A tree grows for Vanessa Guillen
Army Spc. Vanessa Guillen was last seen alive at her Ft. Hood, Texas base on April 22, 2020. The body of the 20-year-old soldier was not found until more than two months, later when contractors working on a fence encountered a horrific odor.
When Guillen originally went missing, rather than mounting an intensive search for her and immediately launching an investigation, she was marked AWOL, absent without official leave. It was treated as if she had just left and abandoned her post.
At the time, there was no “missing soldier protocol” according to an extensive report by ABC’s 20/20 investigation team.
The last person who saw her alive was another 20-year-old soldier, Spc. Aaron Robinson, who worked with her in the arms room of their company.
It took the better part of a month for a real investigation to commence and other soldiers who were friends with Guillen were treated as suspects, while Robinson somehow didn’t stand out as the likeliest perpetrator.
It took weeks for investigators to discover that Robinson had been seen leaving the arms room — where weapons are stored — the day of her disappearance, hauling what is called a “tough box,” the kind of thing you use to store weapons or parts.
Her body was recovered, dismembered and buried under cement in three separate locations. Investigators finally settled on questioning Robinson after unlocking his phone. The alibi with his girlfriend was crumbling and it was apparent he had help disposing of the body.
All of this matters because an Army-wide investigation determined that the command climate at Ft. Hood was lax toward sexual harassment and complaints about military sexual assault. The Army eventually blackmarked 21 soldiers in Guillen’s chain of command.
Guillen’s mother only got the investigation rolling when she publicly aired a complaint, along with her attorney, that Guillen had sent her texts that she was being sexually harassed. Compounding the tragedy, the Army determined she was being harassed by a superior, someone other than Robinson.
Robinson escaped from questioning by Army criminal investigators, fled and was pursued. Surrounded, he produced a weapon and killed himself.
The entire chain of events by the chain of command revealed a flabbergasting series of blunders and crimes compounded by other crimes of commission and omission. Nobody acted quickly, nobody acted or behaved well.
Because of a local tree planting project by Maria Kyupelyan, a recent Miss Antelope Valley, the case has remained in the public eye here in the Antelope Valley. On Sunday, a plaque dedicated to Guillen was installed in Poncitlan Square. Kyupelyan, close in age of Guillen, said she felt an identification with the young soldier.
Guillen came from a Houston family of six and had wanted to be a soldier since she was 10 years old.
One of the speakers at Sunday’s event was Marine Corps veteran Krishna Flores, a combat veteran of the Iraq War who signed up for the military soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
She, too, was close in age to Guillen when she was subjected to sexual harassment within her unit and ultimately survived what is known to professionals as Military Sexual Trauma — betrayal by ones’ fellow troops.
Although 21 soldiers in Guillen’s unit were “removed from their posts,” nobody has been charged or gone to jail, including the other perpetrator.
In making my own appearance at Sunday’s event, it occurred to me that I had seen and heard Guillen’s name so often, I thought her disappearance was a couple of years ago, but it only happened about six weeks into the COVID pandemic when much of the nation was in lock-down.
My daughter Grace was married just a few weeks before Guillen’s disappearance. She and our son-in-law have a beautiful baby. It crushes me to think this young soldier had those moments in life so cruelly taken from her. But that didn’t happen only because she was assaulted and murdered. It happened because there is a barracks culture that has yet to be rooted out.
Unit leaders have a conflict of interest in dealing with sexual assault cases in the military, in which one out of 20 known cases fall on male victims, as well.
Passage of the Vanessa Guillen Bill, in Congress, to take investigations of sexual assault out of the chain of command, should happen promptly. Write your congressional representatives and senators.
The tree and plaque are beautiful. Kyupelyan and Flores have been working on this for a year, now. Their work is honorable. Most of the troops are also honorable. Everyone with honorable service can only devoutly wish, and earnestly work, to change this dark side of our military culture. It is a stain on the honor of the nation.
Dennis Anderson is a licensed clinical social worker at High Desert Medical Group. An Army paratrooper veteran, he deployed with local National Guard troops to cover the Iraq War for the Valley Press. He works on veterans health initiatives.