As part of preproduction research for a documentary film on mental health practices in the United States military, this field note takes up findings related to discursive strategies deployed by the US Department of Defense and Veterans Administration programs in preventing and treating military sexual trauma. In the analysis of dozens of training manuals and interviews with therapists working in Sexual Assault Prevention teams through the Army National Guard and the VA, the analogy of military sexual assault and incest emerged as a recurring motif. The authors pursue the question of whether the analogy is progressive or regressive from the perspective of women service members. The authors situate their arguments in a line of analysis pursued in the earlier work of Haaken that explains how real accounts of abuse acquire social symbolic loadings over time in ways that are open to both conservative and progressive interpretations.