Shortly after my return home, I started being short-tempered with people who would complain about things like waiting for their check at a restaurant. I no longer enjoyed watching horror movies or military movies. The first movie I saw after returning home was Tropic Thunder. It’s a hilarious movie, but it opens with a scene where they are filming a Vietnam-era war movie and a character has his guts spilling out. I had to walk out of the theater. It was too real, and I didn’t have it in me to find it funny. I had seen far worse things in real life, but watching it on a screen also made me feel guilty that I was watching a movie while some people would never return to their loved ones. The gory images, used for entertainment and humor, were just too much for me to handle.
Once I was back home again, surrounded by the monotony of everyday life, I started pushing back, hard, against the tedium. My lifelong addiction to adrenaline started to look like it was going to get me killed. My brain’s chemistry had reset the bar for what was thrilling and death-defying—my level was now set at shoot-downs in enemy territory—so I started looking for thrills anywhere I could find them. I found myself driving my motorcycle harder, faster, and tighter around corners. I went skydiving. Nothing I tried could get me that high I’d become addicted to. This was ridiculous, and I recognized that if I kept notching up the ante, eventually I’d go too far. I had to make a change.
In the spring of 2010, I was sent to Aircraft Commander Upgrade training at Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque. I did well, as I always had in training, so they fast-tracked me to the end. But when I returned to my squadron as an Aircraft Commander, a cold reality began to settle in. I knew I was a good pilot, but I felt the full weight of my new responsibility. As the AC, I would be in charge of an aircraft full of people. My decisions would be life and death, for my patients as well as my crew. I needed to be at the top of my game, both physically, as a pilot, and psychologically, as a leader. I owed that to my crew.
Here’s the thing about PTSD. It’s been my experience that everyone coming home from a war zone who went outside the wire and saw actual combat has some degree of post-traumatic stress. I don’t know whether every person reaches what I would call “disorder” level as I’m not a psychologist. I will say that my squadron mates seemed willing and even eager to share their struggles with me, whether it was trouble at home, ceaseless nightmares, short fuses, or finding themselves easily startled. I had always heard that getting help for this type of thing would ruin your career, but there were so many of us suffering (myself included) that I thought if I were half the leader I hoped to be, I should set the example and get some help.
Unfortunately, instead of others taking my lead, they would corner me and ask me what my counselor had told me. It was as if there was a magic recipe to get over what we had experienced, and they thought I could pass on the secrets I’d learned from my own therapy.
“Hey, can you ask her what it means if you keep having a nightmare that a tiger is chasing you through a supermarket?” a friend asked me while we were chatting in a hallway one afternoon.
We all had issues; we just dealt with them differently. When I see a report suggesting that women get PTSD more often than men, I have to wonder how much of that data is skewed by the fact that we might be more likely to admit we need some help. And shouldn’t that be a good thing?
A few months after I’d returned home, I informed my chain of command that I was going to quit my full-time job. As of May 2010, I would no longer be a Team Hawk pilot. I wanted to move home to Austin to become a “Traditional Guardsman.” I would go to California for training, but I would be commuting in from Austin instead of living in California and working there full-time.
Finn thought I was crazy. The job I held was coveted by most of the pilots I knew, and he thought I would regret leaving. As close as we were, he didn’t know me as well as I knew myself. It was time for a change. I just didn’t know how I would tell Steve.
“Whaaaaat? Why?” Steve asked when I told him of my plans.
“I don’t know. I miss Austin, and I feel like it’s just time for a change. I never wanted to do twenty years, you know,” I told him. “I love this job, but you gotta admit, it’s a shitty environment. We all have to hide our injuries from the flight doc, and we live in fear of being disqualified if we admit to having nightmares. Aren’t you sick of that?”
He shrugged, revealing nothing.
“Besides, I can’t stand coming to work and seeing your ugly mug every day,” I finished with a grin.
I could tell he was disappointed, but of course he retorted with something equally offensive. Then we did that macho slap hug thing we always did and left it at that. I knew we would see each other again and that no matter where each of us moved, we’d remain close. Even if months or years went by without talking, I knew we would always fall back into the easy, insult-trading banter that had marked our entire friendship. I might be leaving Team Hawk behind, but some of my brothers and sisters, I hoped, would remain part of my family for life.
—
A few weeks after Steve and I had talked, I moved home to Austin. It was time to start thinking about my next chapter. I was thirty-four years old, unattached, and trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. There were so many civilian careers I could try out! I could buy a house and plant some roots without fear of being ordered to move. It was an exciting time, but it was about to get infinitely better.
I arrived home in the middle of a blazing-hot Texan summer in 2010. After about a week, I was eager to reconnect with some of my friends from my childhood, so I agreed to meet a few of them out for drinks. I was conflicted about going to a Podunk bar in Leander, Texas, as opposed to some hip joint downtown on Sixth Street, but this is where I came from. This was home. Despite feeling like I had escaped from the small town I’d grown up in and accomplished so much, I never wanted to let myself feel like I was too good for Leander.
