Beverly Kondel was 18, in the Army and out with a friend of a friend in the military when he invited her home to meet up with his wife, whom she knew. Yet his wife wasn’t there.
“He raped me,” Kondel, now 47, said of that night in 1974. “The next time I saw him, he joked about how he had to throw the sheet away because it had my virgin blood on it, so his wife wouldn’t find out.”
After that, she said, “I started drinking pretty heavy. Became promiscuous.”
The military attitude concerning rape, she said, “was that it was always the woman’s fault.” So she did not report it.
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“My life was ruined. I had been brought up Catholic. Virginity was for your husband. … I felt like I was ruined, damaged goods. As a result, I’m not a mother and I’m not a wife. I know I’ll never be a mother, but I hope to be a wife, if I can find someone to put up with the idiosyncrasies of PTSD.”
She began therapy, but still struggles with depression and issues of self-worth. “I don’t know who Bev Kondel is, and I live in her body. And I don’t know how to find out who I am. I’ve had guns put to my head over the years – I’m not very good at picking men. After being raped, you don’t think you deserve much in life. So it’s real hard to get it when you don’t think you deserve it.
“I think I should have been a different person.”
