EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. -- On a warm May evening last year, Sarah Smith, a lifelong tomboy in bib overalls, sandals and T-shirt, climbed into a government sedan with an Army sergeant at the wheel.
She smiled confidently at her mother, who felt the twinge of worry that grips a parent saying goodbye to a child. Melanie Smith still considered her oldest daughter her baby, and she remembers Sarah's playful swagger that day with painful hindsight.
"Always protecting me," she thought as Sarah pulled away.
The drive to St. Louis' Lambert Field took minutes, just a hop over the Mississippi River from this southern Illinois hamlet, and the flight to Baltimore-Washington International Airport another two hours.
By 2 a.m., Sarah, then a 20-year-old private first class in the Army Reserve, was lying awake in a Spartan barracks at Aberdeen Proving Ground. She was a thousand miles from her mom and dad, little brother and sister, boyfriend and red '64 Ford Falcon.
And there, at the Army post where she was sent to learn to be a soldier, Sarah learned above all that she could not protect herself.
Nor could her mom and dad.
Nor could her boyfriend, a college football lineman who months later would crumple to the ground on a rainy night under the weight of guilt.
Nor, finally, would the Army.
Within 48 hours of arriving at the post north of Baltimore, Smith says, she was raped in an Aberdeen motel room by her drill sergeant, the man who was supposed to guide and protect her through a second summer of training.
And though Army prosecutors would drop the rape charge in her case, she insists it occurred repeatedly. On weekends, Staff Sgt. Vernell Robinson Jr. would order her to his car for a trip to a friend's house nearby. That's where she stayed, in a basement bedroom, until Sunday formation.
Robinson was bigger, stronger and armed with the power of rank. She says he told her: "If you tell on me, I will win." He later contended that Sarah was his girlfriend, that he loved her, that he thought she loved him.
Sarah says her protests were small. She said no. She never called him "Vern" or "Rob" as he demanded, only "drill sergeant." She struggled under him. She kept her eyes open during sex.
All infuriated him. But none, she says, made him stop.
Sarah was part of "the game."
Sarah's story captures the challenge facing Army prosecutors in a peacetime military where sex between soldiers is common but the civilian notion of consent has no place in a world of rank, order and command.
But now that Aberdeen has moved off the front page, her story illuminates something else: the human toll exacted by the biggest sex scandal in Army history. The Smiths feel like wounded left on the field of battle.
Twelve male soldiers were charged with crimes involving female trainees at the Army post and four have gone to jail. Five cases remain open.
Robinson, now a prisoner in the Marine Brig in Quantico, Va., was found guilty in May of having sex with five trainees, as well as indecent assault and adultery, among other crimes in a 19-count conviction. He faced a possible prison term of more than 50 years, but jurors gave him a six-month sentence -- a penalty so light the military judge called prosecutors into chambers after the verdict to express his dismay.
Robinson, 32, has never disputed that he had sex with Sarah. From the start, he has said that the sex was not forced, but invited by Sarah during a consensual relationship. It is this vastly different interpretation of their encounters that left Army prosecutors wondering: Was it rape or romance?
In court, his attorney, Capt. Arthur J. Coulter, told jurors that Robinson had sex with the women, but used "no power, no
intimidation. It just didn't happen." He said Robinson should not be made a "scapegoat."
Coulter initially agreed to arrange an interview with his client for this article, then failed to return repeated phone calls.
"My client made some mistakes," Coulter said recently in a brief interview. "But it was his opinion that he was dating Sarah Smith. He was very fond of her."
The military definition of rape does not require physical force as an element, only disparity in rank. And the military is governed by rules different from those of a civilian workplace.
In the Army, a drill sergeant is obeyed. In the Army, soldiers can't go home if they are frightened.
And in the Army, soldiers stick together, a concept that mutated within Aberdeen's 16th Ordnance Battalion into "the game," a loose confederacy of drill sergeants who used code words in targeting female recruits for sex.
The prosecutors' decision to drop the rape charge in Sarah's case, made less than a month after a military jury convicted former Staff Sgt. Delmar G. Simpson of raping six Aberdeen trainees, has never made sense to the Smiths. They live daily with their anguish, and it is out of frustration with the Army that Sarah volunteered to tell her story outside the courtroom.
