Recalling such stories in an interview, Johnston shifts from anger to disgust to paranoia. He is constantly worried both about DynCorp retaliating against him in some way, and about Serbian mafia members coming to kill him. He is angry about being fired, but gets even more upset when he recalls how blatant the problem became by early 2000.

By that point, Johnston says, such ownership was rampant among employees of DynCorp in Dubrave. He says the men walked around town with the women and openly displayed their affection. He describes the women as universally young -- teenagers, even preteens -- and foreign.

One particularly disturbing pattern Johnston describes in his deposition underscores the youth of the women involved:

Johnston: "You could see them [the prostitutes] right out the window [of my house]."

DynCorp attorney J. Gregory Marks: "What were they doing?"

Johnston: "Playing with other children. A lot of them are so young, they would play with other kids, and you could see them riding bikes and stuff like that."

Marks: "You would see the women?"

Johnston: "Right, but the man would be out there, too."

Marks: "And what would he be doing?"

Johnston: "Just watching, smoking a cigarette."

At work, Johnston says, the prostitution talk had spiraled out of control. Co-workers, he says, would talk about "how good it was to have a sex slave at home," and discuss the possibility of selling "them back for half price" when they grew tired of them.

Johnston says that one employee he invited over for dinner brought his sex slave with him. He says the man complained about the woman's wanting to return to her home country and how the man was afraid to let her, because he feared she wouldn't come back.

Johnston's wife Denisa, a native of Dubrave, says that even though she was naive about such activities, in late 1999 and early 2000 she started to become aware of what DynCorp men where doing in their off time.

"I had never seen a prostitute in my life," she says, "only in the movies."

That limited exposure was enough to let her know that the foreign women hanging on the arms of DynCorp employees, identifiable by the patches on their uniforms, were prostitutes.

"I'll never forget this one time," Denisa said in a recent telephone interview. "There was one guy who weighs 300 pounds who wore this greasy leather jacket. He was so gross. And he was with a girl about 14 or 15. He was hugging her and she would push him away. And this was a good-looking girl. You could just tell that there was no way she would be with him [by choice]."

Such public displays didn't sit well with the conservative Muslim community in Dubrave.

"A lot of people didn't like it," Denisa Johnston says. "My uncle and aunt had little kids that were just like, 'Whoa, what's going on here?' You have to picture my town; when I started dating Ben, my brother would always go with us."

She met a few of these girls at DynCorp-related functions and co-worker get-togethers and tried to talk with them. "They didn't like to talk a lot," she says. "They seemed really sad."

Ben Johnston wasn't the only DynCorp employee disturbed by what he was seeing. His best friend, Tom Oliver, eventually would go with him to the CID when Johnston decided he had to take action outside of the DynCorp chain of command to stop men from buying women. Oliver is personally familiar with the workings of forced prostitution in Bosnia -- he admits he paid a local brothel owner for his current wife, who was in her late teens at the time. In his testimony, Oliver describes the transaction as "buying her freedom." The woman, Mihaela, gave birth to Oliver's son shortly before he left Bosnia, and they are now married and living in Alabama.

Oliver's testimony supports Johnston's claim that the purchasing of prostitutes was common among DynCorp personnel in Bosnia -- and not necessarily to free them.

In one of the stories he tells in his deposition, Oliver says he was invited into the house of some co-workers to see what he describes as two "rental" live-in women in their late teens. The women, Oliver says, were clearly prostitutes.

"They invited me into the house [and] the women were just, you know, sitting around the house in their underwear, thongs, T-shirts, maybe a bra, that was it," he testified. "I don't think that's the way most people entertain company."

Perhaps the most shocking tale in Oliver's deposition is the story of a DynCorp employee named Steve who bought a 16-year-old Romanian girl. He says that at some point Steve found himself both in financial trouble and angry with the girl so he sold her back to the bar he had bought her from. Then another DynCorp employee expressed interest in buying her.

Oliver says he gave his 30-day notice to DynCorp in late April 2000. That, he says, is when he and Johnston hatched a plan to report the forced prostitution to the Army Criminal Investigative Command.

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