Military Rape Crisis Center

November 11, 2026 · @panayiotabertzikis

Every November, the country says the same five words to its veterans. Thank you for your service.

We hear it at airports and ballgames. It shows up on banners, on storefronts, in a thousand social media posts on the 11th. I believe most people who say it mean it. I have said it myself, to people I served with and to people who served long before me.

But I have also spent twenty years listening to veterans whose service included something no banner will ever mention. And I have come to believe that gratitude which asks nothing of the person offering it is closer to a ritual than a debt repaid. Rituals are very good at helping a country feel good about itself while it looks away from the people it claims to honor.

This Veterans Day, I want to write about what we look away from.

As a veteran, I know military service can be a source of pride, camaraderie, purpose, and lifelong friendship. I also know that not every veteran leaves with positive memories. For some of us, service came with trauma, loss, or betrayal, or with experiences that changed us in ways we never expected. Some of us miss the camaraderie and the sense of belonging. Others carry experiences we are still trying to make sense of. For many of us, both are true at once.

We can love the people we served alongside, take pride in our service, and still tell the truth about the harm we experienced and the institution we served. We can honor our fellow veterans without glorifying every aspect of the military. We can recognize the courage it takes to serve and the courage it takes to speak out. Those things are not mutually exclusive.

Our service does not obligate us to remain silent. Our uniforms did not make us immune to harm, and taking them off did not erase what happened to us. We should never have to choose between pride in our service and honesty about our experiences. And we should never have to prove our patriotism by pretending we were not hurt.

No veteran should be made to feel that acknowledging trauma, speaking about harm, or criticizing something that went wrong somehow diminishes their service.

It doesn’t.

I grew up in Queens. My father had a third-grade education, and to moving on ceremony from elementary school was a big deal. For a kid like me, the military was not an abstraction. It was a door. It promised structure, purpose, an education, and a way to belong to something bigger than my block. I believed that promise, and I meant every word of the oath I took.

While I was serving, I was sexually assaulted by someone I served with.

The assault was the crime. The betrayal came after. It came when I reported, in the questions about what I had done wrong. It came in the silence of people who outranked me and the protection extended to the person who hurt me. It came in a lesson no one ever had to say out loud: my report was a problem to be managed, not a wrong to be made right.

I went looking for help and found almost nothing built for people like me. So in 2006 I started building it. What began as a small effort to connect survivors with one another became the Military Rape Crisis Center. Two decades later, we have heard from thousands of service members and veterans, women and men, in every branch and at every rank.

What twenty years of listening has taught me is simple. My story is not an outlier. It is a pattern.

Fifty-six a day

In August, the Pentagon released its latest annual report on sexual assault in the military. By its own estimate, about 20,492 active duty service members experienced unwanted sexual contact in fiscal year 2025 (Stars and Stripes). That is roughly 56 people a day, in the most disciplined and closely supervised institution in the country.

More than half of them were men: an estimated 10,632 (AP). When most people picture a survivor of military sexual assault, they picture a young woman. She is real. So is he. He is the sailor who never told his wife, the soldier who drank his way out of the Army, the Marine who has never said it out loud to anyone.

The report also found that about one in three survivors now reports to a military authority, up from one in four two years earlier. That is real progress, and it deserves credit. But read it the other way around. Two out of three people still concluded that coming forward was more dangerous than staying silent. They made that calculation inside their own chain of command, and they were not wrong to make it.

For the survivors I work with, the harm rarely ends with the assault. It continues through retaliation: the transfer, the poor evaluation, the sudden diagnosis of a “personality disorder” that ends a career. It continues at the VA, where too many are asked to prove again and again that the worst day of their lives really happened.

Researchers have a name for this. Institutional betrayal is what happens when an institution you trusted with your life fails to protect you, then punishes you for saying so. It does not only wound survivors. It erodes unit cohesion, readiness, and every recruiting pitch in America, because parents are paying attention.

So let me say it plainly. For tens of thousands of Americans who served, the danger they feared most never came from across a border. It wore the same uniform. Then their country sent them home and thanked them for their service, without ever asking what that service cost.

That is not a footnote to the story of American veterans. It is part of the story. A holiday that honors veterans while leaving them out is not honoring all of them.

Many people remember the name Vanessa Guillén. She was a 20-year-old Army specialist at Fort Hood, Texas. Her family says she told them she was being sexually harassed and was afraid to report it. In 2020, she was murdered by a fellow soldier on her own base. She did not die in combat. She died on a military installation, surrounded by people whose job was to have her back.

Her family refused to be quiet. They marched, they called, they knocked on doors in Washington, and survivors and advocates stood with them. I was proud to help work on the I Am Vanessa Guillén Act. Because of that fight, the decision to prosecute sexual assault no longer rests solely with a commander who may know the accused, may outrank the victim, and may have every reason to make the problem disappear. Those decisions now go to independent military prosecutors.

That change did not come from the Pentagon’s goodwill. It came from a grieving family and from survivors who were told for decades to sit down and be grateful. That is what honoring veterans actually looks like. Not applause. Accountability.

Accountability also has to reach beyond our own ranks. The United States stations service members in dozens of countries. In places like Okinawa, local women and girls have been assaulted by American personnel, and their communities have waited years for justice that rarely arrives. Through the International Center for Survivor Justice, I work with those survivors too. I do it because I love the people I served with, and I refuse to believe that loving my country means pretending its uniform cannot do harm.

I know some readers will call this unpatriotic. Here is my answer. I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Not a chain of command, not a reputation, not a public relations strategy. Telling the truth about the institution I served does not betray that oath. It keeps it.

If you want this Veterans Day to mean more than a post or a parade, here is where I would start.

Believe veterans when they tell you what happened to them. All of it, not only the stories that fit on a banner. If someone in your life tells you they were harmed while serving, your first words matter more than you know. Say: I believe you. It is not the end of what you can do, but it is the beginning.

Make your gratitude specific. If you employ people, hire veterans and train your managers to understand trauma without treating it as a defect. If you sit on a board, a council, or a school committee, ask what support exists for veterans and military families in your community, and who it leaves out. If you vote, ask the people who want your vote what they will do about military sexual assault, then hold them to it.

Stop treating survivors as a side issue. Military sexual trauma is not a women’s issue, and it is not a partisan one. It is a veterans’ issue, and it belongs at the center of days like this.

And to every survivor reading this: I see you. You served. What happened to you does not cancel that service. What happened afterward was not your fault. You are not alone, and you never were.

This Veterans Day, I hope we can celebrate those who served while also remembering those who are struggling, those who feel disconnected from the military community, and those whose experiences have made this day complicated. Pride in service should never require silence about suffering. Honoring veterans means making room for the truth of their experiences, not just the stories that are comfortable to hear.

When I was a kid in Queens, I joined the military because I wanted to belong to something larger than myself. I still do. Today, what I belong to is a community of veterans who refuse to be grateful for silence, people who love this country enough to demand that it do better.

So yes, thank you for your service. Now let us honor it by telling the truth, and by making sure the next generation that raises its hand never has to survive what too many of us did.

We served. Our experiences are our own. And every veteran deserves to be treated with dignity, whether their memories of service bring them joy, pain, or a complicated mixture of both.

If you are a service member or veteran affected by military sexual trauma, contact us at hello@stopmilitaryrape.org.