It was hard enough to tell the general about the baby.
Sofia Rodriguez was 25 and had been in the Air Force one year when she fell in love with someone in her unit and became pregnant.
So Rodriguez told the commander at McClellan Air Force Base in California that she was pregnant, and begged him to allow her to stay, something the military was just beginning to permit in 1976. He agreed, but in a mocking tone.
She was in her third month of pregnancy and not yet showing when she was raped. A staff sergeant, who had always appeared quietly professional, told her he would help her prepare for an evaluation of her job as an aircraft mechanic if she came by his home.
“The next thing I remember … he was raping me,” Rodriguez said. “I couldn’t move. All I could do was cry and think, ‘What’s going to happen to my baby?’ I can remember the tears coming down my face, and he was saying I was crying because I was enjoying it. He had his hand on my throat.”
Rodriguez, now 51, doesn’t remember how she got away. “I went to my dorm, locked myself in my room, and my whole life changed.”
|
VIDEO
|
|
|
She did not report the attack because she dreaded returning to the general who had belittled her before, and she was afraid the military would regard her as a troublemaker.
“I was not about to ask the same general for anything.”
After that, she withdrew. “I blamed myself. I even thought about suicide.” Yet at that moment, she felt the baby move for the first time. “It changed my perspective.”
She gave birth to a son in August 1978, and stayed in the Air Force three more years. After that, she worked a string of jobs. “I’ve always kept myself under the radar – trying not to make any waves.” Her relationships were volatile and brief.
Last fall, it all caught up with her. Stress had taken a toll on her health, and when she arrived at the VA Hospital in Denver for medical services, seeing people in uniform brought flashbacks.
“All the memories started coming.”
She began having panic attacks so severe that, if driving, she would have to pull over. Soon she could not work, could hardly function. She lost her job, then her apartment and ended up on the street.
Her only hope, Rodriguez said, has been the VA in Denver. “I’m doing better, and I believe it’s because I have a support system. I’m not alone. I no longer have to be in denial. I couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with me. Why can’t I function?”
She now rents a room in Boulder and is being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder “for a traumatic experience she had in her military service,” her records show.
“To be able to get to this point seems like a miracle,” she said.
The trauma from rape, she said, “takes your life if you let it. … I joined the military with my whole heart. You don’t expect to be raped by your own peers or superior.”
