A26 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019 K
Sexual assault in the military is a problem widely
recognized but poorly understood. Elected officials
and Pentagon leaders have tended to focus on the
thousands of women who have been preyed upon
while in uniform. But over the years, more of the
victims have been men.
On average, about 10,000 men are sexually as-
saulted in the American military each year, accord-
ing to Pentagon statistics. Overwhelmingly, the
victims are young and low-ranking. Many struggle
afterward, are kicked out of the military and have
trouble finding their footing in civilian life.
For decades, the fallout from the vast majority
of male sexual assaults in uniform was silence:
Silence of victims too humiliated to report the
crime, silence of authorities unequipped to pursue
it, silence of commands that believed no problem
existed, and silence of families too ashamed to
protest.
Women face a much higher rate of sexual as-
sault in the military — about seven times that of
men. But there are so many more men than wom-
en in the ranks that the total numbers of male and
female victims in recent years have been roughly
similar, according to Pentagon statistics — about
10,000 a year. And before women were fully inte-
grated into the armed services, the bulk of the
victims were men.For generations, the military wasn’t looking for
male sexual assault victims, so it failed to see them,
according to Nathan W. Galbreath, deputy director
of the Defense Department’s Sexual Assault Pre-
vention and Response Office. Only in 2006, after the
office began surveying service members, he said,
did the military learn that at least as many men as
women were being assaulted.
“That was surprising to senior leadership,” Mr.
Galbreath said. “Everyone was so sure the prob-
lem was a women’s issue.”
A report published in May indicates that while
the share of male victims who come forward has
been rising recently, an estimated four out of five
still do not report the attack.For tens of thousands of veterans who were
assaulted in the past, the progress made in recent
years offers little comfort. The damage has al-
ready been done. Many have seen their lives
buckle under the weight of loathing and bitterness,
and have seen decades pass before what happened
to them was acknowledged by anyone — including
themselves.
Here are the stories of six of those men. The
Department of Veterans Affairs has reviewed each
man’s case and formally recognized him as a vic-
tim of service-connected sexual assault. The mili-
tary branches in which each man served were
asked to comment for this article, but declined to
discuss specific cases.PAUL LLOYD WAS PUSHING a cart
through the supermarket near his home
in Salt Lake City, looking for light bulbs,
when he stopped to sniff a variety of
scented candles on a nearby shelf. Sud-
denly his hands were over his face, and
he sank to the floor, sobbing.
One candle smelled just like the sham-
poo he had been using in the shower at
Army basic training in 2007, when he was
beaten and raped by another recruit.
“Some little thing can happen, and
you’re back in that little 3-by-3 square
shower,” he said later. “It’s hell, and
there’s no escape from it.”Mr. Lloyd joined the Army National
Guard at 17. When he was assaulted in the
shower one night after everyone else had
gone to bed, he said, he told no one. Even
when he ended up in the hospital the next
day with internal bleeding and a torn rec-
tum, and doctors asked him what had
happened, Mr. Lloyd, who was raised in
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, said he simply shrugged.
“I felt like I couldn’t say anything,” he
said. “I would look like a total failure — to
my family, to my platoon, to myself.”
During the years when Mr. Lloyd was
in the Army, only 3 percent of male vic-tims reported sexual assaults, according
to Defense Department estimates. The
percentage has increased nearly sixfold
since then, but the vast majority of men
who are sexually assaulted still never re-
port it.
Mr. Lloyd earned top scores in marks-
manship and physical fitness, and wanted
a career in the military, but he said a sense
of betrayal and disgust at being raped
started to gnaw at him. When he was giv-
en leave for Christmas, he decided not to
return. He hid out at his sister’s house for
a month before the National Guard found
him. He was taken back to boot camp andeventually discharged for misconduct. He
was later able to upgrade his discharge to
honorable.
At home, he told no one about the at-
tack. He stopped going to church, he
said, fell into drinking and struggled to
hold a job. He questioned his own sexu-
ality. His family wondered why he could-
n’t keep his act together.
It took five years for him to decide to
tell them what had happened.
“They saw me as broken for a long
time,” he said. “When I told them I’d been
raped, they said, ‘Finally, it all makes
sense.’ ”BILL MINNIX WAS TOO ASHAMEDto tell
his family why he was kicked out of the
Air Force in 1973, and they were too
ashamed to ask. What would people at
church say? What would the neighbors
think?
He didn’t speak a word to anyone
about having been raped, he said — not
for the next 40 years.
He had enlisted at 17, and was a few
weeks into radar technician school when
a group of older enlisted men and officers
took some new recruits to an off-base re-
sort. In a private bungalow, after a round
of drinking, Mr. Minnix said, the older
men told the recruits it was time for their
initiation.“At first there was laughing and ner-
vous joking, and then there was silence,”
Mr. Minnix said. “I was scared to death.
And we got forced into sex acts none of us
wanted.” He said the teenagers were
made to perform oral sex or were sod-
omized. “What an awful thing, when you
go back to the base the next day and you
are facing these people,” he said.
Mr. Minnix struggled to make sense of
what had happened in the bungalow.
Real men don’t get raped, he told himself,
they fight back. He found he was unable
to concentrate on his work, and started
to do poorly in radar school. He was des-
perate to get out of the Air Force.
“I couldn’t stand being there,” said Mr.Minnix, who lives in Bend, Ore. “I didn’t
feel I could report it to anyone. The best
thing to do was run.”
He sighed and added, “I’ve essentially
been running for most of my life since
then.”
Mr. Minnix deserted, was caught a
week later, and then deserted again. The
Air Force put him in jail and threatened
to prosecute him if he didn’t agree to
leave the service voluntarily with a less-
than-honorable discharge. He took the
discharge.
Once he was out, he spent most of his
adult life in what he calls “a black box,”
shut off from the world by anger and
shame. He burned through jobs and twomarriages, drinking to numb his own
loathing.
His parents never spoke to him again.
They died not knowing the truth.
In recent years, through counseling
provided by the Department of Veterans
Affairs, Mr. Minnix has been able to
come to terms with what happened. He
has remarried and has joined a local vet-
erans’ group called the Oregon Band of
Brothers. He drove his Jeep in the local
Veterans Day parade in 2018.
“That filled a big void for me,” he said.
“I had military service taken away from
me. For years, when I heard the anthem
or saw the parades, I would cry. I can feel
like a veteran now.”Men Tell Their Stories of Rape in the Service
Text by DAVE PHILIPPS | Photographs by MARY F. CALVERT
BILL MINNIX, 64
ENLISTED IN THE AIR FORCE, ASSAULTED IN 1973PAUL LLOYD, 30
ENLISTED IN THE ARMY NATIONAL GUARD, ASSAULTED IN 2007‘It’s hell, and there’s
no escape from it.’
‘At first there was
laughing and nervous
joking, and then there
was silence.’