Shoot Like a Girl

by Mary Jennings Hegar

  On a hot afternoon in August of 2007, I was flying with Mike, and we were shooting an approach into Bagram Airfield. I was on the controls but was unable to slow the aircraft down enough to avoid passing our lead aircraft. So I decided that the safest thing would be to execute a “go-around.” In our line of work, it’s common to say that “go-arounds are free.” This means that anyone should at any time feel free to call a go-around if you feel the aircraft is unsafe. In Mike’s defense, it sucks to do a go-around on an airfield. You have the chance of messing up the flow of air traffic, and it makes you look bad to the tower. But sending your aircraft and crew into a crater on the ground looks far worse.

  Just as I began my go-around, Mike yanked the controls away from me. He banked hard left, and we swooped behind our lead aircraft, barely missing their tail rotor with our refueling probe. Seeing this, I instantly braced myself for a crash. His crazy zigzag maneuver had slowed us down enough to avoid executing a go-around, but that hardly seemed worth it as the entire crew gasped, all of us probably expecting to die.

  Only when it appeared that we’d be able to land safely did I start breathing again. There was an uncharacteristic silence on the radio. No one said a word. As the Co-Pilot, I was responsible for shutting the aircraft engines and systems down. But instead of taking care of the checklist items, I just unstrapped and got out of the aircraft as fast as I could. Mike took the hint and completed the checklist as I walked away with my helmet in my hand.

  Luckily for me, there was another crew on the deck waiting for the aircraft, and they had seen the whole thing. Thank goodness, because no one would have to take my word for what had just happened—it would have sounded completely insane.

  “What the hell was that? Are you guys okay?” demanded the commander and the squadron safety officer who stopped me on the deck.

  All of the color had drained out of my face, and I just shook my head and kept walking. My commander followed me, so I had to do my best to piece together what had happened. I told him that I would never get into another aircraft with that cowboy again, because I didn’t want to die.

  My commander totally understood, apologizing to me for the whole experience, and immediately assigned me to a new crew. It seemed to me he felt some sort of responsibility for trying and failing to control Mike, who seemed to be some sort of golden boy who was being protected by someone high up in the chain of command. This lack of impartiality, I had discovered, was insidious in the military. Ultramasculine guys who fly the same way they live their lives—too hard, too fast, too careless—are often depicted as the perfect combat warriors. Instead, they usually end up undermining the mission, as their teams cannot depend on them to make the best decisions under pressure.

  Years later, I was heartbroken to hear that Mike had been piloting an aircraft in Afghanistan that took enemy fire and crashed. He and most of his crew died in the crash, and the two who survived were severely disabled.

  —

  Nearing the end of my deployment in 2007, I was walking from the aircraft to the TOC, carrying my gear in at the end of my shift, when I heard a familiar voice. No fucking way. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around until I saw him.

  “ZERK?” I almost didn’t believe it, and by the look on his face, neither did he. The Air Force is a small world, and Rescue is even smaller, so it wasn’t uncommon to bump into your buddies. But here in the middle of the hot Afghan desert? It just seemed like fate kept bringing us back together. I was so happy to see him.

  “Holy shit! What up, MJ?”

  I dropped my gear and gave Keenan a quick hug. I knew I wouldn’t get to see him much, as we were flying different missions and I’d be at TK a lot, but it was really great to see him again. I held to a steadfast rule of not dating the guys I flew with, and although I sometimes regretted it (especially around Zerk), it had served me well. I wouldn’t break my rule for him, though it was tempting. I would see him now and then in passing, but we were always running to answer the radios or sit in on a briefing.

  I was also busy getting to know the new crew I’d been assigned to. I was relieved—already it seemed like it was going to be a much better fit. I was excited to learn that my new Aircraft Commander was one of our most senior pilots. He was serving as the second-in-command, and I felt much safer flying with him. Despite my combat hours, I was still a relatively new pilot, so I was eager to learn from him. He would soon teach me one of the best lessons of my career. Unfortunately for him, it would be at his own expense.

