It was the ’70s when Arthurine Williams-Wright got her first taste of military experience during college in Raleigh, N.C.
Military recruiters signed her and some classmates up for ROTC.
“I was recruited before I even started college to join the ROTC college program. I attended an HBCU university and they were looking for African Americans to join ROTC,” Williams-Wright said.
She excelled in the campus program. Soon, recruiters tapped her again — this time to continue her military training after college.
“My school was very excited about me being selected for engineering,” she said, relaxing on a sofa at her Stone Mountain home.
She moved north to Virginia, near Washington, and started in a program training officers in the United States Army Corps of Engineers.
“As a 21 Bravo Combat Engineer, 21 Alpha, which is both a vertical and horizontal engineer, more on their construction facility side,” she said, “but I entered into the military and trained as a combat engineer studying with engineers from West Point.”
That’s where the harassment and abuse started.
Williams-Wright was the only Black woman in the program.
“I went into training in 1978,” Williams-Wright said. “The men were not embracing women, particularly Black, at the time.”
It started with verbal abuse from both her fellow students and their supervisors, she said, including racist and misogynistic insults and unwanted touching. It seemed they were trying to intimidate her into dropping out.
“Just harassing constantly, even when you’re trying to study or take a test,” she said. “And I mean real ugly things about my being female. ‘Why are you here? Why are you taking up someone else’s space? Those guys at West Point work so hard and they’re expecting a position as an engineer, why don’t you just go home and be barefoot and pregnant?’”
Despite that, Williams-Wright did well academically.
She went on to command an Engineer Company and would deploy around the world over nearly 15 years, including to the Middle East during the first Gulf War.
But the abuse Williams-Wright faced escalated as she continued moving up the leadership ladder.
“I was sexually assaulted,” she said. “There were times that I really felt like checking out. I felt like committing suicide. I’m like, who do I trust? I’m not going to anyone.”
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs calls what Williams-Wright experienced military sexual trauma.
It’s common. VA stats show that among those screened by a provider, 1 in 50 men and 1 in 3 women nationwide report experiencing military sexual trauma, or MST.
“Women are substantially more likely to have experienced MST. It can be very long-term pain and human suffering that result from this,” said Kayla Williams, senior policy advisor at the Vet Voice Foundation and former director of the VA Center for Women Veterans.
Williams is also a veteran who served a combat deployment in Iraq in 2003 and 2004.
“When I was serving, there was very little in the way of sexual harassment, assault, prevention or response,” Williams said.
Since then, the military has made legal and policy reforms designed to better address military sexual trauma and make it easier for service members to report, including moving prosecution out of the chain of command.
Still, change is ongoing, and it’s slow, said Williams, who also contributed to an Independent Review Commission on Sexual Assault in the Military report for the Department of Defense during the Biden administration.
“When your workplace is the military and you live and work around the same people all the time and potentially the person who’s harassing you is your boss, it’s an all-consuming environment that is just different than most other workplaces,” she said, “which is one of the reasons that military sexual trauma is so highly predictive of posttraumatic stress disorder. You’re more likely to develop PTSD if you experience MST than combat trauma or civilian sexual trauma.”
And that, VA research shows, increases veterans’ risks for spontaneous preterm birth, preeclampsia and gestational diabetes.
Mental health conditions are a leading cause of pregnancy complications and maternal deaths in Georgia. The risks are even higher for women veterans who’ve experienced posttraumatic stress disorder, according to the VA. And military sexual trauma is a common cause of PTSD.
Emory School of Medicine clinical psychologist and assistant professor Dr. Kelsey Sprang Jones, a specialist in perinatal mental health, said maternal trauma can also endanger babies.
“Including preterm birth, small gestational size, low birthweight, stillbirth and longer stays in the hospital and NICUs,” said Sprang Jones.
That’s what happened to USACE veteran Arthurine Williams Wright.
“I had two premature children because there was so much stress. The first child — my husband basically took care of him. Apparently, I had postpartum depression. You never heard of that in military active duty. I just couldn’t care for him,” Williams-Wright said. “And then shortly after he was born, not only was he premature, then he had to have surgery.”
Her husband is a Vietnam Veteran. Their den and office walls are decorated with dozens of photos and other framed mementos of their time in the service.
Williams-Wright had hoped to continue in the military until she was ready to officially retire. But, she said, after her sexual assaults and commanders passing her over for promotions, she had a change of heart.
“I was one of the very few Black field-grade Major Engineers left on active duty,” Williams-Wright said. “My career was absolutely derailed. It took me a while to figure that out because I couldn’t prove it, but I felt that.”
After completing a deployment to Operation Desert Storm, she decided to leave the military.
But it wasn’t until more than a decade ago that her healing journey really began. And she finally had a diagnosis from the VA.
“The result was the diagnosis of PTSD, MST, due to my experience in the Army.”
Her healing continues with the help of her VA providers, her deep Christian faith, therapy, and attending peer-support groups with other women veterans.
“Because it takes many years and courage,” she said. “The more I have experienced others who have gone through sexual trauma, rapes, assaults, groping, whatever level, I’m feeling free to just share that and I hope that I will help someone else along the way to say, it’s OK.”
Williams-Wright says life feels different today.
“I could say I’m a survivor now, a survivor of military sexual trauma.”
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is a hotline for individuals in crisis or for those looking to help someone else. Dial 988 to speak with a certified listener.
WABE’s reporting on mental health and women military veterans is supported by the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. This story is available through a news partnership with WABE, Atlanta’s National Public Radio affiliate.
