Last year, Ft. Hood got a lot of attention after the murder of Spc. Vanessa Guillen. Reports show she was sexually harassed and assaulted and her command structure did nothing to prevent it. She ended up brutally murdered by her assailant and her body dumped.
The resulting flurry of response from the Military prompted a report on the conditions of the base with regard to sexual assault and how well programs like SHARP (Sexual Harassment Assault Response Prevention) work. It's been a year and progress is arguable, but of course no one expected everything to be fixed in a day.
However Ft. Bragg, the home of Special Forces in the U.S. Military, shows once again our special operators don't follow the same rules and trends as the rest of the Army. Ft. Bragg has nearly double the deaths as Ft. Hood. And it's not just suicide or sexual assault, it's the Operators killing one another and facing no consequences.
This week, we're unlocking our recent bonus episode with Rolling Stone writer Seth Harp who dives into some of these deaths, and the resulting police action of...nothing really. Operators are shooting one another and destroying property with reckless abandon.
There is an argument here about how much we have leaned on Special Forces in the last twenty years taking it's toll on these men. Certainly rotating in and out of high risk areas yearly while attempting to have a regular life and family has to be stressful. But instead of considering what these implications mean for the greater survivability of SF, we're just going to keep finding people to shoot at them. And if we can't, they will shoot at each other.
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