As one of the few women working in an ambulance unit at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii in 1983, 18-year-old Susan Armenta did not question a supervisor when he instructed her to wear only dresses. Then he told her to wash the ambulances in front of the barracks. Finally, he asked her to dinner, and she asked for a transfer.
She was alone in her barracks early one morning when her next supervisor walked in and sexually assaulted her. As he was leaving, Armenta, now 39, recalls his saying, “Thank you. You just made my day.”
She did not report him, she said, for fear she would be demoted or punished.
Two months later, she left the service and eventually joined the Reserves.
In 1991, Armenta was activated for Operation Desert Storm. She was at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs doing laundry when she walked back into her room and suddenly felt a huge shove.
“I remember seeing a face and blond hair. I know the person was very heavy because I was hurting so bad,” she recalled.
She remembers few details of the rape itself, but can recall waking up the next morning feeling numb. “I went to the bathroom and saw the blood and the stickiness and the bruises,” she said. “I took the longest shower of my life, and that was it.”
Weeks later, she realized she had contracted a sexually transmitted disease from the assault, she said, and was treated by a doctor. She never told him what happened. “You just didn’t hear about being raped in the military.”
She regrets that decision.
“I know the way the military structure is; it will happen to young people coming in, and I don’t want them to be afraid to come forward. … I want people not to be like me. I want those girls to come forward. I know it’s going to hurt them so much more if they don’t.”
After the rape, Armenta returned to work. “I drank wine to keep myself under control. I was so scared I would see him again. One day at work I began crying hysterically. I asked for a chaplain, and the next thing I knew I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital.”
Because of her breakdown, she did not go to Saudi Arabia. After getting out of the hospital, she said, people shunned her. “I was treated like an outsider and a coward.”
She took a job with the Department of Veterans Affairs as a claims specialist, and one day at the end of 2001 she was working on a rape claim when she became depressed, so she went to see a counselor.
“I was asked the question, ‘Was I ever sexually assaulted in the military?’ … No one had ever asked me that question. I had been labeled depressed. I thought a minute and said yes.”
