Shoot Like a Girl

by Mary Jennings Hegar

  I’ll tell you a secret—you never ever want to hear the words “good luck” from an air traffic controller. Luck should have nothing to do with it.

  I was totally on my own. I regripped the yoke and furrowed my brow in determination. Fear was never a part of the equation for me as I faced moments like this. For some reason, in the moment, I always immediately go into laser focus. It’s not until after the incident that I allow myself the adrenaline rush of fear. That day, in that moment and in that aircraft, I was experiencing my first laser-focused life-or-death situation.

  Comparing every landmark I could see to the map next to me, I breathed steadily as the cloud ceiling got lower and lower. I looked for any action I could take to help me land before I ran out of fuel, but unfortunately, after only two days of instruction, I didn’t have the knowledge to use the various pieces of navigational equipment at my disposal. After about twenty minutes, though, through the mist of the lowering clouds, I finally saw the airport beacon. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

  I let out a gasp of relief and called out my intentions over the radio to land. Once I had touched down at the airport, only then did I let myself finally feel the weight of what had just happened. I parked in my spot and called for gas. Then I climbed out of the aircraft, knelt on the cement, and kissed the ground, laughing. This would make for a great story when I got to talk to my instructor again.

  I was suddenly starving, so I decided to grab a bite to eat. It was the best-tasting club sandwich I had ever had in my life. Then I called my school and relayed the tale to my instructor.

  “Rent a car and get back here,” he instructed. He’d come get the plane tomorrow, he reassured me. But something in me stirred. I wanted to finish what I’d started.

  “No. I can totally fly home. I need to fly it home, or I might not be able to climb into another one again,” I responded. I could hear him hesitate.

  “Are you sure?” he asked me with incredulity in his voice.

  I knew that I needed to shake it off and get back in the air. There was no question in my mind that I needed to get back in that airplane. That was where I belonged.

  “Yeah, if it’s okay with you. They’re reporting that it’s already breaking up out here.”

  “Okay, if that’s what you want to do . . . I’m sure you’ve got this.” His confidence in me bolstered my mood. I hung up with him and completed a walk-around of my aircraft. Then I climbed back in, started my engines, and taxied out to the runway. It was such a liberating feeling. The moment my wheels left the ground again, I knew that I had found my true calling in life. I wasn’t even scared—I was just elated. Years later, when I think back to this moment, all I can think is that if I had known then what I know now about all the things that could have gone wrong, I would have been petrified. At the time I was just thrilled to climb back into the clouds.

  The cloud cover was still heavy, though it didn’t appear to be getting any worse. But after my experience getting stuck under the clouds and having to fly so close to the ground, I got worried that the weather was going to creep down again. The moment I saw a hole in the clouds, I went for it, executing a sharp climb and darting through the small hole to see what was on top.

  Above the layer that was pushing down on me, the skies were a bright clear blue. When I broke through and looked down, the cloud layer was like a white, fluffy down blanket spread out below me. It was stunning, and my breath caught in my throat.

  What I didn’t realize at the time, due to my complete inexperience, was that this move was unbelievably dangerous, not to mention illegal. It was incredibly stupid to fly above the clouds. I had gotten the weather reports from the desk in College Station, but I had no idea what it actually looked like in Georgetown. If my home field was covered in clouds, I would be stuck, especially since my transponder was unreliable. I didn’t have the training yet to know how to descend through the cloud layer, and I probably would have ended up crashing. But that day I got very lucky—there happened to be a big hole in the clouds around my home airport. I landed uneventfully and cheerfully relayed the story to my instructor.

  When I got to the part about climbing on top of the weather, he said, “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did! And it was beautiful,” I told him, grinning ear to ear.

  “You don’t understand what I’m saying. NO. You didn’t do something so stupid and illegal. Not if you want to receive your private license,” he said sternly.

  I instantly wiped the grin off my face.

  “Oh. Right. I mean, that would have been cool,” I said with a coy smile.

  He ruffled my hair, and my heart ached at the reminder of my dad. Maybe it was him who’d opened up the cloud layer over Georgetown. I like to think so.

  —

  After I got my license, it was time to get back on a plane and head overseas for my second year in Japan. This time my husband, Jack, would join me. He had spent our year apart finishing up school, and I was both proud and jealous of him for getting selected for pilot training straight out of ROTC. Since he was my husband, he would be assigned to my unit in Japan for about a year while he waited for his pilot training class to start in Oklahoma. They called this “casual status,” and this meant he’d be rubbing elbows with the pilots in my unit and treated almost like one of them. I was thrilled to start our lives together after a year apart, finally in the same country, both of us following our dreams.

  But very quickly it became apparent that I had made a huge mistake. When we had first gotten together back in college, almost everyone I knew tried to talk me out of marrying him, including his own family. I had started dating him shortly after my dad died, and that emotional state, combined with the fact that he was the first guy I had ever slept with, had clouded my judgment considerably. I was young and thought I was in love, though, and I felt like it was just us against the world. No one believed in us, but I did—we did. It was romantic, in a way. Now, looking back, it was just naive stupidity.

