 a'r Eurusiaid Unig. Fy llwyd i chi, wnaethe chi i fynd i'ch meddwl. Felly byddwch i chi'n mynd i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl, ddod i chi i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl. Mae'r môl ar y ddweud i'n mynd i chi, a mynd i chi i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl. Ac mynd i chi i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl. Maria! Dyna yna'r Mexicann, a dyna yn amlwg iawn. Mae gennym ni weithio'n mynd i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl i'ch meddwl. Felly, i wneud yw 16, pan'r gwrth gwrdd ganddiol, a ydy dda i ychydig yw'r 17th ymlaen, sydd wedi'i gofyn yn ddiweddar, ond rydyn ni wedi gwneud y gallwch ar gyfer y gwirionedd. Mae gwrdd gwrdd gwrdd yw'rер yn agnig o'r gweithio'r ddweud mewn. Mae wedi'i gofyn yn amlwg y maen nhw, felly rydyn ni wedi gynnig y graffidi. A'r gwrdd yn gweithio'r ysgol, ac wrth gwrdd, My boyfriend led across the street from my school, so I would go to see him instead of going to class. I was smoking a lot of weed. really messing up. But in the end, I got sick and tired of myself and that is when I started thinking about the army. There were recruiters in the hallways all the time at school, so I went to see one. If you sign up for the National Guard, you won't have to serve outside the country. National? Cos that means in the country. Right? hen oedd yn bwysig ar-dweithwyr yn y Llywodraeth yn fan gweithdoedd ar gyfer y techniad, gyda i'n cerddant yn meddwlol, a wedi cael ei defnyddio'r cyfryd. Ac fynd i'n eraill i ymddiol yn ddod yn cerddant ddod yn 60 o'r cychyn. Oeddiwch chi'n ddowr i'n ddysgu— oeddiwch chi'n ddod yn ddod o'r cyfrwyr i'n ddod ddod, i'n ei oeddiwch i'r cael hyn. Roedd yma ar gyfer 9 11 oes chi,米 hi'n beth ychydig bod llifodd. I went to the recruiter and said I wanted to sign up. You're going to have to get your mom to sign that because you're only 17. I haven't seen my mom in months. But I called her and I told her. If you want to join Forge my name, I don't care. So I forced your name? Right there, under the recruiter's nose. We do it all the time. Don't worry about it. Well, I got my $3,000! Ond dyma dyma'r gweithio arwain ddweud o'r cyfwyr i'r ddweud. Ac rwy'n cael cyfwyr eich cyfwyr. Rydyn yn dweud i mi gyda'r cofio'r collidi i'r cyfun. Ac mae'r ddweud yn ddweud i mi ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud! Mae'n ddweud i chi'n ddweud. Ac mae'n ddweud i chi'n ddi ddweud... ...y ddweud? Mae wedi'i ddweud i chi'n ddeud. Wel, yna'r llinion ar Siro. My whole time in Iraq is a complete day's. I work nights and we were shot at every night. Mortars were coming in and mortars is deaf. You know when they say that only men are allowed to serve on the front line? That's the biggest crock of shit. I was a tank gunner. When I say that I was a soldier, nobody believes me. Nobody listens. Do you know why? Blessed are those who observe justice, who do righteousness at all times. When I was a freshman in high school, I vowed I'd never be in the army. I wanted to go to college, you know? But my parents are real religious. Tara, you don't need to go to college. You can do God's work better in the army. It's strange because she and my dad went to college, but they told me I didn't need to go. I was working as a cook in Bible camp from the summers, and I saw how I could make kids happy doing that. So I thought maybe mama was right. Maybe serving food in the army would give me a mission to spread the word of God. So she took me the recruitment offer. I was still thinking that. They gave me the test that shows what kind of jobs you can do in the military. My score suggested that I could be a nurse. I wasn't sure about that. All I'd ever wanted to be was a teacher. Then the recruiter started calling my house all the time. One day this recruiter came to my home. He was three years older than me. A model, picture guy, you know, blonde, blue-eyed. So handsome in his uniform. He told me I could be a chaplain's assistant. And that appealed to me because it was religious. And he was one of those perfect guys, you know? So I joined the reserves. Mama signed a waiver because I wasn't 17 yet. It was 2004 by then, but mama and me weren't worried about war. We knew you could die just as easily crossing the street. It's all in God's plan when you die. Whether you go to war or not. Name is Terrace, sergeant to Walt Johnson to you. I'm 37 years old and the mother of four kids. Two boys, two girls. My home is in Georgia now, but I grew up in D.C. My life was pretty drastic. My stepfather was a drunk, beat up on my mom all the time. Beat up on me and my brothers and sisters too, but he saved the worst of it for her. He hit her with a hammer, lacerated her legs, broke her skull. One time, he stabbed her 13 times with a long kitchen knife till it sank in so deep. He couldn't pull the knife out again. She only survived because she was so fat. By the time I was 13 though, I was going to fight him back. Layed him out flat with a baseball bat once. It was I had got to kill this guy or he's going to kill my mom. Soon as I could, I moved out and started living with my boyfriend. He's my husband now. A gentleman and a sweetheart. I've known him since I was nine. By the time I was 19, we had two kids and I was working in two jobs. One at McDonald's and the other sell at tour tickets at Union Station. One day this recruiter comes up. What about signing up? The army will pay for college, trade you in whatever job you want and you get to travel. I got interested because I'd always wanted to travel. So I joined the army reserves and that enabled us to get out of DC. DC is such a poison place to me. All you've got there is a bunch of drugs and killing. Three of my brothers were shot to death there for no reason. My son was shot in the feet in a drive-by when he was just five years old playing in the yard. It's because of the military that my four kids live like they do now. We have a nice house. They go to good schools. So I like to be in the army. Then they sent me to Iraq. I grew up in a small rural town in Wisconsin. There were only about 2,000 people so pretty much everybody knew everybody. There were two types of people in my town. The people who left and the people who stayed. My way of getting out was to join the Army National Guard when I was 17. A lot of people from my high school were in the military so it didn't seem like any big deal. But my parents were unhappy. I come from a very political household. My dad was an elected official and were Democrats. So I had to really argue with them to get them to sign and let me join. Anna, we just want to make sure you know what you're getting into. But I was stubborn. I thought I wanted to give something back to society. Do something for my country but really it was a rebellion. When I joined the military I got an overwhelmingly good response from my community. I went downtown or to the supermarket in my uniform. People were proud of me. It made me feel like I belong. After all it was pre-9-11. We all thought differently then. In August 2001 I shipped out to do my training at Fort Jackson and zero day. The day you meet your drill instructor turned out to be September 11. We just finished taking the oath when the sergeant said something about a plane hitting towers. But I couldn't really hear. People were running to the barracks getting hysterical. The sergeant was saying, we're going to war. But I just thought it was part of the training. It took me a couple of hours to realize it was real. After that there were rumors that training would speed up and we'd be sent over. Training just went on as normal. We stuck bayonets into massive targets, sang songs about blood and killing, and didn't bat an eye because we were already desensitized. Friends sitting next to me and third generation Air Force. My grandfather and father were Air Force officers, and all my life I wanted to be just like them. I joined the Air Force Reserves after high school and put myself through school during my high school. I got married too and had a baby girl. My daughter was only two years old when I was deployed. That was Markershire, 2003, where I had the US going into Iraq. I had a neighbor with my husband. Weird horse now. It was so hard to leave him all over the girl. I kept worrying about what should be fed or eyed, what should be able to sleep okay. It really hurt to hear a little voice on the phone. Files on active duty for a little over eight years in the Air Force. I was a public affairs specialist. That means combat correspondent and a photographer. I loved my job. I got Flores, 46 years old, and retired after 22 years in the Army. I was a drill sergeant who taught other people how to be drill sergeants. So I have a drill sergeant personality. You should tell my soldiers holding onto the idea of being a warrior, of being a provider and a protector. It's something we find great honour and pride in. Because nowadays it is hard to find things that bring honour to your family, for natives. When I was 10, I never lived in one place long enough for me to finish out of greater school. My dad kept moving to find one job or another, but also because he was trying to run away from his drinking. You know drinking is a problem for native people? Well, it was no different from my family. Finally, he bought a house and we stayed put. My dad's a supervisor and a bakery, and my mom's a bank teller. They raised me in a little town in Southern Sconson. But I didn't have any direction after high school, so I joined the Army Military Police, became specialist Sylvia Gonzáez. I did it for the money. And the challenge. And the discipline. My parents didn't have any opinion on me enlisting. That's what I wanted to do, I was fine with them. So mom signed papers because I was only 17. And then 9-11 happened. And I was mobilized to Iraq. 9-11 made a lot of people proud of being in military, including me. Oh, I wasn't scared. I was glad that I was in an organization that was going to do something about this. I never thought much about war in Iraq at first. I figured it's not my place to get involved with something that I didn't know about. The thing that worried me was that I was going to be away from home for a whole year. They gave me notice three weeks before I had to leave. My family don't do it things emotionally, so I sorted out my stuff and I left. When I was 13, my dad brings home this white guy to work for a fixing car, George. This was 1973, and George was just back from Vietnam. He had one leg shorter than the other and he spent a whole year in hospital with his wounds. And people said he'd raped girls in Vietnam. I didn't like him at all, but he started being nice to me, took me to a drive-in