On a sultry August night, my engine rumbled as I pulled my purple Dodge Challenger, a deployment gift to myself, into the parking lot of a strip mall and looked around for the sign. Spotting the bar, I tried not to roll my eyes. It was a classic run-down dive bar, but I was excited to see my friends, so I jumped out of the car and walked inside. It was around seven p.m., so it didn’t take me long to spot my group, as there were only about a dozen people in there at this hour.
After a round of hugs and happy greetings, we quickly fell into a long, comfortable conversation about what we had all been up to. Someone mentioned that they were in touch with Brandon Hegar, the drum major of our high school’s band, and that he’d be joining us shortly. Of course I remembered Brandon—he had been in my class in high school. I distantly remembered that all the girls in the band had had a crush on him. He was just that kind of guy—sweet and funny and popular.
I was at the bar ordering a round of drinks when I heard the door swing open. I turned over my left shoulder to see who had walked in. A tall, handsome man was striding into the bar. I jerked my head back around to the bartender so I wouldn’t get caught staring.
It had to be Brandon, but he was way hotter than I remembered. Standing six feet tall and carrying a brawny 180 pounds, he had really grown up from the high school kid I had known. He had a light brown faux hawk and a manicured beard that gave him kind of a Joshua Jackson meets David Beckham vibe.
“One more beer, please,” I asked the bartender as I watched Brandon saunter over to my friends to hug everyone. I walked back to the table with my arms full of beers, and our eyes met. His crystal-blue eyes made my heart skip a beat.
What the hell is wrong with me? Am I still in high school?
“Hi,” I said stupidly. I was never very good at this sort of thing, and I was way out of practice. “You’re Brandon, right? How’ve you been?”
We kept chatting as we nursed our drinks, and everyone else seemed to slowly fade into the blurry background. It felt great to be a normal
person again, just sipping beers and making small talk, but it was more than that. Granted, I had had a few Irish Car Bombs, but it was crazy how quickly I felt like I had met my other half.
Sure enough, though, eventually he asked me what I had been doing since high school. I’d been dreading the topic, but I’d known it would come up. Experience had taught me that one of two things would happen at this point. I would tell him I was a pilot, and he would either get intimidated and become disinterested or he’d get excited and want to talk to me all about rates of fire, engine horsepower, and confirmed kills. I couldn’t help but feel like I was always either just one of the guys or too “strong” of a woman, making a guy feel like less of a man because his job wasn’t as tough or something equally stupid.
I looked down at my drink and tried to enjoy the last moments of talking to this funny, gorgeous guy before having to find out which one he’d choose. Finally I couldn’t dodge the question anymore, and I told him about my job. His beautiful blue eyes widened.
“Really? That’s fucking awesome!” he said. Okay, now it was time for the barrage of technical questions. To my delight, he surprised me with a completely different response.
“Man, that’s hot.”
My smile widened. What do you know? There’s a third option!
The next night was our first date, and we’ve been together ever since. Contrary to my previous belief, I discovered that a soul mate was actually a real thing, and I had found mine. The prospect of falling in love didn’t scare me. His three kids from a previous marriage didn’t scare me. His volatile ex-wife didn’t scare me. I didn’t care what I had to put up with; I was going to marry that man.
As it turned out, his kids are amazing, and I quickly fell just as in love with them. And to my utter delight, his dad reminded me of my dad and welcomed me into his family with open arms. With every new thing I learned about Brandon, I was more and more shocked that he was single. The previous year his wife had cheated on him, and boy oh boy, her loss was my gain. Some people just can’t see a good thing when it’s standing right in front of them. I wasted no time taking him off the market, and I felt luckier than I had the day we survived being shot down in Afghanistan. We’d met in late August and were engaged to be married by Christmas.
In the months that we had been dating, I had been flying back and forth from California, working as a part-time pilot. Even though I was only flying part-time, I still needed to be at 100 percent. My knee was doing okay, but my back was in constant pain. Luckily, after the rough recovery I’d had from my knee surgery, I had been granted a waiver to be able to do the run portion of my physical fitness test on a treadmill instead of on asphalt, as the absence of cartilage made it hard to run on hard surfaces.
Unfortunately, the back injury I had suffered in the crash hadn’t healed; in fact, just the opposite. Afraid of getting grounded, I hadn’t gotten any medical attention for it, and it was getting worse and worse.
With all of this at the forefront of my mind, I went on my first temporary duty (TDY) for a week-long exercise with my squadron as an Aircraft Commander in October 2010. We flew from our home base at Moffett Federal Airfield just outside San Jose, California, down to an Army base called Fort Hunter Liggett. At Hunter Liggett, there is a kick-ass live-ammo gun range. It was the closest we could come to the real thing for practice, rolling in and firing at mock enemy positions while rescuing simulated survivors. I had a blast until one of the last flights at the end of the exercise.
I was flying with Finn, my friend who’d hired me and was the Team Hawk commander at the time. We came in to land at a simulated pickup of a patient, and when the wheels touched down, I heard a crack-of-the-bat sound and saw the windshield in front of me spiderweb out.
I blinked and shook my head a little, and when I looked up again, the windshield was fine. I looked down at my arm and leg, but saw no blood. I looked over at Finn, and he just stared at me.
