From victim to soldier

FlorCruz was just 17 years old at the time of her first sexual assault. She was a student at the University of Virginia. An upperclassman — a resident adviser who had taken an interest in her — undressed her and pinned her to her bed.

FlorCruz’s roommate opened the door, interrupting the assault.

“I was vulnerable, away from my familiar environment,” FlorCruz recalled. “I was humiliated — I felt guilty because my own convictions had been compromised. I was also ashamed because I thought I was more competent than that — how do you find yourself naked with a guy you don’t even like?”

She reported the incident to her own RAs. She credited the RAs — one of whom was a young Katie Couric — for believing her and supporting her. She said that the university handled her case well — considering what it had to work with in the late 1970s.

But the experience was jarring for FlorCruz. She quit the varsity track team and her grades suffered. She decided she needed a change. So she enrolled in the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

It was a bold move for a young woman at the time.

West Point had only just begun accepting female applicants. The academy was still very much a man’s world.

During her junior year, FlorCruz attended a tailgate party at a football game. Like many of the cadets, she drank.

A male classmate kept giving her beers, trying to get her more drunk. She said she had a bad feeling.

FlorCruz left the party and went back to her barracks. She didn’t know the young man had followed her. She woke up with him in her bed, fondling and trying to undress her.

She had no hope of overpowering him — he was close to six feet tall — but she fought back hard enough to make him leave.

“He told me he wouldn’t be so nice next time,” FlorCruz told students at PLU. “I was frightened. I felt nauseous and defiled. I went to the shower and turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, which is a universal response of victims.”

She would later learn that her attacker had also assaulted others.

“Being assaulted by someone who is supposed to be like a brother to you is a betrayal with a pain that cuts very, very deeply.”

Another male cadet, a childhood friend, came to check on FlorCruz. He saw the assailant — whom neither he nor FlorCruz liked — leaving the barracks. He feared the worse.

He asked FlorCruz what had happened and she told him. He asked her if she wanted to report it. At that time, FlorCruz said academy authorities would have seen her as a disruption and would likely have reassigned her to a different company. She told her friend to keep quiet.

Her friend, a skinny young man, offered to go beat up her much larger attacker. “He’s so sweet,” FlorCruz quipped. She talked him out of his revenge scheme.

Later, she began dating a cadet named Kenny Dahl. “I was going to dump him after three months … [but] he treated all women with respect, as well as the men around him. So I married him.”

After commissioning, FlorCruz would go on to fly medevac missions during Operation Desert Storm and to command a medical unit at Fort Drum in New York. She resolved not to be defined by her negative experiences.