"Paid house keeper plus all supplies and food. Helped her family also."
While I have no proof, I'm inclined to believe her. It's hard to imagine my parents owning a slave AND the US Military allowing it's personnel to keep slaves AND word of that not making it back to the US Mainland.
Knowing how base authorities handle off-base housing, I'd say the chances of this are next to zero. I doubt there's a military officer who isn't fully aware that the US's war with the most casualties was the one to end slavery.
"[Iraq and Afghanistan war] foreign workers are known, in military parlance, as 'third-country nationals,' or TCNs. Many of them recount having been robbed of wages, injured without compensation, subjected to sexual assault, and held in conditions resembling indentured servitude by their subcontractor bosses. Previously unreleased contractor memos, hundreds of interviews, and government documents I obtained during a yearlong investigation confirm many of these claims and reveal other grounds for concern. Widespread mistreatment even led to a series of food riots in Pentagon subcontractor camps, some involving more than a thousand workers."
I hope you're right, but it's also worth looking into the history of the Philippine-American war, which like many smaller wars seems to have been largely forgotten by history. I wasn't even aware of it until I came upon a gruesome picture of US soldiers posing in front of a pile of thousands of skulls in one of my history books.
I'm sure some of the strategists in Vietnam were well aware of the horrors of chemical warfare but chose to coat many acres of forests with Agent Orange regardless. Just like any sufficiently large organization, the military has members on every rung of the empathy/introspection spectrum.
By that logic no American institution would ever countenance racism, given that the 14th Amendment was intended to give equal protection under the law for all and was also a result of the Civil War.
Curious, How do base authorities handle off base housing? My husband is in the military and our off base housing is just a normal house we bought. Base authorities have nothing to do with our house. I'm wondering if you're talking about military owned off base housing? Here they are wholly operated by a private company and also rent to civilians and aren't really much different than renting normal private housing.
We've never lived overseas though. I imagine that's pretty different.
I totally believe you have different experience than me, I'm curious to what they are.
I grew up in a town with an air force training base and the students seem to have some oversight from the base housing authority to make sure they aren't doing anything to piss off the locals.
"Paid house keeper plus all supplies and food. Helped her family also."
While I have no proof, I'm inclined to believe her. It's hard to imagine my parents owning a slave AND the US Military allowing it's personnel to keep slaves AND word of that not making it back to the US Mainland.