THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALTHURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2019 N A27
HEATH PHILLIPS STEPPEDin front of a
crowd of hundreds of soldiers at Fort
Hood in central Texas. He took a breath,
and then shared a secret that had
gnawed at him for 25 years.
“My name is Heath Phillips,” he said,
“and I was sexually assaulted when I
was in the United States Navy.”
In 1988, when Mr. Phillips was 17, he ar-
rived at his first ship, and a group of sail-
ors offered to take him out for a night on
the town. They traveled to Manhattan, he
said, and he woke up on the floor of a ho-
tel room to see one of the men ejaculating
on his face while others were trying to
pull off his pants. Mr. Phillips writhed out
of their grip and locked himself in a bath-
room.
He reported the attack to the ship’s
master at arms the next day, he said, but
the master at arms just looked at him
skeptically. “Were you drinking?” Mr.
Phillips recalls him saying. “Do you
know that you can get in trouble for un-
derage drinking?”
Mr. Phillips said he was sent back to
his bunk in the bowels of the ship, where
he slept just a few feet from the attack-
ers. For months, he said, they beat and
raped him repeatedly.
Mr. Phillips said he went to the master
at arms again and again, often with black
eyes and split lips, to complain about the
abuse.
“He always accused me of lying,” Mr.
Phillips recalled. “He would say I had no
proof. I think he just didn’t want to deal
with it.”
Mr. Phillips deserted, was arrested
and sent back to the ship, and deserted
again, and again. Eventually he was
forced out of the Navy with an other-
than-honorable discharge for running
away so many times.
For decades, he said, he told no one
else what had happened to him. But in
2009, he received counseling at a veter-ans’ hospital, and came to realize that si-
lence might only allow assaults in the
military to go on unchecked.
He became a vocal member of advoca-
cy groups and met with lawmakers. A
congressional investigation supported
his account. And he started telling his
story at military bases — something that
petrified him at first, but that he now
sees as a vital part of healing.
“I got my military career cut short, and
that’s not right,” he said after addressing
the soldiers at Fort Hood. “But I still love
the military. By speaking out, I am serv-
ing in a different way.”THE FEW YEARSBilly Joe Capshaw
spent in the Army were the worst years
of his life, he said, but to this day he
wears an Army veteran baseball cap. He
said it deflects unwanted questions from
strangers about the marks on his face.
“It explains the scars,” he said. “They
don’t ask.”
In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested
and confessed to raping and killing 17
young men and boys, some of whom he
then dismembered and ate. The news
media soon learned that Mr. Capshaw
had been Mr. Dahmer’s roommate in the
Army, and descended on Hot Springs,
Ark., where Mr. Capshaw lives.
At a news conference before a bank of
reporters, Mr. Capshaw described the
heavy-metal posters Mr. Dahmer deco-
rated their room with, and the W.C.
Fields jokes Mr. Dahmer liked to tell.
But he did not mention the vials of lo-
razepam and ketamine that he said Mr.
Dahmer often used to sedate him. Or the
metal bar he said Mr. Dahmer used to
beat him, or the motor-pool rope to tie
him down, or the scars, still visible on Mr.
Capshaw’s cheeks after nearly 40 years,
from Mr. Dahmer trying to muffle his
screams with a clenched hand.
“I couldn’t,” Mr. Capshaw recalled,
shaking his head, in an interview this
spring. “You say you’ve been raped by
another man, people blame you, they
shame you. They just don’t get how
something like this can happen.”
Mr. Capshaw joined the Army at 17 and
was stationed at Baumholder Army Gar-
rison in Germany in 1980 when he was
assigned to share a room with Mr. Dah-
mer, who was then an Army medic.
Within days, he said, Mr. Dahmer was
beating him, drugging him and keeping
him locked in their room. At one point,
Mr. Capshaw jumped from the second-
story window to escape, and ended up inthe hospital with a cracked pelvis. But he
never said a word about what was going
on, even to the doctor who examined
him.
“It developed into a Stockholm syn-
drome-type situation,” Mr. Capshaw
said. “He totally controlled me. He didn’t
let me leave the room. He would beat me
and rape me. But we would also play
chess, he would buy me books and sutureup my wounds. I don’t know how to ex-
plain it.”
Mr. Dahmer was discharged from the
military in 1981 for alcohol abuse. Mr.
Capshaw was discharged a few months
later, his military record shows.
For five years after his discharge, Mr.
Capshaw said, he didn’t leave his moth-
er’s house. He stayed awake for days at a
time trying to stave off nightmares, so
tense that he could barely swallow solid
food. He didn’t tell his family what had
happened. In a small town, he worried,
he’d never be able to get out from under
the whisperings if word got out.
“For a long time, the only person I ever
told was my best friend, and his response
was, ‘I’ll never tell anybody,’ ” Mr. Cap-
shaw said. “He didn’t, neither. That’s a
pretty good friend — he knew it would
hurt me, it would get around.”
After years of therapy, Mr. Capshaw
decided in 2010 that hiding what hap-
pened would not help him. With the as-
sistance of his psychiatrist, he created a
website to tell the story of what he had
gone through and how he had begun to
heal.“IF YOU REPORT THIS,no one will be-
lieve you,” an Air Force drill sergeant
told Jack Williams in boot camp.
