Dear Pete Heg-Trash

Nothing taught me more about the danger of silence in the military than surviving rape twice while wearing the uniform of the country I volunteered to serve, because I learned firsthand how quickly an institution built around honor, courage, and loyalty can become terrifying when the person who has been violated must decide whether speaking up will cost them even more.

Our service members understand that fear, which is why attacks on anonymous reporting should alarm anyone who actually cares about protecting the people who serve.

Being able to report misconduct without immediately exposing yourself can mean the difference between speaking and staying silent when rank, retaliation, career consequences, and the instinct to protect the institution are stacked against you.

Let us stop calling silence discipline, stop calling environmental disregard strength, and stop pretending accountability somehow makes our military weaker.

Once those protections are weakened, the misconduct does not magically disappear; the person experiencing it simply has fewer safe ways to expose it.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has repeatedly attacked anonymous complaints while presenting his campaign against what he considers politically correct military culture as a return to strength.

Yet there is nothing strong about creating more fear around reporting abuse, harassment, or misconduct, especially inside an institution where power and rank shape nearly every part of a service member’s life.

I call that feeding the conditions where rape culture survives, because I know personally what happens when silence becomes easier for an institution than accountability.

Survivors should never have to prove their toughness by enduring abuse quietly.

Disregard for accountability also appears in Hegseth’s approach to another responsibility the military cannot escape: what it does to the land, water, and communities where it operates.

In his own words, “No more climate change worship,” but treating environmental responsibility as weakness ignores the damage military activity has already left behind in American communities.

Service members and Mother Earth have something painful in common: Both have been expected to absorb damage in the name of a mission and remain silent about the scars.

Pollution from military operations has contaminated land and groundwater on Guam, the island where I was born, where decades of military activity have left contamination near an aquifer our people depend upon for drinking water.

Our community here in Tucson knows another version of that story, with PFAS contamination threatening groundwater and military facilities, including Davis-Monthan, identified among the sources requiring investigation and cleanup.

Strength cannot mean demanding unlimited sacrifice from people, communities, and the planet while treating accountability as an inconvenience.

As a veteran, a survivor, and someone born on an island carrying the environmental scars of America's military presence, I cannot separate these issues, because both force us to confront what happens when powerful institutions decide that accomplishing the mission matters more than acknowledging who or what gets harmed along the way.

Bodies can be raped, land can be violated, water can be poisoned, and although those harms are not identical, they grow from a dangerous belief that something valuable can be used, damaged, and discarded because those holding power have decided the cost is acceptable.

Let us stop calling silence discipline, stop calling environmental disregard strength, and stop pretending accountability somehow makes our military weaker.

Enough: No service member, no community, and no piece of Mother Earth should ever be treated as disposable.

xoxo, military members & Mother Earth

P.S. Read the first letters of each paragraph.