Wisconsin's women soldiers: 'Watch your back'

She was a small-town girl who joined the Wisconsin National Guard to escape a life of repeated sexual abuse, but she found more of the same among her new band of brothers.

A fellow Wisconsin soldier raped her at Fort Bliss, Texas, where 3,200 members of the state Guard's 32nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team soldiers trained for weeks in 2009 before deploying to Iraq, she said.

"I do get nightmares and I do have really bad flashbacks," the woman said.

The Wisconsin native asked not to be identified in this article because she fears harassment from other soldiers.

"I don't want people to say ‘the girl is a whiner,'" she said.

While the experience has tormented her, reawakening painful memories of childhood assaults by family friends and boyfriends, the woman remains a loyal soldier because the military lifted her out of what she called a dead-end, small-town existence.

Read the full story in the Wisconsin State Journal.

Live ! From Baghdad

Col. Steven Bensend and Command Sgt. Maj. Ed Hanson were taking questions this morning in a live feed from the International Zone.
As one might expect, there were a few technical problems. WTMJ in Milwaukee pointed out that the camera was zoomed in on the Wisconsin flag that stood next to Bensend and Hansen.
Just about every word said in the first half-hour was followed by an echo, and several TV stations had trouble (at their end of the feed) getting a picture.

Bensend reported the morale of Wisconsin National Guard soldiers is very high and the Iraqi military is competent to take over operations over the next year.

"I think they compare to American forces and they should because we trained them," Bensend said.

Meanwhile, the military released several new videos featuring Wisconsin soldiers, including footage from Camp Cropper, Victory Base Complex and the International Zone.
Here is State Journal coverage, including links to the clips.