• • •
I don’t think I’ll ever forget when the VC tried out their first rockets on the MACV Headquarters. It was around 2330, Staff Sergeant Brown had just given me the quickest familiarization of a M-16 rifle in military history and he went topside to sleep. It was at this time that I was glad I had fired different weapons with Marine Corps Rifle and Pistols Clubs in some of my past tours. So I was not afraid of the M-16. In fact had my own T/O weapon, a .38-caliber pistol that went with my job as top secret control officer.
We had sat from evening chow to this time inventorying. I had been getting SITREPs and spot reports across my desk all night. We knew in advance things were getting hairy. All night long, Army cannon had been laying down H&I fire, but we worked right along with the assurance that the troops in the field were keeping the wolf away from the door. It just sounded like a nice security blanket.
I had a cot in my vault, while the action officers bedded down in cots beside their desks in their offices. I had pulled off my boots, pulled my poncho liner over me and had settled the weary body onto my canvas stretched mattress.
I don’t believe it was five minutes when [there was] this overwhelming light, preceded by this horrible scream of noise that ended with a devastating explosion. The fear I felt upon this rude awakening I could never fully put into words. The few seconds I had before the next round landed was spent controlling the panic inside me.
Lights for our office were turned off at a breaker panel clear at the end of the inner hall passageway and we were in complete darkness. The next round went off while I was regaining composure, but it provided the light I needed to stumble towards the inner courtyard windows. Master Sergeant Griesmier, USA (admin chief) had pushed his cot out of the way and helped me scurry over the window ledge and he followed, with our boots and weapons in hand, raced towards our assigned bunker, when another rocket came sailing overhead that caused us to bury ourselves in the ground. It took a couple of seconds to see again after the blinding light created by this monster, but took off again and made it to the bunker. . . .
Vietnamese laborers had built the bunkers and . . . were much smaller in stature than Americans. As I dived through the entrance of the bunker, even in a crouched position, crash! I hit an overhead cross beam that lit up my head with stars that were far brighter than the glare of the rockets from without.
Stunned, but not hurt, I crawled into the bunker with Dave right behind me. We caught our breaths and wondered where in the blue-eyed world everyone else was. We crawled to the entranceway on our stomachs and looked back to our office. The lights were on now, and we watched operations officers scrambling to secure their classified documents. I had been after them to secure their documents prior to retiring, but it was a losing battle. Unfortunately that night they learned their lesson the hard way and I never again had to remind them of security. Making an enlisted top secret control officer put one in an awkward position. Fortunately, I only had one or two who had ever given me a difficult time. After that unnecessary exercise, the rest of COC-1 and the War Room personnel joined Dave and [me] in the bunker. About two more rounds went over. We sat quietly leaning against the bunker wall. Some strange things crowded my thoughts during this time. The first thing was wondering “What the hell am I doing here?” I thought of very private things I hadn’t thought about in years. Went back to early childhood happenings, and shockingly, was glad my mom wasn’t alive so that she wouldn’t have to worry about my being here.
I can assure you that there was no John Wayne movie bravado in the bunker that night. Everyone sat in silence and I’m sure they had thoughts similar to mine.
When the all clear came, we climbed back through the window. The Deputy J3 was waiting in our shop and as I crawled back in he asked [how I was].
“Sir, I’ve discovered I’m a devout coward.”
His reply: “Top, you were not alone—so was every man sharing the bunker with you.”
By now, complete and total exhaustion took over, and Charlie be damned, with my M-16 beside me, I climbed onto my cot and crashed!
Captain Jones called the next morning, since she knew I was inventorying at night and she had heard MACV had gotten some incoming. Besides a big knot on my head and being tired, I was fine.
Charlie was to continue his harassment, but since he never made any direct hits on our Headquarters, we got in the habit of when he would start his midnight fireworks, we’d just go into the vault, pulling open the top drawer of the safes and sitting under them until the all clear came. Although the Army engineers came in and rebuilt the bunkers to American size, they never could have withstood a direct rocket hit, plus Vietnamese workers had taken to cooking their noonday lunch of fish and rice in them, plus being used as a place to relieve themselves. As a result safes became a far better place to wait out the VC nightly intrusions.
[She goes on to describe getting exercise from a mile hike to an Army Olympic-size canvas swimming pool and from a noontime swim.]
Although I had never been that much of a swimmer, I soon became one and it was what I needed to get the exercise and to stay mentally relaxed to get me through twelve to fourteen hour days.
The day before the Tet Offensive, I had taken a flight on Air America with Captain Jones to Na Bhe at the invitation of some American security forces there. It was crazy, lying on this beautiful beach drinking beer and soda pop, eating a picnic lunch and watching helicopters keeping the Viet Cong away from the local fishermen who were spreading their fishing nets along the shallow waters about a mile across the bay from us. I wondered if I was becoming so calloused that I could no longer be concerned with the plight of the poor fishermen who were scrambling for their lives.
[She describes the loss of a friend in a mortar attack on Tan Son Nhut Air Base two weeks before his departure date, and how precious life was becoming. A bit later than she’d expected, she returned to San Francisco. She describes how beautiful the city seems.]
