Band of Brothers: Sex crimes and cover-up in the 101st Airborne Division
Back in Afghanistan, Santoro continued his reign of terror. “I had to go my whole deployment trying to avoid this guy and make him happy so that he would leave me alone,” Queen recalled. “He would kick my door in, come in my room, and grab me. He would just randomly do it like he was playing around and feel up on me.” But this behavior was repeated with others in the platoon as well. “More to me, because I was like his thing or something.”
Other members of the platoon described how Santoro was known to coerce privates into sitting on his lap so that they could “cuddle” with one another. Another eyewitness said that he saw Santoro nibbling on a soldier’s ear after hearing rumors about such behavior for some time.
Many of the platoon members that SOFREP spoke to believed that Santoro was kept around as long as he was because they were on a hot deployment and receiving daily contact with the enemy. In an already troubled platoon, the last thing many felt they needed was to lose their senior squad leader. “One thing I can say about him: I know he was one of the best sergeants I ever had as far as making sure that we did our job,” Jones said. At that time, Jones did not know about the sexual assaults and felt that “Santoro knew his job; he was the weapons squad leader and we definitely needed him.”
“We were getting so much contact from rockets into our base, and going outside the wire in so much contact that it didn’t make sense to tell on him because he was so good outside the wire,” Barnes said. Then, one day, “We started wrestling once after work and he forcefully jammed his fingers in my ass,” Barnes recalled. Fighting his way out of the attack, Barnes yelled at Santoro over the episode.
“Did you just see what happened?” Barnes asked a soldier who had witnessed the event.
“I think I saw what I just saw,” he replied.
Afterwards, the two infantrymen went to their hootch to talk about what had just happened.
“What do I do?” Barnes asked.
“I don’t know, Sergeant,” his teammate replied.
It wasn’t until Santoro tried to force Queen into oral sex that the chain of command took any action. Queen went to talk to his platoon sergeant about the incident. “He had tears in his eyes,” Mason said. “He is a small guy—very small frame. It was basically that he was afraid for one, to be in that building with Santoro. And that he was tired of living in fear, I guess, is the best way to put it, of being groped on a daily basis. Because there was nothing he could do about it and he was scared to death.”