movie, gave me a joint to smoke and something to drink, and then he raped me. I got pregnant from that rape. My dad was furious that it was all my fault. He didn't care that I was only 13, so he makes me get in the car and we go looking for George. We find him pretty quick. Get in the fucking car! My dad said he was six feet tall and people did what he said, so George gets in, Dad drives us back to the house, sits us down at the kitchen table, pulls out a gun, sits on the table in front of us, and he tells George, Yeah, five minutes and two choices! Either marry my daughter or die! And all I could think was, if my dad suits George, he's going to go to prison. All of us are going to be without a dad, and all of us are going to be without a husband. It'll all be my fault, so... I told George, marry him. My eldest son is the product of that rape. I love him, but he knows the story. He feels pretty alienated from my family. And he hates having an Indian mom, because he seems no honour in that. For the next few years, I'm living with George, he is beating the crap out of me, and I am turning to drink, to my family. And when I'm 16, I get pregnant again. Birth control? Nobody told me about that. I had so much trauma in my life at that point, who would have thought about that anyway? Finally, at one point, I decided I can't take it anymore, so I decided to kill George, and dump him in Lake Tahoe. But he's such a big guy, I can't figure out how I'm going to get his body there. I'm going to have to put him on a boat alive, a strong guy, so I think, ok, that's not going to work. By the time I'm 20, George is landed in jail again for attacking me, and I'm divorced at last. So, there I am, living in a one bedroom cockroach infested apartment with two kids, and I am on welfare. So, I'm thinking, what am I going to do? That's when I decide to join the army. When I found out what people were saying about me, I became a bitch. I got me, I just changed the way I was, so that nobody thought I was being flirty. I changed the way that I walked, and the way that I talked. Nobody over there even knew who I was, because I was always putting on an act. A lot of the men didn't want us there. One guy told me that the only reason the military sent female soldiers is to provide eye candy for the guys, to keep them sane. In Vietnam, they had prostitutes, but they don't have those in Iraq, so they have women's soldiers instead. It was July 2003 by the time I got to Iraq. We were in Bob Spiker, which used to be an Iraqi airbase, and there were huge pictures of Saddam Hussein everywhere. Soldiers would pose next to them and take pictures like tourists. I was attached to an army engineering unit, and our job was to build bases and roads, fixed bridges. We cleaned up the rubble and all kinds of disgusting stuff in the building so we could move in. Excrement, rags, bits of military equipment. We prepared the base, built runways, used scrap metal to make our own armour because we had no up-armored vehicles. We built a basketball court for ourselves, but we were doing nothing to help the Iraqi people. I was petroleum supply specialist. That means I pumped gas. My job was to drive around the base, refueling dump trucks, rollers, scrapers, wait for a couple hours, and do it again. When it was busy, it was really busy, and when it was slow, there was absolutely nothing to do. So I wrote a lot of letters, took pictures, threw rocks into a box. My unit was a real good old boys club, though, and I was one of only 19 women out of 141 people. The leadership didn't trust women to do a good job at anything. They were always hovering over me, waiting for you to screw up soon. You feel like you couldn't do anything right. And the guys have cases of porn which they'd look at out in the open. They were always calling out things like... Hey, Peterford! I can take some of that t-shirt. It happened so much and got numb. Finally, after a couple months, I started to go out on missions to rebuild schools. That was the best part of my time there. Then, I began to convoy to other bases. I was driving a 2,300 gallon diesel truck, and because it was taking occasional gunfire, it could have burst into flames any moment. It was a bomb on wheels. The Iraqi people were pretty hostile to us by that time. When we went into town, we were always looking at faces and hands, trying to guess their mood. If there's something wrong, try to guess their mood. If they're staring at you, not in fear, but because they hate you. You know you're not wanted. We were told the kids could be dangerous too. They could be a decoy or be carrying a bomb. So, if they run in front of the convoy, you're supposed to run them over. I'd been a daycare teacher before I got deployed, and one of the guys on my team who knew this about me said, Edinine had been talking. If a kid came in front of the convoy, we don't know if he'd be able to run him over. I had to tell him, I don't know if I could either. But then, our first day out, a boy threw a rock at our vehicle. It made a crack like a bullet. And I knew then, that if I had to hit a kid and kill him, I would. Not to save my life, but to save all the soldiers who might die. That was really hard to come to terms with. What do you feel? By the time I was deployed to Iraq in 2005, I was 35 years old and I'd been in the army 14 years. So when I was on the plane to Kuwait, and the young soldiers around me were making all kinds of dumb ass jokes about going to Iraq, I gave them a piece of my mind. Hey, I don't know what this means to you, but to me, this isn't a game. I have four kids at home who will have no understanding if I'm killed. Back when I was training at Fort Bragg, I knew things were going to get bad when I saw how my command was acting. Instead of the leadership saying, we need to work together to bring these soldiers back safe and sound. Too many people wanted to be chief and not enough wanted to do the work. And they were training us like we were going to fight in a jungle, not the desert. They made us practice lying in the grass and taking cover behind jungles. Taking cover behind jungle plants. There ain't no jungle in Iraq. Then I had this dream. I'm in a truck and it gets hit. The vehicle blows up. And all I see is a big ball of fire above me. My sight goes black for a minute and when it comes back, I'm descending from the clouds to my mom's house. My mom's there and she is going berserk because the news has gotten to her that I got killed. And that's what hurt me the most. The next morning, they ordered me to the fire range to practice shooting with live rounds but I couldn't shake that dream. I get my weapon and when I look up, the first sergeant and the commander there, I'm thinking, these morons are going to get me. All of a sudden this anger just comes over me and I see myself shooting both those morons dead. Sergeant, I can't go to the range today. Somebody needs to take this weapon off on me, please. No, sir. And I throw my weapon at my Kevlar on the ground and I walk off. And then I call my uncle who's a bishop and I tell him about my dream. And he says it's a warning about my leaders being so weak. So I decide I've got to speak to them. So I go to the first sergeant. Sir, we've been here now for about four or five weeks and for some reason the senior enlisted still have not gotten it together. Now none of these soldiers is going to tell you this to your face but I will. We don't believe that you are able to lead a horse to water. He slapped me with an article 15 for attempting to destroy government property. That was with all my M16 and my helmet on the ground. And then he tried to send me for a mental eval. Sir, I've been in the army 14 years, sir, and I've never been sent for a mental eval. Talk to me, sir, when there's a problem. I know when I get tense my brows kind of frown up but it really doesn't mean anything. I'm not as fierce as I look. Two weeks later we were deployed. When we flew into QA there was nothing to do for six weeks. I had my 20th birthday there when otherwise we would just sit around and play with cars. And then finally in June of three we convoied to Baghdad to cat Mustang in the green zone. Our mission was to reinstall the police force. Guard it from the looters, fix it up, weed out the good police from the bad and we'll take new riders, raping, eating prisoners. We weren't allowed to do that anymore. Some were part of the insurgency. Later we moved to this different base where we were sleeping in tents with sandbags around them. We didn't have any protection for mortar there. This tent just down the road from us got hit. Shrided. My friend Sandra had just left a latrine when he got mortared. She turned around. First five months the routine was the same every day. You get up, you load the trucks with equipment, go through inspections, meet with a squad about where we were going to go. Then I'd have breakfast and then I'd climb into a humvee with the two guys that made up my team and convoied to a camp and to a station in Baghdad. Then twelve hours later the next squad comes, relieves you, you load up, go home, put everything away, go to sleep and do it all over again the next day. Being the lowest ranking soldier in my team I was the gunner. That meant that when we were driving I was sticking out of the rooftop of the humvee and a 50 cal machine gun in this little gun turret. Now in the turret you're exposed from name tag up. We didn't have any shields. Luckily in the beginning we mostly got waves and good feedback. We had like 20 kids running after us dancing for us. But some of the women did run away. Later people got hostile. People stare at you, dirty looks, people tell you go home or a rock at you and the guys expose themselves because you're female. As a soldier the hostility doesn't bother me. But as a woman it bothers me a lot. I hate it when guys do that. If you're rocky or not I think it's sick. I'm disgusting. Some of our own soldiers were a poem too. They made flirty or sexual comments. They stared at you. That was the thing that I couldn't stand. He walked into the chow hall. There's a bunch of guys who just stopped eating and stared at you. Every time you've been over somebody's going to say something it got to the point with me right. I was afraid of walking past certain people because I didn't want to hear their comments. Hey where's you down? I loved my job and I did. Right from my time at boot camp up until I got out I was harassed all the time. People used to call me Air Force Barbie. I couldn't go anywhere without being watched by a million eyes. I had a senior non-commissioned officer constantly quiz me about my sex life. Show up at my barracks at odd hours at the night and ask me personal