Editor’s Note
She is a veteran working to change U.S. military culture who is quoted in articles in Vogue and The Daily Beast this month. In Vogue, Mimi Swartz describes her as excelling in her active duty career and as “a freckle-faced former Air Force mechanic who favors ponytails and cigarettes” hanging with her best friend, someone she bonded with living in Biloxi, Mississippi through their common experience of military sexual assault. Jacob Siegel’s Daily Beast piece investigates a complex case she is involved in as an advocate.
My first encounter with Jessica Hinves’ voice was not on the page, but in person last October, when she spoke on a panel at Fordham Law School’s Forum on Law, Culture and Society screening of Oscar-nominated documentary The Invisible War. Hinves appears in the film. Her easygoing demeanor, penchant to listen to others before speaking, and humility belie the fortitude which not only brought her back from the precipice of suicide, but makes her a resilient force in seeking justice for herself and other assault victims, lobbying for change, and thinking about ways to improve the military systematically. She is currently piloting programs and looking for aspects of her healing process that can resonate with other military sexual assault survivors.
The photograph that accompanies this essay shows the writer on an F-15 on her technical school graduation day.
– Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien, March 2014
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FOR THEE I SING
My uncle Harold Jacobs (Jake) should have been given a Congressional Medal of Honor for his conduct in Vietnam War, had he not punched a commanding officer in the face for making some off-color remarks after they had just returned from a battle where they lost some of their men. He instead received two bronze stars. Uncle Jake was a proud Marine and a hero who passed away recently. He was the kind of man I expected to serve with when I decided to join the military. I realized very quickly that I was ready for the military, but the military wasn’t ready for me. In fact there were plenty of young men who were vocal that women had no place being crew chiefs and weren’t wanted in their career field. This was during our training in tech school before any of us had been in the ‘real’ military. We were all fresh out of boot camp and learning jet mechanics together for the first time. As I heard this, I thought, I joined with more in experience with mechanics then some of my male counterparts, yet I don’t belong here? I loved working on F-15s, so their comments pushed me to try harder and do better. I was determined to earn their respect at my first duty station by showing that I was a hard worker.
I started at my first duty station with those hopes of gaining respect. I was used to hearing language like we lube, we screw, we nut, and we bolt; it was one of the crew chiefs’ mottos. I was even used to a culture of binge drinking and sexual advances. They didn’t bother me. But I was not used to my senior non-commissioned officers (NCOs) and other officers making sexual advances towards me. I realized I would be ostracized if I reported them. The flight line is a small world. My chances of getting trained on, taking out, and installing a jet fuel starter relied on my seniors’ willingness to train me. A senior officer yelled “Show us your tits” one night after too much drinking. Because he was responsible for handing out job assignments, there was no way I wanted to upset him. I learned to laugh some things off and deflect others by being assertive. I always had to walk the line of rank and boundaries, never making the mistake of responding to the aggressor as if I were interested, while always trying to stay on his good side so that my career would not be impacted.
I continued wanting to build a reputation as a good crew chief, or at least as a hard worker. I recall the words my co-worker said to me before he raped me, after welcoming himself into my room through an adjoining bathroom. He told me he was going to make a good crew chief out of me. After I was raped, I realized I was completely disposable to my comrades. I was seen as a traitor for getting one of theirs in trouble. Men whom I served with questioned me angrily about why I was getting him in trouble. Why wouldn’t I just realize it was ‘just sex’ and drop the charges?
I realize now after working as an advocate with so many people who have been raped that the rape is not the hardest thing to overcome. The biggest obstacle for most of us is the retaliation we face after we report. The real issue underlying this is that many people still don’t believe women should be serving in the military. Men who can’t pass physical training tests and some civilian wives have told me that I should not have chosen jet mechanics as a career field. I should have picked something else, like a medical field, where there are more females.
