American Experience Presents

SCARLET: I wanted his respect. I wanted his esteem. I did not want to have sex with that man.

KLAY: From Insignia Films and PRX for GBH, this is American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories. I’m Phil Klay. I’m a veteran myself. I served in Iraq with the Marines from 2007 to 2008 and now I write books about war. 

KLAY: In each episode of this podcast, we’ll hear one American vet tell us: Who they were before they joined, what they did in the service, and who they became afterwards. These are their stories.

SCARLET: I’m CJ Scarlet. I was in the first platoon of women that had any combat training.

KLAY: CJ Scarlett grew up in a pretty big family. She had two older sisters, one younger sister, and one twin brother. Their father had been a Marine and they grew up hearing stories about training on Parris Island in the 1950s.

SCARLET: My father told stories about being hit with a rifle butt for calling his pants “trousers.” He had a tooth knocked out. These stories that he told us about how brutal boot camp was were glorified, and made us believe that that was what it took to become a man. And my brother and I held onto these stories like they were gold, because they were falling from my father’s lips.

KLAY: CJ’s brother followed in their father’s footsteps and joined the Marines. 

SCARLET: I wanted to do everything my brother did, cuz I could play sports just as well as my brother could, which is one of the reasons why I joined the Marine Corps. I took it as a challenge.

KLAY: CJ enlisted in 1981 as part of the first class of women to receive combat training. This was a big deal. Women had been serving in the Marine Corps off and on since the First World War, but they had been pushed into clerical work. Starting in the 1960s though, women were increasingly being sent into combat zones, and at home, women were demanding access to jobs and opportunities they’d long been excluded from.

KLAY: Like her father, her brother, and generations of Marines before and after her, CJ went to bootcamp where she and the other recruits learned the usual stuff and made the usual blunders. 

SCARLET: We learned to throw a grenade, and fortunately, they were dummy grenades, because the first girl that took the first grenade went like this to throw it, and it dropped out of her hand right in the middle of all of us. So, we would all have been dead. (LAUGHS) But we did go on the rifle range, we were the first platoon of women that went on the rifle range, and that was a blast and I was an expert marksman, so that made it even more fun.

SCARLET: It was an adventure. I learned new things, and I, I just enjoyed so much being able to prove what I was made of.

KLAY: CJ had entered boot camp with distinct advantages—she’d gone to a pre-boot camp training program, and her father had taught her things throughout her childhood. So she already knew how to march, how to “field-strip” or take apart an M16, how to do an about-face.

SCARLET: Which sounds like a simple thing, but it’s actually very complicated to learn how to do an about-face.

KLAY: CJ was trained in a group of about 50 recruits. It was only very recently, in 2019, that men and women started training together in the Corps. So she didn’t train with men, and her drill instructors were women. But that didn’t make it any easier. 

SCARLET: I mean, what they want to do is they want to break you down into a million little pieces, and then build you back up in the image that they want to create. They deprive you of sleep for the first few days and they’re screaming at you, you’re so disoriented, you have no idea what’s going on and they know how they’re breaking you down, and they know how to push you to your limit, and they wanted to weed people out as early as they possibly could. We had one poor woman who kept pooping on the floor in the bathroom, at night. Because she was so…stressed out, so overcome by, by the boot camp experience, that she simply could not handle it, and that was her way of screaming for help. And of course, she was gone within minutes. I mean, she was gone. There were other women who had a lot of difficulty with the program. A woman who tried to jump out a window, another one who tried to jump in front of a car. It’s so crazy that I went to bootcamp expecting to be beaten on a regular basis and that I actually willingly went, but all they did was yell at me. They couldn’t even swear. I remember, about a week into it, I’m laying there in my bunk at night, and the girls around me are crying, going, I want to go home, and I’m laying there thinking, this is it? (LAUGHS) All they’re going to do is yell at me? I can do this.

SCARLET: They tried every nickname, they tried screaming at me till the cows came home, and I was just so thrilled they weren’t hitting me, (LAUGHS) that nothing phased me. And boot camp was actually fun for me.

Audio: [Bootcamp yelling and sounds] “HEY! WHAT DID YOU CALL ME?”