“Hey . . . You okay?”
“Fine. I’m fine,” I replied a little too quickly.
I was slightly rattled, but I was okay. It was so real, though. That was the first actual flashback I’d had—and it was very different from just a bad memory. I had experienced the exact moment that enemy round had blazed through my windshield all over again, and for some reason the flashback was almost worse than the real thing.
At the end of that exercise we landed back home at Moffett in California. As I was carrying my gear into the aircrew locker room, I heard someone calling my name. It was Finn, catching up to me with some bad news. Because of my time in training and the fact that I had been commuting in from Austin, I was overdue on my physical fitness test.
My flight home to Austin left the next morning, so despite being mentally and physically exhausted from the exercise we had just completed, I would need to retake it immediately. With no advance notice, though, I couldn’t get a copy of my waiver from the medical group for the test proctor. When I asked if I could just take it when I came back in a few weeks, the answer was a firm no. Not wanting to make things difficult for my leadership, I begrudgingly took the test without the waiver. What was the worst that could happen, right?
I found out. Halfway through the 1.5-mile run, my knee exploded in pain. I stopped in my tracks, conscious of the fact I was being timed, and tested it by putting my foot on the ground. It felt okay, so I tried again. Nope. I was done. As my knee doubled in size, the test proctor drove me to the med group for assessment.
“Why were you running on asphalt if you have a waiver?” they asked me.
I just shook my head at the stupidity of it all.
On my way out of the medical group, I bumped into my flight doc, who was the person assigned to our squadron with the authority to decide who could fly and who was grounded.
“No problem,” she told me. All I had to do was get an MRI on my knee and she could clear me to fly. I flew home, saw an orthopedic surgeon, who also lectured me for running on asphalt, got an MRI, and returned to Moffett the next month expecting to be cleared. After all, I had done what was asked of me, right?
“Shit, MJ,” the flight doc began. “I can’t clear you to fly with your knee like this!”
“WHAT? You told me to get the MRI and I’d be clear. It’s back to normal, so what’s the problem?”
She just looked at me like I was crazy.
“I meant you needed a clean MRI. Did you know you have no cartilage in your knee?”
I nodded with a blank look on my face, trying to hide my fury.
No shit, Sherlock. Maybe next time they’ll believe me when I say I have a waiver and stop acting like I just don’t want to run outside and mess up my hair.
She refused to clear me to fly. I flew back to Austin, disappointed, growing more and more frustrated over the amount of red tape I had to deal with.
Over the next few months, an argument between me, my chain of command, my flight doc, and her chain of command would ensue. The conclusion they reached was the most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. They would clear me to fly, but I would have to pass a test that they had made up on the spot. They wanted me to dress in full gear and show I could run on the taxiway six hundred yards away from an aircraft to simulate an aircraft with live ammunition that was on fire, in order to prove that I could get away from it to a safe distance.
“Are you kidding me?” I sputtered in response. “Didn’t I just prove in Afghanistan that I can run away from a disabled aircraft?”
My real-world experience didn’t matter as much as their simulated environment test. Typical military. Didn’t they care that they were asking me to injure my knee again? At what point would reinjuring my knee and hiding my back injury have a permanent, long-term impact on my health? The ludicrous test they proposed was the last straw for me. They clearly couldn’t see the big picture, and I wasn’t going to continue to subject myself to permanent injury so that they could
feel better about letting me fly.
Sometimes when fate is screaming at you, you have to listen. Now that I had met Brandon and experienced what real happiness felt like, suddenly the thought of being grounded no longer seemed like the end of the world. Perhaps it was finally time to close this chapter of my life and start another. Almost every person I had flown with was hiding some sort of illness or injury, but I was growing tired of that game. It was time to just let nature run its course.
It wasn’t the way I had envisioned my career ending. I thought of the celebrations and “fini-flights” a lot of pilots have at the end of their time in the sky. I wouldn’t get that opportunity. As strange as it sounds, for someone who had spent her entire life dreaming of being a pilot, my flying career ended without much of a bang.
I knew I was finished, but I also knew I had some fight left in me. So before I even flew back to Austin, I started looking for other ways in which I could serve my country and utilize the skills I had honed over the years as a pilot. I did some research and found out that there was, in fact, a job in which you needed iron resolve in combat, a good sense of the battlefield, and a solid understanding of the unique language and shorthand we use on the radios. I was thrilled—I could be a Special Tactics Officer and forward deploy with ground forces, calling in their airstrikes and ensuring there was no miscommunication that could result in friendly losses or civilian casualties. This job was right up my alley.
Except I wasn’t allowed to even apply for it. The job was not open to women because there was an antiquated policy on the books called the Ground Combat Exclusion Policy, which was intended to keep women out of combat. The policy was news to me and to the deep scars on my right arm and leg, and I chuckled while thinking about the combat I had seen and the clear, direct ground combat I had medevaced other women out of in Afghanistan. That didn’t seem fair to me, but I racked it up as the Air Force’s loss. Their ridiculous and antiquated policies on job qualification meant they were about to lose a combat-seasoned warrior.
Shoot Like a Girl Page 21