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War always comes home, even when it seems safely exported. We now have indications that the new wars of preemption and empire building are bleeding back already onto our shores. The evidence is not just in the , ill and mangled soldiers returning from combat but in troubling new clusters of domestic violence in the military as well as ongoing efforts to shield military batterers from justice. Just as individuals, families, public infrastructure, and the international reputation of the United States will be paying the price of the ongoing debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan for decades, women partnered with soldiers will face increased rates and levels of violence far down the road. The spotlight was focused on this problem during , when the bodies of five women, each the current or recently separated wife of a soldier at the army’s Fort Bragg, were discovered in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Shalamar Franceschi had her throat slit; Marilyn Griffin was stabbed seventy times and her trailer set on fire; Teresa Nieves and Andrea Floyd were shot in the head; and Jennifer Wright was strangled. They are only a few of the hundreds of women who have been killed or permanently disabled by soldiers—often their husbands or partners—in recent years around the approximately , domestic and overseas U.S. military bases. Even in the best of times, rates of domestic violence are three to five times higher among military couples than among comparable civilian ones. Yale University researchers reported their finding that male veterans who had been in combat (a relatively small subset of all veterans) were more than four times as likely as other men to have engaged in domestic violence (Prigerson, Maciejewski, and Rosenheck ). Despite the prevalence of such crimes, the murders in North Carolina became objects of intense media attention: reporters and film crews flew in from all over the country and from as far afield as Japan and Denmark. The attention was in part because the killings were clustered tightly together, but also because several of the 223 13 Living Room Terrorists CATHERINE LUTZ ——————————————————————— ——————————————————————— CH013.qxd 5/29/08 10:25 AM Page 223 killers had recently returned from the war in Afghanistan. But the media have now moved on to other things, and the many murders and murderous assaults around the country that have followed those at Fort Bragg have been ignored. Many in the general public and media wondered if the murders might have resulted from combat trauma suffered by the perpetrators. Army brass immediately suggested that the stress of deployment was to blame, particularly because it created what the army called marital problems. This argument had the advantage of supporting the army’s requests to Congress for more money for a larger military, while also maintaining the hygienic fiction about combat, a required fiction if the military was to reach its recruitment goals. In both media and military accounts, the soldier was the victim, and his murdered wife in one sense was the sign of his sacrifice and pain. After the murders, army officials ordered an investigation . Its conclusions: the couples suffered from marital discord and family stress. At most, gender appeared briefly in the analysis when it was noted that soldiers , perhaps qua men, have difficulty “asking for help” from service providers available on installations like Fort Bragg. In an earlier formal directive to military commanders, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz had said that “domestic violence is an offense against the institutional values of the Military” (, ). But from the ritualized abuse at the navy’s Tailhook convention to the ubiquitous and virulent misogyny of everyday “humor” in the military to the  public testimony of dozens of women cadets raped at the Air Force Academy (fifty-six rapes are currently under investigation there), all the instances indicate that domestic and other forms of violence against women are not anomalies. Rather, they are at the center of the rationale and methods of war. The military as an institution promotes the idea of heterosexual male supremacy, glorifies power and control or discipline, and suggests that violence is often a necessary means to one’s ends. Taking a life already requires that soldiers violate the most basic precept of human society. In a military increasingly forced or even willing to bend international codes of conduct in prosecuting wars, soldiers may absorb an attitude that they are above the law at home as well. Alternative, more adequate explanations come from those who work...

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