  One day, a few months into my second deployment, we were launching on a mission just like any other, with our usual high sense of urgency but also with a strict adherence to protocol. My AC was on the controls, taxiing us out, when the TOC relayed updated coordinates for our pickup. I had noticed that there was a fire truck parked on the taxiway, but that was hardly rare, so I called it out to him and he acknowledged it as I went “heads in” and looked down at the navigation system to update our coordinates. As a partnership, the two pilots take turns flying and operating the systems. When one pilot has their hands on the controls, they are “heads out” and looking outside the aircraft. The other can go “heads in” at times to navigate, adjust radios or check systems.

  The next thing I knew, I heard a loud thumping and felt the aircraft lurch to the right. We had hit the fire truck with our rotors. Technically this would go down as “his fault,” given the fact that he was the Aircraft Commander and the one driving the bird, but I would forever remember this as my greatest failure as a pilot. I should never have assumed he was so senior that he didn’t need me backing him up. I had failed him by trusting that he didn’t need my help. I should have waited until we were clear of the truck before punching in the coordinates, and I learned a huge lesson that day about human fallibility. No one is above making mistakes. While I thought I was showing him respect by trusting him to clear the vehicle, the reality is that it was my failure, too.

  To this day I regret this incident, but I have to wonder what bigger catastrophes I was able to avoid due to the fact that I learned that important lesson when I did. We were close to the end of the deployment already, and that mission would complete my tour that year. The required investigation that would clear me to fly again after the incident would take longer than we had left in our deployment. So within days of the accident, I said farewell to KAF and headed home.

  —

  I had a few weeks of leave coming to me, so I decided to spend some time in Austin, as I had no desire to go see my “friends” in New York. The people who had brought me to the New York unit had either retired or passed away, and I was a little unsure of who was left. I knew that the majority of them had no problem with my being a woman, but they also hadn’t stood up for me; nor had they stopped the discrimination I was suffering at the hands of the few in Kandahar who did. Most of them had played a role, some large, some small, in one of the lowest moments in my career thus far. Yes, they had sent me to pilot training, so I felt I owed them a debt, but I was in no rush to go back and pay it off.

  A few days into my leave in Austin, my phone rang. It was from a California area code, so I jumped to answer it, hoping it would be my new friends from Kandahar. Sure enough, it was the unit from California. Better yet, they had great news for me.

  Knowing how unhappy I was with my unit, they had found me a job working for the California Counterdrug Task Force, part of the Air National Guard unit. I would be a member of the 129th Rescue Squadron while also flying marijuana eradication missions.

  I was beyond thrilled, but I hesitated, because part of me still felt I owed New York, despite everything some of them had put me through. Then the commander explained to me that earlier that year they had sent Curt, the Aircraft Commander I’d flown with during my deployment to New York, so getting a Co-Pilot in return was a fair swap. I couldn’t believe my luck.

  My head instantly filled with visions of wine tasting,
surfing, and all-around great California dreams. Within a few weeks of the phone call, I had packed up my car with all of my belongings and gotten on the road. This time around at the crossroads, I would head west.

  SIX

  Reporting to the 129th Rescue Squadron at Moffett Federal Airfield in Silicon Valley was the beginning of the happiest part of my entire career. I was worried that I’d be bored flying stateside missions after two back-to-back tours in Afghanistan, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Flying with this unit was everything I had ever hoped for as a rescue pilot.

  I was one of three pilots assigned to the elite Counterdrug Task Force flying unit named Team Hawk. On my first day of work, I walked into the Team Hawk room, and the first person I saw was a burly guy who was concentrating so hard it looked like he was going to bite his tongue off, pecking the computer keyboard in what only distantly seemed like an attempt at typing. He looked up and broke out into a huge grin that matched mine. It was Steve Burt, my cigar-smoking buddy from KAF.

