Written by AJ Williams in August 2020, lightly edited by inewsource.
I am Angela Lynette Williams, but I prefer to be called AJ. I am a U.S. Army veteran who enlisted two years after high school, on Feb. 15, 1995.
When I joined the Army, I had so many plans for what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be, who I wanted to become. I was going to be an interrogator linguist, learn how to speak a different language, and then get shipped off to school to learn counterintelligence work. Then after my tour, I was going to join the FBI, because that was my ultimate goal.
Most of my Ramona High School classmates at the 20-year reunion reminded me about how much I bragged about it. I had the blinders on. I was working hard, and then … BAM! My world went topsy turvy. I’ve never been the same since.
Yes, the drill sergeants are tough on you, and for good reason. Your training may mean the difference between life or death to the man or woman next to you on the front lines. That’s what you sign up for.
But what you don’t sign up for, what you don’t expect, what you should never have to do is be afraid of staying silent after being raped by your drill sergeant just after you come off of a four-hour watch in the middle of the night during bivouac. You should be able to go to your company commander and tell them what’s been done to you and have them believe you without questioning you, mocking you, calling you a liar, or even just merely dismissing you from their office without a word.
Help for sexual assault victims
The Center for Community Solutions in San Diego offers counseling and other services for victims of sexual assault. The nonprofit operates a 24-hour confidential hotline at (888) 385-4657. Other resources are available here.
And for the life of me, I can’t remember the drill sergeant’s name. And at this point in my life, I don’t want to be reminded of it either. It’s difficult enough to sleep at night. I still have nightmares and memories of what he did to me over 20 years ago. What he did kick-started what would become the whole premise of my downward spiral into major depressive disorder, bipolar depression, anxiety and the rest of this story about the VA.
After I graduated boot camp, I was attached to the 120th Military Intelligence Battalion at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center (DLIFLC for the enlisted folks), in Monterey in Northern California. When I signed up, I originally told my recruiter that I had learned Spanish in high school but flunked AP Spanish my senior year. I mentioned that I could hold a decent conversation, and with some more training I could easily and quickly pick it up. But the Army had other plans for me.
They needed more people in the Asian languages, and I was appointed to the Korean language division. I wasn’t doing very well with it. Korean is based on symbols rather than letters. Although I’m a visual learner, the Korean language was just flying over my head. So I asked my platoon leader if it was possible to ask for a transfer to the Spanish division. He told me I needed to speak to their platoon leader in person and ask if there was a “possible position open.” That should have given me a clue.
I should have learned from boot camp that I should never be caught alone with a male senior ranking officer or noncommissioned officer in an enclosed space and no way out. It took less than 10 minutes for the man to have his way with me. He just left the room, adjusting his tie like nothing ever happened.
I ended up being late for my company’s run that day, and I was reprimanded for it. I tried to muster the courage to tell my captain why I was late, but he didn’t want to hear it. He was in a really bad mood. I was at the end of the list for reprimands, and I got the brunt of his anger.
A few days later, I scheduled an appointment to see medical staff because I was still in physical pain from the assault. I was going to tell them what had happened and see what could be done, if anything. But I arrived, literally, two minutes too late. They had closed for the day, and again I was late for the company run. This time, I asked for a formal hearing with my platoon sergeant, the company commander and my squad leader. As I entered the room, all of the individuals I had requested to be present were already seated in the office. Plus one more. The platoon leader from the Spanish division.
I could immediately feel the blood drain from my face, my heart pounding in my throat. The hearing started and ended without me saying anything but “Yes, sir,” saluting my captain and leaving the room. I then went to my barracks room and cried my eyes out.
I was charged with dereliction of duty, but my captain spared me and decided that I would be discharged under honorable conditions. I never got to tell my side of the story at all. I was discharged on April 18, 1996.
Fast forward to 2007, and I’ve just graduated from broadcasting school in Denver. I’ve gotten my first job at a news station in North Platte, Nebraska. I was doing a story about veterans and the American Legion, and I just happened to ask the subject of my interview some questions as to whether I would be able to qualify for disability from the VA due to what happened to me. We made plans to speak later, and he got me disability benefits for PTSD.
It took many years after that and several moves out of state, including back to Colorado, a brief stint in Arizona, and then finally back home to California, before I was finally rated 100% disabled by the VA for PTSD, bipolar disorder and a few other ailments. I was also rated 30% disabled due to my migraines, because the combination of medications I was usually prescribed would generate a blinding headache so severe it would require a visit to the ER.
