I was raped after being drugged at a small get-together for our supervisor’s birthday. Six people were there altogether. They laced the pizza with pot. I had no idea it was laced until I had a severe allergic reaction to eating it. I took allergy medicine and fell asleep on the top bunk, fully dressed as I had just come from work and was only there to be a designated driver. I did not have any alcohol that night. My coworkers freaked out when I started coughing and would not stop – little did anyone know that my throat was closing up. So they decided to give me cough medicine with alcohol in it, as that was the way things were back in 1980. I don’t know much of what happened after that. I don’t even remember drinking the medication. I awoke the next morning to find myself on the bottom bunk totally naked, in a mess of body fluids.

I freaked out and climbed onto my supervisor who was lying next to me, totally nude, and began beating his face, chest and stomach. He began to struggle to get up, which woke up the couple in the top bunk. They pulled me off him because I had done some damage. We were then taken to the emergency room by ambulance.

We had curtained off rooms. He was lying and telling the ER staff that he had been in a snowmobile accident and they bought it, despite the fact that there was no snow around us that year. The ER doctors decided I had asked for the sex and tried to get me to tell them that I set it up. Needless to say, I was furious and began to yell for the hospital administration. I reported the rape to the ER staff and hospital administration, yet nothing ever came of it. There was no investigation of any kind. However, I was forced to meet with the one who raped me, as he was my supervisor. He told me this investigation would never take place and I would not be allowed to stay in the USAF if I don’t keep quiet until my orders came. I never kept quiet, but nothing was ever done and I still had to work with this supervisor on a daily basis.

I found out two months later that I was pregnant from the rape. All this took place after I had been married for two weeks but had been separated from my husband for over seven months, due to our orders being messed up. Imagine being separated for seven months from your new husband and then, when you finally get orders to join him, you are two and half months pregnant from a rape by a man your husband worked with and knows. My husband and I were both AGE mechanics. I was forced out of the military as I became more pregnant. Nothing ever came out of the rape case. Even though I had reported, my time from the rape to my son’s birth is totally blacked out in my medical records. The only thing that shows up in my medical records at that time is a doctor’s appointment for an issue with my foot (the one thing VA approved for compensation).

It has been 33 years since I was raped. My son was born that July in 1981 and I have seen my rapist in him every day of his life. I have learned to try to separate the two since my son is still half me. But to say that life after USAF rape was easy is totally wrong. My good friends or some family did not believe me. My son knows his father is a rapist and struggles to find his place in the world. The length of missing time and what actually happened is a blur that continually haunts me, since a smell or sight might trigger old nightmarish memories. I just want the VA and USAF to own up to the fact that this was swept under the “good ol’ boy” carpet and that they need to make it right.