“Every time I tripped over another female veteran, it was almost always the same story, and there was no help for us,” recalled Faren Jones, 38, who served in the Army Reserves and the Navy.
In 1983, Jones was stationed near Fort Bragg, N.C., when she was raped in her home by a Marine who was a friend of her husband, she said. He choked her and threatened further harm if she told anyone.
She became pregnant, and was not sure if the father was her husband or the rapist. After five months of anxiety, she miscarried.
Jones then attended a naval aviation school in Memphis, Tenn.
She was walking home from a movie theater one night with a sailor from the base when he suddenly pulled her into a dugout on the baseball field and raped her. She fought him hard enough to make him bleed, she said. Later, afraid of being blamed, she washed her bloody clothes and did her best to wipe the memory of the rape from her mind.
Assigned to a job at Lemoore Naval Air Station in California as an engine mechanic, Jones struggled for acceptance from her peers. “Being a black female in a nontraditional job is hell,” she said. “From day one, they didn’t like me.”
The hazing became malicious, and happened every day. Sometimes, she said, they groped her.
She went to her commanding officers, who dismissed her complaints, Jones said. She went to a human resources officer, “who told me I was hallucinating.”
A group of congressional aides concerned about sexual harassment visited Lemoore in 1988 to gather information, Jones said. During an assembly, one of the commanders told the aides “there was no sexual harassment on this base,” recalled Jones, who was there. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know which base he’s on.”‘
She stood up in the assembly, she said, opened a notebook and began reading incidents she had recorded. “Then I pointed to different people, talking about things I had witnessed.” Silence swept over the room, she said.
At work a few days later, Jones said, “I had enough. I threw stuff in the office, said, ‘You will never touch me again.”‘ She was ordered to go to the infirmary, and from there an ambulance came and she was taken to Oakland Naval Hospital, where she was put in a psychiatric unit.
Once released, she was told she was being given an honorable discharge for medical reasons. Two days before the congressional aides were due to return to Lemoore, she was barred from the base, Jones said.
Still, as a result of her earlier complaints, some of the men were brought in for a hearing before a captain. At the hearing, Jones said, she was asked, “What clothes did you wear? Did you brush your breasts against them?” The men were given verbal warnings. “They got nothing. I got destroyed.”
Nobody talked to her after that. Now living in Florida, she is unable to work and, some days, struggles just to go grocery shopping.
Jones, who records show is considered by the VA to be 100 percent disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder related to sexual assault, said she is still in treatment. “I have flashbacks, panic attacks, migraine headaches. So many things I have to struggle with daily just to get out of the house. It’s taken over my life.”
“They looked at me and laughed. I still get angry about that. I was powerless, and have been powerless ever since. But I’m working on it.”