KLAY: One key to getting through boot camp is understanding that it’s a game. That way, you can look at the insanity happening around you and find it amusing. You grow to appreciate the drill instructors who can insult you creatively. CJ’s nickname in boot camp was Snow White, because she seemed so innocent.

KLAY: In the summer of 1981, CJ graduated from boot camp. She finally became the Marine she’d always wanted to be.

SCARLET: I was the honor graduate of my platoon in boot camp, and that meant so much to me because my father was sitting there in the parade stands at my graduation, sitting next to the general, crying on his shoulder, going “That’s my daughter.” And I don’t think I’ve ever had a moment in my life where I felt more proud, knowing how he felt about me at that moment, how proud he was of me, meant everything in the world.

Audio: [Parade sounds]

SCARLET: My confidence shot through the roof, I was just...I loved myself like a teenage boy, I thought I was the bomb.

KLAY: In 1981, the country wasn’t at war. CJ and her unit had been only trained in defensive tactics, and women weren’t allowed to do combat jobs like the infantry or artillery. Nonetheless...opportunities for women in the Marines were expanding, and CJ took advantage of them.

SCARLET: Well I had aced the ASVAB, the military entrance exam, and could pretty much choose any field I wanted, and so I got a six-year contract to sign up as a photojournalist. Journalism school was tremendous fun. I really enjoyed it, and I, I loved the fact that I was going to get to do different stories every single day. And so, I was so excited to get started with my career when I got to Camp Pendleton.

KLAY:  Camp Pendleton is a great base to be stationed, out in lovely Southern California.

SCARLET: I worked for the Pendleton scout, initially as a reporter. We were kind of objective observers of everything and the storytellers for what was going on. Everyday was something different. I got to stand on the skits of a helicopter and fire a machine gun one day, and ride in the tank the next day, and shoot a light-armored tank weapon the next day, and interview generals and infantrymen and movie stars, and escort the media and do community relations and oh my gosh it was so much fun.

KLAY: CJ’s first day on the job was memorable.

SCARLET: So, I get to my office, the Joint Public Affairs Office at Camp Pendleton, and there’s, like, nobody there. Because everybody is at a joint Navy/Marine Corps exercise on the beach, and I’m just hanging around the office, and then we got a call from a, a television news crew. They wanted to come and shoot the military exercise, and so, they said, “Well, you’re going to escort the news crew.” So, I got in a van, I hooked up with the news crew, and we went down to the, the beach, and I had never seen a military exercise, and it was massive. My jaw was just on the ground. And the cameraman decides he wants a shot of the machine-gunners. So, he goes over to them and starts to walk out in front of them. I’m like, are you crazy, and I jump out in front of him, bravely, and I start screaming, “Cease fire, cease fire.” I’m like, God, you, are you out of your mind? And the machine-gunners stop shooting, and the tanks stop rolling, and the helicopters land, and the ships stop sailing, and I look at the cameraman, and I said, “Now, get your shot.” And he’s looking at me like I’m absolutely crazy (LAUGHS), and I hear this voice coming over the dune, and it’s going, “Who the hell stopped my exercise,” only he didn’t say “hell,” and the general of the whole exercise comes over the hill. Every finger pointed to me. I didn’t know they were shooting blanks. (LAUGHS) I was brand-new on the job. I stopped an entire military exercise because I didn’t know they were shooting blanks. That was my very first day on the job.

KLAY: CJ’s first day would prove memorable for another reason as well...

SCARLET: That’s the day that I met the man who would become my first husband. He was in a foxhole very, very close to where I was, and saw the entire thing unfold, and I don’t know what he was thinking, but…I made a big impression.

KLAY: He was also a photojournalist, and had already been at Camp Pendleton for over a year…

SCARLET: I was dating somebody else when we first met, and he would leave little notes on my windshield, “Good morning, Princess. I owe you ten kisses,” and draw little, funny drawings and I just kind of blew him off for about eight months. And then I broke up with the gentleman that I had been dating, and began dating him, and we ended up being married for 11 years.

KLAY: During their romance, and even after they got married, there were some things CJ kept from her husband...

SCARLET: I didn’t share what was going on on a day-to-day basis with the sexual harassment.

KLAY: As a woman in the Marine Corps, sexual harassment was so common that it became almost expected, something to be endured...

