Four years ago, Army Specialist Vanessa Guillén was brutally murdered by a fellow soldier at Fort Hood (now Fort Cavazos), Texas. Guillén’s death attracted national attention, shining a spotlight on sexual harassment and assault within the armed forces as well as how disappearances of military personnel are handled.
Following a high-profile independent review, the Army announced “substantial changes to its policies, structures, and processes.” One of the Army’s “major accomplishments” was the overhaul of its “missing soldier protocols” — initiating new regulations regarding searches for absent personnel, contacting local law enforcement, communicating with troops’ next of kin, listing those who fail to report to duty as “missing,” instead of absent without leave or AWOL, and making “every effort to locate the absent soldier.”
An internal Army audit, completed earlier this year but never publicly released and obtained exclusively by Rolling Stone, found that the policy changes — known as Army Directive (AD) 2020-16 — instituted in the immediate wake of Guillén’s murder have been almost universally ignored.
According to the audit, commanders consistently failed to report absences and units neglected to accurately document missing soldiers, placing at-risk troops in further danger. Auditors were unable to tell, for example, if units had even searched for soldiers who may have been absent under unusual or suspicious circumstances. “Army units didn’t follow the guidance in Army Directive (AD) 2020-161 to track and account for absent soldiers,” reads the audit, which also determined that the Army neglected to institute any oversight processes to ensure adherence to the new directive.
The failures documented in the audit are part of a pattern of neglect by the U.S. military that has led to an epidemic of sexual assault as well as domestic violence, drug abuse, self-harm, and avoidable deaths in the armed forces. In many cases, the military has undercounted, poorly tracked, or sought to cover up or minimize the problems. Investigations by Rolling Stone found, for example, that a staggering total of 109 soldiers assigned to North Carolina’s Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) died in 2020 and 2021. Ninety-six percent of those deaths took place stateside. Fewer than 20 were from natural causes. All the rest, including macabre or unexplained deaths, homicides, and dozens of drug overdoses, were preventable. The Army has repeatedly stonewalled grieving families seeking answers. This new investigation by Rolling Stone demonstrates that ongoing failures to protect personnel and a lack of transparency and accountability continue to put vulnerable troops at greater risk.
Mayra Guillén, Vanessa’s oldest sister and the president and founder of the I am Vanessa Guillén Foundation, which advocates on behalf of survivors of sexual assault in the military, was scathing in her response to the new audit.
“The Army’s failure in following policy is a slap in the face to not just us but many families that have lost their loved ones,” she tells Rolling Stone, adding: “The Army needs to review these findings and take them seriously… these are lives that we’re talking about.”
AFTER VANESSA GUILLÉN, 20, went missing on April 22, 2020, she was listed as AWOL. Months later, Guillén’s remains were discovered in shallow graves about 20 miles from Fort Hood.
Being AWOL, or not being present for duty, was historically seen as a military crime that undermined “morale, discipline, and unit effectiveness” — a personal failing, typically committed by young, less educated troops with “a history of disciplinary and family problems,” according to a 1979 government study. Little consideration was given to the possibility that an absence might be involuntary.
An Army investigation later determined that the Army listing Guillén as AWOL “sent the wrong message, creating an inaccurate perception that she had voluntarily abandoned her unit and limiting the command’s access to certain resources, such as [a] casualty assistance officer to liaise with the family.”
That same inquiry also found “evidence of sexual harassment and mistreatment toward SPC Guillén,” unrelated to her murder, by a superior. “This supervisor created an intimidating, hostile environment,” says the report. “The unit leadership was informed of the harassment as well as the supervisor’s counterproductive leadership and failed to take appropriate action.”
Guillén was bludgeoned to death at Fort Hood by Army Specialist Aaron Robinson. Robinson’s girlfriend Cecily Aguilar told investigators that she helped Robinson dismember, burn, and bury Guillén’s remains. Robinson killed himself before he could be arrested. Aguilar pled guilty to a charge of being an accessory after the fact and three counts of making false statements. In August last year, she was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Guillén’s murder prompted widespread outrage over the Army’s failure to protect her, and prompted renewed attention to the larger issue of sexual assault and harassment in the military. An independent review of Fort Hood’s culture, released in November 2020, found strong evidence that sexual assault and harassment were commonplace and “significantly underreported,” and that commanders frequently looked the other way. In 2021, a federally-funded study by the RAND Corporation found that women at Fort Hood had a far higher risk of sexual assault than the average woman in the Army: 8.4 percent compared a 5.8 percent for the service as a whole.
