I dreamt about being in the storyline of General's Daughter tonight. Not perhaps as southern flavored, but the whole female raped in the male environment thing was straight from that book. There were also elements from movies such as The Whistleblower, Captain America and Terra Nova. And a lot from real memories of my army period.
The story was basically about a vast field training campaign where there were LOTS of people and lots of stuff going on – almost everything in range had something to do with the army. Many people there, though, were volunteers and reservists, so they weren’t a) really taking things seriously or b) they weren’t being taken too seriously. In my unit, because I am not so physically fit, we were just a bunch of women, nothing militant about us. In fact I was being laughed at because I was the only one doing the proper marching turns. Even the commander (The Taylor guy from Terra Nova) mocked me, so of course, like I did thorough my entire service, I would fight and challenge his authority. At some point, though, I saw officers dealing with gender issues (The Whistleblower) and I approached them, insisting on their attention until they made me one of their department. I was sent to deal with a case of a young woman being attacked amidst us – the lesser military ranked candidates. She wasn’t raped as such, but several men attacked her and when she fought back, they beat her up really badly. After some research, I managed to identify the jerks and made a whole show of arresting them. However. The only punishment they got (because they were proper special forces and we were basically just secretaries and extras on press conferences material), were very harsh warnings. All in all the poor girl got no justice at all.
Upset, I emptied a bottle of something I must have seen in the pilot of Person of Interest, and would stop in the late night town street, throwing stones at that propaganda life-size mirror poster from Captain America – where there’s the front soldier with a mirror instead of a face. I broke several shop or movie-theater windows and the cops started to come down the avenue. A car pulled over, a convertible, with the drill sergeant (Taylor) behind the wheel. He yelled at me to get my ass into the car and we drove off just in time. He also tried to pull my bottle away and got nasty language and a couple of bitch-slapping attempts, albeit very drunk, in return. Don’t touch me! I would yell at him, stubborn and slightly dumb with liquor (or so he thought). Do you like being touched?! Or maybe do you love being groped, oh my god, are those some big guns stretching your T-shirts, you MUST work out!... I mocked him, also hitting him some more and then climbing into his lap to nearly strangle him and he had to pull over so we didn’t crush. It probably wasn’t his intention to include anything sexual in the already very bad day, but he could understand why I was feeling very poorly and could tolerate me a bit further before he had me court-martialed for picking on a superior arsehole.
Not rightly sure how we got to the fucking bit, but there was some of that, too, in his bed, rather nastily, until I woke up, realized what has happened and skadaddled out, chanting Oh Fuck Oh Fuck Oh Fuck…
That same morning, the entire compound was administered a routine drug test and everyone had to stop whatever they were doing, take a cup and go into the nearest tiny screen shelter and pee. The sergeant was slightly worried about my results – but not as worries as when he got the tox-screens back and saw that my blood was thoroughly clean of any alcohol. His, on the other hand, has certain traces of THC. It didn’t take him very long to comprehend he’s been royally screwed. On the positive side, I chose to involve him because I could see he felt bad for that girl getting a rotten end of a deal, but on the bad side, he was now in a position he wasn’t used to being in. Knowing that I myself would never be taken seriously, I stood no chance alone and frankly, at that point, I didn’t care about some stuck-up old military jerk. But I think together we found the way to turn the tables and got the assailants into a civilian law frame, ultimately achieving graver punishments – graver at least than a slap on the wrist. No idea how it all ended, though, as I woke up. An hour early, as it turns out: today the clocks switched backwards. Some earlier than others :)))
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