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Warning: This video/written content discusses military sexual trauma (MST).
As an Army trailblazer in the late 1970s, Linda Jones was one of the first women soldiers to train with men at Fort Jackson in South Carolina. She loved the challenge and pride she experienced in the military, and felt safe alongside her male counterparts.
That sense of safety was shattered in 1979 when Linda was sexually assaulted by a male soldier.
More than three decades of self-isolation, addiction and bouts of homelessness would follow. Linda felt lost, blaming herself for the assault and failing to identify as a veteran.
That would change in 2012 when Linda's trauma was diagnosed and she started getting the help she needed. She also discovered her passion for writing and performing spoken word - a creative outlet she now uses to help other women veterans heal. One of her spoken-word pieces is titled "When the Women Speak" and reads, in part:
Oh I tell you it's a thing of beauty when the women speak!
We are every hue of a rainbow of life experiences. Our bodies bearing scars and bearing witness to the many battles we have won to find our way here to this place where this divine soul work is done! Where we transform and we BECOME!
The process can be horrifically beautiful like the death battle of caterpillar turning to butterfly. But we are here and we gratefully bear witness to the change…
And it binds our voices in a holy harmony that not all will have the grace to hear. This "sister song" we sing so clear!
"It's not for everybody," Linda says, "but I found that performing arts is a very wonderful way for female veterans to express themselves, or even to hear someone else to express what they're feeling."
"There's so many of us that have lived," she adds. "And we're not just surviving - we're thriving."
Linda, now 60, grew up in Gary, Indiana. By the time she was a junior in high school, she knew college wasn't for her - she needed something different. She would find that something the day an Army recruiter visited her school.
She took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) test without her mom knowing. Only 17 at the time, she wasn't old enough to enlist on her own, so she took her high test scores to her mother.
"This is meant to be," Linda recalls saying. "I'm meant to be in the Army."
After much hesitation, her mother signed the papers and Linda left for basic training in August 1978, knowing that her mother was silently very proud.
Basic training challenged her physically, and she learned new skills, met some amazing people and loved being a part of military cadences - marching and proudly shouting back to the drill instructors. Eventually she even became a cadence-caller herself.
Graduating from basic training was one of the proudest moments of her young life.
"Little did I know that years later I would look at my time in the service much differently," Linda says.
Linda trained to become a behavioral science specialist and a combat medic. Serving from 1978 to 1982, she was part of one of the first groups of women to train coed at Fort Jackson. Linda found it somewhat challenging, yet the experiences with her male counterparts were mostly positive.
As an only child, Linda felt like many of the men she served with were the brothers she never had. Initially, she felt safe when they were around, but that feeling ended when she was raped by a fellow soldier while stationed in Aschaffenburg, Germany.
It was 1979 and Linda was with other soldiers drinking and hanging out like they often did while off duty. She ended up with a man who she said didn't respect her boundaries and took advantage of her.
After the incident, she went to the clinic on base and reported the assault, but nothing ever happened. Linda isolated herself for a long time. She tried to cope with the pain of her trauma with substances, food and other relationships.
"For a long time, I blamed myself," she says. "And I learned, that even though I made some bad decisions, the bad things that happened, I didn't deserve them."
Linda tried to bury the memories of her trauma. After being discharged from the military in 1982, she returned to the United States, but found transitioning to civilian life difficult. None of her family or friends understood military life and she felt alone. For a while she was homeless and got by couch surfing and staying with family. It was easy for Linda to get jobs, but she struggled to keep them because of chronic pain, anxiety and depression.
About six months before Linda was discharged, she had married another soldier. To try and deal with her difficult transition, one of her only coping mechanisms was calling her husband overseas as she waited for him to join her.
When he returned, she started traveling with him as a dependent. They had three sons together, but their marriage ended in 1987. After their separation, Linda lived in Baltimore with their three sons until 1993 when she moved to Detroit. She's been there since.