SCARLET: It was like Chinese water torture, it was just this daily onslaught. Drip, drip, drip. There were comments, there were touches. There was inappropriate behavior coming from all angles. So, I would be sitting at my typewriter, working on a story, and feeling like a professional journalist, and I never knew when someone would come up behind me and plant a kiss on the back of my neck, and just make me feel instantly like a sexual object, just completely devalue me and disrespect me and make me feel like I was not worthy to be there.

SCARLET: I received a lot of comments about my breasts. They would back me up against the file cabinets, literally, and try to kiss me. They would make suggestions about having sex with them.And when I entered into the relationship with my first husband, I stopped telling him what was happening, because he would become so angry at our coworkers, that I was afraid he was going to hurt somebody. Our staff non-commissioned officer in charge was particularly bad. He used to go out of his way to goad him. Put his arm around me and nuzzle my neck and say, “Why don’t you be with a real man,” right in front of my husband. And my husband would just be gritting his teeth and wanting to punch his lights out, but of course, he couldn’t. What he wasn’t seeing was all the things that were happening outside of his line of vision.

KLAY: Even when I was in, two decades later, misogyny was everywhere during officer’s candidates school. We had an instructor in unarmed combat who joked about using the moves he taught us to beat his wife. And one candidate, before being kicked out of training, was hauled in front of our whole company and told that instead of testicles he had “a slit” between his legs, and therefore didn’t deserve to be in the Corps.

KLAY: None of this stopped plenty of women from serving well, and with honor, and with pride, but it was an extra hurdle...and a betrayal of the commitment Marines are supposed to have to one another. In the Marine Corps, how women were treated varied from command to command. Some leaders didn’t put up with misogyny. Some tolerated it. Some encouraged it. And, of course, some were harassers themselves.

[MIDROLL]

KLAY: For CJ, the harassment she experienced in the Corps was nothing new. It had started even before she got to boot camp… 

SCARLET: It was very common practice back then for the recruiters to engage in relationships with the female recruits.

KLAY: Most recruits don’t just show up, ready to sign the paperwork and join the service. They’re actively recruited over time by Marines whose job it is to form bonds with young men and women…and to prepare them for getting through boot camp. That means recruiters have a lot of power over their recruits.

SCARLET: My recruiter started crossing the line immediately. It began with a hand on the leg, and the compliments, and the attention. It was a fist in my gut whenever I knew that I had to see this person, because I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I didn’t feel like I had any control. But I also really wanted to impress him because he had control over my fate. When he acted inappropriately with me, I totally blamed myself, I mean, he was a married man with four kids. He knew better, but I still took all the responsibility on myself.

KLAY: Sexual abuse isn’t just about the abusers and their victims. It’s also about the broader community that stigmatizes and shames victims of sexual trauma. Victims internalize that shame, and abusers use it to their advantage. 

KLAY: For CJ, leaving for boot camp had felt like an escape, a fresh start. But as she said, when she got through boot camp and went on to Camp Pendleton, the harassment continued.

SCARLET: I did not report any of the incidents that I can recall. You stay within the chain of command. Well, the next person in command was the senior enlisted man, he was the worst of them all, and if I’d complained, I knew nothing was going to happen to him. The commander probably would’ve chewed him out, and then my life would’ve been living hell, and so would my husband’s. And so, I just tolerated it and my husband was generally at one of the other offices that we had, so he didn’t see most of what was going on, and I kept it from him. It was when I got to Albany, Georgia that things really shifted.

KLAY: It wasn’t easy for them to find an assignment together, but CJ and her husband got a transfer to a logistics base in Georgia. The public affairs team there needed two sergeants, and they fit the bill. And this time, her husband was right there, a witness to her ongoing humiliation...

SCARLET: He saw the daily harassment that I endured in Albany, Georgia, there was no escaping that cause it was such a tiny office, and we were in super-close proximity to one another.

SCARLET: My boss there did not sexually harass me. He was a misogynist. He hated women in his military. The only thing he hated worse than that was my ex-husband. And so, he decided to make our lives miserable, and the way he got to my ex-husband was through me. He taunted me, he made my husband make me stand at attention in front of everyone in the office while my husband had to chew me out in front of everybody.