The idea that I can’t serve without sexual harassment or being raped is an affront to the military’s core values and culture. I cannot buy into the belief that being a female should be considered a handicap or a risk. I was just as capable of being a good crew chief as any of the men who joined with me. I enjoyed my job. I could handle the jokes and digs. I should not ever be asked to tolerate sexual harassment. This year, Senator Gillibrand’s Military Justice Improvement Act was threatened by filibuster; it would have been real reform. While Senator McCaskill’s Victims Protection Act passed the Senate unanimously, she wants to allow the military to change. I believe the military should be held accountable. Congresswoman Speier’s Sexual Assault Training and Oversight Prevention (STOP) Act is a beginning of that system of accountability. But if the military doesn’t start addressing the culture and stop allowing the propaganda that women are a liability, then we will have failed to adapt and overcome.
This issue will become our weakest link as a military. Not only will we create a foundation for our female troops to believe that they are incapable of greatness or equality, but we will instill in our male troops the notion that the military is weaker as a whole because we have allowed females to handicap all of us. How do we address this now and change the culture? We start by empowering our female troops. We encourage them to lead and to hold themselves to a standard of excellence. We also bring along our young men and empower them to understand women’s capabilities. This includes the rich history of women in the service, not only of men in the service; the fact that women serve today in many capacities and are successful; the fact that because of the nature of warfare today, women are being put in combat situations even though there are continuous debates about whether they should; and even the fact that women have been in combat even since the Revolutionary War, when they dressed like men for the sole purpose of sneaking onto the battlefield to fight for this country.
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Uncle Jake’s first tour of service was at Guantanamo Bay, and he volunteered for two tours to Vietnam while the army was advancing from south to north. One of the diseases caused by Agent Orange is diabetes, and Uncle Jake had it before the military acknowledged this connection. But he didn’t want to go to Veterans’ Affairs and his claim was never processed for years. Only with the assistance of Miss America, the former Miss Kentucky, did he receive his claim for $80,000 in back pay. They connected because her father was a Marine. Even though Uncle Jake was a double amputee, he was not bitter.
Maybe that’s because the United States Constitution was very dear to him just as it is to me. I joined the military to defend it with my life against all enemies foreign or domestic, something he taught me to do my entire life. I only found after high school that Jake was not my ‘real’ uncle. He was, though, a hero in my family and we had adopted him because of that. My grandpa, in particular, who served as a bomber mechanic in the Korean War, thought Jake was special. And he was! Harold Jacobs was in the Special Forces; he knew he was needed to be in a position to save his comrades; he grieved the men he lost for his entire life. He was also the proudest Marine you would ever meet. Chester Puller ain’t got nothing on my uncle Jake; all Marines will understand that reference
I wanted to be a Marine, too, as I grew up, but I wanted to do something else first before I fully committed the rest of my life to the military. That led me to spend time living on a commune; I left the commune after discovering the hippies were fun, but they were doing the opposite of what I was driven to do: they were running from society. I did have a strong sense of spirituality, and being from the country, I next turned to Jesus. At that stage of life, I was able to find more depth in the Bible than I had ever learned in Sunday school as a child. To me, Christianity was interesting in part because of how it ties in with other religions. I was especially drawn to the connection with the Jewish religion and all of their beautiful triumphs over the centuries.
So, I went to college to become a certified minister, but on a mission trip in Patzcuaro in the south of Mexico, a celebration for the day of the dead changed my perspective. It was beautiful; I thought it was a wonderful way to honor and celebrate the lives of those who have crossed over. I realized by introducing Christianity, I was telling the people I was ministering to that their beliefs and culture are wrong. After I finished ministry school, I decided to use up an art scholarship I had won in high school thanks to the best art teacher I ever had, another influential Vietnam veteran in my life – his name was Mr. Alexander. But the scholarship went fast, and I had to seek out work which I would be able to do successfully and could use to support myself.
I moved to Texas with a man for love, but ended up falling in love with farming. We had thirty head of cattle and I learned to drive a 4020 tractor, give a pig a shot of penicillin, and build a garden from the ground up where a chicken coop used to be. We grew peppers next to tomatoes so they would cross-pollinate, and I’d have spicy tomatoes. That relationship ended, but I had an amazing job at a vineyard. I stayed and bought my own fixer-upper home. While I was learning to do everything from drywall to plumbing for myself on many trips to Home Depot, I realized I wanted to be a Marine mechanic.