questions that no supervisor should ever have the right to ask. I had a colonel she sexually harassed me and weighs on to a barracks to explain. These are the people who had complete control over my life. When I worked, when I ate, when I slept when I could talk rest or not rest these are the people who I was supposed to obey no matter what. One time my sergeant came sit with me in the child hall and he said, I feel like I'm a fishbowl away all these men's eyes are burning to your back. That's what my life is like I said. Finally I went to my leadership and explained the situation. I was told to write an MF book a memo for record every time that officer said or did anything that made me feel uncomfortable. Well, I did that for months till I had a binder just full of those memos. I took it straight to senior leadership. Did that officer get punished? No. He went on to make E9 which is the highest enlisted rank in the armed forces. Why am I complaining? Who's only words and gestures right? But it should never have happened. I was a hard worker who loved her service in country this is not what I deserve. But like so many other females in the military I put up with it for the good of my family my beliefs in my country. Well after my first deployment I decided the constant harassment was all just a part of being female in the military and I made the decision not to tell anyone any more about my problems. Excuse my language but I decided to be a bitch. Bitch! When I got to Iraq in November 2005 I was still hoping to do God's work among my fellow soldiers. I was there for a year and in the beginning I was attached to a company out of Alaska. My platoon had 60 men and one long female me. I was also the youngest till 17. Because I was the only female there men would forget in front of me all the time and say these terrible derogatory things about women. I had to hear these things every day. I had to say HEY! And then they look at me all surprised and say oh we don't mean you. One of the guys I thought was my friend was trying to rape me. Two of my sergeants wouldn't stop making passes at me. Everybody in the army is supposed to have a battle buddy. Females are supposed to have one to go for the trains with or the showers so they don't get raped by the men on their own side. When I was a female I didn't have a battle buddy. My battle buddy was my gun and my knife. When we drove up into Iraq on a convoy in April we saw how the people were living. It was so sad. We saw kids on the sides of roads using hand signals to bed for food and water. Kids barefoot and dirty. We saw how they lived in makeshift mud houses held together with pieces of clothing or plastic. It makes us realize how blessed we are. Seeing those kids though, maybe this mom is real bad. My youngest, you don't beat around the bush. So my mother's day sent me an email that said Mommy, love you. Happy mother's day. Wish you were here. Hope you don't get killed in Iraq. Okay. Base at Camp Adder in the south but it wasn't long before they sent me on a convoy up to Camp Anaconda, which is 50 miles north of Bad Dan. Anaconda got mortar so much the soldiers called it Morda Ritaville. But our trucks had no armor. Nothing. We weren't even authorized to be out on that road, but they sent us on out anyway and at night too. It was a suicide mission. I'm driving the middle gun truck when an IED goes off right under the truck in front of me. It was so loud and scared to live in shit out of me. My heart was pumping so fast felt like it was going to jump right out of my chest. But I showed none of what I was feeling to my soldiers. Two days later the commanders ordered us out into formation. I expected some kind of apology but they were blabbering on about nothing. Setting up the internet. I were violating dress codes by wearing the wrong t-shirts for PT. Dude, I've been fired at. I don't want to hear about no goddamn t-shirt. Then they asked. Anybody got anything to say? Nobody said anything. These soldiers were young and trained not to question their seniors. So I raised my hand. First Sergeant did you all forget about the incident two days ago? Do you realize that none of your soldiers have any confidence in the leadership now? Don't you give a damn about us. The first sergeant gives me this look like he wants to kill me but you don't say nothing. See, when you have a female with that type of attitude in the military it does not go over well with a lot of men. I was deployed to Iraq in 2004 when I was 42 years old and a staff sergeant who has 19 years of service under my belt. I was so proud of what I'd done in the military that when my two sons grew up I encouraged them to join too. One's in the army, the other's a marine. And by the time I got sent to Iraq I could be so grateful. I was based at Camp Cedar II a convoy pit stop about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad. I was put to work with a lieutenant in charge of organizing the movement and repairs of all the vehicles. But they were so messed up they didn't know how many soldiers they had. You could be missing for a week and nobody would know. So I thought, okay they don't know what they're doing any better than I do. And I started organizing the whole thing myself. But man of this female major a white woman who hated anyone was a white and male. She replaced every soldier of color with a white soldier and she made the soldiers of color train the white people who would take over their jobs. She destroyed the careers of many soldiers of color doing that. But if she said anything we'd be punished. One of the first things she did when we got to Iraq she made me and the other female non-commissioned officers move into the same tent as the privates. We literally had that much space between our books. Now you do not move a higher ranking soldier in with a lower ranking. It makes you lose your power base because it's their territory. Major knew this. Soon the privates are refusing to obey our orders. This one girl, Benson had a canopy over her bed with pink blankets and I thought what the fuck but when I tell her to move her bed over her foot to make room for me she goes into this itty bitty little voice like a baby about what my young soldiers were going through out there on the roads in Iraq. One was this young female sergeant who trained as a driver but they made her into a gunner as there was a shortage of military police to do the job. So she and her team were out on the road and they were attacked with mortars and grenades. So the sergeant fires back with her machine gun. She kills a bunch of civilians. When she gets back she's all excited and shouting about what had happened. Right now your adrenaline's up. Tomorrow's going to be a different story. And then I realized that the combat stress team hasn't shown up. Now they're supposed to come help soldiers who've been in battle like this but nobody bothered to come. Go to bed. It'll be fine. Sure enough, the next morning this sergeant and her team are a mess. One's lying in her bunk in a fetal position and the others are sobbing because well, they've killed all these innocent people. And Benson, the girl with the pink blankets well, she was driving a large truck in a convoy Now over there you drive on the opposite side of the road a lot to avoid IEDs and you drive fast. So one day this car was coming towards them but nobody had time to get out of the way so the car ends up driving right underneath the truck. Killed four children and both the parents. There was blood and body parts all over the place. So when she gets back to camp she's in shock. I guess she thought I was still mad at her because she just stood there and didn't say anything. So I hugged her. She was only 20 years old. They should have debriefed these girls. They should have had a combat stress person there but they didn't. Nobody was taking care of these kids so you can imagine the condition they were in when they got back home. It's not getting any better. I was sent up to back about just northeast of Baghdad. We stayed in camp at Warhorse. One night we were in the wreck building. I was doing my email when the whole building shook. There was this high-pitched squealing sound and a flash and it went black. Everybody stared at each other a second then dropped to the ground. 20 seconds later another bomb came in. I grabbed somebody's shirt. Take me to the bunker. We got outside. There was no bunker. We got 50 meters away. Shrapnel was flying over our heads. This girl was lying on the ground screaming. My phone's coming. Blood was all over the place. This female was lying on the ground covered in it and this guy called Sergeant Hill was helping her. I said, he said no. I think some of it's mine. I got hit too but she's worse. I found someone else to help her and then I lifted his arm and there was all this blood. He was much worse than her but he didn't realize because he was in shock. I was holding back this guy's blood with my hand. I didn't have anything else. Another mortar dropped. We had no flatjackets, no cavalars, nothing. So we threw our bodies on top of the patients. The mortar stopped long enough for us to drive the wounded to the hospital. Soon as we got there I saw a nurse and healed. This is Sergeant Hill. He's 32. He's O-positive. He needs blood now. How do you know? Because I'm covered in blood and none of it's mine. The only thing that helped me survive my time in Iraq was my boyfriend Stephen. I couldn't have got through it without him. We met the night I arrived at Fort Dicks, New Jersey for my AIT. I started talking immediately. He said, give me your number. And then later he texted me saying, what's good? We started going out right away. Stephen's black but he looks kind of Dominican. Real cute and a big muscular guy from New York. Now you're not allowed to fraternise in the army which means have a relationship but everybody does. And because he was a surgeon and I was a specialist nobody could know about this. Everybody knew. And then I got pregnant by him. So I couldn't deploy when he did and the rest of my team did. I had to stay behind at Fort Dicks with strangers. And then after three months I had a miscarriage. Made me feel really empty and sad. I really loved Stephen and I really wanted to have his baby. They gave me one month to recover and then they said go into Iraq which made me really mad because one month is not enough time to get over losing a baby. But in February 2005 I was sent to Bob Spiker. They put you in this tiny chew like this little trailer that sleeps two people but you've got to share it with three. Night I arrived it was so tight in there I had to squeeze my way into it. I didn't get along with the girl on my right. But the girl on my