Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1997/05/14/on_military_rape_charges.php
Wednesday, May 14, 1997
So Staff Sergeant Delmar G. Simpson, a drill instructor at Aberdeen Proving Grounds Army Base, married and father of two, has been convicted of 18 counts of raping the female recruits he was training, his conviction resulting from 54 criminal charges on which the jury handed down its verdict.
Sergeant Simpson obviously is in terrible trouble. He probably will get out of federal prison as an old man, if ever.
But the Army, and with it the rest of the U. S. Military, is in terrible trouble too because of the facts that emerged at the trial of Sergeant Simpson. Other cases awaiting court martial support the evidence at the Simpson trial that the absolutely necessary discipline in our armed forces appears — to put it mildly — to have seriously collapsed. It may be useful to get back to first principles.
The U.S. Army, like all other branches, has as its goal: fighting wars. To put it bluntly, the purpose of the military is to kill people and destroy property as efficiently as possible.
In case anyone thinks warfare is going to end anytime soon, consider the following. There has been a historical estimate that since human history began to be recorded there have been exactly 29 years during which warfare was not going on somewhere.
The job of the military is not to provide careers for women. Its job is not to legitimize homosexuality. Anything that detracts from its unit efficiency — regiment, ship, airbase — must be excluded in view of its essential job.
I will interject here that I understood this in fewer than fifteen minutes after entering training as a naval officer during the Korean War. We young trainees understood that we could be handling very expensive and dangerous equipment, as well as things that made a very loud explosion when they went off.
From that perspective, we understood that we wanted everyone around us functioning at top efficiency, without distractions, and knowing what his job was. That was the prevailing ethos of the Navy as I understood it, and it must be the ethos of any military organization worthy of the name.
We also understood that the duty of enforcing that ethos extended from the bottom to the top of the chain-of-command, and the penalties for not doing so were severe. Now this brings us back to Sergeant Delmar G. Simpson.
What emerged at his trial was a picture of chaos at his Army base. The witnesses described, according to The New York Times , 'a freewheeling, libidinous atmosphere in which adultery and sexual activity between superiors and subordinates were rampant, drill sergeants competed to have sex with as many trainees as they could... Soldiers had public intercourse in a public game-and-television room and in the backs of buses, and it was common to find empty liquor bottles and used condoms in the trainees' barracks and storage rooms in the mornings.' It is obvious here, perhaps primarily, that the chain-of-command in that unit had collapsed completely.
Sergeant Simpson must have had a Lieutenant directly above him. Did that Lieutenant know nothing of all this? Were there no inspections of the barracks, buses, rumpus rooms? Were there no official reports? And, above the Lieutenant was a Captain, a Major, a Lieutenant Colonel, and a Colonel — everyone of them with legal responsibility for his command.
As it happens, I served in Naval Intelligence, and we dealt with many things, but nothing quite like this. We sometimes received information, if merely an anonymous note, that something was 'wrong' on the 'Destroyer Farragut.' We would look into it. Call sailors in for an interview.
Of course, any homosexual activity on a ship of war was criminal under our regulations, and rightly so. Today, I suppose, we would have to investigate heterosexual activity. The thought is boggling.
For officers, also, there was a count called 'conduct unbecoming' — and this included conspicuous drunkenness and, certainly, adultery. Both could utterly destroy an officer's naval career. When President Harry Truman heard that none other than Dwight Eisenhower was holding hands with his female aide in England, he informed him through George Marshall that if he did not cut it out he would relieve him of command and destroy him in the Army. That also would have relieved Eisenhower of any presidential ambitions he then entertained.
The entire situation revealed by the Delmar Simpson case must be cleaned up on an emergency basis, with convictions and dishonorable discharges —?and the process must extend right up through the chain-of-command, obviously will involve career officers.
Our commander-in-chief, of course, is in no position to emulate Harry Truman.
To repeat. The job of a military organization — ship, tank, or plane — is to destroy the designated enemy and his property efficiently, and anything that interferes with that job is frivolous.
Sergeant Simpson and those who begave as he did have no place in the military, and such behavior merits condign punishment. And long serious thought will have to be given to integrating women into combat units.