I finally made it home to California in 2012, and I immediately began to seek treatment at the VA Medical Center for mental health. That’s where I met psychiatrist Dr. David J. Printz.
Eight years later, this humble, knowledgeable, quirky, affable but extremely caring and kind man is still my psychiatrist. We’ve been through the entire repertoire of antipsychotic medications and antidepressants. You name them, I’ve tried them at least once, if not twice.
He even suggested ECT. That’s electro-convulsive therapy, aka, electric shock therapy. After screaming a few choice expletives at him, and then replying, “No, thank you,” I made my position clear. But Dr. Printz showed his stubbornness matched my own. He had me reading articles on the internet, two books by Carrie Fisher on the subject, and it still didn’t sway me.
Finally, with my sister sitting beside me, he told me he had determined a while ago that I had drug-resistant depression. I didn’t even know that was even possible. So I finally relented and tried ECT for a year.
I would come home from those sessions like a literal vegetable. It would take almost the rest of the week for me to recover, just in time for me to go back to the VA Medical Center for another session.
I was slurring words, unable to complete a sentence, unable to remember names or why I walked from one room to another. It bothered me that I wasn’t remembering things. But when I tried to tell Dr. Printz something wasn’t going right, I couldn’t even tell him what it was! My sister had to do it for me. And that’s when Dr. Printz suggested ketamine therapy.
I was authorized to go see Dr. David Feifel at Kadima Neuropsychiatry, which just happens to be directly across the street from the VA. There I was introduced to the incredible experience of ketamine therapy.
After just two sessions, I felt like a completely new person. I was a functioning, productive, and a pleasant member of the household and society again. No more teary-eyed breakdowns, no more violent, erratic mood swings. I was actually able to stop taking over 10 different medications that Dr. Printz had previously prescribed me. I didn’t need them anymore. It was great!
I began ketamine therapy in April 2019. It’s an intramuscular shot in one arm, and then a booster shot in the other arm after 20 minutes. You end up going on a “trip” for about an hour, and then you go home. You can listen to your own music, relax in a recliner in a dark room, all by yourself while you’re monitored by the nurses on closed-circuit TV. You’re safe, relaxed and you come out feeling better than when you walked in. At least that was the case for me, until last October, when I started getting letters from the VA.
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The letters stated that the VA wasn’t going to pay for my ketamine therapy at Kadima because they weren’t authorized. I was getting one for each session I was receiving at Kadima. With a flurry of emotions swirling through me, curiosity won and I started my own fact-finding mission.
At one point, I was told there was a problem with getting the authorization paperwork back from the VA accounting office in Florida so the funds could be released to Dr. Feifel’s office. I wasn’t buying that line, so I dug deeper but hit a brick wall.
Then, in late April, after my last session at Kadima, I made my appointments for the following month, just to stay on top of things. Tuesdays at 5 p.m. Perfect. Or so I thought, until I got a call from Dr. Printz at the VA two days later.
He told me that I was “not allowed” to go back to Kadima anymore for my ketamine therapy treatments. That I was to start going to the VA to begin the newest drug, called Spravato, and that I had to show up on Tuesday at 10 a.m. He was sending me paperwork via email to electronically sign due to FDA regulations prior to the procedure.
Spravato was a nasal inhaler filled with glow-in-the-dark green fluid, and one was supposed to depress the nozzle once into each nostril to get the full effect of the drug. I tried Spravato five times. It did absolutely nothing positive for me. It only made my migraines worse and more frequent.
But it was either get my “ketamine” treatment this way or no way at all. Dr. Printz had NO say in the matter. He was just doing what he was told, and all other questions/answers on the subject were above his pay grade. Flabbergasted, I called Kadima and told them about the situation, and they told me that I wasn’t the only one who had called that day to cancel their appointments. All of their veteran patients had been calling in to cancel with the same story.
I ended up calling the hospital director’s office — what was formerly known to me as the “patient advocate office.” For some reason, they had changed the name and the administrative duties of the office. Because COVID-19 had hit, they would only talk to me over the phone.
I had to actually tell the woman handling my call to stop, shut up and listen to me for one minute. This was an off-script topic, and I needed her full attention on this matter. Once my story was told, she guaranteed that I would be contacted by the head of the mental health department within 48 to 72 business hours.
