Later, another woman in our camp, a staff sergeant, was raped by a translator in a shed after a game of chess. She didn’t report it. She had been around longer; she knew better. She didn’t want to jeopardize her security clearance or her career. A female command sergeant major suspected what had happened, but refused to move the sergeant away from her rapist. Then a female chief warrant officer threatened to report the victim when she learned the staff sergeant had been in the shed with the translator, because she felt a woman shouldn’t have allowed herself to be alone with a man. Whatever had happened, that was on her. So the staff sergeant kept her head down. She remained silent for years, through her military career, finally admitting the truth to me only when the Army was long behind her.

Our rapes were on us, the Army was telling us, and neither I, nor the specialist, nor this staff sergeant acted enough “like a rape victim,” a mantra often repeated by the investigators in my own case. The sergeant went back to work, did her job, and didn’t openly fall apart. The specialist didn’t uncurl her fists and shoot her rapists. Despite my own visible, documented injuries, I didn’t cry hard enough, loud enough, in the military police station in the hours after my rape, in front of a group of men who had no intention of believing me anyway.

As for the recent West Point cadet, according to the United States Army Court of Criminal Appeals, her mistake was that she didn’t scream for the attention of the rest of the unit sleeping nearby while she was assaulted. If she didn’t yell, she must have wanted it. Rape victims must yell, cry, fight — says the Army that has trained us for years to be silent, to be strong, to be obedient. It’s as if there is a list somewhere about how we, the raped, are supposed to act, how to play our parts for those who will judge us. We’re failing a set of standards that we have no idea even exist.

And if we, the victims, know how the system treats those who report, so too do our rapists. Decades of continual evidence have shown that our reports will be met with derision, our careers will be threatened, and we will endure alone. Even others who have been raped will not come to our aid.

And so of course Cadet Whisenhunt didn’t bother to clean up his semen. That he didn’t do so says nothing about his guilt or innocence. What did he have to fear from his actions? Even when the ruling panel is two-thirds female, the system prevails.

When we stay silent to protect ourselves, we perpetuate our own isolation. We are a sea of women, and yet we make islands out of each other. Something has got to break, and it shouldn’t be us anymore.