left was a friend from before. She didn't know I was coming she was so excited to see me because last she'd heard I was pregnant. The first thing I did was I put on my favorite perfume and I went to look for Stephen. We haven't seen each other for four months so I knocked on his door and his room he said he didn't know where he was. And then I remembered the time difference that when it was midnight for him it was three o'clock for me and that's when we would talk online. So I thought I know where he is. So I ran over to the recreational building I'm sure enough there he was sitting at a corner computer with his back to me. Now I didn't go up to him right away. Instead I sat down at a computer and I walked online. Sure enough there he was. So I wrote I'm in Kuwait it's really cool that I'm on your time zone. And then he wrote it's weird I can smell you I must really miss you because I can smell your perfume. So then I wrote turn around and he turned around and he just started laughing. In each police station that we fixed up in Baghdad we'd go through the day searching people coming into the station and searching our positions. You'd be there 12 hours every day standing or sitting it is hot. You have to watch everybody all the time. We get used to that. The thing that I couldn't stand was the people that I was working with. My squad leader was a pervert. He was old, like 35 or 40. He used to point out these little Iraqi girls and say these disgusting sexual stiffbef all the time. These girls are like 12 or 13 years old. But the worst was my team leader. He made passes at me at first. Then he tried to have revenge by controlling everything I did. So I had to eat with him because he wouldn't let me eat with my friends. I had to clean my weapon with him. He wouldn't let me speak to anybody. So I'd sit up in my Humvee turret all day long just to get away from him all along. And every day people knew it. They'd come up to me and say, Man, your life sucks! When I tried to get switched they wouldn't do it. And that just really made me hate my time there. I got so that I didn't trust anybody. I was in my company after a few months. I didn't trust anybody at all. I still don't. During my first few months in Iraq my sergeant assaulted and harassed me so often that I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided to report him. But when I turned him in the one common factor in all these problems is you. Don't see this as a punishment but we're going to have you transferred. Then that same sergeant got promoted right away. I didn't get my promotion for six months. They transferred me from Mosul to Rawa. Rawa was nothing but a Ted camp on the Syrian border covered in Zang. The camp had Marines, Navy, Air Force and Army. There were over 1,500 men in the camp. And less than 18 women. So it wasn't any better than the first platoon I was in. I was fresh meat to the hungry men there. I was less scared of the mortar rounds that came in every day than I was of the men who shared my food. I would never drink late in the day even though it was so hot. Because the Port of Johns was so far away it was dangerous so I'd go for 16 hours in 140 degree heat and not drink. I'd just ate skiddles to keep my mouth from being too dry. I collapsed from dehydration so often I have ivy track lines from all the time they had to rehydrate me. They made me cook because I was female. So I wanted to do other jobs too. So I was cooking 1,500 meals three times a day. I worked from four in the morning to nine at night the next day. I was exhausted all the time. One day somebody wrote my name on a Port of Johns saying I'd had sex with a lot of people when they put it in much worse words than that. But when I wasn't working I went to chapel and then I went to bed and that was all I did. Work chapel bed. Work chapel bed. It was so untrue but I couldn't prove it. I couldn't defend myself because nobody there wanted to believe me. Nobody was on my side. I'd always try to stay cheerful. It would be nice to everybody. Back in boot camp I was known as Sunshine. But within a few months I went from cheerful and smiling and bursting into tears all the time. I couldn't even smile anymore. I called Mama and cried and told her what they were doing to me. If you were treading the path of righteousness I would never know if you were treading the path of righteousness. None of this would be happening. Working at the entrance of Spiker I saw a convoy being hit all the time. Highway 1 ran right past our base. We used to call it the highway of death because so many people got killed there by ID's and motors. Once this convoy got hit it was this huge flash in the night and then they drove to us with their wounded. The civilian got out of his car and started throwing up because his brother who was sat next to him had been shot in the throat. I was on a tank out in the road just looking at him. We radioed for an ambulance but they have to go through all these clearance and shit so by the time it arrived it was too late. The guy was already dead. I never really thought about death that much when I was in Iraq. I figure everything happens for a reason and I'm going to die anyway so I was never really afraid of dying. But I was afraid of though losing a limb or scarring my face or chirping because walking is really hard you know it's hot and you've got all this heavy equipment which weighs nearly half your weight for a small like me and I was worried about our equipment too. We had these flat jackets from Vietnam that everybody said were no good against AK-47s which is what the Iraqis are shooting. A radio is old and broken our ambulance is rattled and shook I cannot imagine having to travel in one of those wounded. But I didn't mind working at the checkpoint. I got to work with Stephen that way because he was the team leader and the sun rises and the sun sets were beautiful and I got along with the guys on my team most of the time. A couple of things that they did bothered me. Stephen went home for two weeks on R&R and when he was gone they hit on me all the time and then when he came back they made up all these stories about me hoping that we would break up and that they would get a chance with me and if we were attacked they'd make me stay right at the back of the tank and they'd be like no because you're like heaven to you we had to guard out on the road nobody wants to guard out on the road the soldier that's out on the road is known as the sacrifice soldier because you're the first to be hit if anything happens. For a while they put me out there every night they didn't want to hear me say I'm a soldier I'm a soldier just like you and you and you in deploying with us to Afghanistan with the army tent mountain vision now by this time I'm a sergeant with years of sexual harassment under my belt so I decided this time it was going to be different this time I decided to put up a wall hang thicker and thicker you know normally I'm a very bluffing person but all that disappeared behind the wall then to this day I don't know if I've ever regained that part of myself but you have to put up a wall and act like one of the boys even if it means losing who you are you become very cold and you don't show your emotions and you don't let anyone in because if you do they will walk all over you still harassment is worse than it had ever been a couple of months into my deployment I was directed to full not go do I smoked like a chimney when I was in Afghanistan and this night was no exception so after a few hours I put my weapon on my radio in the guard check and walked 20 feet to the closest smote you don't ever leave your weapon unattended in a combat zone I had a momentary lapse thought I would be okay 20 feet from my weapon I was wrong I had just taken a few dregs in my cigarette when some people grabbed me in a choke hold and dragged me behind some power generators all I could see was a man much larger than me US Armed Forces uniform I struggled with all my strength to get free wealth dragging to his spot I tried my hardest to fight him off I got him a few kicks but it wasn't well I waited until my ship was over and then did what every lawn or the show says to don't take a shower go through to your authorities I thought they would listen to me I was wrong they told me if I filed a claim that I'd been raped I'd also be charged with dereliction of duty for leaving my weapon unattended in a combat zone that could get me court-martial could end my grief so I should SHUT UP didn't say anything to him they made me Convoy Commander now some of those convoys are 25 trucks long and I was in charge of making sure that every one of those soldiers and drivers did the mission and got home in one piece one time I'm in the lead truck going through a crowded street but this young guy up in the gunner's chute now he hasn't been out on the road before he's been in the office doing paperwork for so long he's getting called Professor Staplet now we've got traffic coming at us and civilians all over the place and this car comes toward us too close for comfort but being that it's my gunner's first time he doesn't know what to do so I tell him fire a warning shot he doesn't shoot so I tap him hey man don't be afraid to fucking shoot that weapon okay you do know how to shoot right the vehicle is getting closer and closer but the moron still doesn't shoot so I hit him hard man I tell you to fucking fire you're fucking fire okay you don't never have to be able to be that close to my fucking Convoy he knows I'm not plants he's only 19 he grabs his hand and yells oh my god I think I killed some look it's not your fault I don't think you shot nobody but we've still got a lot of shit coming at us you hear me so I need you to focus right now and pay attention but his face is red and he's yelling oh my god he's got a story to tell the guys and it makes him feel like he's matured from a boy to a man see a lot of young soldiers feel like that women too they think I'm not some wimpy female because of the job I did in Iraq the longer we stayed at that dad the worse it got you got to that you knew something was going to happen every day you just didn't know what one day we were driving to this police station in Najif when suddenly this IED blows right next to my Humvee truck and I must have passed out because when I woke up I was by myself in a truck and my ears were ringing and my whole body hurt they gave me a first aid and some IV drip heal dressing I had shrapnel that's little bits of metal in my arm and in my face and my ear drops drops were ruptured I went to hospital and they cleaned me up they gave me painkillers but I couldn't work for a month because I was deaf so I just hung out on base watched a lot of