  “Well, holy shit. Look what the cat dragged in. How the fuck are you?” Steve asked as he got up to give me a shoulder-slapping hug. I breathed a huge sigh of relief—I was back with my people. I greeted the other two pilots, who had also become friends of mine in Afghanistan. Something in my chest untied—I’d found my home.

  One of the other two pilots was my new boss. Finn was the Team Hawk Commander and a huge part of why I was in California in the first place. He and I had become great friends in Afghanistan, and it was ultimately his decision to hire me. Finn was the perfect example of a clean-cut all-American pilot. He was a good ol’ Midwestern boy who had graduated from the Air Force Academy and was married to a teacher. To me, he always looked the way I imagined Ender from Ender’s Game all grown up. He had a quiet demeanor and wasn’t a huge guy, but his fiery Irish side would come out now and then when he was really spun up about something. I wouldn’t be surprised if someday he ends up a senator from the Buckeye state of Ohio.

  The third Team Hawk pilot was Dave. Over the years, Dave and I would become close friends, and I could always rely on his loyalty and sound judgment. He and I didn’t always agree on tactics, but he was a good pilot and a great friend.

  After visiting my new team, I ventured out into the rest of the squadron to see who else I could bump into. One of the first people I saw was another good friend I’d made at KAF. He hailed me warmly and asked me to take a walk with him to the admin building. I could tell he wanted to talk to me in private.

  “So, I just wanted to give you a heads-up because I know what you faced in New York,” he began in an ominous voice. “You’ll find ninety-nine percent of the people here are thrilled to have you. You have a great reputation in rescue for being a good stick and a mission hacker.”

  A mission hacker is someone who relentlessly hits the mission, volunteers for the difficult flights, focuses on their career, and won’t hesitate to jump out in front when the bullets start flying. It’s a great compliment to a pilot, and I took it as such while also bracing for the “but” that would inevitably follow.

  “But one of the guys here did fight hiring you,” he continued. “He doesn’t think women should be on our crews, and you’re going to have an uphill battle convincing him otherwise. I debated whether or not to even tell you, but I think you should know. Hell, I think he’d tell you to your face if you asked him. His name is Doug Sherry, and he’s a former Army pilot.”

  As it turned out, I already knew Doug, and it didn’t surprise me in the slightest. All in all, he was actually a well-respected, reasonably decent guy. He wasn’t your run-of-the-mill chauvinist—in other words, he didn’t seem to hold a low opinion of women based on his own insecurities, and he didn’t shove it in people’s faces. Maybe he’d had some sort of experience with a mediocre fellow soldier on which he based his opinion, but that wasn’t enough to scare me off. I actually looked forward to showing him what I could do.

  One thing I did know was that, first and foremost, Doug was a damn good pilot. And I figured that once he saw that I was an asset to the team, he’d probably come around. I thanked my friend for the intel, though—it was good to know that he’d fought the decision to bring me on board. I’d have to be very careful about trusting Doug.

  I certainly wouldn’t be able to avoid him—he was always around. Doug walked around everywhere with an unlit, disgustingly wet stub of a cigar in his mouth, as if he had just walked off the set of Hogan’s Heroes. He’d make crude jokes as he swapped his cigar to the other side of his mouth, coining new insults on a daily basis. “That guy’s a total doucher,” he’d drawl, inventing new words as he went. He was quite a character. Despite our differences, though, I can say that the unit was better off for having him on the team. Things just wouldn’t be the same around there without him.

  Of course, as I was running around processing into the unit that first day, I bumped right into him.

  “Hi, Doug!” I said, muffling my discomfort and painting on a cheery face.

  “MJ.” He nodded to me. “Welcome to Moffett. Don’t fuck up.”

  It was actually more than I had hoped for from him. After all, it was solid advice. Don’t fuck up. I managed to convince myself that his statement was coming from a place of genuine concern for my success and well-being. Maybe.

