Monday, April 26, 2004 | 9:29 a.m.
A Las Vegas woman has been absent without leave, or AWOL, from the Army for five months after filing a claim alleging that she was sexually harassed by her superiors at Fort Irwin in Southern California.
Pfc. Jacquelyn Fairchild, 21, says she decided not to return to the post because she feared for her safety and the Army refused to protect her.
An official at Fort Irwin said the Army investigated Fairchild's allegations and found no evidence that the incidents she describes ever occurred.
"The investigation is still open. We are waiting for her to give us the evidence she says she has. She has yet to do this," Maj. Michael Lawhorn, Fort Irwin's public information officer, said on Friday. He cited photos, e-mails, phone records and eyewitness testimony that could be submitted to back up Fairchild's charges.
"We will punish those responsible if in fact the evidence shows they are responsible," Lawhorn said. The Army conducted an investigation and interviewed "dozens of people," he said, but "the claims she made are unsubstantiated by anybody, by any evidence."
In a legal statement and an interview, Fairchild, a thin young woman with honey-blond hair and light brown eyes, described ongoing harassment that began almost as soon as she arrived at Fort Irwin, her first military posting.
She alleges a married warrant officer called her and flirted with her relentlessly, demanded nude pictures of her and wanted to meet with her.
Whenever she refused to meet his demands, he glowered, yelled and cursed at her, she said.
She said she eventually gave him a partial nude shot, hoping it would make him "back off." She said the picture only made him more aggressive -- and he passed it around the base.
A noncommissioned officer told her he dreamed about her and would grab her as she tried to perform her duties in the supply room, she said.
And an acting first sergeant invited her to socialize off-base, and made sexual advances and touched her and kissed her.
All these men ignored her repeated rebuffs, Fairchild said. She said their behavior made her constantly tense and afraid, but as a private, she was required to follow her superiors' orders, and she feared that filing a complaint would jeopardize her career in the Army, she said.
"I didn't want to get anyone in trouble," Fairchild said, noting that her alleged harassers were popular and well respected.
"They had a lot more rank than me. They knew a lot more people than me. I thought if I said something everybody would turn their backs on me," she said. "And that's what happened."
Fairchild had followed her father and two brothers into the Army, hoping to continue the family's tradition of service, to "help out my country" after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and get money for college, she said.
But the Army her father and brothers described bore little resemblance to the environment she encountered, she said.
"It's a lot different for males," she said. "I didn't know."
Fairchild was assigned to the 11th Armored Cavalry, the same regiment her father, Jerry Fairchild, a former one-term Nevada assemblyman, served with in Vietnam. It was the first time in the regiment's history of more than a century that a daughter had followed her father into unit.
Because of the distinction of being the "first daughter," she said she was a favorite of the officers at the fort. "When I got there, the colonel, the lieutenant colonel, all the higher-ups treated me better than any other private," Fairchild said.
She didn't like the attention, she said, because it made her fellow privates resent her. "My own rank didn't like me," she said.
In October, she finally made a complaint about the sergeant who rubbed against her in the supply room, and she was given four days' leave, she said.
"They told me to go home and calm down while they started the investigation, and by the time I got back I wouldn't be in the same troop," she said. Fairchild said she was "having a nervous breakdown" and often contemplated suicide.
But before her leave was up, a colonel called her father and said Fairchild would not be moved away from her alleged harassers.
"That's when I started crying and got on the phone," she said. "I said, 'Sir, it's bad enough that people from other troops are calling me and telling me they saw naked pictures of me'-- like it was me, like I was the problem, you know.
"He said something really rude, something like, 'Well, you did send them, didn't you?' And he said, 'You need to come back here. You'll probably be punished for what you did.' "
Scared and fearing for her safety, Fairchild decided she could not return to Fort Irwin, despite the seriousness of leaving the Army without permission.
"Right now, the major issue is her being AWOL," Lawhorn said. "We are holding our investigation open pending the evidence she says she has."
As soon as Fairchild made her charges, the Army began investigating, Lawhorn said. "You would think that in a year and a half of systematic harassment, somebody saw something, but that is not the case," he said.
"We interviewed dozens of people, as many people as we possibly can, and nobody has any evidence to support those allegations," Lawhorn said. "The only theme that seems to run through the witness statements is that if she was treated differently at all, she was treated better than the average soldier."
Fairchild and her father said they have turned over to the Army all the evidence they have, including names of eyewitnesses. They said the Army has refused to share the results of its investigation with them and their lawyers.
Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., has staff members investigating the situation, spokesman David Cherry said.
As for Fairchild's continued absence from the fort, Lawhorn said the Army does not have the resources to round up soldiers who leave without permission, but they can be arrested and returned to base if, for example, they are pulled over by traffic police.
Fort Irwin, located near Barstow, Calif., is the home of the Army's National Training Center. Its soldiers cannot be directly deployed to war, so war desertion is not an issue, Lawhorn said.
The post houses about 5,000 active duty personnel, 85 percent of them men, Lawhorn said. He said the fort receives about a dozen complaints of sexual harassment or sexual assault each year -- 13 last year and 12 in 2002. He could not say what action resulted from those complaints.
Sexual harassment and sexual assault are persistent problems in the military, surfacing periodically in scandals such as Tailhook. Most recently, allegations of widespread sexual misconduct in Operation Iraqi Freedom in February spurred Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to launch a "detailed review" of complaints filed by more than 100 women.
The review is expected to be completed next month.
Fairchild said the issue of sexual harassment was "a big deal" at Fort Irwin. "Twice a year we had to go to classes on sexual harassment," she said. "They were always preaching about how sexual harassment is wrong and it will not be tolerated."
archive