movies and I slept the shrapnel was still in there we only take it out if it's really big took it out of my face you can see the scars but it's not hideous my hearing is not as good as it used to be but I wasn't fazed about being wounded like that I was like okay I'm alive in fact I was pretty pissed that I didn't get hurt worse I really hated it out there my friend Michelle Whitmer she was on our platoon she got hit too in an ambush shot me armpit hit an artery she was 20 years old she died at the same time my tour in Iraq was a real high order for me because my biggest enemy out there was my own company first would brief us by saying it's Indian country out there go get em very shocking if this was Indian country perhaps I'm on the wrong side when I was over there a lot of young people would come and ask me for help especially soldiers of color but I'd stand up for them against their command after all I was old enough to be their mom but that got me into lots of trouble with my command I was banned from my unit I wasn't allowed to talk to anyone and then they sent me to another base Scania that's where they sent soldiers to punish them because Scania is on the major highway and gets murdered all the time the whole time I was at Scania hardly ever wrote for my son didn't even think about home it's because you've become hollow like a robot you get up you do your job you hear people complain you talk about this, you talk about that but you don't look inside my sister sent me a medicine box and my prayer stuff in so I'd sit at night smoke a cigarette off my prayers and I watched the moon that brought me some peace that and the songs I hear the Iraqi men singing in the morning I can't scan it, prayer songs the songs would echo and oh my God it was beautiful like angels I'd wake up peaceful because those songs they saved me because there were times I thought I was going insane what the fuck am I doing here why am I not just getting on a plane and going home this paste concentration came I started talking to the Iraqis who worked on things the young ones would come up to me and say you're Indian from India and I would say no then finally one of them comes back after seeing the movie Down to the Wolves and he goes you're a red Indian and I'm going yes I'm a red Indian and he goes Native American and I'm like so I was invited to have a meal with them at the market they had just outside the base they cook the same kind of rice my people cook the same kind of bread and chicken I tell them the same kind of bread tell me about your people and your religion I want to know about your women I want to know what you think about this war I found out so many of their traditions are the same mine the significance of the moon our tobacco ceremonies the way we use sage and their clown system how people marry in and out of clowns and I started to think hell am I doing here am I doing this to these people I started to see how we were changing their clown system their council system it's been there for thousands of years I started to see how imposing democracy means this country and I began to think this war is a genocide and it wasn't we'd have things in place to help the women to help the children to help the civilians to hear about them we'd rather they die yes, it's a church street market and I know it have a show that was then the day finally came sitting on the plane next to Steven I was so nervous I didn't know how my family was going to act or how I was going to cope with being a civilian and I didn't know what was going to happen with Steven either what every girl hates in the army is you meet a guy and you get close but you never really know what kind of guy he's going to be on the outside people can present themselves to whatever they want over there my friend was really in love with her boyfriend from Iraq and when they got home she took a plane to go visit and she waited at the airport for him to pick her up he never came got off the plane, there was nobody there saying welcome back or nothing I came back from Iraq until I saw my grandpa and my aunt my aunt gave me a hug now I never cry only when Grammy died but I cry coming home is like you're a ghost like you die and you're coming back to life and you kind of weasel your way back in because everyone has had to adjust without you I came back a completely different person not as easy going I can't stand loud noise I don't like being around a lot of people and I lost how to dance I think I'm so in tune with marching that I got every really drunk to dance I started getting really depressed I never usually get like that I can usually deal with things but I think it was the army and Iraq and Grammy and losing the baby it just all got too much and it made me really angry the way that I was being treated as a female veteran we don't get the same respect as men we have to really fight for it about seeing death and being shot at because nobody believes me everyone just to be with Steven and to go to school to get away from my family and I got pregnant by him again he's a sweet guy he's different from before he's from the hood he's got whoever he had before he had me I don't know if he had them now but he had to go back to his life and I had to go back to mine so I guess I'm having this baby by myself you know to this day I've never told my family about my time in Iraq and they ask me and I just go oh it was hot I tell them anything because I don't want to feel sorry for myself and the people close to you they don't understand anyhow you can't hate them for not understanding but a lot of the time you do if you ask the majority of soldiers do you know what our purpose is in Iraq I couldn't tell you some might give you some political bullshit to justify it or say that because we wear the uniform we're supposed to not speak bad about it but most soldiers would say they don't see the point you think about this area here is the place the military built for us soldiers we got showers and running water or a toilet you can flush you got trailers, beds, mattresses air condition and washers and dryers big generators you know running all night you got subways and Taco Bells PXs good food, lobster, shrimp steak and we're not paying the Iraqis any property taxes or anything at all for all our luxuries but over here on the outskirts you got Iraqi families living in hut no electricity, no running water who are starving and you tell us we go outside these gates and there's a kid on the side of the road asking for water we're not supposed to give it to them we got warehouses full of water but I can't give one bottle of this kid nor had any because we bombed the shit out of his water supply and everything else too the US government is going to stand for someone coming into our country and telling us how to run things like that but we think it's fine to go on over there and westernize them because people have been living this way for centuries now I may not agree with their way but that is their country it used to say that our way is the right way you know what we are we're just bullies bullies that's what we are I got home from Iraq I kept everything to myself I thought I was going to be okay I went straight back to school I worked hard but by a year later I was tense all the time snipping into my friends stopped hanging out I did homework every night for hours and I wasn't sleeping well either but I didn't get any help though I thought my problem was girl things maybe that's because those post-traumatic stress videos they show you never represent women and I'm getting to a car driving for another bushings so I didn't recognize that there was anything wrong until my boyfriend was like you need to get some help so I did so people ask me what the best part of being in the army was for me is it the drive that I have to succeed now or all the friendships that I made I can't think of it every day there was a bad day by the time I got home in April 2004 after 11 months in Iraq I was really a mess I couldn't sleep for more than 50 minutes at a time and I'd be awake for 2 hours in between I got angry easily agitated I had nightmares about the mortar attack flashback on New Year's Eve they had fireworks in our town square and as soon as I heard the booms I fell to my knees every time I opened my eyes the faces in front of me would fade away and I could drop to that night I was crying hysterically my friends didn't know what to do and I had nothing to talk about all my friends' conversations were about movies I hadn't seen or fashion I didn't know about anything I talked about to morbid very quick little kids in Iraq that mortar attack then everyone would get quiet and no one would know what to say I remember this girl talking about how she wanted some designer purse and I said yeah I know what you mean one time in Iraq these kids wanted some food and I felt really bad because we didn't have enough to give them I hate it when you can't get what you want no one just sat there they felt like assholes I felt like an asshole I was so out of place after I got home I couldn't feel comfortable in my skin and I couldn't talk about it to anyone I didn't know other soldiers were going through the same thing so I thought I was crazy my back and head were injured too I'm 80% disabled now because my back so messed up from banging around in the humby no shock absorbers hitting my head on the ceiling compressing my spine and I couldn't stop worrying about that guy and the mortar attack Sergeant Hill and whether he'd lost his arm and could I have done something more I tried to get a medical discharge from the army to pay for my benefit they made it so difficult I gave up I couldn't get the tuition they promised me for a long time either for a long time I couldn't even get to a clinic for my medication or therapy because all the VA clinics were so far away I work with veterans now so I know a lot of soldiers go through this which helps it's important for vets to reach out to each other so you don't feel alone and crazy like I did um I still think a lot about why we went for war was Saddam a bad person who needed to be removed from power yes was he the reason for us going in there and it's not the guys sitting in their air conditioned offices at the Pentagon who are feeling the aftermath of it it's the mother and father who are getting their child sent home in a box it's the innocent people of Iraq who've been killed and raped and had their villages turned upside down I really do love some of those people of Iraq but I don't know how to help them some of those children were so beautiful they only wanted attention but I knew I had to kill a kid to save my money how can anybody love anyone who has such horrible thoughts when