On the morning of Monday, Jan. 9, 2006, a 21-year-old Army specialist named Suzanne Swift went AWOL. Her unit, the 54th Military Police Company, out of Fort Lewis, Wash., was two days away from leaving for Iraq. Swift and her platoon had been home less than a year, having completed one 12-month tour of duty in February 2005, and now the rumor was that they were headed to Baghdad to run a detention center. The footlockers were packed. The company’s 130 soldiers had been granted a weekend leave in order to go where they needed to go, to say whatever goodbyes needed saying. When they reassembled at 7 a.m. that Monday, uniformed and standing in immaculate rows, Specialist Swift, who during the first deployment drove a Humvee on combat patrols near Karbala, was not among them.

Swift would later say that she had every intention of going back to Iraq. But in the weeks leading up to the departure date, she started to feel increasingly anxious. She was irritable, had trouble sleeping at night, picked fights with friends, drank heavily. “I was having a lot of little freakouts,” she told me when I went to visit her in Washington State last summer. “But I was also ready to go. I was like, ‘O.K., I can do this.”‘

The weekend before the deployment was to start, however, Swift drove south to her hometown, Eugene, Ore., to visit with her mother and three younger siblings. The decision to flee, she says, happened in a split second on Sunday night. “All my stuff was in the car,” she recalls. “My keys were in my hand, and then I looked at my mom and said: ‘I can’t do this. I can’t go back there.’ It wasn’t some rational decision. It was a huge, crazy, heart-pounding thing.”

For two days after she failed to report, Swift watched her cellphone light up with calls from her commanders. They left concerned messages and a few angry ones too. She listened to the messages but did not return the calls. Then rather abruptly, the phone stopped ringing. The 54th MP Company had left for Iraq. Swift says she understood then the enormity of what she’d just done.

For the remainder of that winter, Swift hid out in the Oregon seaside town of Brookings, staying in a friend’s home, uncertain whether the Army was looking for her. “I got all my money out of the bank,” she told me. “I never used my credit card, in case they were trying to trace me. It was always hanging over my head.” At her mother’s urging, she drove back to Eugene every week to see a therapist. In April of last year, she finally moved back into her family’s home. Then, on the night of June 11, a pair of local police officers knocked on the door and found Swift inside, painting her toenails with her 19-year-old sister. She was handcuffed, driven away and held in the county jail for two nights before being taken back to Fort Lewis, where military officials threatened to charge her with being absent without leave. As Army officials pondered her fate, Swift was assigned a room in the barracks and an undemanding desk job at Fort Lewis.

Despite the fact that military procedure for dealing with AWOL soldiers is well established – most are promptly court-martialed and, if convicted, reduced in rank and jailed in a military prison – Suzanne Swift’s situation raised a seemingly unusual set of issues. She told Army investigators that the reason she did not report for deployment was that she had been sexually harassed repeatedly by three of her supervisors throughout her military service: beginning in Kuwait; through much of her time in Iraq; and following her return to Fort Lewis. She claimed too to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, a highly debilitating condition brought on by an abnormal amount of stress. According to the most recent edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, used by mental-health professionals to establish diagnostic criteria, PTSD symptoms can include, among other things, depression, insomnia or “feeling constantly threatened.” It is common for those afflicted to “re-experience” traumatic moments through intrusive, graphic memories and nightmares.

Swift’s stress came not just from the war and not just from the supposed harassment, she told the investigators, but from some combination of the two. In a written statement to investigators, Swift asserted that her station, Camp Lima, outside Karbala, was hit by mortar attacks almost nightly for the first two months of her deployment. She reported working 16-hour shifts, experiencing the death of a fellow company member in an incident of friendly fire and having a close friend injured in a car bombing. What Swift said distressed her most, however, was a situation that involved her squad leader, the sergeant to whom she directly reported in Iraq. She claimed that he propositioned her for sex the first day the two of them arrived in Iraq and that she felt coerced into having a sexual relationship with him that lasted four months – the relationship consisting, she said, of his knocking on her door late at night and demanding intercourse. When she finally ended this arrangement, Swift told me, the sergeant retaliated by ordering her to do solitary forced marches from one side of the camp to another at night in full battle gear and by humiliating her in front of her fellow soldiers. (The sergeant could not be reached, but according to an internal Army report, he denied any sexual contact with Swift.)

As it often is with matters involving sex and power, the lines are a little blurry. Swift does not say she was raped, exactly, but rather manipulated into having sex – repeatedly – with a man who was above her in rank and therefore responsible for her health and safety. (Some victims’ advocates use the term “command rape” to describe such situations.) Swift says that the other two sergeants – one in Kuwait and one back home in Fort Lewis, both a couple of ranks above her – made comments like “You want to [expletive] me, don’t you?” or when Swift asked where she was to report for duty, responded, “On my bed, naked.”

