'It savaged my life': military sexual assault survivors fighting to become visible

Sexual assault within the ranks has reached shocking levels and while some awareness around female service members’ has belatedly begun, the 52% of male victims still struggle to get justice – and redemption

Annie Kendzior photographed at her family’s home in Southlake, Texas. Photograph: Allison V Smith for the Guardian

Squinting so he could drive through the vodka and the pills, Heath Phillips searched for a tree he could wrap his truck around.


It was a frigid February day in 2009, some 200 miles north-west of New York City, on a road Phillips drove every day to get to work. He describes this moment as his rock bottom, but it was not his first suicide attempt. Twenty-one years earlier, Phillips had first tried to kill himself aboard the ammunition ship USS Butte after his shipmates repeatedly raped him.

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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/oct/11/military-sexual-assault-survivors-epidemic