I was not the only one. According to the Department of Defense’s Military Sexual Assault Report for 2012, an estimated 26,000 members of the United States military, both men and women, were sexually assaulted in that year. The Pentagon survey almost certainly underreports the scale of the issue. Of those sexual assaults, 53 percent (approximately 14,000 in 2012) were attacks on men. A vast majority of perpetrators are men who identify themselves as heterosexual.

These facts are horrifying enough, but when institutions like the military, closed systems that lack oversight, do not validate the experience of the rape survivor, the perpetrators get to continue their criminal behavior without consequence.

I kept my secret for 30 years. I never told.

I went on to serve 20 years in the Air Force, retiring at the rank of technical sergeant. After that, I bounced around from civilian job to civilian job. I finally settled at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, and eventually became plant manager for the Air Force Research Laboratories, before being medically retired for joint pain.

But my real problems were psychological. Sexual assault, whether in the military or in civilian life, is solely about the abuse of power, about control and domination. The lasting scars it leaves are psychic. I suffered from depression; my personal relationships were troubled and always failed. I made several suicide attempts; finally, after my last, I wound up in front of a seasoned social worker at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Northport, N.Y.

My denial was strong: I came up with all kinds of diversionary reasons why I was depressed. Then, one day, in the middle of a counseling session, she asked me flat out:

“So why don’t you tell me about the rape?”

After all the pain and humiliation, it was such a relief finally to get rid of this dirty secret I’d been carrying around for so many years. In a follow-up session, I asked her how she’d known.

“I have counseled a lot of male veterans who were raped in the military,” she said. “I just had a feeling that was your trouble, too.”

It took me awhile, but I embarked on the journey of sharing my story with other male and female survivors of military sexual trauma — or M.S.T., as the V.A. calls rape and other forms of sexual abuse and harassment — as a way to help myself.