In the wake of several sex scandals in the 1990s, the U.S. military has tried to become more sensitive to the presence of women, especially now that they fill 15 percent of the ranks worldwide. There are regular mandated workshops on preventing sexual harassment and assault. Each battalion has a designated Equal Opportunity representative trained to field and respond to complaints. Swift said she initially reported what she characterized as an unwanted relationship with her squad leader in Iraq to her Equal Opportunity representative there, who listened – she claims – but did nothing about it. (According to the internal report, the E.O. representative told investigators that he asked Swift if she had a complaint to make but that she declined at the time.)

Swift made it clear that since enlisting in the Army when she was 19, she’d grown accustomed to hearing sexually loaded remarks from fellow enlisted soldiers. It happened “all the time,” she said. But coming from her superiors, especially far away from the support systems of home and against a backdrop of mortar attacks and the general uncertainties of war, the overtones felt more threatening. “You can tell another E-4 to go to hell,” she said, referring to the rank of specialist. “But you can’t say that to an E-5,” she said, referring to a sergeant. “If your sergeant tells you to walk over a minefield, you’re supposed to do it.”

I went to see Swift last July as I was immersed in a series of interviews with women who’d gone to Iraq and come home with PTSD. I was trying to understand how being a woman fit into both the war and the psychological consequences of war. The story I heard over and over, the dominant narrative really, followed similar lines to Swift’s: allegations of sexual trauma, often denied or dismissed by superiors; ensuing demotions or court-martials; and lingering questions about what actually occurred.

Swift and I – along with her mother, Sara Rich – met at a run-down sushi place in Tacoma, Wash., not far from Fort Lewis. Swift has blond hair, milky skin and clear green eyes, which lend her the vague aspect of a Victorian doll – albeit a very tough one. She curses freely, smokes Newports and, when she’s not in uniform, favors low-cut shirts that show off an elaborate flower tattoo on her chest. “Suzanne is not some passive little lily,” explained her mother. “She’s a soldier.”

By midsummer of last year, the two women had settled into a ritual: once a week Rich would pick up her daughter at the base and take her out for a meal, and then the two would check into a nearby Holiday Inn, talking and watching television and finally going to sleep. At 6:30 the following morning, Swift would put on her uniform and Rich would drive her back to Fort

Lewis in time to report for work. Rich, who is 41, is a social worker who specializes in family therapy and operates with a certain type of mama-bear verve. She was in frequent touch last summer with her daughter’s Chicago-based lawyers, who were then negotiating with the Army to get Swift medically discharged for her PTSD so that she could avoid being court-martialed and convicted for going AWOL. In the six weeks since Swift’s arrest, Rich marshaled both legal funds and public sympathy for her daughter’s defense, largely by tapping into the outrage fulminating inside the antiwar movement. One of Rich’s friends from Eugene built a Web site devoted to Suzanne, taking both donations and online signatures for a petition to have her released from the Army without punishment. Someone else started selling T-shirts, tote bags and teddy bears that read “Free Suzanne” and “Suzanne’s My Hero” to benefit the cause.

At that point, the hullabaloo was doing little good. A week before I arrived in Washington, the Army’s investigation determined that Swift’s charges against two of her higher-ups, including the one Swift said demanded sex from her, could not be substantiated because of a lack of evidence. (Both men denied Swift’s allegations. By the time the investigation began, in June 2006, her squad leader had already finished his military service, which put him beyond the reach of punishment by the military anyway.) There was a third sergeant against whom Swift filed a formal harassment complaint in the spring of 2005, nearly a year before she went AWOL. In it she maintained that immediately following her unit’s return from Iraq, he began making frequent suggestive remarks to her and at one point, during the course of a normal workday, “grinded” his body against hers in an inappropriate way. That man received a stridently worded letter of reprimand on May 25, 2005, from a lieutenant colonel and was transferred away from Fort Lewis.

What still remained to be determined was whether Swift would be held accountable for going AWOL or whether the Army would accept the idea that her failure to report was, as she saw it, an instinctive act of psychological self-preservation. Whatever the case, Swift was quickly becoming a symbol – though of what it was hard to say. Among the antiwar crowd, thanks in part to the fiery speeches Swift’s mother was delivering at local rallies and antiwar gatherings, she was being painted as a martyr, a rebel and a victim all at once. Meanwhile, others deemed her a traitor, a fraud or simply a whiny female soldier who’d been too lazy or too selfish to return to war.

Swift herself seemed stunned by the attention. “Look at me, a poster child,” she told me wryly, making it clear that she was not enjoying it. She did not make the kind of grandiose anti-military statements her mother did but rather seemed to be trying to shrug off what happened to her. She told me she was having nightmares and was sometimes waylaid by fits of hysterical crying. But she described these flatly, seeming almost unwilling or unable to express anger or hurt. Overall, she seemed strikingly detached.

