The night before she left for boot camp in 1999, Ayana Brown’s Navy recruiter threw her a party at a bar in downtown Brooklyn. 

That was also the night he sexually assaulted the 18-year-old.

Looking back, Brown said if she had wanted to report him, she wouldn’t have known who to talk to or who would care. Instead, she blamed his actions on where she was from and how she looked.  

“Right then and there came the decision: If I say anything now, I can't leave. Who would believe me? I was stupid enough to go to a party and drink, and this was the person who go me into this, the person who made my parents proud of me again,” Brown said.  

Brown’s scores on her military entrance exams were high, which was “unexpected” from a black girl who went to an alternative high school, she said. “It felt really good for people to look at me as a brain,” she added. 

In Brown’s neighborhood the people who left were the ones who joined the military. She wanted that chance. She also wanted a breast reduction. 

“I'm just this person who really was trying to not make waves,” Brown said. “I had these dreams. I wanted to be the first black female nuclear chief in the Navy-- yeah no.”

Brown grew up in a three bedroom house in Brownsville, Brooklyn with her parents and two siblings. Her block was a melting pot of people from different islands. It’s where she heard the “greatest music in the world,” and ate the best food. Double dutch, dancing, block parties and parades were a part of life. But in the midst of all of it, Brown’s “normal” looked a little different. 

On the elementary school playground, Brown and her friends played handball and flicked little colored tubes around: they didn’t know they were playing with crack files. She was warned not to walk past certain houses, she often fell asleep to the sound of gunshots and woke up to a stolen car. 

The day after she was assaulted she left for Great Lakes Naval Base, north of Chicago, to start bootcamp.

She kept to herself. When asked if she was OK, she always said, “I’m fine.”

After bootcamp she went to nuclear power school more desperate and angry than ever but also determined. 

“My attitude did come up quite a bit,” Brown said. “For me this was ride or die. I just got violated to be here. I will pass this. I am not going back to New York.”

Brown also had to pass school to get her breast reduction. She wanted the surgery so people would keep their hands off of her. 

“That was the thought process- that’s all I wanted,” Brown said.  

She forced herself to keep her emotions under control. 

“I was under the impression that somebody in uniform was automatically a good person,” Brown said. “Here I am, I'm trying to get away from cops who don't care about us and they’re in uniform but you're in the military, you're a hero. I had to learn the hard way that my heroes can also be snakes.” 

A few years into her enlistment, Brown found out she was pregnant. She could no longer hide the emotional pain. She was called antisocial, picked her skin, got in trouble for “intimidating people.” A suicide attempt put her in the hospital.

“All the things that I was trying to mask, could not be masked anymore,” Brown said.  

About a year after her son was born, Brown was sexually assaulted by someone she considered a friend. He later became an officer.  

“That was it for me,” Brown said. “That is when I decided that I did not want to reenlist. I just wanted to finish up and go.” 

Brown completed one, six-year enlistment in the Navy, honorably. She was a mechanic trained to work on nuclear equipment. The military was supposed to be her lifelong career, but after the assaults, she didn’t know how to continue. 

Brown was “embarrassed” to leave the military and return home a single-mom.  

“I might as well stayed,” Brown said. “But there was so much more to it.”