Finding Private Guillen

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

PFC Vanessa Guillen has been missing for two months. The details surrounding her disappearance are sketchy at best. Her wallet, ID card, and car keys were found where she had been working earlier. Her car was still in the parking lot and her cell phone was missing and still hasn't turned up.

As far as I know, PFC Guillen was never listed as AWOL. I suspect there will be a glaringly obvious reason for this when and if she is ever located. She would have been declared AWOL by someone in her chain of command, someone who knows damned well she's not AWOL.

Y'all remember when Chandra Levy went missing? How there was 24/7 news coverage for weeks, mostly due to allegations she had been having an affair with a married congressman old enough to be her daddy. Do you remember Natalee Ann Holloway? She disappeared on a senior trip to Aruba. Again, wall to wall news coverage. The same thing happened when Elizabeth Smart was taken from her home by a deranged handyman.

Can you see where I am going here? Every one of these women became the focus of a deranged media frenzy caused by the fact they are young, attractive, affluent, and white.

Yeah, I went there. Every one of these women became the focus of a deranged media frenzy caused by the fact they are young, attractive, affluent, and white. There's even a name for it. "Missing White Woman Syndrome". Every day hundreds of women go missing, yet the very second one of these jewels misses curfew, the media feeding frenzy begins, usually hampering the efforts of law enforcement with rumors, innuendo, and invasion of privacy for family members.

Let me make this clear: no woman should have to live in fear of 'disappearing' from anywhere, be it home, work, or vacation. Every year hundreds of women go missing, many of them never to be heard from again. Sometimes they do it themselves to get away from horrific abuse and really don't want to be found. The rest make a tiny blip on a society's radar scope and disappear into the cold case files. Then there are the favored few ringing the media cherries all the way across the board. They are white, attractive, and affluent.

While you are thinking this could never happen in the American military let me remind you of the story of Jessica Lynch. This is from a Wikipedia article related to the "Missing White Woman Syndrome".

"Social commentaries pointed to media bias in the coverage of soldier Jessica Lynch versus that of her fellow soldiers, Shoshana Johnson and Lori Piestewa. All three were ambushed in the same attack during the Iraq War on March 23, 2003, with Piestewa being killed and Lynch and Johnson being injured and taken prisoner. Lynch, a young, blonde, white woman, received far more media coverage than Johnson (a black woman and a single mother) and Piestewa (a Hopi from an impoverished background, and also a single mother), with media critics suggesting that the media gave more attention to the woman with whom audiences supposedly more readily identify with."

Meaning Lynch looked good on camera.

PFC Guillen is Hispanic. She's not from a wealthy family. She was targeted by a sexual predator who in all likelihood has been getting away with hurting women for a long time.  When CID finally catches him, when he can no longer retaliate against his victims, there will be dozens of women coming forward. Women no one listened to because they didn't fit into the proper media format.   

I am an Old Cold Warrior. I enlisted about five minutes after the WAAC was disbanded.  For the first time, women were being assigned to traditionally all-male military units. Usually with little or no preparation or indication of what we had gotten ourselves into.  I won't name the post or the unit, as the victim deserves more respect than what she got from the Army. 

She was a big girl, not overweight, just a big strong healthy girl. She wasn't beautiful or drop-dead gorgeous, best described as average looking,  married to another soldier, and doing everything right. Until this one field training exercise. For this one, we were only out for a few days and were sleeping in two-person tents instead of the big ones.  Her tentmate was on guard duty, and it was just her, alone in the tent, when she was awakened by a knife to her throat and instructions to keep quiet while he raped her and not to report it or he'd kill her.

She knew who he was. He was in the same company. She saw him every day when she went to work and she was not going to let him get away with it. 

She started screaming and reported it.

Took forever but the MPs finally showed up and took her to the hospital for a medical exam.

She gets grilled for hours.  The first thing they wanted to know was what was she wearing. We were on a field training exercise and I suppose they were laboring under the assumption we were all wearing Fredrick's of Hollywood lingerie under our uniforms. The questioning got worse from there. She named her attacker.

That's when command stepped in. They sent him to mental health. Not because he was being accused of sexual assault, but because they wanted to know why he went after this particular victim, instead of one of the more attractive women.

She left the Army soon afterward. He stayed in. Probably retired. She got a lifetime of nightmares. 

The military, like the civilian media pimps, doesn't give a rat's rear end about female soldiers unless they can get good press out of her. A twenty-year-old private of Hispanic descent is not considered media worthy. Young enlisted women complaining about unwanted sexual advances from older NCOs and officers is not conducive to good press. For the woman, it can be career suicide. The military has a new tool now.  It's a little chart that adds up all these vague little symptoms and calls it "Borderline Personality Disorder".  The beauty of this, that is from the military standpoint, is that BPD is considered a pre-existing condition, meaning you lied on your enlistment forms, no bennies for you, have a nice life.  Works wonders for keeping women in check. 

PFC Guillen has one thing many of these women don't, a mother and a sister who won't shut up. If it were not for these women, Vanessa would have been written off as a deserter long ago.  Only this isn't enough. There is no media frenzy outside the gates of Fort Hood. There are no daily press briefings.  We are in the middle of pandemic and protesters marching against police brutality while the most ineffective president to ever steal an election sulks in the Oval Office because no one wanted to go to his stupid rally.

Then again, what else can you expect from a man who sent out this tweet before he got into office: 

"26,000 unreported sexual assults* in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together" *his misspelling not mine.