SCARLET: Working in an environment where I so clearly was not wanted, and where I was under so much emotional stress from just the scrutiny of this person made me anxious, so anxious I got into therapy. And that was the killer, because he would actually introduce me to people as, “This is Sergeant Crazy Marine,” which was humiliating, and drove me even further into therapy, you know? And I got on medication, and that is a no-no in the military. It’ll kill your service record worse than anything to have psychiatric care in your service record book.

KLAY: The past two decades of war have somewhat changed this culture. Senior leaders have spoken out about suffering from PTSD themselves. And there have been attempts to destigmatize psychiatric care, or “going to see the wizard,” as it’s sometimes called in the Marines. Nevertheless, in the stoic, and sometimes callous. culture of the military, talking honestly about psychological wounds remains a challenge. 

SCARLET: I was eventually drummed out of the Marine Corps because I was on medication, and I was depressed, and so, I say that I came into the Marine Corps with a roar, and I went out with a whimper.

SCARLET: I was depressed for a really long time after I got out, because I felt like I had failed. I had wanted to stay in for 20 years. I had wanted to be a career Marine. I mean, that went with the super-Marine image, and I was not given a choice. The fact that I was on medications for depression forced me out.

KLAY: Eventually she was diagnosed with PTSD. Even before then, the effect of her trauma weighed on her marriage.

SCARLET: I believe that our divorce was in large part due to the harassment that I endured in the military, because it impacted my ability to be in a healthy relationship with my husband.

KLAY: After leaving the Marine Corps, CJ went back to school where she studied criminal justice and sociology and got a Masters degree in human violence. Then she started working as a victim advocate—trying to, in her words, take her power back. A few years later, CJ served on a council to advise the governor of North Carolina on military issues. 

SCARLET: So, I’m in this meeting with the other governor’s Advisory Commission members, and I start telling funny stories about the sexual harassment that I experienced in the military. And as I’m telling these funny stories, I looked at the faces of the people I was talking to, and they were horrified, and I thought, these stories aren’t funny. This is not a joke, and I myself became horrified, and started hearing myself for the first time. Underneath those jokes was my own sense of horror about what had happened, I had minimized my own experience to cope with it.

KLAY: After years of avoiding her military trauma, CJ finally began processing what had happened to her. At 35 years old, she went back into therapy, and she started thinking again about when she was 19, about that recruiter. The guy who had immediately crossed the line, and worse. 

SCARLET: We had engaged in intimate relations before I went to boot camp and about a week before I left, we were at the house of another Marine who I respected very much. And my friend left to go to the store for something, and I was alone with my recruiter, and he swooped me up and carried me to the bedroom. And I didn’t want to have sex in the bed of my friend, and I told him no, and he insisted, and I told him no, and he ended up raping me, and it devastated me.

SCARLET: In a way, though, the rape was easier to deal with than the psychological coercion, because I felt so ashamed. I felt so guilty. I felt so responsible, even though he was the one with the senior rank, and he was in his late 30s. He was the one with the family and the children, and he was the one that was responsible for making the right decision to not do that and take advantage of a young woman in my position. I still blamed myself.

SCARLET: It took a long time for me to realize that I had also experienced a moral injury, that something intrinsic to my integrity had been stolen from me. I endured a trauma because of my military experience, and as a result of that, I deserve to get help through the Veterans Administration, through the military.

KLAY: PTSD is a psychological wound…and moral injury is about a violation of your conscience, your sense of self, and your trust in the world. In the military, your life depends on your fellow Marines, and on your leaders, and so the betrayal of that trust can leave deep scars. 

KLAY: Sixteen years after being medically discharged from the service, CJ applied to the VA for disability benefits. Her now ex-husband wrote a letter on her behalf, attesting to what he’d witnessed at work, and how it had damaged their relationship.

SCARLET: I remember feeling sick, reading his letter, because he saw so much of what had happened, and felt so powerless to do anything about it himself, because he was constrained by his rank, he couldn’t do anything to help me.

SCARLET: When I applied for disability, for the military sexual trauma, I had to sit in front of a therapist I’d never met, and I had 30 minutes to tell my story, which was gut-wrenching, but in the waiting room were all these other women waiting to tell their stories.

KLAY: Two years later, the VA approved CJ’s disability benefits. She was diagnosed with military sexual trauma.

