International law has finally—after mass violation of women and girls occurred in Kosovo and Rwanda—recognized these crimes as distinct ones under international law. That’s obviously a critical development on behalf of women’s safety and women’s integrity worldwide. Three recent stories, though, remind us of the fact that war culture and utter disregard for women go hand in hand, and not just in far-off places. These stories take place, if not always geographically within our borders, within our own society.

Firstly, Representative Louise M. Slaughter, along with over 100 of her congressional colleagues, recently pressed Secretaries Gates and Rice to provide answers on the record to prove they will ensure that the grisly gang rape and torture Jamie Leigh Jones, a KBR employee, endured in Iraq by a group of her fellow employees, including the ensuing cover-up by the US military and the security company, will never happen again. Slaughter writes that while the Army created a rape kit, it then handed the kit over to the contractor KBR, and it was promptly “lost.” Two years after the brutal attack on Jones, there is still no word about an investigation from the Departments of Justice, State or Defense. This kind of collusion doesn’t sit well with Slaughter and fellow congressional members. Accountability, writes Slaughter, merits “rocking the boat.”

Although not directly related, after Persian Gulf War Veteran James Allen Selby hung himself in jail awaiting sentencing for at least 27 counts that included rape, armed robbery and attempted murder, he was, in death, granted a full military burial. In a recent opinion piece that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Ann Ream questions this procedure. She writes: “The military policy of allowing honors burials for veterans convicted of rape sends a chilling message to victims: Even the most heinous sexual violence does not trump prior military service,” a position she deems as “ethically indefensible as it is inconsistent.”

And the murder of Lance Marine Corporal Maria Lauterbach, eight months pregnant, by a fellow Marine, Cesar Laurean, a man she feared and at least at one time accused of sexual assault (although he was never even switched from the same unit), completes this trifecta of military protectionism for men who potentially have perpetrated violence against women. Her purported rape fell into an area some deem as “gray,” as if date rape or saying “no” isn’t enough to make it real. This grisly murder was real, though and it occurs as the media has begun to shed light on how many military personnel have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with such severe emotional trauma that a spike in murder, domestic violence, and suicide rates amongst those veterans is undeniable.

I don’t highlight these crimes to argue that one problem is bigger than the other or that men are more important than women or vice versa. The ways traumatized military men or veterans act—these extreme cases and many unreported ones—signals that the Military has a formidable job to do in the wake of war.  The Military must take on—as its moral imperative, and its humanitarian imperative—a boldly different and compassionate and comprehensive way to care for its veterans returning from war with such deep trauma that at best their young lives are forever altered.

It’s that caring for emotional wounds of its service men and women isn’t the only moral imperative for today’s military. An essential component to that moral and humanitarian imperative is for the Military to take a forceful stand against any tacit condoning of violence against women, internationally, domestically, and in zones where US citizens work as civilian contractors. You cannot work to protect basic human rights without seeing this one as absolute: freedom isn’t freedom if it’s only for half of the population.

Compassion isn’t linear. Compassion must move fluidly, in many directions in order to do its job, and begins with absolute intolerance for violence against women anywhere in the world, by anyone, at any time, in any uniform, “gray” or no. And it extends to those who served in inhumane conditions, to try to make it so that their broken selves can be restored. These priorities must be paired to make today’s world a safer, more just, more humane place.