Servicewomen are the most vulnerable in the Military, from the Army to the Air Force they have refused to take these violent acts against women seriously. U.S. servicewomen today are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire. At some Veterans Affairs hospitals, over 40 percent of female patients report having been sexually assaulted during their service, and almost one-third are survivors of rape. Now murder is on the rise on an Air Force Base in North Carolina.

“My daughter’s dream became a nightmare,” sadly said Gloria Barrios, seven months after her daughter, US Air Force Senior Airman Blanca Luna, was murdered on Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas. On March 7, 2008, Senior Airman Luna, 27, was found dead in her room at the Sheppard Air Force Base Inn, an on-base lodging facility. She had been stabbed in the back of the neck with a short knife.

Luna had four years prior military service and was killed three days prior to her graduation from Air Conditioning, Ventilation, and Heating course.

When she was notified of her daughter’s death, she was handed a letter from Major General K.C. McClain, Commander of the Air Force Personnel Center, which stated that her daughter “was found dead on 7 March 2008 at Sheppard Air Force Base, Texas, as the result of an apparent homicide.” When her body was returned to her family for burial, Barrios and other family members saw bruises on Blanca’s face and wounds on her fingers as if she were defending herself. One of the investigators later told Mrs. Barrios that Blanca had been killed in an “assassin-like” manner. Friends say that she told them some in her unit “had given her problems.”

Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright who ended her career in 2003 has become a spokeswoman on the issue of violence against women in the military and women who live near U.S. military bases. She claims the military has failed to adequately investigate the deaths of a number of servicewomen despite reason to suspect they were raped and murdered.

On the same day Mrs. Barrios went to Sheppard Air Force Base, October 3, 2008, the US Army announced that a US Army woman sergeant had been killed near Fort Bragg, North Carolina by a stab wound in the neck. Sergeant Christina Smith, 29, was stabbed on September 30, 2008, allegedly by her US Army husband Sergeant Richard Smith who was accompanied by Private First Class Matthew Kvapil. Smith was the fourth military woman murdered in North Carolina in the past 9 months.

“The military has no sense of timely responsibility for keeping the family informed,” says Wright. “They don’t set up strong enough liaisons with the family. Someone should be calling the family every week to say ‘this is where we are in the investigation.’ It really is a lack of professional responsibility in my opinion. They’re the big dog, the military, and these poor little families have little recourse unless they get a lawyer. But most of these families don’t have any money-that’s often the reason the kids joined the military in the first place.”

Wright says Luna’s family is right to be suspicious.

All of this makes you wonder if there is someone in the chain of command that the Air Force is covering for. Or is it that the “killer” may be a friend of the investigators looking into these violent crimes? So many questions and no real answers from the Air Force-too much violence against women is happening in all branches of the Military. For these four women, so far, there has been no justice. There should be an outcry of moral outrage of this inexcusable injustice…