I came out from Afghanistan I didn't talk to anyone about rape that was my own fault six months between my time on my mother while I had to lay vehicles mark never go back military has a way to make females believe they brought this upon themselves yes I made some bad decisions but the guilt lies with the predator not me there's an unwritten code of silence when it comes to sexual assault in the military but if this happened to me and nobody knew about it I just know it's happening to females as well it makes me so mad when I think about the fact that it'll let them get to me and let the military I was so proud of being third generation I had dreams of becoming a high ranking officer one day like my father and my grandfather by the time I came home I felt like I messed everything up I let my mom and dad down I let everyone down I hated myself September 30th 2006 that was the day it was all going to end no more shame would be brought to my family it will be over take the tip of a blade to the middle of your forearm touch the top for the main thing press the home steel through your skin drag it down so there's no room for mistakes one shot, one kill that's what they teach in the army take the steak, blood, running bright red for a moment it seemed that that gash would bring relief I was ready to cut the other arm when my phone rang it was mama she felt God pushing her to call she wanted to tell me how proud of me she was I went to Iraq I used to hold healing ceremonies but when I got back I couldn't deal with those women anymore to me everything they talked about was petty I hated one hearing lost connection my mother brothers sons my boyfriend everybody came back so angry and I didn't know why nobody could stand me couldn't stand myself it's really hard to admit you have PTSD it feels weak because the military teaches you to suck it up and drive on after I've been home for a while my former husband George died he'd rake me and beat me up but I went to his funeral anyway maybe just to make sure he was dead but another part of me that cried next to him was my husband because he was a Vietnam vet who got lost he didn't come back for one thing he always talked about raping girls in Vietnam so what he did to me wasn't any different from what he used to so who's fault is it I don't know but I don't think he was bored that kind of person I think the military made him like that and I forgave him after all I had to after I'd been home from Iraq for about half a year I wouldn't even wear a makeup wouldn't dress up didn't care couldn't concentrate couldn't sleep, couldn't work and I became paranoid thinking people were following me and breaking into my house and I was afraid to take sleeping pills because I thought that would make me vulnerable if somebody attacked me I joined the army to get off welfare and after 22 years in the military he right was on welfare again, my friends who I served with in Iraq a woman a year ago they found her dead in her home she'd been dead for two days had PTSD and depression so bad and she couldn't tell anybody because there was nobody to tell so she killed herself the war isn't over when you come home one thing I really can't stand is for people to come and say thank you for your service are you thanking me for participating in a genocide is that what you want because I am not protecting anybody's country I am taking somebody now even though I never put a trigger I feel that I participated in a genocide I feel very responsible and that's a hard thing to live with very shy as a spiritual person how as a mother can I send my own sons to war I the whole thing I thought it would be it is based on the book that she wrote which was called The Lonely Soldier The Lonely Soldier inspired two things one thing was a law suit against the Pentagon in which Helen testified twice and the other thing is The Invisible War a documentary about women and sexual harassment in the military in the rest of the military there was two things it was Oscar nominated I would like to welcome Helen there you go lovely I would also like to introduce Emma Norton a solicitor who works for the Human Rights Organization Liberty Liberty was founded 34 years ago and is a UK one of the UK's oldest human rights organisations and fights for the civil liberties of human rights so I would like to welcome Helen Emma at the end of it I'll open it up to the audience so one of the things that I'm sure many of you would like to ask I'll ask Helen first if I don't get the names wrong Helen are these stories typical of the stories that you've seen or heard they are really representative much more so than I realised when I first started doing the research I spent three years interviewing some 40 women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and many of them I interviewed for many many hours over and over again over that three years gradually winning their trust and then I found a lot of studies that had been done in the states of veterans about sexual harassment sexual assault traumatic stress disorder and I found with horrible statistics that 30% of women said they had been sexually assaulted by their comrades while serving in the military that was almost one in three and 99% had been harassed which completely reflected exactly what I was hearing from the women and some of whom you met tonight as it were so the combination of the traumas of war of the culture of the military of this underfunded wrong-headed war which is corrupting and was solved and the way they were treated by their male comrades and their superiors was left really with double and sometimes triple traumas so yes indeed these are very representative stories and of course individuals there are some people who have better experiences than others ok I'm going to pass it over to Emma it's a US play it's a US story and I remember when I did the reading in 2013 I had somebody from the UK army who came up to me and he said I'm just going to say one thing to you it couldn't possibly happen in England so I'm going to pass it back on to you and please could you answer that I would have one thing to say to him which would be called Royal Annemarie Elements that was just a very recent case and we only know about her because she's dead she was a Royal Military Police Officer and in 2009 she was based in Germany she alleged that she was raped by two fellow Royal Military Police Officers she reported it and was investigated by the Royal Military Police themselves unsurprisingly no charges were brought she was subjected to a campaign of rape related bullying her mental state deteriorated it was just one problem after another and she took her own life in 2011 and the only reason we've been able to get what happened to her is because she died and because there was an inquest but there are, I am sure and I know because some of the women called me other women, lots of other women who have suffered rape who have been able to survive to the extent that they have committed suicide and so these, what happens to them has remained hidden so I don't doubt that it's a problem in all of your life One of the questions the American women had to be very vocal I'd just like to ask Helen how vocal were there about the story what did they know were they false coming or did you have to tease it out of them I approached the interviews originally just wanting to know why they joined the military and what it was like being a woman at war why would a woman in particular join the military in the time of war I wanted and so everybody else was wondering the same thing and I never I have a lot of experience interviewing traumatised people it's something I've done a lot as a writer and a journalist and you don't ask directly but all I have to say is after winning their trust over long hours of listening to them about their backgrounds and whatever else they wanted to talk about was how did the men treat you and how did the other women treat you I never asked them a pointed question on that and some of them would come out right away with these stories Clara, the one who tried to commit suicide at the end by cutting herself told me very fast what happened for her amazingly fast but others took months before it finally came out because it was so extremely hard to talk about sometimes they'd have panic attacks in the middle of the interviews and not be able to breathe so it's not easy what you're seeing of course is a condensed version of hours and hours and hours and months of conversation but all the words are their words and the songs are real military songs and I wanted to be very true to that because they struggled so hard to get those words out and they told their story so well and I wanted to honour that by making a real verbatim play What do you think the prevalence is in the UK since we haven't got these voices so is there any other faces that you could I've got colleagues here from other who represent people who are subjected to harassment bullying including sexual harassment sexual bullying so I think it is quite a significant problem one of the major issues is the army is very bad at retaining information and publishing information so depending on who you ask and when you ask them you'll get a different answer and the statistics that they've published there had not been a single conviction for rape in court martial between 2012 and April 2014 that was just a snapshot by their own account there wasn't even a single prosecution for rape and there was just one other important statistic two years ago 400 women were polled service women every single one said she'd had unwanted sexual harassment every single one so that suggests that there is a very serious cultural problem there's a silent problem in England that is bubbling under the surface that may be I think like the voices that we've heard the American voices have come out and we've had folk and we've had the play so therefore it's out there in discussion on how far do you think we've got to in the UK regarding this issue I think there's increasing concern about it increasing awareness about it but it's always really difficult you're saying to a victim or a survivor of sexual violence come and share your story that's a really really hard thing to do for anybody and it's an especially hard thing to do if you live and breathe and work and play in the armed forces that's your entire environment so if it happens to me in civilian life it's appalling but my family are not connected to what has happened to me my workplace is not connected to what has happened to me but if I'm in the military none of that is true so it's like a double triple whammy it's a very very hard I think that's one of the things that you found Helen is that the military is an