http://entertainment.time.com/2012/06/20/the-invisible-war-when-soldi...

The events described could be scenes from some lurid horror movie about girls attacked by psycho monsters at a summer camp. Kori: “He hit me across the left side of my face… and my face hurt so bad.” Lee: “He put his locked-and-loaded .45 at the base of my skull [and] engaged the bolt, so I knew there was a round chambered.” Tia: “He slammed my head against the concrete wall and very forcibly had sex with me.” Kori: “He screamed at me and he grabbed my arm and he raped me.” Teah: “Within a two-week period, he raped me five times.”

And with the sexual violation comes the next onset of horror: the helplessness, the isolation, the knowledge that things can only get worse. Hannah: “The entire time I was screaming and yelling for help, and for him to stop, nobody came to the door, nobody came to help me.” Valine: ”When I got tested, I had trich [trichinosis] and gonorrhea, and I was pregnant.” Trina: “They made it very, very clear that if I said anything they were going to kill me.” Ariana: “He said that if I told anybody, that he was gonna have his friend Marv, from Indiana, kill me and throw me in a ditch, ’cause that’s how they took care of things in Indiana.”

The brave women speaking in The Invisible War, Kirby Dick’s documentary about sexual abuse in the U.S. armed forces, are American soldiers: Kori Cioca of the Coast Guard; Lee Le Teff, Teah Bedney and Valine Demos of the Army; Tia Christopher, Hannah Sewell and Trina McDonald of the Navy; Ariana Klay of the Marine Corps. Their devotion to military service was tested, perhaps shattered, first by the sexual abuse they endured and then, when they dared report the crimes, by their superiors’ hostility or smirking indifference. Really, they were raped twice: once by their assailants, a second time by the tough-boy network of commanders protecting this man’s army. “The thing that makes me the most angry,” says Lieutenant Klay, “is not even the rape itself; it’s the commanders that were complicit in covering up everything that happened.”

In his previous docs, Dick has probed the abuse of power in the Roman Catholic Church (Twist of Faith), the public homophobia of right-wing politicians thought to be closeted gays (Outrage) and the double standard in the movie classification system (This Film Is Not Yet Rated). In Sick, he memorably profiled the performance artist and cystic-fibrosis sufferer Bob Flanagan. Heroic underdogs on one side, the criminal. misguided or ignorant guardians of society on the other: these are Dick’s subjects, which clash with awful power in The Invisible War.



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