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Many years ago, not too long after my military enlistment ended and back when I got most of the news from actual newspapers made of paper, I was confronted with the following headline:

SEX SCANDAL AT ABERDEEN PROVING GROUNDS!!!

I was remembering reading the story–in case everyone’s forgotten about it, the gist was that

at Aberdeen Proving Ground, a United States Army base in Aberdeen, Maryland…the Army brought charges against 12 commissioned and non-commissioned male officers for sexual assault on female trainees under their command.

Specifically, a bunch of drill sergeants had been having sex with a bunch of female trainees, with varying degrees of consent on the parts of the trainees. Now, this did not surprise me at all, but what did was the way it was being reported–as if it was a huge shocker, unbelievable!! etc. etc.

Mostly I remember just sitting there, staring at the story, and trying to swallow the fact that anybody, anybody at all was shocked by this. Maybe, I remember trying to think charitably at the time, the reporters on this case had absolutely zero familiarity with the military..? Because boy howdy, anybody who’d ever actually served in the Army knew quite well that Army basic training was a big ol’ sex fest of male drill sergeants and female trainees, right? In my basic training unit, one of our drill sergeants was having sex with at least four of the girls that I knew of, and another was having what could most gently be described as an emotional affair with a fifth, and another drill sergeant, not in my platoon but in my company, actually got married to a sixth girl after she graduated from training.

And yeah, the degrees of consent were variable. The time that the first drill sergeant collapsed our tent on me and a squadmate when we were out in the field and then, after I crawled out, crawled in with her and stayed there for about twenty minutes–that was absolutely consensual, to the best of my knowledge. The time I got sent back to the barracks to retrieve something or other and a girl in one of the other squads in my platoon was sitting on her bunk staring blankly at nothing..? Less so–

Me: Brady*, what are you doing here? Are you sick?
Private Brady, about five feet tall and ninety pounds soaking wet with big blue eyes and freckles, all of eighteen years old: No…I was waxing the floor, and Drill Sergeant Morris* came in, and told me that after I finished the floor I had fifteen minutes to get all the toilets in the bathroom clean enough to eat off of.
Me: Seriously?
Private Brady: I told him I didn’t think I could do it and he said I’d better do it, or I’d better learn how to fuck.
Me, only eighteen myself and totally bewildered: Oh. Wow. What did you do?
Private Brady: We fucked.
Me: Oh. …are you okay?
Private Brady: I guess so. (went back to staring blankly at nothing)

And, of course, there was graduation night, when we all got a four-hour pass to hit the base and wound up at the enlisted club, and another cycle (all male, as ours was all female–Army basic training used to be sex-segregated, the trainees anyway) that was graduating invited us to a party that two of their drill sergeants were having for them in a hotel room–I didn’t go, but some other girls did. When midnight rolled around (the expiration of our four-hour pass), two of them were missing. They did finally show up at the barracks a few hours later, though–one shoved past everyone and ran into the showers, where you could hear her screaming as she tore off her clothes and started viciously scrubbing herself, and the other one flung herself into my arms and started shaking hard enough to bruise my chin with the top of her head, though without making a single sound. The first girl managed to wash away most, though not all, of the evidence of her gang rape before the MPs showed up, but I kept a firm grip on the second girl after some advice from the cold-eyed female drill sergeant from another platoon that was first on the scene, and I heard later they got plenty of evidence off of her body.

My basic training experience was quite representative, really–so you can see why I was sitting there shocked that anybody else was shocked. I mean, everybody knew…we all knew everybody knew.

I had a similar experience last night, reading the following headline:

Uninsured trauma patients are much more likely to die

The risk of dying from traumatic injuries is 80% higher for those without any insurance, a study says. ER physicians say they’re surprised by the findings.

O RLY?

Patients who lack health insurance are more likely to die from car accidents and other traumatic injuries than people who belong to a health plan — even though emergency rooms are required to care for all comers regardless of ability to pay, according to a study published today.

The researchers also did a separate analysis of 209,702 trauma patients ages 18 to 30 because they were less likely to have chronic health conditions that might complicate recovery. Among these younger patients, the risk of death was 89% higher for the uninsured, the study found.

Rosen, now a surgical resident at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, said the group expected to find at least some disparity based on insurance status. But she said the group was surprised at the magnitude of the gap.

Dr. Frank Zwemer Jr., chief of emergency medicine for the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center in Richmond, Va., said he was “kind of shocked.”

“Kind of” shocked? Gee, because I’m not shocked at all.

“We don’t ask people, ‘What’s your insurance?’ before we decide whether to intubate them or put in a chest tube,” said Zwemer, who wasn’t involved in the research. “That’s not on our radar anywhere.”

Good God. Did you just spear somebody on your nose, Pinocchio? The very first thing they do when you go to an ER is admit you, and before they ever ask you what’s wrong with you (but, I admit, usually after they ask you for your name) is if you have insurance. If you are unable to speak, they ask whoever has brought you in. LONG before they offer you any medical treatment. I speak from personal experience.

Well, I guess I should be glad that they’re willing to pretend this is some kind of news flash, right? Nothing like emphasizing your dirty laundry as publicly as possible to raise the chances of someone with actual power and authority being willing to do something about it, even if everybody did really already know all about it. Let’s hear it for the pressure of public shame.

But I’m not willing to go along with the pretense. Of course they all knew about it already, just like we all knew already about what went on in Army training barracks. Of course they did.

Disgusting.

*Names changed. Duh.