all-encompassing world that things women live in and therefore it's very difficult for them to come out of that world and if they do they're shun, they're excommunicated and therefore it's a question you know how did you find many of those women felt did they feel that they betrayed their comrades well firstly they were all veterans so they had all separated from the military by the time I interviewed them I never would have got these stories out of active duty soldiers they would not ever tell me such things they were still invested in protecting themselves and not being seen as traitors as winders and they also had signed a release and they weren't allowed to really talk about the real things that went on in the military while they were on active duty the gag wars we called it in the States so that would have been a useless exercise in my new year I had to find people who had reached the phase where they were willing they needed to talk these women really wanted to talk to them for different reasons some because they felt that they were not getting the recognition that they deserved for the danger they had gone through some of them because they were angry at what we'd done in Iraq some of them because they were angry about what had been done to them and they wanted to be heard and they wanted their real names used which I did at the book so it took such courage and some of them retreated back into not being able to talk about it afterwards because post traumatic stress disorder you go through phases when you can talk and when you can't talk but this was not the other thing I wanted to say is that a lot of them had no idea of the problem they thought it was all they were the only ones and they were alone and one of the things that play book achieved I'm so happy about is that they found out that they were not of them that there are thousands and thousands of women who have gone through this and a lot of men too so it's here and more people speak out here and more others will be encouraged too I'm just going to get Emma Liberty's running a military justice campaign you like to just well that goes it's kind of snowballed not by itself but we've been really quite overwhelmed by the momentum and the interest that it's attracted from the public and from serving men and women and from people inside the army and the chain of command could you just explain exactly what the military justice campaign what you're trying to achieve with it because I think a lot of our audience don't know what this campaign is it started off with a number of cases so Corporal Anne-Marie Elements is one but we're also representing through the Deep Cup families some of you may have heard of that though four young people that died in various suspicious circumstances have never been properly investigated and we've got lots of other cases less profile but nonetheless so it came out of that but as soon as you start scratching the surface of what's happened to these people you realise that the fundamental problem is that the military is allowed to investigate itself and even in cases where it's not technically allowed to investigate itself by the time it's got to any outside independent involvement they've been able to deal with that and shut it right down plus you have a cultural problem that it's really difficult for serving men and women to speak out because they are then shunned and they're looking at their career going down the pan so it was a response to all of these problems that we were identifying the hopelessness, the interminability that's a word of the complaints process just how it's almost designed to wear somebody down and disincentify them from complaining and also this cultural problem with women that the armed forces clearly have and in particular their absolute inability to deal with cases of sexual violence and to support those women so one of the things that's come out is what is the response to people at the top in the military when these stories come out what's happened in the US has there been any forward steps towards improving the situation of women that have been sexually harassed or raped laws in place that may inculcate their situation the combination of the lawsuit that came out of my work and the film which focused on the lawsuit was terrific because people's minds are changing more by movies than they are by books alas for me as a writer but it's true and that film The Invisible War was shown to the government and it was shown to the military top brass and it's become a standard viewing for all incoming Marines now after watching this documentary about sexual assault in the military and it's really stirred people up so yes there have been changes in protocol there have been changes in the way rape is reported the way victims are supposed to be protected and looked after and who you report to has been moved up the chain of command now we still and President Obama also said in the speech that this was a problem that had to be stopped and the history that the President the Commander-in-Chief has recognised this is a problem but there's still a huge issue which is similar to here which is that the military has its own justice system and it decides whether to investigate and prosecute any wrongdoing within itself so if you imagine a corrupt corporation and we ask the CEO the corporation to investigate wrongdoing in his own company ha! I mean it's an obvious conflict of interest it's obvious that they are going to be invested in covering it up and that's exactly what happens but the only solution is to take these cases out of the military all together and put them in the hands of civilian court and until that happens we're going to keep getting cover-ups and lack of justice for these victims I'm going to ask Emma have we had any forward stages in the military element case what did the coroner say at her second interest the coroner was extremely critical of the army and found that the act of alleged rape had directly contributed to her death and the bullying has contributed to her death so you couldn't have hoped for a stronger burden and when we got that we then wrote to some senior members in the armed forces and invited them to talk to us and to their credit a couple of them have and we've had a series of meetings I don't doubt that there are some pretty good people up there who want to try and get it right the problem is I hear them still as quite lone voices and they are still inside the armed forces and with the best will in the world they are just not qualified they are just not qualified to deal with cases of sexual violence which they see primarily as a disciplinary problem not as a crime that needs to be sat out where people need to be held accountable so what is liberty actually fighting for what would you like things to be done there has been some small steps in regarding the ombudsman all of those cases where there has to be where there are serious sexual violence cases cases that are sufficiently serious sufficient seriousness must always be dealt with by salunia is that what you would like absolutely done there can be no reason for the army to be investigating cases or the services police to be investigating those cases so they need to be taken out of place in the hands of civilians and at the moment there is an enormous lack of clarity about when civilian police are involved when service police that is army or neighbouring police are involved so that needs to be sorted out and the new armed forces ombudsman which has been trumpeted and heralded and is a very good step still if you could just explain to the audience the ombudsman's job will be she doesn't yet take her powers to investigate complaints and she is external and she's independently appointed so that's a really really good thing but her powers are still limited and she can only get involved after a service person has been through the internal complaints process by which point in our experience they've usually given up because it's so hopeless but nonetheless we think that it's a really positive step that they've appointed her she is independent she does have better powers than she was originally going to have after lobbying by us and other organisations so is that not a liberty after the Anne Marie element case? was that the original lobbying from the ombudsman the day or the, I think it was the week of this critical verdict clearly it was Philip Hammond at the time wanted to be able to announce something so he announced the creation of a new ombudsman with very very limited powers very heavily critical and that was in 2014, just last year and then after a lot of lobbying that they conceded by the defence select committee's own recommendations that it needed to have the greater teeth she now does have that still doesn't go far enough but it's a good step and the other things we want to see are the main thing is the human rights act you've probably all heard that we're going to reveal the human rights act apparently that is an absolutely vital tool for service management the element family would not have got a fresh inquest without it they would not have got a fresh rape investigation without it the deep cut families would have not got anywhere without the human rights act and of the rape cases where where women report being raped it's not being investigated we're able to use the human rights act to force the police to investigate these are a hugely beneficial piece of legislation for service people and the MOD and the government want to do that ok well I am going to there's a lot of facts here so what I'd like to do is just open up the debate to anybody in the audience and do we have any Twitter comments Barzil? well I was just trying to take Syria upstairs that's why in the notification we just have someone saying that just saw a great play and we saw just one of that cosplay theatre about gender injustice war no specific question oh that's lovely absolutely so I'm just going to let you say we're having people watch this all over the world and they can enter into this debate as you can because you're live which is even more exciting so Helen would like to ask Emma the first question but after that I am going to open and over to you my question is whether now that you've seen the play Helen's testimony do their stories echo what you're hearing here well it's interesting the women so far have all been on barracks either in England so not on active operations overseas or on British barracks but abroad and not on active operations but in terms of the culture of sexism absolutely in terms of the sense the enormous sense of disloyalty that she then feels for having had the audacity to report a rape absolutely it does resonate can I take questions from