I really believe at that time I truly appreciated the United States. . . . Dr. King had just been shot and Kansas City, my new duty station, had just undergone rioting as the result of his murder. No matter what, we were so [much] better off from where I had been, I knew I could cope. My only real fears were for the dear friends I had left behind. I had survived and so now my thoughts were with them.
Would I ever do it again? I’m sure I would. Always a new challenge—something different. (I think.)
9
Gender Wars
“Hounded and Hunted”
Navy helo pilot Paula Coughlin left the pool patio on the third floor of the Hilton Hotel in Las Vegas, stepped through the doors near the main passenger elevators, and started down the hallway toward the squadron administrative suites—rooms rented by squadrons of naval aviators attending the 1991 Tailhook Conference.
The narrow hallway reeked of alcohol, vomit, and urine that Saturday night in September. Loud, rowdy naval and Marine pilots and flight officers lined the sides of the hallway. Men leaned on both walls; two in the center had their backs to Coughlin. She tried to pass on the right, and one of the men deliberately hip-checked her. She excused herself. Someone shouted, “Admiral’s aide!”
Suddenly, someone behind her grabbed her buttocks with such force that she was lifted off the ground and pushed forward a step. She turned and yelled, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The men in the group began grabbing her breasts and buttocks. They pushed her down the passageway. One man put his hand inside her tank top and bra and fondled her breasts. She dropped into a crouch and tried to pry the man’s hands off, then bit his left forearm—hard enough, she hoped, to draw blood.
One man started to walk away. She reached out, tapped his right hip, and asked if she could get in front of him. He stopped, turned to face her, put one hand on each of her breasts, and smiled.
Coughlin broke free and ran into an open door into an empty administrative suite. She sat alone in the dark and tried to pr
ocess what had just happened.
She had encountered the “gantlet,” a Tailhook Convention tradition.
The next morning, Coughlin reported the assault to her supervisor, Rear Adm. Jack Snyder, commander of the Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center. He replied, “That’s what you get when you go to a hotel party with a bunch of drunk aviators.”
The following June, frustrated by senior officers’ unwillingness to address her complaint, Coughlin took the aviators’ behavior to the media. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Barbara Pope refused to accept the results of a Naval Investigative Service investigation that minimized the scope and number of the assaults and blamed most of the lewd behavior on enlisted men. A subsequent investigation by the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office found that aviators had assaulted eighty-three women and seven men; that they—and civilian women—had participated in public sex acts; and that they had engaged in indecent assault, indecent exposure, conduct unbecoming an officer, and failure to act in a proper leadership capacity. Ultimately the scandal ruined or damaged the careers of fourteen admirals and three hundred aviators. The Navy grounded Coughlin and questioned her psychological state. Her male colleagues shunned or harassed her. Most Navy women chose not to express support for her publicly, fearing that they would be tarred with the same brush. In February 1994 Coughlin resigned her commission. The scandal delayed officer promotions for several years afterward, lowered morale for both men and women, and changed the Navy’s approach to sexual harassment.
In the aftermath of the social and political upheaval caused by the Vietnam War, the services realized that America’s armed forces could no longer rely on involuntary conscription. In 1969 President Nixon charged the Gates Commission to advise him on the creation of an all-volunteer force, and he announced an end to conscription on January 1, 1973. By accident rather than by design, establishment of an all-volunteer force that relied on women’s participation coincided with a national movement to improve women’s legal and economic equality; changes in women’s military status were driven not by a desire to impose equality or by abstract notions of “political correctness,” but by the armed forces’ reluctant recognition that they would need to recruit and retain women in order to meet personnel goals for an all-volunteer force and their desire to avoid outside interference in military personnel policy. Military women’s own desire to change policies that they recognized as discriminatory, and their willingness to challenge policies in court, contributed to the changes as well.
In 1972 a Department of Defense All-Volunteer Force task force identified policies that restricted the use of women in support of personnel recruiting and retention goals. These included higher enlistment standards for women, policies denying enlistment of married women and those with dependents, and restrictions on the number of occupations open to women. The integration of women sped up exponentially.
The first changes took place in assignment and promotion policy. The first women were promoted to general/flag officer rank in 1967; the 2 percent cap on women’s participation was lifted in 1973. Promotion lists were integrated, though combat exclusion laws that restricted women’s assignment continued to make them less desirable for promotion in senior ranks despite service efforts to create “equivalent” career pathways. The separate women’s components were disbanded: the WAVES in 1972, the WAF in 1976, and the WAC—which had to be disestablished by Congress—in 1978.
To meet personnel requirements, the services had to change accession policies. The Air Force opened ROTC to women on a test basis in 1969; the Army and Navy followed suit in 1972. The Navy’s first coed class at Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, graduated in 1973. In 1975 Congress ordered service academies to admit women in the fall of 1976. Many men resented women’s intrusion into the hallowed halls of the service academies; press interest complicated the situation for women, and accusations flew that standards were being lowered. But 229 women graduated from the service academies in 1980: 98 from the Air Force Academy, 62 from West Point, 55 from the Naval Academy, and 14 from the Coast Guard Academy.
