Bogeys and Bandits

by Gandt, Robert

  What it meant to the old hands, the senior officers who had come up in the old system, was that they wouldn’t have made it through the Fine Mesh. “I was a ski bum,” said Capt. Matt Moffit, whose own naval career was rising like a rocket. “Hell, with my college grades, I wouldn’t even get into flight training today. These kids are different.”

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  Just how different they were struck Commander Moe Vazquez one day. Vazquez was a forty-something-year-old fighter pilot instructor in the RAG. He was nearing the end of his career. His retirement was scheduled for July, four months away.

  Moe couldn’t believe what he had just heard in the ready room. He stopped Major Bull Durham, the training officer, in the passageway. “You’re not gonna believe this. What would you guess a bunch of twenty-four, twenty-six-year-old fighter pilots would be bullshitting about in there?”

  “Getting laid?” ventured Bull.

  “Of course. Something like that. Or fast cars. Or telling lies about how shit hot they are in an airplane.”

  “So what are they talking about?”

  “Bonds.”

  “Bonds?”

  “Their goddamn investments!” roared Moe. “That kid in there, who is a lieutenant jaygee three years out of college, is reading the Wall Street Journal and discussing—get this—the yield on thirty year bonds.”

  “Are they listening?”

  “They’re all doing it. That’s what they’re talking about—frigging stocks and bonds! Unbelievable! These kids are going to be fighter pilots?”

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  There was no question about it: These kids were different. They were not like the nuggets from Moe Vazquez’s generation, nor from any previous generation of Navy fighter pilots.

  This was the Fine Mesh generation. They were better educated, smarter, distinctly more serious. They talked more about getting rich than getting laid.

  That these kids were different, everyone agreed. But no one had yet supplied the answer to the most important question about the super-serious, over-educated Fine Meshers: Were they better fighter pilots?

  CHAPTER THREE

  WOMEN WARRIORS

  Lieutenant Angelina Ramona Morales was accustomed to not being taken seriously. With her dark, bobbed hair and tiny stature, she looked like somebody’s kid sister. Angie Morales had brown eyes and a pretty, oval-shaped face. Even in the gray-green flight suit, twin bars on each shoulder, clunky black flying boots on her feet, she looked so. . . kid-like. How could a baby-faced little girl like her fly a supersonic fighter? How could she be a warrior? She looked like someone’s baby-sitter.

  Even her manner was diminutive. In the boisterous ready room talking-with-your-hands bull sessions—“. . .there I was behind the ship, on this blackass night, when all of a sudden. . .”—Morales would listen politely. In such bull sessions she never took the lead. She listened with interest, laughed in the right places, and accorded the storyteller what amounted to a polite deference.

  Such deference she learned from her mother, who came from the border town of Reynosa, Mexico, and who, as a teenager, had waded the muddy Rio Grande one night with her parents and eight siblings and migrated to the hill country of Texas. It was in San Antonio where she met and married Angie’s father, a third generation Mexican-American, who was a sergeant stationed there at Kelly Air Force Base.

  Angie Morales’s parents were enormously proud of what she had accomplished. Her father, who retired as a master sergeant after thirty years service, could hardly believe it: His tiny little girl, the smart and bashful one, was an officer! And flying those supersonic jet airplanes!

  It was her mother who was having trouble. She was a worrier. Though she had become thoroughly Americanized, learning the peculiar customs of her new country, she was still bewildered by her daughter’s untraditional choice of a career. She worried constantly about Angie. —. . .

  So when Angie Morales finished Navy flight training and received her wings, her mother was there to congratulate her. She seemed extraordinarily cheerful that day, beaming and smiling, patting her daughter on the back. Angie had never seen her mother so happy.

  And then she realized why. Angie’s mother was overjoyed that she had finished Navy flight training, because she thought the whole dangerous business was behind her. Now her daughter could get on with her life, raising a family and being a woman. No more of those dangerous airplanes.

  “Uh, Mom, this isn’t the end of my flying. It’s just the beginning.”

  “Beginning?” The mother was perplexed. What did she mean, just the beginning? Wasn’t it over? There was more?

  “This was just the training, Mom. Now that I have my wings, I’ll go to the fleet and be a real aviator. I’m going to be a fighter pilot.”

  Oh, dear. The smile vanished. The mother’s brow furrowed just like it always did when she thought about her daughter flying those Navy airplanes. Now she really had something to worry about.

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  Angie went to the University of Texas on a Navy ROTC scholarship. While she was there she met Roger Yeates, whom she dated for four years. They married six months after they graduated. Both had goals: he was a teacher and aspiring writer. She was a naval officer and aspiring fighter pilot.

  She was lucky. Roger was her greatest fan, giving support and encouragement. Best of all, he didn’t mind the sometimes subservient role he had to play as the spouse of a Navy pilot. He even had fun playing the role.