I called Uncle Jake to talk about it. Looking back, I laugh and I should have laughed in his face the moment he said this. His response was, “The hell you do! Go in either the Air Force, first, or as a second choice, go to the Navy. You’ll get a better education, better food and lodging, and you don’t have to march there. You fly there.” I was sold! My grandpa loved being a bomber mechanic. He even retired from Delta after thirty-five years doing the same career as a veteran. I already loved mechanics, so I decided to be a jet mechanic. I had to meet the male requirements for my recruiter who tried to talk me out of my decision. He made me lift seventy pounds, three times. I couldn’t be denied the job since I scored higher than the Air Force standards on the ASVAB – the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery – in both mechanics and in logic and reasoning.
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When I got into the training for the job, I was full of love for the military, especially coming out of boot camp; it was such a piece of cake. I was shocked by the feeling of being among 300 horny young men who were walking around in uniform, playing video games and listening to rock bands so fresh out of high school I never knew they existed.
After knowing my uncle Jake, I probably had unrealistic expectations; I was not expecting some of the lack of professionalism I saw in such a serious duty. However, I did met someone who lived up to the idea of the Airmen I expected to meet, who had joined for completely honorable reasons. His goal was to be a civil engineer; he wanted to learn how to build roads to get clean water to African villages. After breaking his ankle, he was sent into my career field. Fate had it that we were in the same class. We were both in our mid-twenties with real world experience, and we hit it off. He was the funniest guy I had ever met. We had a tech school fling for the first several months, but we were going to different bases; I was focused on my career and not willing to commit to a relationship at that time. We were stationed three hours apart; when we visited each other, we had a blast. I started dating a guy on my base and so our visits stopped.
After one particular tough shift of intense work in a cockpit in 2009, a sergeant escorted me safely home from a night of drinking. But there was an adjoining bathroom connecting my room to the next: my rapist was the other side. He was drinking next door with an underage girl, whom he had tried to grope a few nights earlier. He came into my room through the bathroom, raped me, went back into her room, grabbed his book bag without speaking to her, and left. I was at the hospital getting a forensic exam when she reported him to my command which opened an investigation.
I went from the horrible exam into the halls of the Office of Special Investigations (OSI), lined with almost everyone I worked with on a daily basis. A man from OSI asked me questions while a woman sat silent; in all, I was there for about eight hours. I was told I could keep it restricted which meant I was offered care, but no one would know what happened. I wanted to ask, restricted from who? I was so afraid to say anything and, most of all, I was terrified of having to go back to my room. I did have to return and sleep in the same room where I was raped for two days. I didn’t trust anyone. Anyone was capable of anything at that point. When my 1st shirt and supervisor came to talk to me, I couldn’t stand for them to be in the room. I wanted to be left alone. One of the three females that I worked with came to talk about it with me. I was too much in shock to even say ‘rape.’ I just told her to tell OSI the truth. I couldn’t talk at all.
When I went back to our home base, I was moved to a squadron next door and another airmen exchanged places with me. I was told by a female in the office that she was assaulted, but everyone had her back. She wondered why it seem like everyone in my flight was against me. I soon found out what she meant by that, when I was sent to the end of the runway to work. Co-workers played a movie of a woman being raped. Someone tampered with my bright pink truck so it wouldn’t run; I started walking to work and back. Several people approached me during these walks, questioning me about why I was getting their friend in trouble. They became increasingly aggressive; I was afraid to sleep in my own room so I stayed with the man I was dating. We were on different shifts so our sleep schedules were opposite. I was hardly sleeping.
As my superior applied for me to be humanitarian reassigned to another base, I tried to survive, to stay hidden on a military base. It seemed as if everyone around me could be a potential enemy. I was reassigned to Langley Air Force Base, where my tech school fling had been stationed. Since my truck was still in the garage, being repaired after being vandalized in retaliation for my reporting of the assault, I moved in a U-Haul.
