Over the next several years, I spent hundreds of days in and out of hospitals. I developed what may be a lifelong, chronic daily headache disorder. Several years ago, I got a device called a peripheral nerve stimulator implanted near my brain, which made it possible for me to work and exercise again, but I am still in pain daily.I also lost my career and my dream of becoming a pilot, and the Air Force lost a competent and devoted officer candidat

My attacker was accused of raping at least two more women in just the four months after my attack, before he was ultimately incarcerated for another assault. And while the consequences of unreported, untreated rapes are not always as obvious as in my case, they are often devastating. How many women and men will stay silent as I did? How many will get ill as a result? How many will develop post-traumatic stress disorder?At the Veterans Affairs Center for Sexual Trauma Services at Bay Pines, Fla., I got to know a woman who had been raped when she was in the military during World War II. She kept her rape secret for decades, until the year before we met, when one of her doctors asked her if she had ever been raped. I was 21; she was in her 80s. Her post-traumatic stress disorder nearly destroyed her life.We have no way of knowing how many competent service members the military loses every year to sexual assault. Many then turn to Veterans Affairs for health care. My rape alone has already cost the federal government more than a million dollars. We can’t afford this. The military needs strong leaders who will loudly counter the normalization of sexual violence, who appreciate the contributions of service members of any gender and who recognize the costs of staying silent.

This one conversation among my classmates, my “brothers in arms,” helped me to fully understand why I had remained silent after my own rape. My classmates had made the implicit cultural belief explicit: Victims were to be blamed for their rapes, and if they lost their military careers for it, all the better.