly, the question we are left with is “why?”

We need to know why veterans are completing or not completing higher education and the factors influencing their persistence to completion or lack thereof.  We need to know what may be impacting their time to achieve their education, when they are making decisions about their benefit use, and how they are selecting their academic paths.  Mostly, however, we need to understand why veterans are attending higher education, why they are achieving, and why they are not doing so at a higher rate.  We need to stop celebrating as 51.7 percent completion rate is not worthy of celebration, and is likely an underestimate.

We should begin asking what we can do to raise veteran graduation rates on our individual campuses, so that we will truly have the best-educated and most employable veteran workforce ever.


 

Sarah E. Minnis, PhD is the CEO and Principal Consultant at Anthology Consulting LLC. She has over 20 years of career and organization development experience with 8 years working specifically with veterans and the organizations educating and employing them. As a recognized expert in veterans’ career development, Sarah has published and presented nationally and internationally on her experiences and research with veterans. Through her ongoing work in veterans’ career development she has developed a program of support and education to help college and employment communities understand the value of the veterans they serve.

Dr. Shane Hammond is a demonstrated scholar-practitioner in higher education with diverse experience in student affairs administration and leadership.  Currently serving on the graduate faculty in the College of Education at the University of Massachusetts, Dr. Hammond has worked tirelessly to support the creation of model student veteran programs in the state of Massachusetts.  His on-going research of student veterans in higher education provide empirical insight into the identity of student veterans who have experienced combat.


 

Works Cited

Cate, C.A. (2014). Million Records Project: Research from Student Veterans of America. Student Veterans of America, Washington, DC.

Madaus, J.W.; Miller II, W.K. & Vance, M.L. (2009). Veterans with disabilities in postsecondary education. In J.W. Madaus (Ed.), Journal of postsecondary education and disability: Veterans with disabilities (10-17). Huntersville, NC: AHEAD.

McCann, C (April 8, 2014). Million Records Project Raises as Many Questions as Answers. Ed Central. Retrieved from http://www.edcentral.org/million-records-project-raises-many-questions-answers/

Vacchi, D. & Berger, J. (2014).  Student veterans in higher education.  In M. Paulsen (Ed), Higher education: Handbook of theory and research (Vol. 29).  Netherlands: Springer

Travelers

By Michael Lund

On the way to the joyous occasion of our son’s wedding recently, my wife, an animal lover, got to chatting at the airport with a younger woman traveling with her small dog. “She’s been with me all over the world,” said the owner proudly. “She’s a great companion.” The dog rode in a soft cage, but was well-enough behaved to sit on her owner’s lap, have a biscuit, and drink water while they waited.

It turned out the traveler’s first flight on her way from a Mid-Atlantic state to Alaska had been canceled that morning after she’d arrived at the airport and been checked in for her flight. To reschedule, she explained, she had been made to go back though security with all her baggage. (This also gave her the chance to walk her dog in an approved area.) Re-booked on an afternoon plane and with the new boarding pass in hand, she endured the process of having herself and her effects screened a second time before being allowed to settle in and wait for the same plane on which we had seats.

Encouraged by my wife’s interest, she eventually revealed that she was the wife of an Army sergeant–seven years in the service, three tours in Afghanistan. He had been wounded (lost part of a hand), experienced several concussions, was perhaps developing a need for counseling (but was reluctant to seek it).

After his most recent time overseas, she, the spouse and the mother, began to feel unwell. She was tentatively diagnosed with MS, the symptoms of which–tiredness, tingling in the limbs, vision problems–are often augmented by stress. Over the last few weeks, she’d been to see a specialist near where her parents lived (who could help with the children traveling with her while she underwent tests at the hospital). Her physical condition confirmed and a treatment plan established, she was returning to care for her family. Some of their children were staying with the grandparents for a time.

Overhearing this conversation, I offered to get my wife a soft drink and asked the mother if she would like something also. She thanked me and began unpacking her purse to find the money. I waved her off, saying she and her family had done enough for me and mine.

When our flight was called, she got up, gathered her dog and her travel bag, and came over to exchange a hug with my wife–an hour and a half ago a complete stranger. Holding back some tears, we both wished her well. Her long journey would stretch into the next day at least; and when she arrived home the real hard work would begin.

That this military spouse was so receptive to the concern my wife showed for her underscored to me how lost the military can feel in a civilian environment. She had not volunteered her story, but my wife, a good listener, encouraged her to speak. To those not aware of her burdens, she was just one more traveler, deserving no exemptions from such policies as those that govern the care of pets and those traveling with pets.

If I’d had my wits about me (they were scattered by the matter-of-fact way she spoke about all she was going through), I would have made sure she was booked first-class for the rest of her journey. I will feel this regret for a long time. And I should.

A native of Rolla, Missouri, Michael Lund served in Vietnam as an US Army correspondent (1970-71). Professor Emeritus of English at Longwood University in Virginia, he is the author of a number of novels inspired by Route 66. He lives in Virginia and writes about veterans issues.