I had read enough about PTSD to know that “emotional numbing” is one of the disorder’s primary symptoms, but it made understanding Swift and what she’d been through a more difficult task. “Avoidance” is another commonly recognized symptom in people with PTSD, especially avoidance of those things that bring reminders of the original trauma. If the Iraq war and the men she encountered there and afterward traumatized Swift, then perhaps going AWOL could be seen as a sort of meta-avoidance of all that plagued her.

That night after dinner, Swift lay on her hotel bed with her shoes kicked off, staring blankly at the ceiling. She was thoughtful and willing to answer questions. A few times, describing her deployment, she hovered close to tears but then seemed promptly to swallow them. She told me that she came home from Iraq feeling demoralized and depressed. She resumed her stateside duties with the Army for the 11 months between deployments and in general “just tried to deal.”

She was not, however, formally given a diagnosis of PTSD until after she went AWOL – first by a civilian psychiatrist within days of her failure to report for deployment and later, Swift says, through the Army’s mental-health division at Fort Lewis. (The Army could not confirm this, citing privacy issues.) The timing raised a serious question: Was the PTSD a legitimate disability or a hastily crafted excuse for skipping out on the war? Nobody, perhaps not even Swift, could say for sure.

II. The “Double Whammy”

No matter how you look at it, Iraq is a chaotic war in which an unprecedented number of women have been exposed to high levels of stress. So far, more than 160,000 female soldiers have been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, as compared with the 7,500 who served in Vietnam and the 41,000 who were dispatched to the gulf war in the early ’90s. Today one of every 10 U.S. soldiers in Iraq is female.

Despite the fact that women are generally limited to combat-support roles in the war, they are arguably witnessing a historic amount of violence. With its baffling sand swirl of roadside bombs and blind ambushes, its civilians who look like insurgents and insurgents who look like civilians, the Iraq war has virtually eliminated the distinction between combat units and support units in the military. “Frankly one of the most dangerous things you can do in Iraq is drive a truck, and that’s considered a combat-support role,” says Matthew Friedman, executive director of the National Center for PTSD, a research-and-education program financed by the Department of Veterans Affairs. “You’ve got women that are in harm’s way right up there with the men.”

There have been few large-scale studies done on the particular psychiatric effects of combat on female soldiers in the United States, mostly because the sample size has heretofore been small. More than one-quarter of female veterans of Vietnam developed PTSD at some point in their lives, according to the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey conducted in the mid-’80s, which included 432 women, most of whom were nurses. (The PTSD rate for women was 4 percent below that of the men.) Two years after deployment to the gulf war, where combat exposure was relatively low, Army data showed that 16 percent of a sample of female soldiers studied met diagnostic criteria for PTSD, as opposed to 8 percent of their male counterparts. The data reflect a larger finding, supported by other research, that women are more likely to be given diagnoses of PTSD, in some cases at twice the rate of men.

Experts are hard pressed to account for the disparity. Is it that women have stronger reactions to trauma? Do they do a better job of describing their symptoms and are therefore given diagnoses more often? Or do men and women tend to experience different types of trauma? Friedman points out that some traumatic experiences have been shown to be more psychologically “toxic” than others. Rape, in particular, is thought to be the most likely to lead to PTSD in women (and in men, in the rarer times it occurs). Participation in combat, though, he says, is not far behind.

Much of what we know about trauma comes primarily from research on two distinct populations – civilian women who have been raped and male combat veterans. But taking into account the large number of women serving in dangerous conditions in Iraq and reports suggesting that women in the military bear a higher risk than civilian women of having been sexually assaulted either before or during their service, it’s conceivable that this war may well generate an unfortunate new group to study – women who have experienced sexual assault and combat, many of them before they turn 25.

A 2003 report financed by the Department of Defense revealed that nearly one-third of a nationwide sample of female veterans seeking health care through the V.A. said they experienced rape or attempted rape during their service. Of that group, 37 percent said they were raped multiple times, and 14 percent reported they were gang-raped. Perhaps even more tellingly, a small study financed by the V.A. following the gulf war suggests that rates of both sexual harassment and assault rise during wartime. The researchers who carried out this study also looked at the prevalence of PTSD symptoms – including flashbacks, nightmares, emotional numbing and round-the-clock anxiety – and found that women who endured sexual assault were more likely to develop PTSD than those who were exposed to combat.

Patricia Resick, director of the Women’s Health Sciences Division of the National Center for PTSD at the Boston V.A. facility, says she worries that the conflict in Iraq is leaving large numbers of women potentially vulnerable to this “double whammy” of military sexual trauma and combat exposure. “Many of these women,” she says, “will have both.” She notes that though both men and women who join the military have been shown to have higher rates of sexual and physical abuse in their backgrounds than the general population, women entering the military tend to have more traumas accumulated than men. One way to conceptualize this is to imagine that each one of us has a psychic reservoir for holding life’s traumas, but by some indeterminate combination of genetics and socioeconomic factors, some of us appear to have bigger reservoirs than others, making us more resilient. Women entering the mi

---