Sergeant, man her battlefield!
The Pentagon is considering court-martialing U.S. troops stationed overseas who visit prostitutes, apparently in a move intended to cut down on the human trafficking that occurs near overseas military bases. This is pretty interesting, because prostitution has been a long-standing and well-ignored tradition in the military, dating all the way back to the Civil War. In fact, legend has it that Union Gen. Joe Hooker often brought a group of ladies along to raise the spirits of his men, and they soon became known as "Hooker's women" -- and that, of course, was soon shortened.

I know this because I wrote a story for Salon about the military and prostitution. When I was researching it, I called a number of different military PR folk, and each seemed confused and fairly unprepared to answer any questions about prostitution. One even said to me, "You know, you're going to anger a lot of people with this story." If I did, though, nobody ever wrote me about it. That was surprising, because I expected at least this passage to get a rise out of somebody:

In the Philippines, the field is even hairier. Eric, who was once stationed there, says the place is a veritable bargain bin of sex. A special forces friend of his rented a bungalow for a month and hired two women to service him in bed and in the kitchen, and the final bill came to $50. Another friend told him of a night at a Philippines strip club, where a woman went onstage, put a beer bottle in her vagina, flipped upside down until the beer had been poured inside her, then went back on her feet and waited until the beer refilled the bottle. Then, she gave the bottle to a Marine in the crowd, who drank it down. "It's quite fucked up," Eric says "There's a lot of weird stuff going on."

Cracking down on prostitution has its pros and cons. I'm impressed that
the Pentagon would care enough about human trafficking in foreign lands to actually fight it by punishing troops -- if, of course, that's the Pentagon's true intention. The stories reporters find while investigating human trafficking are just heart wrenching, and it's hard not to support ant effort to dismantle those trafficking rings. But at the same time -- and yes, I know this is petty -- if a soldier who has been surrounded by other soldiers in a foreign land for months or years needs to get his groove on every now and then, it's hard to begrudge him that. So anyway, it will be interesting to see where this goes, and if troop morale -- already, I imagine, at an all-time low in some parts of the world -- gets and lower when local ladies are off limits.