by John Gregory Evans
This story contains suicide and sexual assault.
For some life hangs in the balance. Living in the shadows is never easy. Life after Military Sexual Trauma is not easy, either. But some of us reach that ideated pinnacle where suicide and attempts become an everyday experience. Our lives (especially as a fresh seventeen-year-old), aspiring to serve democracy and the US Constitution, become blind with fear, retaliation, self-shame, guilt, doubt, brokenness, peer pressure, and excessive worry. We develop our cognitive thinking with a paralyzed personality. And, as definitory explanations are concerned, we think regarding the gravity and urgency of our experience as a “forceful violation of the sexual intimacy of another person,” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition 566). Life can, and oftentimes will be lived in darkness that may be envisioned by the victim (survivor), as before an elusive firing squad. A permanent dark scenario of suicide as a final answer imminent. This must not be congested as a final solution to a serious problem. We must be able to claim victory (or progress), over military judicatory preferences.
Loneliness sets into a panic as fear takes control. Loneliness has a way, though, to reach even the hardest of hearing. I have heard God call me by name, and still the suffering and pain continue. But in the suffering upon many years of a self-indulgent lifestyle brought about by sexual misconduct (especially as a child), upon my person, MST adds fuel to the already burning fire. I do not listen to some so-called authorities because I believe in experiences not empirical data. Experience is reality. Empirical data eliminates experience where it becomes indulgent upon numbers.
My experience lay claim to a decade’s long ordeal of suffering upon serving a short tenure with the USMC (November 1971-June 1972). But the facts do not stop with rape. We continue into the scenario of combat zones, fire-fights, explosives, and M-60 spent cartridges with their gutted shells heading for their unsuspecting targets during ICT (Infantry Combat Training), with a suspected concussion hit in the cervical spinal cord I lay flat on my back. I was hit! Derelict voices sifted through a PA system commanding me to “keep moving”. Blood snaking down my neck mixed with dirt and sweat and barely the strength to push me beyond the boundaries of M-60 rounds jetting past my nose under this barbed-wire steel cage where I continued to crawl. Just fifty yards to go and my thoughts are “will I survive? Don’t move, just crawl.”
After the ordeal, a fellow Marine explains to me that an accident occurred on the field that day in April 1972. He told me I now believe because he observed I was in a daze. I was stunned and confused. The incident witnessed by the entire company grappling with the notion “how could this have occurred in a training exercise?” The Marine who befriended me was among two others who were buddies of mine. He informed me a night crew was out cleaning the contaminated field. But the concussive blast shielded the truth behind the repressed memory already taking shape prominent in this underdeveloped mind who did as the order commanded. My friends as witnesses advised me to report to Battalion. But the incident was forced back into my thought process. Later, I discovered one of my buddies had reported to Battalion. And, after the incident, and me without the opportunity to be seen by a medical officer, I remained stunned with just two band-aids on my neck. What a disgrace for those in charge.
After training, I was sent to a grunt unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C. where nothing made sense to me. I was living a surrealistic life. I had forgotten my training and discovered inside this grunt outfit men who out-ranked me, with man-sized statures, and experience as US Combat Marines. This frightened me to the point of walking around as a dead man. I did not even have the sense to come to attention when an officer entered the room. I was oblivious to the chain-of-command. And, as memory serves me presently, fearful of my life. Simply put, I was running scared.
This became the point of what I prefer to reiterate as the field of valor. As it were, I was brave enough to complete the training as well as the infiltration course with honor, and no complaining. I felt my work was accomplished in a highly professional manner. My assailant was running scared, too. He feared the truth I would report him for the subsequent sexual assault. This may have been grounds for him to receive a Bad Conduct Discharge or worse, brig time if I would have pursued to file charges. But what does a seventeen-year-old kid know anyway about judicatory privileges to a system allegedly bulging at the seams with corruption? I wish I would have known then what I know now. I served honorably. He did not. And the squad-bay was reminiscent of others who were sexually assaulted by this middle-ranking NCO; not withstanding attempted murder charges through friendly fire against me. This has become my final consensus.
Fast-forward to life after the Corps. What type of young person was I going to become? With a disheveled manner of thinking, dazed, confused, and worrisome over my future, I stepped off the bus in Victoria, Texas, waiting for a transfer to San Antonio. Will I be welcomed home? Can I find help? Will I survive? Do I wish to survive? Suicide was always a risk, and an option. I was and am an innocent man. There were no premeditated motives on my behalf. I was there to serve the community. But, not as a puppet for a disturbed sexual predator who also tried to have me killed. However, I was the only one who carried this disturbing secret with me. Everyone else was trying to forget.