It was 2 a.m. in the sergeant’s office,
Mr. Williams recalled. The sergeant had
just choked Mr. Williams, who was 18, un-
til he passed out, he said, and then had
raped him over a desk while dozens of
other recruits slept in the next room.
It was 1966. The military had no re-
sponse and prevention program, as it
does today, and there were no protec-
tions for troops who reported assaults.
Homosexuality was not just forbidden in
the ranks, it was seen as a national secu-
rity threat.
“If you came forward and said you
were raped, people would have thought
you were a queer or a child molester —
you were treated like it was your fault,”
said Mr. Williams, who now lives in Ever-
ett, Wash.
After the attack, Mr. Williams said, he
did all that he felt he could do. He took a
shower and went back to bed.
The sergeant raped him twice more
during basic training, he said. Each time,
Mr. Williams stayed quiet, determined to
make it through boot camp.
But as soon as Mr. Williams graduated,
he reported what had happened to Air
Force authorities, expecting them to jail
his attacker and start an investigation.
The anger still trembles in his voice
decades later when he describes the Air
Force’s response.
“No investigator ever called me,” he
said. “Nothing was ever done.”
Instead, his chain of command began
to complain about his performance, he
said, because the rapes had left him with
damaged kidneys and a torn rectum, and
because he was missing too much train-
ing in order to get treatment. He was
soon forced out of the Air Force for being
medically unfit, his service record
shows.Today, veterans like Mr. Williams are
coming forward in growing numbers to
demand that the Department of Veter-
ans Affairs provide treatment and com-
pensation for the harm done to them.
Some 61,000 veterans, including Mr.
Williams, are now formally recognized
by the department as having been sexu-
ally traumatized during their service,
and the number of claims filed each year
has surged by 70 percent since 2010.
A monthly check is poor compensa-
tion, though, for decades spent in limbo.
“I had a future, I wanted to serve my
country, and I was good at what I did,”
Mr. Williams said. “That was all taken
away from me.”ETHAN HANSON HAS AVOIDEDtaking
showers since he left the Marine Corps in- Instead, he runs an inch and a half
of warm water in a bathtub, then rinses
quickly with a plastic cup, with each
splash evoking a painful moan.
“When I do come into contact with
steam, hot water, anything that makes
my skin slippery,” he said as he looked
around the bathroom in his house in
Austin, Minn., “honestly, it makes me
want to vomit.”
Mr. Hanson was one of a group of Ma-
rine recruits who were sexually as-
saulted in the showers during boot camp
at Camp Pendleton, Calif. Like many of
the sexual assaults on servicemen, it was
a hazing exercise, meant to humiliate
and intimidate young troops.
According to a RAND Corporation
study, one in three men who are sexually
assaulted in the military describe the of-
fense as hazing or bullying — twice the
rate reported by women who are sexu-
ally assaulted.
It happened to Mr. Hanson after an ex-
hausting morning running the obstacle
course. The platoon was showering when
a drill instructor marched into the steamy
room, angry that he had heard talking. He
ordered the 60 naked recruits to pack
themselves into a tight line against the
wall, genitals pressed up against back-
sides. After holding them in that position
for several minutes, he ordered them to
run to the other side of the room and line
up again, then back to the first side.
“It was back and forth for more than
an hour,” Mr. Hanson said.
In the following days, several of the re-
cruits reported the episode to their chain
of command, and the drill instructor was
prosecuted. Mr. Hanson has a copy of the
Marine Corps investigative report con-
firming that the episode took place.
Mr. Hanson graduated from basic train-
ing and tried to move on, but soon after-
ward he saw a Marine dressed like the
drill instructor, and had a panic attack.He told his superiors that he was sui-
cidal, and was sent to a Navy hospital.
But when his mental health did not im-
prove after four weeks, the Marine Corps
forced him out of the service, noting on
his discharge papers that it was for “fail-
ure to adapt to military life.”
“It’s their way of saying, it’s my fault,
not theirs,” Mr. Hanson said of the dis-
charge. “If I was injured in training, they
would have to treat me and compensate
me. But they said this was a pre-existing
condition.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs
has since formally recognized his case as
one of service-connected sexual trauma.JACK WILLIAMS, 71
ENLISTED IN THE AIR FORCE, ASSAULTED IN 1966
BILLY JOE CAPSHAW, 56
ENLISTED IN THE AIR FORCE, ASSAULTED IN 1980ETHAN HANSON, 29
ENLISTED IN THE MARINE CORPS, ASSAULTED IN 2014HEATH PHILLIPS, 48
ENLISTED IN THE NAVY, ASSAULTED IN 1988
‘I got my military career cut short,
and that’s not right. But I still love
the military. By speaking out, I am
serving in a different way.’
‘They just don’t get how something
like this can happen.’
‘No investigator ever called me.
Nothing was ever done.’
‘When I do come into contact with
steam, hot water, anything that makes
my skin slippery, honestly, it makes
me want to vomit.’