When I was a US Army company commander at Ft Jackson, DC, in the early 1980s, my training company was about one-third women. The soldiers had all completed basic training and were training to be qualified in their military specialty; therefore they had some privileges that BT recruits didn't have, one of which was to go on weekend evenings to the "1-2-3" Club, so called because it was for the lowest enlisted ranks, E1, E2, E3. None of the troops had cars so they had to walk.

Like every other commander, I had emplaced a very strict "buddy" policy for both males and females. No soldier could go anywhere outside the barracks alone; they had to have a buddy go with them. Didn't have to be pairs only. This included to, at and from the 123 Club.

I also had a very strict curfew on Friday and Saturday evenings of 2300 hours. (That's 11 p.m. for you Air Force types. Big hand on the 11 and little hand on the 12 for you Marines!) Once in awhile I'd drop by at curfew time to check in with the NCO on duty.

So one evening about 2315 a couple of female soldiers come lolly gagging in and the NCO sweeps them up and has them report to me (I was standing near the door anyway.) I demanded to know why they were late. One was white and the other black. Yes, this is relevant.

"We would have been on time," the white one said, "but on the way back a man jumped out of the bushes and dragged me over and raped me." She said this about as emotively as she might have reported walking through a short rain drizzle. Then she added, "He was a big black man." Well, of course!

I said nothing but turned to look at her buddy, who was black, who cried out, "Oh, sir, I was with her the whole time! We didn't break the buddy system!"

True story.

How did this all end? I called the MPs, who came over, took her statement and took her to the post hospital where the rape kit was done. Medium story short, it was all baloney from beginning to end, just a cover for missing curfew. The brigade commander told me he'd handle it, and he did: field-grade article 15 for the liar plus a general discharge. He left her conspirator for me. I article 15'd her but didn't discharge her as apart from that one major slip up, she was actually a pretty good soldier.

This was only one of many false claims of rape that I had reported, always to cover their tracks for some other misconduct. One claim I'll never forget, though. It was a sergeant assigned for retraining into another specialty, which happens more than you might think. A young black woman, she was one of the sharpest, smartest NCOs I ever saw.

She went home on emergency leave and was returned to the post on her due-back day by local police - not in custody but because, they said, in taking a nighttime cab back to the post from the airport the cabbie had raped her. (The Columbia PD did confirm the rape was real and they picked up the cabbie.)

The sergeant never recovered. She almost literally lost her mind and became badly transformed in her personality. We would up having to process her for a medical (psych) discharge. A real tragedy.

That young sergeant brutalized is why I have a deep-seated contempt for women who falsely claim rape. It not only ruins an innocent man, it demeans and dismisses women who really were raped.
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It's too ironic. The only way to end this defining down of rape is for both men and women to save themselves for marriage, just like it used to be (well, was the societal norm, anyway) before women decided that being "sexually liberated"* was a terrific idea. Call me crazy, but I happen to think it's a good idea to not get plastered on the weekends and expect every other plastered person around you to have good judgment when you can't manage that yourself.

Maybe if people stopped hooking up for one-nighters and made sure the "love" part of "making love" was there before sleeping together, these problems would just go away. That people - men or women - even imagine that's it's a good idea to sleep with someone you just met and/or don't care about is just sad. Frankly, it's just as sad that in all the posts and stories I read about this issue, it's treated as simply a given that having one night stands is the new normal, and the only issue is one of consent.

*Having meaningless, guiltless sex as often as men do.

A man who behaves badly is evil. A woman who behaves badly is not well. The pattern is repeated over and over again, going back through Susan Smith and all that mess from the 90s.