Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 100

BOOK REVIEWS
unnecessary because “If it’s a legitimate rape, the
female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing
down.” Akin’s comment caused his own party to
drop him, with President Obama responding simply,
“The views expressed were offensive. Rape is rape.”
The author takes particular aim at large institutions, including universities, churches, and the
military, for not only failing to install or enforce
procedures and policies to protect constituents from
sexual predators but also for lacking the will to
investigate and prosecute alleged perpetrators when
a rape is reported.
After discussing notorious cases involving
accused rapists such as international financier Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Penn State’s Jerry Sandusky,
assorted Catholic priests, and professional athletes
as well as lesser known college frat boys, prisoners,
and military cadets, Raphael dares to imagine a world
without rape denial, offering ways to improve the
way rape cases are reported, handled, and analyzed—
and she says the process begins within each of us.
“Writer Albert Camus understood that, in the face
of evil, ordinary people must just respond out of
simple decency: ‘All I maintain is that on this earth
there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s
up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with
the pestilences,’” she posits.
Raphael cites studies that indicate only two to
eight percent of rape reports are false—and it would
have been interesting to read real accounts from those
who cried rape when there was none, or perhaps from
men who were rape victims.
However, the author’s laser focus is on the gender
that statistically suffers the most from this crime,
and that makes it must reading for anyone wishing
to understand how something as abhorrent as rape
can ever be denied.
Carol Saynisch, M.A., APR, is a journalist and
international media consultant from Steilacoom,
Washington.

NONE OF US WERE LIKE THIS BEFORE
American Soldiers and Torture
Joshua E.S. Phillips, Verso
London and New York
2010, 238 pages, $16.96

98

A

T THE HEART of None of Us Were Like This
Before is one unit’s tragic story.
The 1st Battalion, 68th Armor Regiment, 3rd
Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, deployed to Iraq
from April 2003 to March 2004. These soldiers
knew they might experience terrible events in war.
However, unlike their imaginings, these events did
not find them in great tank battles in Iraq’s deserts
and cities. It instead found a few of them in a small
jail on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Lion near
Balad, Iraq, where the soldiers inflicted horrors
upon their detainees and, ultimately, themselves.
According to their first-hand accounts, they tied
prisoners to the highest rung on the jail bars and
“let them hang there for a couple days.” They made
detainees do push-ups and prolonged stress positions. They deprived prisoners of food and drink.
They kept detainees awake by blasting music in
their ears. They splashed chicken blood on walls to
create fear and performed mock executions. They
beat, choked, and water boarded prisoners.
The tales they tell Joshua Phillips are mutually
consistent and are the same stories they tell their
loved ones. One of them showed Phillips photos to
substantiate his claims.
The soldiers never “broke” a detainee (that is,
forced a detainee to give them helpful information).
But, the soldiers themselves returned home broken,
mere shells of the young men they had once been.
Sgt. Adam Gray drank too much, became bitter and
moody, and attempted suicide. Once he “snapped,”
putting a knife to a fellow soldier’s throat. Spc.
Jonathan Millantz, a medic, was discharged for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He, too, drank too
much and attempted a drug overdose. Other soldiers
from the unit struggled with drugs and alcohol,
insomnia, high blood pressure, depression, keeping
jobs, and various symptoms associated with PTSD.
One of the soldiers, after years of depression
and therapy, angrily told Phillips: “None of us were
like this before. None of us thought about dragging
people through concertina wire or beating them or
sandbagging them or strangling them or anything like
that.” Heartbreakingly, both Gray and Millantz died,
miles and three years apart, under circumstances
the Army ruled accidental but which many friends,
fellow soldiers, and loved ones believe to have been
suicides.
November-December 2013 ? MILITARY REVIEW