Since it was late on Thursday, May 7, I wasn’t expecting anything that day. It wasn’t until May 20, when I had to call the same office back and leave a nasty voicemail message, that I got any type of response. And it was in the form of a return phone call the very next morning on May 21 at approximately 11:45 a.m.
The man on the phone identified himself immediately as a doctor, what his position was and his phone number. I won’t name him here, to save him from embarrassment due to the mere fact of the way he treated me over the phone. Which, to be kind, was extremely rude. He ended the call leaving me feeling incredulous and discounted as a veteran.
The same doctor called me back at the beginning of June “to follow up on a complaint I had,” and didn’t even remember that we’d spoken previously! I retrieved my notes from our previous conversation (The eternal journalist still resides within me. Write everything down!) and refreshed his memory. This doctor recalled the conversation and said, “I guess I need to learn how to treat people better when speaking to them on the phone.” And then hung up. The gall of the man, I thought!
I called Dr. Feifel and asked if he knew what was going on. He told me the story about Marine veteran Jodi Maroney, and how she took her own life because the VA did the same thing to her that they were doing to me and others. And Jodi couldn’t live without the miracle that ketamine was working for her.
In addition to getting blowback of some type from the VA, I was still getting letters for “unauthorized sessions” from the VA Medical Center in San Diego. Dr. Feifel and I put two and two together and figured out something was not only amiss but someone outright had lied to both of us. And we had the documents to prove it. Dr. Feifel told me about how this story was already making the local news through inewsource.org. And stubborn though I may be, I’m not one who will back down from a fight. Nor will I stand for bullying. From ANYONE. Not anymore.
So now, here I am, in the biggest battle of my military career, fighting for not only my life but for the lives of my fellow veterans across the state and country who may be facing this same situation. It took me a while, but I’ve stepped up to the front line. As difficult as it may be sometimes, I’m not going to let anyone knock me down.
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inewsource is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom dedicated to improving lives in the San Diego region and beyond through impactful, data-based investigative and accountability journalism.
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Below is a breakdown of staffing data at inewsource. We determine the composition of our staff by asking them to self-identify. It is based on a newsroom of 11 and a total staff of 15 as of August 2020. Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns.
| All Staff Percentages are based on 15 total survey responses. The numbers include full-time and part-time staff, full-time fellows and full-time and part-time interns. | Newsroom Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | Business Percentages are based on 15 completed survey responses to this question. | |||
| Gender Identity | Gender Identity | Gender Identity | |||
| Women | 80% | Women | 82% | Women | 75% |
| Men | 20% | Men | 18% | Men | 25% |
| Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | Sexual Orientation | |||
| Straight | 87% | Straight | 82% | Straight | 100% |
| LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | LGBTQ-identifying | 7% | ||
| Not specified | 7% | Not specified | 7% | ||
| Speak a language beyond English at home | 33% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 18% | Speak a language beyond English at home | 75% |
| Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | Race/Ethnicity | |||
| White | 67% | White | 73% | White | 50% |
| Hispanic or Latinx | 20% | Two or more races | 18% | Hispanic or Latinx | 50% |
| Two or more races | 13% | Hispanic or Latinx | 9% | ||
| Age | Age | Age | |||
| 20-29 | 40% | 20-29 | 45% | 20-29 | 25% |
| 30-39 | 47% | 30-39 | 45% | 30-39 | 50% |
| 60 or older | 13% | 60 or older | 9% | 60 or older | 25% |
* The percentages in the charts have been rounded and may not add up to 100.
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Transparency is one of our core values. Today, there is a need to build trust with our audience because new media and ways of communicating spread lies and slanted news faster than “real” news. At the same time, this era of new technologies makes it easier than ever for news organizations to be transparent. People don’t just have to believe us, they can investigate our investigations with our source materials.
Transparency is key to building credibility.
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CEO, Editor and Founder: Lorie Hearn, loriehearn@inewsource.org
Lorie Hearn is the chief executive officer, editor and founder of inewsource. She founded inewsource in the summer of 2009, following a successful reporting and editing career in newspapers. She retired from The San Diego Union-Tribune, where she had been a reporter, Metro Editor and finally the senior editor for Metro and Watchdog Journalism. In addition to department oversight, Hearn personally managed a four-person watchdog team, composed of two data specialists and two investigative reporters. Hearn was a Nieman Foundation fellow at Harvard University in 1994-95. She focused on juvenile justice and drug control policy, a natural course to follow her years as a courts and legal affairs reporter at the San Diego Union and then the Union-Tribune.