  “My wife, the fighter pilot,” he liked to say, introducing her to friends. He liked to watch the perplexed looks: Fighter pilot? This half-pint kid who looks like she ought to be selling Girl Scout cookies? They just knew it had to be some kind of joke.

  Angie was a math major at Fordham. She graduated in the top ten percent of her class, something she managed to accomplish wherever she went: the top ten percent. The Fine Mesher percentile. It was that distinction that won for her the top assignment for newly graduated and commissioned Navy officers: assignment to Navy flight training.

  Two years later, when she won her wings, there she was again: the top ten percent. Which then earned for her the most coveted of flying assignments: F/A-18 Hornet strike fighters.

  The Fine Mesh. That was the way it worked. You went through it at every phase of training. If you made the top ten percent, you moved on. Then you had to make the next top ten percent. And so on. Of the several thousand who had begun the journey with Angie Morales as newly commissioned officers in the Navy and Marine Corps, that’s what it came to: Fewer than a hundred were going to fly Hornets.

  Lieutenant Angie Morales was, by definition, a winner. She had made it through the Fine Mesh. But it wasn’t over yet. The hardest part was yet to come.

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  Sally Hopkins’s call sign was “Shrike.”

  “I got it at post graduate school,” she would explain. “One day I was bitching about things—the Navy or the school or something—and an instructor told me I sounded like some kind of shrieking bird. A shrike. The name stuck, so I guess it fits.”

  Like other professions whose progeny tend to continue the family tradition, the officer corps included a disproportionate number of military offspring. Sally Hopkins’ stepfather had been a Navy enlisted man, and then a warrant officer. She finished high school in a small town in Tennessee, just outside Memphis, where she graduated third in her class and won an appointment to the U. S. Naval Academy.

  After commissioning and graduation with a degree in mathematics in 1988, she won an assignment to flight training. She completed advanced training in jets, and pinned on her Navy wings at the Meridian, Mississippi naval air station in 1990. Like her male classmates in the jet pipeline, she should have been eligible for an assignment to a seagoing fighter squadron.

  But that was before complete gender integration reached the Navy. The ban on women in combat squadrons was still firmly in place.

  So Sally went off to a utility squadron based at Subic Bay in the Far East. She was flying the A-4 Skyhawk
, a Navy attack jet, and that was good. But her job was to fly support missions, and that was not good. Utility squadrons were supposed to provide services to fleet squadrons, servings as radar targets and adversary aircraft in mock attacks on ships. Assignment to a utility squadron meant you were, in effect, relegated to the scrub team. You hadn’t made the varsity.

  Sally looked around for something better. In 1992 she was accepted in the Navy’s postgraduate school at Monterey, California, where she earned a master’s degree in astronautical engineering. And during the time she was off in grad school, away from the cockpits and ready rooms of the airborne Navy, a phenomenal thing happened. The new Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, signed a document on 28 April 1993: “The services shall permit women to compete for assignments in aircraft,” the Secretary’s memorandum said, “including aircraft engaged in combat missions.”

  It was the breakthrough Sally and her female comrades had been waiting for. The wall of discrimination had been breached. It meant they could fly real pointy-nosed fighters on real missions, not the scrub team roles they’d been assigned before. It meant they could fly off carriers. They could fly combat missions. They could be killers.

  Killers?

  That was the part that was making people say the stupidest things. Things like: Women just don’t. . . well, you know. . . they get all sort of queasy about. . . I mean, the gentler sex and all that. . . they’re just not into blood and guts. . .

  One thing Sally Hopkins could never get over was how people always thought women were somehow incapable of killing. She’d heard it enough times, it made her furious.

  One of those times was an evening in the Miramar officers’ club. It wasn’t long after the Ban on Women in Combat had finally been lifted, and Sally had her orders to strike fighter training.

  A Navy commander whom she recognized as the CO of the Top Gun school—the polishing school for the Navy’s shit-hottest fighter pilots—came up to her at the bar. At first she thought he might be trying to be friendly. But the commander stared at her with eyes like lasers and fired the question that seemed to be roiling the guts of every male fighter pilot in the business: “Lieutenant, do you really think you have what it takes to kill another human being?”

  The thought occurred to Sally that this would be a wonderful opportunity for her to do something smart—and keep her mouth shut. But that wasn’t Sally’s style. She looked the commander in the eye and asked, “Do you have a gun?”

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  It was clear that Angie Morales and Sally Hopkins were not destined to be soul mates. They were as different as hawks and geese. Despite their common minority status—they were the only two women in strike fighter training—they might as well have come from different planets.

  Morales tended to be invisible. She was quiet by nature, slight of stature, and in a room full of hulking, flight-suited aviators she blended into the surroundings like a bird in a forest. Sally Hopkins, by contrast, was a one-woman blitzkrieg. She would barge into a male-filled ready room, full of chutzpah and hubris, and within a minute have every one of the inhabitants grinding his teeth like a mill saw.