  Once he arrived in Japan and we started our married life together, my optimism dwindled to nothing. Everyone back home had been right about him, and everyone here in Japan thought less of me for having married him. There were more than a few fighter pilots in Japan hoping to rescue me from him, but that wasn’t my style. I decided to resign myself to the fact that maybe life was just supposed to suck. I had made a bad decision, but it was mine to live with.

  One night, about eight months after he had arrived in Japan, I was in bed reading. For some reason, we got into an argument about Air Force regulations. Jack was asserting that not all regulations were good ones, and he insisted that there were some you could simply turn a blind eye to.

  “Wow. I hope you’re never a commander with an attitude like that,” I retorted, looking back down at my book.

  Then, like a bull about to charge, Jack leaned over me, clenching his fists, staring at me, as if daring me to speak again. Panic gripped me. He had lost his temper countless times before, but this time seemed different. Slowly, and without making eye contact, I slipped out of bed. My intention was to pack a bag, not for the first time, and go stay with a girlfriend of mine who lived nearby.

  But as I slowly stepped by him, I suddenly found myself on the floor. It took me a minute to figure out how I had gotten there. Shocked, I looked up, realizing that he had kicked me in the back and sent me flying into a dresser. I’d bounced off the dresser and landed on my butt. I’ll never forget that moment, looking up at him from the floor in utter shock.

  There was no fear in me—honestly, I was prepared to kick his ass—but it was such an enormous emotional betrayal. Had he come to think so little of me that this was how he felt I deserved to be treated?

  In that instant, he saw it in my eyes—the second I had decided to divorce him. He dropped to his knees crying, apologizing over and over. I got up and cradled his head to my chest. We both knew i
t was over. His temper was something he had struggled with his whole life. He had once told me that he was afraid to get married because of it and that he didn’t deserve me. I only wish I had listened to him.

  —

  Over the next few days we had countless agonizing conversations, but my mind was already made up. I would not repeat my mother’s mistakes and wait for the situation to get even worse. Jack cried as he begged me not to leave him, which surprised me. I always felt as if he treated me like he hated me.

  It quickly became obvious as he pleaded his case that he was even more concerned that I not tell anyone that he had kicked me. He was ashamed of himself, and he was probably worried that it would hurt his career. We only had a few months left in Japan, and honestly, I didn’t know how to go about divorcing him when we were living out of the country. I didn’t want to go through the base’s legal services, so I agreed to let him continue living with me until we got back to the US. But from that night onward, we were never really husband and wife again.

  After the incident, to be honest, I felt a huge sense of relief. I was devastated, of course, but in some ways, the road ahead was clear for me. I could focus all of my energy on accomplishing my goal. There wasn’t time for grieving. It was time to get back to work.

  At this point, I had put my pilot application package together, and I couldn’t wait to interview with my chain of command. I knew I had a very good chance of being named to the number one slot off of the base for selection to pilot training, and my hopes were high. Sure enough, my squadron commander easily gave me his number one rating.

  The next step up would be meeting with my Group Commander to convince him to do the same, and I was excited to get the chance to talk to him about my aspirations. After all, he was an F-16 pilot himself. My interview with him went extremely well, but at the end he told me he couldn’t in good conscience give me his number one rating. My throat closed. I tried not to show any emotion, but inside I was panicking. All of my hard work was circling the drain again. How had I screwed up? What had I done wrong?

  “But why, sir? Who’s your number one applicant if not me? Is anyone else in your group even applying to pilot training?” I asked, forcing myself to stay strong and not let my voice falter.

  “No. You’ve been an amazing asset to this group. It’s just that your husband is here on casual status, right?”

  This could not be happening. Wordlessly, I nodded. As far as anyone at work knew, we were still together. Jack had stayed on to finish the year, even though we both knew our marriage was over. This was the consequence of my trying to do Jack a solid by not letting anyone know what he’d done.

  “Well, how’s that going to work with both of you as pilots? Who’s going to watch your kids? What if you both get deployed? If he’s going to be successful in the Air Force, he’ll need a strong support system at home. Don’t you want to be a good wife to him?”

  My heart sank. It was absolutely none of his business that we were going to get divorced anyway. None of this was any of his business. It clearly was not his place to be making that kind of decision for my family, or anyone’s family.

  Stunned, I couldn’t even respond. I left the meeting and made it back to my office trying to keep it together. Senior Master Sergeant McCabe saw me return and asked me how it had gone. I told him the whole story in a monotone reenactment, looking down at my desk in disbelief. He grew quiet and his cheeks started to get red. Oh boy. I had seen that before. I knew I was about to get an ass chewing and guessed I should have stood up for myself more. I gritted my teeth, preparing to get berated. But instead of laying into me, he got up from his chair and gestured for me to follow him.

  “Come with me,” he snapped.

  I followed him right into our Squadron Commander’s office. He knocked once on the door, and our commander invited us in. “What’s up, Matt?”