Hearn became Metro Editor in 1999 and oversaw regional and city news coverage, which included the city of San Diego’s financial debacle and near bankruptcy. Reporters and editors on Metro during her tenure were part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning stories that exposed Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham and led to his imprisonment.
Hearn began her journalism career as a reporter for the Bucks County Courier Times, a small daily outside of Philadelphia, shortly after graduating from the University of Delaware. During the decades following, she moved through countless beats at five newspapers on both coasts.
High-profile coverage included the historic state Supreme Court election in 1986, when three sitting justices were ousted from the bench, and the 1992 execution of Robert Alton Harris. That gas chamber execution was the first time the death penalty was carried out in California in 25 years.
In her nine years as Metro Editor at the Union-Tribune, Hearn made watchdog reporting a priority. Her reporters produced award-winning investigations covering large and small local governments. The depth and breadth of their public service work was most evident in coverage of the wildfires of 2003 and then 2007, when more than half a million people were evacuated from their homes.
Managing Editor: Laura Wingard, laurawingard@inewsource.org
Laura Wingard is the managing editor at inewsource. She has been an editor in San Diego since 2002, working at The San Diego Union-Tribune, KPBS and now inewsource. At the Union-Tribune, she served in a variety of roles including as enterprise editor, government editor, public safety and legal affairs editor, and metro editor. She directed the newspaper’s award-winning coverage of the October 2007 wildfires and the 2010 disappearance of Poway teenager Chelsea King. She also oversaw reporting on San Diego’s pension crisis.
For two years, Wingard was news and digital editor at KPBS, overseeing a team of four multimedia reporters and two web producers. She also was the KPBS liaison with inewsource and collaborated with inewsource chief executive officer and editor Lorie Hearn on investigative work by both news organizations.
Wingard also worked at the Las Vegas Review-Journal as the city editor and as an award-winning reporter covering the environment and politics. She also was the assistant managing editor for metro at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside. She earned her bachelor’s degree at California State University, Fullerton, with a double major in communications/journalism and political science.
Assistant Editor and Senior Reporter: Brad Racino, bradracino@inewsource.org
Brad Racino is the assistant editor and a senior reporter at inewsource. He has produced investigations for print, radio and TV on topics including political corruption, transportation, health, maritime, education and nonprofits.
His cross-platform reporting for inewsource has earned more than 50 awards since 2012, including back-to-back national medals from Investigative Reporters and Editors, two national Edward R. Murrow awards, a Meyer “Mike” Berger award from New York City’s Columbia Journalism School, the Sol Price Award for Responsible Journalism, San Diego SPJ’s First Amendment Award, and a national Emmy nomination.
In 2017, Racino was selected by the Institute for Nonprofit News as one of 10 “Emerging Leaders” in U.S. nonprofit journalism.
Racino has worked as a reporter and database analyst for News21; as a photographer, videographer and reporter for the Columbia Missourian; as a project coordinator for the National Freedom of Information Coalition and as a videographer and editor for Verizon Fios1 TV in New York. He received his master’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in 2012.
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inewsource is proud to be a member of The Trust Project and support efforts to increase transparency in journalism by displaying the 8 Trust Indicators on our stories. We launched the Trust Indicators on Sep. 16, 2020.
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Our site may contain links to documents, resources or other websites that we think may be of interest to you. We have no control over these other sites or their content. You should be aware when you leave our site for another, and remember that other sites are governed by their own user agreements and privacy policies, which should be available to you to read.
Disclaimers and Limitation of Liability
Although we take reasonable steps to prevent the introduction of viruses, worms, “Trojan Horses” or other destructive materials to our site, we do not guarantee or warrant that our site or materials that may be downloaded from our site are free from such destructive features. We are not liable for any damages or harm attributable to such features. We are not liable for any claim, loss or injust based on errors, omissions, interruptions or other inaccuracies on our site, nor for any claim, loss or injust that results from your use of this site or your breach of any provision of this User Agreement.
Contact Us
If there are any questions regarding this privacy policy, please contact us at contact@inewsource.org or call us at 619-594-5100.