The General's Daughter: by Nelson Demille.

No matter how much she achieves, she could never achieve one thing she desperately needed as a child, her father's approval and love. He is a high profile general and a selfish man in that his career, his standards, his name is everything. Perhaps a male heir would beat him at his own game, perhaps not, who knows! But a daughter has no chance whatsoever no matter how high an achiever in his own field, because she has other needs too, of love and admiration, and if she does not get them from him she could only go frigid and die within or do something that would inevitably blot the father's escutcheon, since respectable ways of a happy life with love do not match requirements of a life with high achieving career if you are a woman, not in west, certainly not in military.

So when she is dead in a position incompatible with her father's position, he must order an inquiry but makes his requirements clear, hush. And the setup of the inquiry is as suitable for the purpose, or so those that arranged it think.

Only, those that are given the job have more of a conscience and integrity. They will go to the end to discover truth, and will not hush it up. And truth is, however much others in the base hated her or whatever, for whatever reason, it is her own father that is responsible for her murder, in a more literal way than the slow torture of her life from childhood on.


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All that assuming the general is well meaning and honest, sincere at all times. But that is an assumption demolished cruelly for the daughter in her hour of most need of a father, when he turns out to be not merely less of a father than a marionette to be commanded by his paymasters, but far worse - he takes orders to hush her up, have no inquiry to ascertain who were participants in the gang rape she suffered from her own colleagues - which in US military happens often enough in individual setting for most women in military, but with just as little redress - but tells her to forget it ever happened and assures her it is for the best. How would he know any better? Women usually do not rape men, much less gang rape with all the repercussions involved, being made feel like trash being only one, and open laughter amongst colleagues around her for another.

Only, if he were a father - which he biologically was but never grew up enough to be, perhaps not even as much a human as a machine aiming at one thing, his own career - he ought to have known, and more. He ought to have felt all her pain and humiliation and outrage, and ought to have moved heaven and earth and hell too if necessary to get justice for her and punishment for the miscreants, beasts that raped her, only for being superior to all her colleagues. If he were human, if he were grown up enough to be a father more than in biological terms.

He however was far more concerned about his own career, although the issue was dressed up in terms he and others could dress up suitably so as to not seem like he exchanged his daughter's life for his own medals - interests of nation, military, future of women in military, whatever blah would sound right.

Only, this veil of secrecy, pretense of nothing happened, forgetting, did not save future for women in US military - on the contrary.

It was a subterfuge everyone could clearly see through, and from that day one it was not only his own daughter that was presented to all males who could and wished to rape her - it was any and every woman, in military or otherwise. For sake of medals for him and anonymity of rapists heart's desire, all women of world were officially sacrificed to the base ignoble males of military of US and elsewhere. It was regression at its worst.

And the daughter's sense of justice would not give up, either, just as much as her heart bleeding tears of blood for the father she had needed in her most dire moment continued to force him to look at her, to acknowledge it did happen.
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Fortunately for her the investigating team did hear her - after her death. And they chose not to overlook and pretend and forget.

In this perhaps she was luckier than most women of the world, and not because she was the general's daughter.