The profanity-laced email that landed in thousands of Coast Guard inboxes this past May wasn’t intended to foment a rebellion in the nation’s most under-the-radar branch of the military. It wasn’t meant to get cited in a congressional hearing. It was just sheer, scorching frustration.
The 4,000-word screed from an anonymous, encrypted email account focused on alleged sexual misconduct at Sector Mobile in Alabama and claims the Coast Guard mishandled the investigation. Not long after firing off the email, the sender, who called themself Whistler McGee, also posted the letter on Facebook.
“I was just going to make the Facebook account, post it, and then bail,” McGee told The War Horse in an interview last month. “But within two, three hours, it just exploded.”
McGee started receiving hundreds of emails from Coast Guard members with similar experiences. Soon, current and former service members were publicly posting stories of alleged sexual assaults, many of them under the hashtag #ImWithWhistler, sharing how they also felt the Coast Guard had failed them. Leaked documents — including internal guidance on how commands should respond to the social media activity — soon followed.
Now, two months after Whistler McGee’s initial email, what started as a quest for vengeance has erupted into a rank-and-file reckoning over how the military handles sexual assaults and who should drive the conversation about whether leadership is doing…
