Diane Brent’s first assignment in the Air Force was in a building where she was the only woman.
“They said the last female they put there lasted only two weeks,” Brent, now 48, recalled of her job at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey in 1973.
She was 18.
“The men were really profane. They bragged about their sexual exploits. Would rub up against me. My staff sergeant would tell me I had to gas his car, wash it.”
Soon his demands turned sexual.
“He would tell me, ‘If you want to make it in this man’s military, you do what your supervisor says and you don’t complain,”‘ she said.
They drank alcohol, and he raped her, she said. Within a week she went to the captain in charge of her unit and told him what had happened.
“He just said that I should shut up and bear it because that was the only place I could work and anyway he didn’t believe it was happening because my sergeant was married.”
She did not try to report it again. “It meant my career. Without good performance ratings, I couldn’t make rank. And rank meant more money I could send home because at that time I was supporting my siblings.”
The sergeant forced her to have sex several times over a period of 18 months until Brent was transferred to Japan. By that point, she said, “I was drinking pretty heavily” to deal with the pain.
Her self-esteem plummeted. “It formed a pattern after that because I didn’t expect to be treated any differently. That’s what I felt I deserved.”
She went on to have a string of abusive relationships, continued to drink and got into trouble on the job, finally leaving the Air Force in 1989.
Estranged from her family, she could not hold down a job. “If I tried to work, I would get anxious, panic and then shut down,” Brent recalled. She began living on the street until she entered May Day House, a homeless program in Buffalo, N.Y. She began to get counseling in 2000.
“Now, it’s one day at a time,” she said.
