I was promoted to corporal in June 2006, a few months after returning home from deployment. Though I had earned the title and the authority of a leadership position, my self-esteem had been ruined. I was a Marine who, while sleeping, had been sexually touched by another Marine, inappropriately and without consent — and I hadn’t done anything about it. A real Marine would have fought back, I thought. A real leader would have resorted to violence as an immediate and instinctual means of retribution against his attacker. My inaction that night crippled me, and I had no way to fix it. And the response of my fellow Marines only made things worse. In a Marine unit nothing stays a secret forever, and my confidence was misplaced when I trusted in my noncommissioned officers to keep my story quiet. Within days my story had spread throughout our small camp. Usually, when a Marine finds a weakness or something another Marine is insecure about, he is relentless in attacking it. It’s how Marines bond, in their own aggressive, competitive way. So I took the constant references to the incident when they came my way. I laughed along, hoping to be in on the jokes, instead of being the subject of them. To do anything else would be to admit how deeply I was struggling with what had happened.

During the court-martial, the defense lawyer built his case on challenging the character of me and my peers. We were called liars and co-conspirators. Our integrity, honor and loyalty to the Marine Corps were questioned. By the time it was over, the Marine Corps had failed me three times: It had failed to take my claims seriously; then made my attacker out to be the victim and me the criminal; and finally failed to provide adequate support and resources in the aftermath of my assault (whether through access to sexual-assault counseling or something as simple as believing my story).

In the years since then, I came to realize that it wasn’t the assault that had the most enduring effect on me. It was people’s refusal to believe that one man would assault another man. It was the mockery from leaders I had trusted and the implication that, if it had happened, I must have done something to invite it. The second trauma of losing that support structure was orders of magnitude worse than the first. I could no longer wear the same uniform as the person who had assaulted me and the many more who had let him get away with it. In 2007, I left the organization I had once so deeply loved and accepted a commission with the Army Reserve. I promised myself that no soldier under my leadership would experience the anguish that I had. Every year, I sit down with my soldiers and tell them my story, so that they won’t feel ashamed to come forward if something similar happens to them. I want them to know they will be treated with respect and empathy.

Ten years after my assault, I received a call from a detective in Kansas who was building a case against the man who had assaulted me. After he had left the Marine Corps, he had continued assaulting and violating people. In 2010 he had been convicted of a sexual assault, but served no prison time. Now he was facing 54 years for sexually assaulting three male soldiers from the Army post at Fort Riley. I was asked to testify to help build the case against him. On my birthday, I left my wife and 2-year-old daughter at home to retell the story of what had happened to me that night in the Horn of Africa — a story that, a decade before, no one had believed.

I felt no cascade of emotion when the guilty verdict came down, with a prison sentence of 49 years — only relief that my assailant was finally held accountable for what he had done and heartbreak that he had managed to hurt at least four other men before that happened. I also felt vindicated. Someone had finally listened to me and believed in my story. I opened Facebook Messenger and typed out a message to my old team leader: “I wish you had believed me.” Then I quickly deleted it. Instead, I fired off an email to my Army Reserve staff, the men and women that I’m in charge of leading and teaching. It said, “What do you want your legacy to be, and what did you do to accomplish that today?”