KLAY: That might seem like a dry, clinical term, but it was important for CJ and not simply because of the benefits. Her previous attempts to seek help had been used against her, as a reason she couldn’t be a Marine. The designation acknowledged she’d experienced trauma in the military, like so many other veterans, and deserved the same rights. But the process also convinced her that there was a much bigger problem. 

SCARLET: The main question they did not ask, that I thought was the most important question, was “Who did this to you,” because I could name the person, and nobody ever asked. And so, they have these repeat offenders in the military, and the military is not tracking these people.

SCARLET: The command structure that’s in place right now discourages commanders from taking action. They want something done, but not if it’s someone in their command, because it reflects on them as a commander. It goes in their record book as well. This happened on their watch. I think they are afraid that if they take sexual assault complaints out of the command structure and put it into the criminal justice process, separate from the commanders, that the whole thing’s going to run rampant, and that they won’t be able to contain it. I think, though, that if they change it, they’ll get a lot more reports, and so, it’s going to look like they’re losing control and that they can’t contain it, but that in fact, it will actually be telling a closer to the truth of what the reality of the situation is. This is what exists, and we have to name it, because we can do better.

KLAY: This has been a decades long fight, to get sexual assault investigations out of the chain of command. Far too many commanders have buried allegations or gone after men and women who speak up, treating them as a bigger threat to discipline than the sexual predators in the ranks.

KLAY: Some politicians have been listening to women like CJ, though. For years New York Senator Kirstin Gillibrand has been pushing the issue. She wants to remove the investigation and prosecution of sexual assault cases from the control of military commanders, and recently the president said he agrees. It’s now up to Congress to change the law.

SCARLET: My loyalty to the Marine Corps was so strong that I felt like I was betraying it, by speaking my truth. And so, I didn’t for so long, but now I recognize that speaking my truth is the only way I can really honor that experience, because just as the Marine Corps and the military service has this incredible aura and power, it also has a shadow side. It has a dark side, and if we’re not talking about that shadow side, we’re not telling the whole story. We’re not encompassing the entire military experience.

KLAY: Women have been integrated into the military for decades. They’ve served with distinction at home and abroad, and thousands have experienced combat in recent wars, well before the lifting of the official ban against women serving in combat in 2013. And we now have women in combat units, and women infantry officers. 

KLAY: But the shadow side remains. And today, the Marine Corps leads the services in rates of sexual assault. There’s still a culture that devalues women and protects sexual predators. And the military justice system has repeatedly failed to respond to sexual harrassment and sexual assault in the ranks. And it is only thanks to service members speaking out over the decades that the military has been pressured into confronting that shadow side at all.

SCARLET: I was at a conference for women veterans, and was told by the director of veterans’ affairs for the state not to mention military sexual trauma while I was on the stage. Well, I’m not very good at being told not to do things. (LAUGHS) So, when I was asked a question about my military experience, I started talking about the military sexual trauma, and every other woman, there were seven of us on the stage, every other woman had her own story to share. And it became the most powerful, poignant moment of the entire conference. And so, what was not to be said was spoken, and it was incredibly powerful.

[CREDITS]

KLAY: American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories is a production of Insignia Films and PRX for GBH. This episode was produced by Julia Press. The lead podcast producer is Curtis Fox, the composer and sound designer is Ian Coss, and the executive producers for Insignia Films are Amanda Pollak and Leah Williams. Kathleen Horan did the interview with CJ Scarlet. Thanks to Matt Gottesfeld for his research. For GBH, Devin Maverick Robins is managing producer and Judith Vecchione and Elizabeth Dean are executive producers.

KLAY: Funding for American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories was provided by The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding was provided by The Wexner Family Charitable Fund, Battelle Memorial Institute, JP Morgan Chase, and Analog Devices. 

KLAY: Next time on American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories, Harold Brown, a black fighter pilot in WWII, is captured and sent to a POW camp.

BROWN: And if you can imagine umpteen thousand hungry POW’s hollering and screaming, you’re talking about the day of jubilation.

KLAY: For more powerful memories from Veterans visit pbs.org/americanveteran where you can also watch the American Veteran television series and digital short films. You can also learn more by using #AmericanVeteranPBS. 

KLAY: I’m Phil Klay, thanks for listening. 

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Note: Red text denotes Archival Transcription.