Voices
resigned when stories of an affair
with his biographer broke. Gen.
John Allen, current commander
of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, too, was for a time facing possible relieve of command
if the 20,000-plus pages of email
exchanges with a civilian woman
named Jill Kelley had been found
to have breached military codes of
conduct. And, to make the story
even murkier, the FBI agent who
initially took up the investigation
of all of this was discovered to
have sent inappropriate shirtless
images of himself to Kelley; so he,
too, is now under investigation.
Some called the complex situation a ménage à cinq, or better
yet, a love pentagon.
Still, regardless of the geometry,
one can always rely on this old savory caveat: sex follows the army
the way bottle flies follow fresh
dung. In fact, it’s a little perplexing to see our nation’s press corps
in a feeding frenzy over the rather
commonplace adulterous love affair
between army head honchos and socialites, as if unaware of the nature
of sex and war and its consequences
since the Iliad and Odyssey.
In light of this, the news coverage following Petraeus’ resignation seemed rather disproportion-
ANDREW
LAM
HUFFINGTON
12.02.12
ate to the actual deeds, and the
shock seemed manufactured in
contrast to the real, untold story: That thousands of unwanted
children born overseas from the
American military rarely get to
Compared to past wars,
there are few sexual outlets
available; but the top brass
can fly to and fro with their
girlfriends-cum-biographers
in private jets.”
see their stories told in print, and
that the number of incidents of
women being assaulted in the military have a long history of going
undercounted and underreported.
Here’s a bit of history: The term
hooker itself can be traced back
to the American Civil War, when
Union General Joe Hooker was famous for having a flock of women
following his soldiers to the extent
that they were known as “Hooker’s
girls” or “Hooker’s division.”
Sex with soldiers, indeed, was
such a norm during the Vietnam
War that it was an economy in and
of itself. It propped up bars and fueled the black market of Saigon and
Danang (soldiers sold army goods
often in the same place where they