Roger reported the abuse to his staff sergeant, but as you may have guessed by the fact that this article exists, it didn’t go well. “, ‘You’re a corporal and a big bad Marine, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. You liked it, you stupid faggot.'” Oh great, so six-foot-tall, 205-pound men can get the “They didn’t fight the attacker, so they must have wanted it” shut-down, too. Hooray for equality.

Because most of the world’s sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the victim, it’s depressingly common for people to have to spend time with their rapist afterward. But Roger was raped in an active war zone by a man he was expected to go into battle with. It created a bizarre situation where he actually was fine having the guy next to him when bullets were flying (“I wasn’t worried that the guy who did it was beside me. It wasn’t even a thought.”), but was continually nervous away from combat (” didn’t want to go anywhere alone”). It didn’t matter what happened during their downtime — in a battle, they would have saved each other’s lives without hesitation.

“I think that’s another reason why, for the most part, I just made myself be okay with it over the years. I will never make this an excuse for him … but combat does weird fucking things for you. When you’re an 18, 19, 20-year-old kid, you’re not supposed to see a decayed body, you’re not supposed to see . You fundamentally change as a person, whether you admit it or not. Maybe this guy became a predator when he was over there because he did not know what else to do. War is grotesque in every single possible way, and it destroys your soul. Maybe that’s just how he reacted.”

That is possible. A 2010 study by the Navy found that soldiers with PTSD were eight times more likely to engage in “antisocial behavior.” Or maybe he would have been a rapist even if he became an accountant instead of a soldier. We don’t know. But we can tell you that …

Raped On The Battlefield: What Male Veteran Survivors Know | Cracked.com