  “Tell him what you told me,” he said to me. I relayed the story to my Squadron Commander, and he silently exchanged a glance with Senior Master Sergeant McCabe. He told me to go back to my office and wait for his call. I don’t know what he did, but I’m sure the words “inspector general complaint” probably came out of his mouth at some point during his conversation with our Group Commander, who was his boss. After thirty minutes sitting alone in my office trying to reconcile myself to the fact that I’d be spending another year trying to be number one, there was a knock at my door. I cleared my throat and tried to compose myself, but I couldn’t hide my complete shock to see my Group Commander, a full-bird colonel (as opposed to the “light colonel” we called the lieutenant colonels) with his flying gear on and his helmet in his hand, standing at my office door.

  “Lieutenant Jennings, I don’t know what I was thinking. Of course you have my number one rating. I shouldn’t take your husband’s career into consideration when making a decision like that. You’re my best officer, so you get the number one recommendation. You can move forward for your interview with the Wing King. I hope you get it. You deserve it.”

  I don’t know if he said those things out of fear of reprisal for his behavior, or if he really believed it, but I was so relieved. I wasn’t dead in the water. I had the green light to go on to the last hurdle, an interview with my Wing Commander, the top-ranking guy on the base. If it went well, I had hopes of receiving the number one spot from the entire wing, if not the whole Pacific Air Forces.

  My interview with the Wing Commander, again, went really well. However, I’d soon be walking out of his office after taking yet another punch to the gut. He cleared his throat and looked me in the eye.

  “MJ, you’re clearly the number one choice, but you’re only twenty-five. You have so many years of eligibility left. There’s another candidate on the base who’s about to age out, and this is her last chance. I’m giving her my number one recommendation.” My heart dropped. I knew there were other men and women on the base who wanted to go to pilot training, and I could understand his reasoning. I didn’t agree with it, but at least this wasn’t personal.

  “But will she be as competitive of a candidate as I will?”

  He didn’t respond. It was clear his mind was made up already.

  I knew that the number one rating was nowhere near enough to get selected. It was true that there was no way of getting selected if you were number two, but even if you were the number one, it wouldn’t be easy. There would be a number one from every base, nearly seventy across the world, competing for only a handful of slots. It was almost impossible to achieve even as the number one choice.

  None of this mattered, though. It was clear I wasn’t going to change his mind, and I had to live with his decision. Gathering myself up for the long walk back to my office, I resigned myself to another year of working my ass off to try to be my next base’s number one all over again.

  My next assignment was Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, Missouri. I’d be in command of troops who would be working on the B-2 Stealth Bomber, and by God, I was going to be the best company grade officer that base had ever seen.

  —

  In April 2002, I arrived in Missouri to join the advanced team of maintainers who were responsible for the B-2 Stealth Bombers. I knew it was going to be a tough few years, as the program was under constant scrutiny.

  Before leaving Japan, I had given Jack the option of divorcing quickly and getting it over with or waiting until he was finished with pilot training. I still considered him a friend, and I didn’t want to be the reason he did poorly in training. This was a small concession on my part since we’d be living apart either way, and I wanted to focus on work. I was certainly in no hurry to date anyone else, and I figured it was the least I could do; he was still devastated by our breakup, whereas I was already feeling stronger. He asked that we wait until after pilot training, so I settled into my assignment at Whiteman, ready for a solitary lifestyle while he finished up his pilot training in Oklahoma.
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br />   Once I started at Whiteman, I worked my ass off and quickly gained the esteem of the aircraft maintenance leadership. Eventually I was assigned the absolute best job that someone in my position could hope for. I would be in command of the Fabrication Flight, which at any other base meant keeping up and patching the skin of the aircraft. A high amount of work goes into maintaining the stealthy skin of the B-2, so at Whiteman, about 85 percent of all B-2 maintenance falls under the Fabrication Flight. It was a very prestigious job, which also included briefing distinguished visitors, such as congressmen, generals, and admirals, as well as being called into key conversations around the deployability of the aircraft into a given military situation. My flight comprised more than two hundred military troops and thirty-seven civilians.

  When the B-2 went into its first-ever combat deployment, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, this mighty aircraft was responsible for the majority of the shock and awe of the first few weeks. It couldn’t have been a better time to be in charge of the Stealth maintenance at Whiteman—what an incredibly opportune moment to have this job on my résumé. I was definitely looking forward to this year’s application for pilot training.

  A few months later, when the application process began all over again, I started checking off the boxes. For example, every year you had to obtain an exhaustive flight physical. This physical included a gynecological exam, but since flight surgeons weren’t gynecologists, each year I’d obtained the necessary exam and tests from my military ob-gyn doctor. Then I would submit the results to the examining flight doc. The previous four times I had taken a flight physical, twice in ROTC and twice in Japan, this had been completely acceptable. But that year at Whiteman, for some reason, the flight surgeon decided that this was no longer acceptable.

  Dr. Adams, one of the many flight docs on the base, was in charge of my flight physical that year. He conducted a thorough exam, much more thorough than I was used to, as his attempts to ensure I didn’t have any “tumors” led to him groping my breasts far more attentively than seemed absolutely necessary.