the audience okay lovely thank you mine's a question for Helen actually I used to be in touch with the women who originally spoke to have they read the work seeing the documentary and what do they think of it I'm in touch with some of them I was in touch with more of them but as the time has gone by I've left some of them alone because they need to move on some of them have told me that just my voice triggers the memories which triggers a flashback or something so I'm actually bad for their health but they read their chapters in the book to make sure I had it right they all have the book and a lot of them came to see the play when it first opened in New York and then afterwards they came up on stage and the actors stood behind me each soldier who they played and it was very moving and then they both would take questions from the audience there wasn't a dry eye in the house and they bonded because I'm sure the actors here would relate to this they felt like sisters because even though they'd never met they felt they knew each other so well and they all went out after as it got totally plastered It's a question followed by a comment if that's allowed Maybe I was interested in the comments about PTSD because I work with a lot of service personnel mainly there because so few in number relatively and because as you said you have to draw these testimonies in your play come after many many many hours and not the challenge yet I was very struck by the comment that the character made about women's PTSD being different in its manifestation since it's meant to be PTSD I wonder if you have any Yes, that's been studied now in the States and there are significant differences both in the rates of PTSD and how it manifests itself women tend to turn their violence inward more than outward compared to men there are similarities self-destructive behaviour drug abuse alcoholism but women are often dealing with the double trauma sexual harassment on top of the combat trauma and sexual harassment PTSD was actually a term coined originally about rape survival not about combat so there are these a lot of women end up spinning down into the vortex and men are homeless in larger proportions not numbers but larger proportions so those are some differences Is there a question over there? Yes, quite a good question Both of you really What is the policy instrument that allows the military to treat criminal allegations within the military as internal policy issues Why is that allowed? One of the important aspects of our campaign is it's quite complicated but there's a military justice system and there is a civilian justice system and it seems to us it's not never quite clear which one is supposed to apply the narrative is civilian is supposed to have is supposed to supersede but there are a number of cases where a commanding officer is in charge of his troops he is required as a matter of law to refer to certain criminal allegations to authorities he has to do that rape, murder, GBH there are a few exceptions to that and one of those is sexual assault a commanding officer receives a report of sexual assault he is not required of a matter of law to refer that to the police either service police or civilian police he can use his discretion to encourage the complainer to just let's deal with that internally as a disciplinary matter and we say that that sends an absolutely horrendous message about how they see sexual violence but more generally there is an enormous lack of clarity as to when civilian is supposed to apply and when military jurisdiction is supposed to apply so depending on where it's happened and who's in charge you might have a local police force investigate in another case it might be the military police investigating and that really does need to get sorted out to bring something in I think with the Anne-Marie element case it was quite... it happened abroad and that's in Berlin was it Berlin or Germany? it was in Germany and that caused another complication obviously that's the reason why they have a separate system because obviously if a commanding officer's in I don't know if he's in Helmand probably they need to be able to apply British law so that's what it's all about I've got a case like Anne-Marie in Germany there is a theory you wonder why it's the same system there what's wrong with German law but in any event that was a really extreme example of how well it can go when it wasn't just the service police it was military police investigating other military police officers and it would be like police officers at the same police station investigating it just would never happen so it was extraordinary it wasn't identified as a problem until it was gone to you I'm just going to take that question over there a question for Helen it's a question to Helen, the dramatist clearly you've got a lot of authentic testimony and that is both a great good it's a restraint you want to be authentic to the voice of these women as a dramatist and on a second related point Emerson said another circle can be drawn you've obviously drawn a circle around sexual harassment of women in the American army the other circles as we move out are hinted at and touched upon in the voices of these women is rape and violence as an act of war traditionally men giving 3Ds to rape and pillage in cities that the actual invasion of Iraq in any invasion of rape and violence of that country not to mention issues of nationalism and so on and so forth and the one moment of real horror in all this testimony however brutal and disturbing it was was the challenge at the beginning and end and there was nothing in the testimony that went close to the real deep horror upon horror upon horror piles of bodies in the read and the images that come out well where might you have gone with this and have you been actively free to take it from well I'm going to defend myself but I wasn't interested in doing that I mean I wrote a novel I did it in the novel I'm a novelist actually not a playwright and that's where I was free to go deep inside where I think where war happens deep inside people and corrupt the soul further than the soldiers could even say but with this I thought the power in it was because these were the real words of the soldiers and because they were saying things we have this play is a little historical now because I was doing these interviews from 2005 to 2007 2008 and at the time America was very very raw raw about the war still and you didn't hear much criticism and you never heard criticism from within the military from soldiers themselves so what these women were saying about genocide about the Iraqis being like them about killing children about their guilt about what were we even doing there was radical more so than it might sound now what I did do as a dramatist was take the stories and instead of making them one whole story one at a time I split them into three acts and I pulled the structure with their parallel stories before they went to war war and home because I wanted to show the arc of what war does to people and how it changes people and I also wanted to go in and out emotionally with some that are more analytical some that are more emotional some lighter moments the way you would do in a fictional play so there was actually quite a lot of structure that I was able to do even within the confines of not being able to act and write the words but in terms of of what I would do otherwise as a play I have no idea I've never given it a moment to thought I'm not going to make that up on the spot I wrote a novel which is out there and you can read it ok I'm going to take one long question I just was wondering if there was any veterans you met that you considered what had survived psychologically at all through all this trauma or who had resolution so you were able to deal with it and every story was incredibly moving but out of the 14 was it that you really followed I just wondered if there was anybody who seemed to have a more positive story and managed to get through it with help or without help or if they had a complaint actually had it resolved through the military oh well in the latter the latter part of your question did they have it resolved absolutely not that almost never happens so that's that but I can feel you in a little bit on what happened to those soldiers since the play the terrorists the African American went back to war she had to deploy one more time she went back to Iraq she was fine though politically but she was fine she was a very strong person and she had a very strong supportive family behind her which is all important in how you cope with any kind of she was the one with the four children who were met and the husband and they were terrific so she was fine until she went back and I then lost touch with her so I don't know what happened then Sylvia, Maria the one with the boyfriend she ended up for a while in the homeless shelter for better and single mothers raising that child on her own and she then she got onto Oprah and I'm happy to say that I've changed she is she's like a cork she just bounces back up and she now has a very important position working with other soldiers in the Department of Veterans Affairs and is doing very well and I believe she's just got engaged so she's fine too the Native American one Santiago has had a very, very rough time and the others I don't know I lost touch I'm just going to conclude this because we're running on and Helen and Emma are going to be outside and we'll be back in more questions I wonder if Emma would like to say a few words about liberty and what they do Yes, well as you said we are very old you said the 34 were actually 31 81 I meant I found it in 1934 so please forgive me but if you care about the Human Rights Act and if you care about military justice please think about joining us you don't need to be an active member there are all these people that are really concerned about this at the moment would be enormously valuable and that's a really good practical thing you can do if you're concerned about the state of the nation at the moment which some people are OK, well I'd like to thank Helen I'd like to thank Emma and most of all I'd like to thank the actors who are doing an amazing job my technicians who are amazing as well this is the first time we've live streamed the show to everywhere do tell people, not in England anybody because we would like them to come live to the show but if you know anybody in America I will give you an email, a link and you can tell them to watch a show wherever they might be and most of all I'd like to thank our kickstarter backers who kicked it all off and that's why we're here thank you very much all of you wherever you may be in the world thank you