Woman Reservist Tells of Sexual Assault : Military: The Gulf War veteran, testifying before a Senate committee, says charges that her sergeant forcibly sodomized her ‘fell upon deaf ears.’

A veteran of the Persian Gulf War told a Senate panel Tuesday that she was forcibly sodomized by her sergeant shortly after the Desert Storm air offensive started last year but when she told her male superiors they did not believe her.

Army Spec. Jacqueline Ortiz, a mechanic based in Saudi Arabia south of the Iraqi border, said that she immediately reported the assault to superiors but “my claim fell upon deaf ears.”

Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) said that Ortiz is one of more than 60,000 women veterans who, he estimated, may have been raped or assaulted while in the military service.

Ortiz’s charges, aired at a hearing of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, prompted Sen. Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) to charge that American women serving in the Persian Gulf “were in greater danger of being sexually assaulted by our own troops than by the enemy.”

Four days after Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned over the Navy’s handling of the Tailhook Assn. sexual assault scandal, DeConcini introduced a bill that would create a special Defense Department inspector general to investigate charges of sexual harassment, abuse and assault involving military personnel.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Tuesday that the Bush Administration has made no decision on Garrett’s replacement.

Ortiz’s testimony came as the issues of sexual harassment and assault in the military services have come under increased scrutiny in the wake of the Navy’s handling of an incident involving Naval aviators attending a convention of the Tailhook Assn. in Las Vegas.

While recent accounts of sexual harassment and assault have focused on the Navy, Pentagon officials said that all of the military services have had problems in this area.

In a 1989 Defense Department survey, 11% of Army men and women said that they had been the victims of actual or attempted rape or sexual assault at the hands of fellow service members during the previous year. The survey showed the reported incidence of such assaults--as well as many less violent forms of sexual harassment--to be slightly higher in the Army than in the other services.

In 1991, the Army determined that 317 reported sexual assaults involving its personnel merited further criminal investigation, according to Capt. Rick Thomas, an Army spokesman. That figure is down slightly from the previous four years. Thomas and Capt. Bill Buckner, another Army spokesman, said that the service is conducting extensive training of soldiers on sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape prevention.

Army investigators initially charged Ortiz with sexual impropriety after her alleged assailant, 1st Sgt. David Martinez of New Mexico, stated that she had engaged in consensual sex with him. After further investigation initiated by Ortiz’s complaints to a congressman, the Army apologized to Ortiz and withdrew the reprimand that she had been issued.

But while Martinez was found to have spoken untruthfully in a lie detector test, the Army has not court-martialed him, according to Henry Mark Holzer of Brooklyn Law School, Ortiz’s attorney.

“It’s very difficult to deal with,” Ortiz said Tuesday. “I was very proud to serve my country but not to be a sex slave to someone who had a problem with power.”

The New Mexico reservist, part of the Army’s 52nd Engineer Battalion, told senators Tuesday that she “would rather have been shot by a bullet and killed that way, than have to deal with what I deal with daily.”

Ortiz was one of four women veterans who told the Senate panel that they were raped or assaulted by fellow soldiers, but male superiors did not believe them.

Cranston said that many such women have sought treatment for the resulting trauma at Veterans Administration hospitals but found it to be poor, largely because the hospitals had no specific programs for treating sexual assault trauma.

A Department of Veterans Affairs official told the committee that the veterans agency is planning to correct shortcomings in rape crisis treatment. She cautioned, however, that it will take time to develop a full program for treating such trauma.

Dr. Jessica Wolfe, an associate director at the VA’s National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, said that a program exclusively for women veterans with assault trauma will begin at the VA Medical Center in Menlo Park, Calif., in 10 days. She said that experience gained there will be used at other VA hospitals.