Neither the Department of Defense (DoD) nor the Veterans Health Administration (VHA), though, was prepared with the same cutting-edge treatment for the one in three women soldiers in those same wars - an estimated 70,000 - who were sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers.
The VHA is the agency within the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) responsible for picking up the pieces of lives injured and shattered by combat, war trauma and military sexual assault. It will be faced, over the next months and years, with a tsunami of severe injury and illness from the DoD's largely feckless sexual assault prevention programs.
Following the first Persian Gulf War, a series of Congressional hearings on women veterans' issues in 1992 led to authorizing the VA to provide outreach and counseling for women veterans who had suffered military sexual assault, services that were extended to male veterans soon after. By 1999, the VA put in place a universal screening program for military sexual trauma (MST) for all veterans using their services.
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