It was still my first night at Langley when my new supervisor made an advance. I called my tech school friend, who I felt safe with, to come and get me. He listened to me about what I was going through. He reminded me of the kind of Airmen he had met in tech school before this happened, and assured me that with time this will pass. I wanted to be near him because I felt he would protect me until I could realize again who else was safe to be – and where I’d be safe. My anxiety was so high that I was stuck in fight, flight or freeze. It was the first time in my life I had ever experienced that. I began to aggressively seek counseling.
The friend I had admired as an Airman and was relying on for strength pursued a relationship with me, thinking I would move beyond the experience and that the military would handle it. I believed the same. After spending time with each other for several months, we got married after dating for only two weeks. My husband Scott deployed three weeks later.
I think I would have improved had I not been put under investigation for a year; day and night, I never knew when I would have to describe the details of my rape over and over again on the phone – only to have the case dismissed because a new commander went against the recommendation of the Judge Advocate General (JAG). His explanation to me was that he felt like the man accused of rape didn’t act like a gentleman, but that he didn’t believe that’s reason enough to prosecute. In the middle of the investigation, the man who raped me received an award, so my suspicions that he was being helped by my old chain of command increased. I asked my JAG officer what my next step was: did I appeal or go to civilian court? She explained I could not go to civilian courts because it was under military jurisdiction. I could contact my Inspector General, so I did. He told me he was too busy told handle my case. I was shocked.
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My work performance was greatly impacted, but more than that, I had an incredibly difficult time dealing with life on its own terms. I was in a shattering reality too painful to digest and I began to consider escaping the pain. The drugs they prescribed me made me feel high, but I was too afraid to be out of control so I drank, trying to ease my nerves and to get any amount of sleep. All the details of the rape and the aftermath circled around my head during the day and my thoughts were spinning at night. I was too afraid to sleep even if I could have. Alcohol became a crutch. When my husband returned from his deployment he found a ninety pound woman who was suicidal and having a nervous breakdown. I was an emotional beast: I hurt so much that I did not trust anyone.
My uncle Jake passed way and I began to drink even more. I did not go to his funeral because I was too messed up; I didn’t know how to relate to everyone I grew up with at that moment. We were from such a patriotic background, but I was so angry and questioning my identity. How could I put on that uniform anymore? A few months later, I found out I was pregnant. Then I was given recommendation for separation from the military. I fought it. I did not want to get out. I wanted to get help and continue my career. It had been my dream to serve and I had only begun.
It was not logical to me that I could be diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from military sexual trauma (MST) and yet the case would never go to court. They acknowledged the symptoms, but not the cause. It was unjust. I volunteered to become a victim advocate and I hoped to figure out how to preserve my own career. The damage was too far done; my removal date was already set. On April 23, 2011, I would be a civilian. I would also be seven and a half months pregnant. How was I going to get a decent job while that pregnant?
While on active duty, I began to research MST and I found out about a lawsuit against the former secretary of defense. I was put in a group of PTSD combat veterans who were allowed to continue to serve – but I would not be allowed to do so because my PTSD was from rape. This is an example of how leadership needs to serve others, to understand and respond with appropriate treatment and opportunities, to remain invested in its own people who have been victims. We need leadership with sensitivity and understanding of the trauma that sexual assault causes, and who consider the nature of joining the military.
We sign up willing to fight wars and with the knowledge of the risk that involves, but I found myself fighting a different kind of war against one of my own. That is the craziest war that I never signed on to handle – being raped and having that dismissed.I spoke with the film The Invisible War which opened up opportunities to have real conversations with media and Congresswoman Jackie Speier; I lobbied for her bill the STOP Act. Then, she told my story on the House floor. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand also shared my story several times; the fact that they are paying attention to this issue gave me a sense of validation. I also began to meet several other survivors and connected to social media groups for people who had been sexually assaulted in the military.
As The Invisible War gained momentum, I began to advocate for an organization called Protect Our Defenders and I was given so much training. I now want to continue working with the Department of Defense to make internal changes to the system. This journey has drawn me closer to my religion; the prayers of Daniel and the psalms of David have become words of comfort to my soul when I am having difficulty. I am seeing some of my prayers answered; I am blessed to be able to work with other people who are my heroes on an issue that is causing corrosion in my military and damaging the defenders who protect us.
