Paula Glover joined the Air Force in 1965 at age 18 because of some bad weather in Philadelphia.
“I ducked into a recruiter’s office to get out of a snowstorm,” Glover recalled. “I took the test while I was there.”
Within a few months, she was in technical school at Amarillo Air Force Base in Texas. The one hitch to her graduating: typing class. Aware that if she failed the class she would be sent home in shame, Glover practiced. And practiced.
The day she took the test, the instructor, a sergeant, graded it without telling her how she had done. Then he asked if she wanted to get something to eat.
After their meal, Glover recalls, he stopped at a store and bought a pint of Bacardi light rum and a Coke. “I remember him coming around the car to my door, but I don’t remember how I got in the back seat,” she said of that day. “I remember saying, ‘No! Stop!”‘
“The next thing I know, I was being let off at the barracks.”
She became pregnant.
“When I realized I was pregnant, I told my mother I wanted an abortion,” Glover said. An aunt performed the abortion using two No. 22 knitting needles.
After that, Glover said, she began drinking.
She never reported her rape. “You have to report it to a man, who talks to a man, who gives it to a man, to make the decision.”
She never saw that sergeant again. She had passed her typing test and began to work.
After that, two things mattered: working hard and drinking hard. “I got promoted quickly,” she said. “I didn’t want a man to be my supervisor again.”
She also became promiscuous, but sex was not enjoyable. “I couldn’t have cared less. I was a functional alcoholic. I drank my way through many bases.”
She left the Air Force as a first sergeant in 1975 and took a job at the post office. “I convinced myself that if I wasn’t sleeping, I should be making money. And in between, I always found time to drink.”
Eventually, she was admitted to the psychiatric floor of the Philadelphia VA Hospital in 1998. “The women there were very compassionate,” she said. “I was comforted.”
Once out, she began seeing therapists but did not find them helpful. “One white female psychiatrist called me an angry black woman,” said Glover. “I told her not to take it personally but that she should leave the profession.”
Glover said one of those therapists diagnosed her with post-traumatic stress disorder and put her on medication. At the time, she did not tell VA officials she was raped.
Finally, in September 2002, she had a breakdown and planned to kill herself. “I was tired. Tired of not knowing, hurting, drinking, being alone, getting angry.”
A friend stopped her, and she was hospitalized for 19 days in a ward with men. “THEY should have been scared of ME,” she jokes now. During that visit, a doctor asked her for the first time if she had been sexually assaulted in the military, Glover said, and she told her yes.
She joined a sexual-assault treatment program. Now, she said, “I better understand why I did so much of what I did.”
And she wants to help other women. “As a first sergeant, I kept referral numbers to abortionists. Told my rookies of the option. Many came to me that had been sexually assaulted. How do you take this from people? This thing needs to be told so badly.”