Upon arriving home, I discovered an extremely difficult truth; I was not welcome. Not by my parents, school, no job opportunities, no friends, absolutely nothing. I, for all intense purposes was a young teen without any future, and without any hope. I had no money, no car, no home, no job, and, I had not even known the love of a good woman at this point. Penniless, all I had was the ultimate truth of what had transpired during active duty during the Vietnam War. I was even spat upon by a solo-protester coming home at the airport for my first leave. Another indignant welcome home.
I could only muster enough thought to write a small poem while sitting at the bus station back in Victoria:
“So, where is home? Home is where the dust cries in a foreign land, as we shall all come to know the bitterness of exile. And yet, where is this home? It is inside the mustard seed where only the dying can see. If, we are to poeticize these inkwells with an altruistic art, we must become the pen upon this page of forceful doubts. Only then, shall we come to light this legendary fire of hope.”
As the hopes for an accomplished poet began to sink within my sullen eyes, all dreams began to fade to a mode of survival. My primary interests in school were writing/photography. I am just now receiving (or seeking out), the privilege of accomplishing just this, here now, in 2022.
My goals presently are to create a schematic of sorts for social change regarding our sexual natures and reeducate that we are gifts not meant to be seized as property, but to be given in lieu of John Paul II’s vision as in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. The transformative changes after a vision as gift (West 204-205), are truly holy and life-altering. We envision ourselves in a whole new way. The transformative power of God and holiness create within us a deeper level of understanding our bodies, our way of thinking, and our vision of espousal love that is non-threatening and quite beautiful. One must know how to reach this delicate and intimate balance.
As West goes on to state:
“All the man can do is “receive femininity as gift” and only when the woman freely gives it,” (West 204).
For me, this is a beautiful manner to envision women, as gift. This was the way I viewed women as a teenager. Growing up in the mid-sixties was not an easy thing to do but the fashion industry took precedent over our moral values with mini-skirts and untied blouses.
Confronting the heretical skeptic regarding MST and rape are my greatest challenge. Transforming myself to a believer as a Christian where trials turn to grace a true conversion. God is good, they say. And I believe this. Saint Augustine said that “we may find one man made savage by love, and another gentle by iniquity.” Plainly speaking, love drives us all mad. Iniquity brings us home. Augustine’s statement is in direct alignment with the Catechism’s definition of rape. If we are to stop the barrage of sexual misconduct today, we must in some manner, reinvent the wheel, per se. Attitudes must be traded in through the experience of being wrong. How can we identify being wrong? Ask yourself through your espousal love, is the conjugal love holy? Have you experienced a pure, divine, spiritual ecstasy leaving you in a daze of holy love? Is the depth of your love Godly? Are we engaged in misdirected love, or are we engaged cooperatively with God’s own divine will? How are we able to comprehend this? Are we in a controversial denial of how we should love one another? How may we reeducate ourselves? If as I wrote in the previous compositional poetic phrase:
“We are to poeticize these inkwells with an altruistic art, we must become the pen upon this page of forceful doubts” in order to, “light this legendary fire of hope,”
then experience, as poets well know, are truths that must be revealed to discover a hope within us that desperately seeks out a kind of divine romance with our spouses and with our Creator God. To transform a misdirected love in heart and soul, one must be honest with themselves, enough so that truth is inevitably a freedom that will, as Christ said, shall set us free!
I concur I have witnessed a truth many have faced. I wish to theologize new beginnings as an advocate for those inflicted with the pain and suffering from sexual assault and rape. For me, this remains an imperative.
This was a beginning to a love affair not just with truth but with transforming the wickedness within my own heart, a healthy desire to change, and a permanent transformation that not only heals, but puts me on the same kind of path as the early desert mothers and fathers of the early church. There exists so much wisdom here.
Matthew Fox states,
“Like alcoholism and drug addiction, nihilism is a disease of the soul…Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done by one’s own affirmation of one’s worth-an affirmation fueled by the concern of others,” (Fox 192).
Conclusively, we typically view evil in terms of a hardline assault on the flesh, and human-beings who are: human; and we make mistakes. My life was a balancing act trivialized by MST, but we can turn our trials of suffering into the graces of the Sacred. Remember Augustine’s statement, “savage by love, gentle by iniquity?” Think about it. As well where Christopher West reminds us we are all a gift to one another, perhaps we should behave as such. If we become transformed by our thoughts as St. Paul recommends we can change the world to a world of holiness. And this is something I can get excited about.
Works Cited
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition. Washington, DC, USA: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994, 1997. Print.
Fox, Matthew. Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming EVil in Soul and Society. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2016. Print.
West, Christopher. Theology of the Body Explained: A Commentary of John Paul II’s Man and Woman He Created Them. Boston: Pauline Books and Media, 2007. Print.
Category: Featured, Memoir, Nonfiction