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In civil rights movements, there have been different approaches and extremes: I think about Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. What we are asking is for the military to bring women into the twenty-first century with equal treatment and equal rights. Race and gender have sometimes united people who have similar goals or shared histories of being outside of the circle of white male privilege. I have seen on the flight line how women and minorities support one another, and how unspoken stereotypes about both groups are present. The publication “Blacks in Blue Jackets” from the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial tells the history of an admiral who didn’t want any black men on his Union ship during the Civil War. Yet those sailors’ performance was later praised and the ‘blacks in blue jackets’ were essential for winning the war.
After slaves were given the promise of freedom for service – it became illegal for captains to return fugitives serving in the Navy to their owners – and restrictions on the numbers of blacks in the service were lifted, their percentage in the Navy increased to a number that is similar to the number of women serving today. Both blacks in the Navy during the Civil War and women officers in the military since the end of the draft tripled from around 5% to 15%. The situations are very different, but in each a balance of power was upset. Dynamics shifted. There is still racial discrimination in the military.
There are historical echoes in what’s happening to women today seeking acceptance and safety in the military and in my personal experience. If we can translate lessons from that into this work, I’m hopeful that we can stop rapes and better serve victims. We need to empower women as a step towards generating accountability, and we have to help those who do report. The way I’ve been able to mediate for people helps me understand the chain of command’s perspective and to think situations through from the side of the military’s considerations, such as retention for the organization, but I also have the individual experience of going through the process as a survivor. Other advocate groups have other survivors who come at it only from a place of their experience, many organizations have an objective, and politicians have their own motivations.
I want to bridge the communication gap between the chain of the command and the person who has been assaulted – for example, in cases of retaliation against victims who report. The questions I ask are: What is the military’s responsibility to survivors? What does the person have that she or he can still to contribute to the military? The ongoing process of force reduction should be used as an opportunity to weed out toxic leaders; there are people who are skating by and others who cover up sexual assault, retaliate against women who report, or commit assaults themselves. Leadership responsibilities should not be based on who has been here the longest, but on questions of who wants to be here to fulfill the mission.
Legislature will be a failure if the culture doesn’t change because people will keep finding loopholes. Retaliation is a serious problem. Most of my work is with victims who are suffering with PTSD from their MST and who are facing or trying to get Article 32 hearings before their case can be considered. In one year there has already been more than a fifty percent increase in reporting of sexual assault. Change is happening from within the ranks, and within survivors. I know now that the shame of rape isn’t mine. Through dialectical behavior therapy, I learned radical acceptance. Speaking out about this can set you free; it did that for me.
My pastor has talked to me about forgiveness. Everyone who has been a victim should have the chance to go somewhere where they do talk about that. The spiritual aspect of this experience is important; we need a way to provide attention to the core and essence of a person, whether they are an atheist or a believer from any religion. People are shy and hesitant to talk about spirituality because it becomes an issue of what role does God have in the military. But spirituality does not need to be organized religion; it can be about resilience, which is a characteristic every solider needs.
I think of spiritual strength as physical, mental and emotional. We can do better with giving meaning to these concepts; now, it’s become a PowerPoint presentation. In addition to implementing command accountability and communication – access to information about our cases, resources, rights – cultural change can happen through programs that empower both men and women so we’re not in a place where the question of women being in combat is seen as a threat by many.
There’s a museum in California that I visited with inspiring images of Rosie the Riveter. We’re still fighting for acknowledgement that we do belong in the military – and when we make progress in the military, I hope that carries over into society. I’ve discovered a protectorate, a sisterhood in this work, of other women and also men who are allies, and that sustains me. After everything, I am still an optimist. We have a chance for the military to be a change agent that, if it evolves, can be a catalyst and model for society to empower women and address sexual assault.
Jessica Hinves is a wife whose husband is active duty, and a mother to a two-year-old son Patrick and one-year-old daughter Marley. She is a United States Veteran and housewife who volunteers as an advocacy board member for Protect Our Defenders. She tries to be a Christian.