An expansion in occupational specialties open to women was necessary. Over the coming decades, the Army classified occupational specialties first as “support,” then reclassified them as “combat,” and then classified them yet again as “support.”
The Coast Guard and Navy began integrating more women into service at sea. Navy nurses had long been assigned to hospital ships; in October 1972 USS Sanctuary sailed with a mixed-gender ship’s company that included fifty-three enlisted women and twenty women officers, some assigned to deck, supply, operations, and administrative (but not engineering) departments as well as to the hospital. The commanding officer reported that women performed every shipboard task with equal “ease, expertise, and dedication” as men, including on general quarters repair parties and on emergency teams. Law continued to restrict Navy women—but not their civilian counterparts—from assignment to naval vessels and transportation on them; women Navy pilots could not land on carriers, though Army and Air Force women were not restricted; and women in officer accession programs could not obtain mandatory sea duty training. Enlisted women could be assigned to seagoing ratings but could only be assigned ashore, which disrupted the sea/shore rotation cycle for men.
The Coast Guard assigned women to two cutters, Morganthau and Gallatin, in 1977; that same year, Beverly Kelley took command of the cutter Cape Newagen. The Navy then requested congressional authority to assign women to naval auxiliary vessels, tenders, repair ships, and rescue ships. In 1978 four Navy women brought a class-action discrimination lawsuit (Owens v. Brown) challenging the assignment policy, noting that civilian women could be assigned to naval vessels but military women could not. The court ruled that the assignment policy unconstitutionally denied Navy women equal protection of the law, but left up to the Navy the decision on how to proceed. In 1978 President Jimmy Carter signed PL 95–485, which prohibited women from permanent assignment to combatant vessels and from temporary assignment for a period exceeding 180 days. The first Navy women—55 officers and 375 enlisted women—reported for duty at sea on auxiliary vessels in 1978.
Integration of the military aviation community also expanded on a small scale. The Navy began accepting women for flight training in 1973, the Army in 1974, the Coast Guard in 1975, and the Air Force in 1976. These women understood that while their missions were designated “combat support,” they could still find themselves flying in a combat situation and exposed to enemy fire. Numbers of women aviators remained low through the early 1990s. The Air Force also began considering integration of ICBM crews late in the 1970s; the greatest opposition came from officers’ wives, who objected to their husbands standing duty overnight with women.
Family policy provoked the most emotional disputes in the 1970s, not least because some of the changes played out in the courts instead of the service personnel offices. Military family policy developed after World War II reflected prevailing social expectations of women’s primary role as wife and mother, the assumption that military and family duties were inherently incompatible, and the idea that women should prioritize family responsibilities over military duties whenever the two conflicted.
The first policy changed was one that discriminated against men—the option for women to seek early discharge on the basis of marriage. The ban on enlistment of married women was revoked. The requirement for services to separate married couples gave way to prioritizing spouse co-location, subject to the needs of the service. In 1970 1st Lt. Sharron Frontiero filed a class-action equal protection suit in federal court challenging sex discrimination in family dependent entitlements; the court concurred.
As early as 1949, the chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery had suggested that women with families should be allowed to continue serving, noting that pregnancy was a “normal biological phenomenon” for the military age group. But Executive Order 10240 of 1951 permitted the armed forces to terminate the service
of any woman who became a parent, stepparent, or custodial parent of a minor child. Although the order was permissive, the services interpreted it as mandatory and granted few waivers. Men who were widowed or granted custody after divorce, however, were retained. Repeated attempts to challenge the double standard in court failed, but in June 1974 the Department of Defense ordered that separation of mothers would be voluntary. Service pushback against retention of mothers continued through the early 1990s. A woman Marine, ordered to participate in a full physical fitness test in her eighth month of pregnancy, went into labor the following day; her doctor extended her hospital stay “to keep your commanding officer from killing you.” Men frequently subjected women to complaints about the so-called nine-month flu and special treatment (policies limiting activity in the second and third trimesters of pregnancy, and maternity leave). Men accused them of deliberately getting pregnant to avoid deployments or unpleasant duty; while this certainly occurred, it was hardly the norm.
A perception that gender integration in the military was a creation of social activists who supported passage of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) at the expense of readiness amplified resistance to women’s integration. Congress intended that physically and mentally qualified women should be subject to Selective Service registration, and they included the requirement in the unamended ERA bill passed on March 22, 1972. This provision contributed to states’ decisions not to ratify the amendment.
Hearings in the House Armed Services Committee on the repeal of combat exclusion laws in 1980 reinforced the perception that women’s integration was a social experiment. Congresswoman Marjorie Holt noted that “Capitol Hill and the media gained the impression that the proposal [to rescind combat exclusion laws] was being pushed by civilian feminists within the administration who, rightly or wrongly, were perceived as being more concerned with women’s rights and ‘social experimentation’ than with legitimate personnel requirements or the needs of national defense.” That perception continues among many today.
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