  —

  I’d only just arrived in California, but we had to hit the ground running at Team Hawk. I jumped right into our counterdrug operations, which meant that we flew a variety of different missions. On marijuana eradication missions, we pulled cargo nets full of marijuana plants out of the national forests. We also supported the ground forces or local law enforcement on their missions, and we occasionally even landed our helicopters at schools to show kids that staying off drugs could be “cool.” We laughingly called those our “Hugs Not Drugs” missions. I do think we reached some of the kids, but most of them seemed to only want to hear about whether or not we were armed and if we had ever killed anyone.

  One of my favorite Gunners to fly with was TieJie Jones. His first name was pronounced “TJ,” and he was a seasoned Gunner who was a valuable member of our squadron. TJ hailed from somewhere in the Virgin Islands. He had the muscular build of a warrior but the demeanor of a retired gunslinger living the good life on a beachfront property somewhere.

  Those of us who flew with the 129th during the summer of 2008 would always remember our time there. The operational tempo that summer was insane. We jumped from one thing to the next, starting with a planned Counterdrug Task Force operation called Operation LOCCUST, which stood for Locating Organized Cannabis Cultivators Using Saturation Techniques. It was a huge, multiorganizational campaign, ultimately resulting in thirty-six arrests and more than $1.4 million of cannabis eradicated, and it required us to fly out of Ukiah in the heart of marijuana country. The locals didn’t bother masking their disdain for us, knowing that we were out there depleting their supply and raising their prices.

  Once, we were sitting in the grass behind the shut-down, parked helicopter, just relaxing between missions as the fuel truck was getting us ready to go back out, when we heard the loud, incessant honking of a car horn. I turned to look and saw a truck full of hippies flipping us off and shaking their fists at us. I chuckled and shook my head. Like the vast majority of my colleagues, I had never tried pot before, due in large part to the fact that we were regularly and randomly drug tested. We all knew that would be an exceedingly stupid way to end a career and flush all of our hard work down the toilet, but I’m sure I wasn’t the only one curious about the lifestyle.

  Our work for Operation LOCCUST was thrilling but extremely grueling. We constantly maxed out the time we were allowed to fly, and we kept our downtime to the absolute minimum required by regulation. The commander even occasionally approved extended hours, which was not something they did lightly. If there had been any mishaps, the investigation board would have jumped down his throat for
approving the overtime. But we were professionals, and we had all lived through a number of brutal and difficult situations in our careers thus far. We just bonded even more closely and collectively enjoyed the suck. A cold beer and great camaraderie at the end of the day usually made up for the heat exhaustion and the unforgiving pain in our backs from twelve hours in the vibrating, rattling aircraft.

  —

  Toward the end of the two-month operation, we were all looking forward to the upcoming break that most of us planned to spend back at home. At the time, California was experiencing one of the worst wildfire seasons in recent memory, so before we were able to leave, we were immediately retasked with helping the local firefighters protect homes and forests from the devastating destruction of the blazing infernos. We’d be fighting to protect the same forest out of which we had just been pulling marijuana.

  Flying through wildfires was an incredible ordeal, almost like navigating through a terrible storm. The smoke was so thick, we couldn’t rely on vision alone to navigate. In order to be able to see each other in the choking cloud, our maintenance crews marked up our camouflaged helicopters with hot pink and neon orange paint. It was quite a sight to see our tough-as-nails, war-fighting machines covered in hot pink candy-cane stripes up the refueling probe, along with a three-foot-tall pink “J94” painted on our belly and tail to signify our call sign, Jolly 94.

  For large operations such as LOCCUST and wildfire suppression, we would augment our core Team Hawk crew with aircrew from the rest of the squadron. My crew included Rhys Hunt, who was my Aircraft Commander and our squadron’s director of operations, the second-in-command behind our squadron commander. Steve was our Flight Engineer, and Matt Rymer was our very experienced Gunner. Matt’s call sign was “Blue” as in “You’re my boy, Blue!” from the movie Old School, and he was an easygoing, smart dude who was always quick to smile.