The Invis­i­ble War

Har­row­ing is what this film is, unre­lent­ing­ly har­row­ing, from begin­ning to end. Kori Cio­ca and Ari­ana Klay are two ex-ser­vice­women who appear in inves­tiga­tive doc­u­men­tar­i­an Kir­by Dick’s exposé of rape in the US mil­i­tary. There is no mis­tak­ing the soul-crush­ing effects on these women who tell their sto­ries in tones that alter­nate between numb and tear­ful. Their lives unfold beneath the shad­ow of night­mares that won’t go away. Kori’s been on a soft food diet for the last five years after her rapist whacked her in the face dis­plac­ing her jaw discs. To add insult to injury, he’s still serv­ing in the Coast Guard while her arc involves a long-stand­ing fight with the Veteran’s Asso­ci­a­tion to get the med­ical ben­e­fits need­ed to fix her jaw.

Injus­tice emerges as a theme with­in the mil­i­tary, a bit­ter irony con­sid­er­ing that it mar­kets itself on fight­ing glob­al tyran­nies. ​“You pre­sent­ed him with an oppor­tu­ni­ty that he cap­i­talised on and need to under­stand that that is not the same as rape“ and ​“That’s what you get when you walk down a hall of drunk­en SEALs” are among the dis­missals told to Kir­by Dick’s case stud­ies that they repeat to him, shak­en that the events that caused their lives to fall apart have been so glibly invalidated.

Shock comes fil­tered through sto­ical mil­i­tary bear­ings for these ladies (and one man) remain mould­ed by the insti­tu­tion that they used to be proud to serve. Pho­tos of their younger selves in uni­form and bio­graph­i­cal details of hard work and com­mit­ted ser­vice recur, the con­trast between ide­o­log­i­cal recruits of the past and psy­cho­log­i­cal casu­al­ties of the present nev­er ceas­ing to sicken.

It’s hard to call whether the vet­er­ans have been more dam­aged by abuse or sub­se­quent betray­al by an insti­tu­tion they once believed in. As in Alex Gibney’s bril­liant inves­ti­ga­tion into rape in the Catholic Church, Mea Max­i­ma Cul­pa, we are spend­ing time with indi­vid­u­als who were once enmeshed in a pow­er sys­tem that plays by its own rules, hush­ing up crimes in the name of fra­ter­ni­ty. There is an extra­or­di­nary dis­con­nect between the flesh and blood vic­tims we see before the cam­era and the per­pe­tra­tors who remain free, their cal­lous hypocrisy and sex­u­al oppor­tunism attrib­ut­able only to ghosts outlines.

It is the mass of absent faces and names that makes The Invis­i­ble War so hard-hit­ting. Where­as in Gibney’s film there is the sat­is­fy­ing pur­suit of per­pe­tra­tors, here there are just shell-shocked vic­tims and their loved ones. ​“I don’t think it’s affect­ed his life at all,” says Jes­si­ca Hinves in a swollen sob. She still hears about her rapist from her for­mer and his con­tem­po­rary col­leagues in the Air Force.

US gov­ern­ment sta­tis­tics con­cern­ing the high­er rates of rape in the mil­i­tary than in the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion fade in and out while psy­cho­log­i­cal experts break down the impact of trau­ma and the empow­er­ing effect that know­ing they can get away with sex crimes has on per­pe­tra­tors. What emerges by the end of 93 pun­ish­ing and emo­tive min­utes is a por­trait of the army as a shady and anti­quat­ed boy’s club where flesh is seen as far game. The bar­rage of relent­less­ly upset­ting facts presents a trou­bling pic­ture that, unlike so many of its sub­jects, can­not be ignored.