A new study by Brown University’s Costs of War Project found that, for the U.S. military as a whole, the prevalence of sexual assault is likely two to four times higher than the Pentagon estimates. Since 9/11, roughly a quarter of women in the military have experienced sexual assault, with minorities at greatest risk. The analysis determined that there were likely 73,695 cases of sexual assault in the military in 2023, compared to the official estimate of 29,000.
“ARMY POLICIES WILL REINFORCE our focus on caring for soldiers and families,” reads Army Directive 2020-16, adding: “The Army will always place people first and will never leave a soldier behind.” The audit — which was completed earlier this year — determined this is not the case. “Unit leaders didn’t report 74 percent of Soldier absences correctly in Army personnel systems,” according to the audit. Of 207 soldiers who went missing from December 2022 to March 2023, units failed to follow the required steps for documenting the absence 89 percent of the time.
Under AD 2020-16, once a soldier is listed as “absent-unknown” (AUN), unit commanders must enter information into a national crime database within three hours, thereby notifying local civilian law enforcement. But the audit found, for example, that after one soldier was reported absent on February 7, 2023, the unit did not contact local law enforcement until February 13.
Mayra Guillén was perplexed by the lag time in reporting and called for consequences for those failing to follow the regulations.
Amy Braley-Franck, a longtime advocate for victims of sexual crimes within the military and a consultant to the Biden administration’s Independent Review Commission on Military Sexual Assault, says the Army’s process for accounting for absent soldiers is overcomplicated, but the solution is simple: immediately attempt to contact the soldier, their family, and especially law enforcement. “The military is fixated on figuring out if the soldier’s absence is voluntary or involuntary. That’s inconsequential to the problem,” she tells Rolling Stone. “We learned how to take care of these problems in kindergarten. It’s simple. Call the police and make a report.”
The Army auditors discovered that not one unit examined followed all the steps to properly identify their missing soldiers as absent, contact law enforcement within the correct timeframe, and update duty status as prescribed under AD 2020-16. They found that these shortcomings stemmed from a cascade of failures including units misinterpreting the directive or using outdated guidance, a lack of training on the current requirements, and the failure of the Army to implement any oversight mechanisms to determine whether units were complying with AD 2020-16.
While the audit faults low-level unit leaders for not enforcing the revamped protocols, experts say that the failure flows from the top. “The Army is blaming the individual units and low-ranking officers for not following their guidance but it’s not a failure of the units,” says Braley-Franck, a former Army sexual assault response coordinator and founder of Never Alone, a coalition seeking to end commanders’ abuse of power in the military. ”If you have that many units trying to execute something and failing, then it’s a failure of the entire program. It’s a failure of the Army.”
The Army did not respond to questions about the audit, implementation of AD 2020-16, and failures to institute oversight mechanisms prior to publication.
“The Army should be transparent — but it’s a foreign concept for them,” says Braley-Franck. “Without transparency, we’re never going to see positive change.”
IN THE LAST DECADE, scores of troops — perhaps hundreds — have died or gone missing at Fort Hood/Cavazos. In 2020 alone, 13 soldiers at the base killed themselves and five, including Guillén, were murdered. Last year, another 20-year-old soldier who said she was being sexually harassed, Ana Basaldua Ruiz, was found dead at Fort Cavazos. The Army ruled her death a suicide. Ruiz’s family disputed the findings. “My daughter did not commit suicide; my daughter was suicided,” her mother, Alejandra Ruiz Sarco, told Telemundo.
When asked for the latest figures on soldiers who went missing or died at the base, the Fort Cavazos Media Center said it could provide no information and recommended Rolling Stone file a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain these numbers. Such requests, if ever fulfilled, generally take months, if not years, to be completed.
“The Public Affairs Office is not the keeper of this kind of data,” says a spokesperson, who instead directed this reporter to a media center website with no relevant information and an outdated “Remembering Vanessa Guillén” webpage. When this reporter clicked on a link to “read more” about how the “Army mourns Spc. Vanessa Guillén,” the link led to a Korean language website about online gambling.
“There was a lot of positive progress being done until I came across this audit. I truly hope the Army takes these numbers seriously and has more prevention or some kind of consequences to those not doing their job,” Mayra Guillén tells Rolling Stone.
She adds, “Our soldiers matter and should be accounted for — especially if a family is trusting their loved one to join the forces and defend this country. They are giving up their freedom for ours and the least we can do is push these provisions and make sure the Army doesn’t drop the ball again when it comes to accounting for soldiers.”
