To join the Army and fire a gun would have been surprising enough, but when people learn that Fowler is a Navy Veteran and once drove a ship, eyes grow big and mouths hang open. “I can’t see you doing that!” is a common response. She is proud but casual about her service and responds with a smile and a shrug. It was just what she did, and she doesn’t regret it for a moment.
Trigger Warning: The following is an anonymous personal account of survival after MST. Please see our list of resources at the …
THE WORD I COULD NOT SAY: A VETERAN’S JOURNEY OF SURVIVAL AFTER MST Read More »
She stepped out of her car and was immediately accosted by a man in the parking lot. He pointed out that her husband was not there. She responded politely that she was aware. He kept talking, adamant that she was in the wrong. “Well you can’t park there. This is for Veterans only.”
She told the man she was a Veteran. He insisted she was not. But she didn’t back down. “I said, I was in the Air Force, I did my time. I have a DD-214. He said, ‘No you don’t. They don’t look like you in the Air Force.’”
“That Chapstick must be really good.” Regularly surrounded by men who outranked her, it was the kind of comment Carmen Felder …
After Conley separated from the Navy, she felt the intense gaze of others who didn’t understand what their curiosity cost her. It was like being under a microscope. At this point she was still having surgeries. People would see her in a wheelchair and ask a cascade of questions that left her feeling very uncomfortable. Eventually she stopped talking about being a Veteran, and if people made assumptions, she let them go. “I wouldn’t do anything to correct them because it was just easier. And people don’t always need to know everything. I definitely downplayed and was almost secretive about what I did. Because [I got] everything from disbelief to that awful question: did you kill anybody?”