The local CBS news affiliate is reporting this morning that the top two administrators for the Air Force Academy will be fired this week. This is something that should have happened long ago.

The problem, as I pointed out in my earlier post, is what that culture of rape at the academy has done to the USAF as an institution. This letter published in the NY Times makes that clear.

Here are five paragraphs of excerpts:

You know that look you get when someone thinks you're full of it? The eyes narrow as if there's a thick, black smoke cloud between you, the head turns skeptically to one side, the brow crinkles in a look that can be read only as, "You have got to be kidding me." I know that look well.

I grew up poor and black. I escaped poverty in large measure by enlisting in the United States Air Force and staying for 12 years. The service claimed me as one of its own: I was decorated, I was promoted early, I earned bachelor's and master's degrees and became an officer. I was an official golden girl.

But along with all the support and encouragement came incredible sexism. It was infinitely more difficult to be female in uniform than to be black. As the ultimate expression of that, I was raped by a member of my own unit, in my own bed, on Christmas Day 1981, shortly after reporting to my first assignment, at Osan Air Base in South Korea. I was 22. I pressed charges and my attacker confessed. Then the second phase of the nightmare began: the military blamed me."

"My fellow airmen ostracized me. Another unit member who was charged with killing his infant while drunk was surrounded by weeping airmen during his trial. No one except a sympathetic major, who wasn't even in my chain of command, came to support me during my rapist's trial. My peers drafted a character statement attesting to my rapist's high morals and their disbelief in the guilt to which he had confessed. The unit's women led that effort. Had he falsified an expense voucher, he'd have done hard time and been discharged. For raping me, he got six months and served two. He lost his security clearance but went on to retire with full benefits."

"That's why I became so familiar with that "you've got to be kidding me" look. No wonder. People were right to think me a fool. If wholesale rape and scapegoating of victims is going on at the Air Force Academy, it must still be pure hell in the trenches. My eyes have finally been opened, however late in the game. I was never one of the Air Force's own. My rapist was."

Some will charge that I am being unfair to the Air Force about this. My reply is I am being no more "unfair" to the Air force than the Air Force was "unfair" to its serving women.

Rape is part of the human condition. It will happen in any institution with people in it. The measure of that institution is how it responds to this crime. By that standard, the USAF fails miserably. Treating rape less seriously than travel voucher fraud and shunning the rape victim as a "nutty slut who had it coming" are the signs of a dysfunctional institutional culture that can only be cured through serious purges.