  In the drab and baggy Navy-issue flight suit and the clunky flying boots, her blonde hair pulled back in a helmet-fitting bun, Sally was far from gorgeous. Her plain-featured face was made plainer by the absence of make up or mascara or lipstick. Cosmetics, in any case, were a no-no with flight gear, especially oxygen masks. Oxygen and any grease-based cosmetics, even lip salve, made an inflammable mixture. Sally knew one guy who tried out a trendy new hair gel and, while wearing his oxygen mask during a flight, set his scalp on fire.

  Sally was on the short side, about five-five, and had the solid build of a weight lifter, which she was. She was also a jogger, roller-blader, and lover of ball room dancing.

  She had a sometimes boy friend whom she had met back in postgrad school. His name was Bruce, and he was a helo pilot based at North Island in San Diego. Sally and Bruce had a relationship that sputtered on and off. “Bruce, well. . . he and I are different. He’s sort of a narrow, unspontaneous kind of guy. Not like me, you know . . .”

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  Women aviators in the Navy were a small group. Because they were so few in number, most knew each other, or knew about each other. As they fanned out to assignments around the world, most stayed in touch. Each had experienced her own share of The Gender Thing—the hostility, discrimination, the exclusion. Each had gone through flight training knowing that no matter how good she was at flying Navy jets, she wouldn’t be getting one of the glamour jobs—the assignments to pointy-nosed fighters that flew off carriers. Those slots were reserved for the guys in their class.

  So when the Ban came off in 1992, and women were finally authorized to fly combat airplanes, the Navy reacted with a typical military scatter gun approach. Find women pilots and train them. Get them in fighters now!

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  Sally Hopkins had two friends from back in flight training with whom she stayed in touch: Kara Hultgreen, and Bonnie Detweiler. They were the Terrific Trio. All were early-nineties graduates of Navy flight training, and each, because of the Ban, had been assigned to non-combat aviation units. The Terrific Trio stayed in touch, monitored each other’s progress, exchanged hopes and aspirations for the future.

  Kara Hultgreen, who was nearly six feet tall, tough and outspoken, had been flying EA-6 Prowlers in Key West. The Prowler was not a glamorous jet. It was an unarmed, electronic warfare version of the A-6 Intruder attack jet. It had four crew members on board and, weighted down with surveillance gear, flew like a turkey.

  When the Ban was officially lifted, Kara Hultgreen was the first of the Terrific Trio to get orders. She won her dream assignment: F-14 Tomcats in a West Coast squadron. Hultgreen was going to be the Navy’s first operational woman fighter pilot.

  Bonnie Detweiler was next. She was assigned to an A-6 Intruder squadron on the east coast, and had already started her training.

  The last of the Trio was Sally Hopkins, who was still finishing her postgraduate studies at the Navy’s postgraduate school in Monterey, California. She received orders to F/A-18 training on the east coast.

  By the end of 1994, when Sally Hopkins reported for strike fighter training, things had changed. The Terrific Trio was no longer a trio. Soon it wouldn’t even be a duo.

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  The Gender Thing.

  It was the hottest, messiest, most controversial topic in the Navy. Nothing had inflamed passions in the ready rooms and coffee messes and officers’ club bars like this since the torpedoing of the Lusitania. No one was neutral on the subject. Depending on which side of the issue you sat, integration of women into combat units was either inevitable and overdue or it was unbelievably cockeyed stupid.

  Some of the nastiest resistance women encountered came from their own classmates, the guys with whom they had gone through the naval academy and flight training. In a shrinking post-Cold War Navy, these young men saw precious flying billets being reserved for a favored group—at their expense.

  Some saw the whole thing as a social experiment being forced onto the military by a liberal government. This view was widely held because the military service, at its core, was deeply conservative both in politics and culture. The military officer corps has always tilted to the starboard side of center. This whole business of women in combat, well, hell, it just wasn’t. . . you know, natural.

  The argument always boiled down to a traditionalist attitude: Women were supposed to be the nurturers, the life-givers, the home makers. That was the way it had been for several thousand years, and it worked just fine. Leave it to the men to go out and kill, burn, pillage. To let women join the killer team—that just got everybody confused about roles.

  Contributing to the debate was a deep-seated feeling that women were not being evaluated on the same scale as men. Male officers were convinced that women were being accorded special concessions in training, that a “double standard” was being applied that allowed women to get
away with mistakes that, in a man’s case, would get him disqualified.

  For a squadron commanding officer, the Gender Thing was a nightmare. If you flunked a woman for poor performance, you could be accused of discrimination. If you recognized her for superior performance, you took flak for giving special treatment. If you criticized her, it could be construed as harassment.

  “I wish we didn’t have them,” said the commanding officer of a RAG. Then he caught himself and quickly added, “But, of course, we do have them. It’s the law. Now I wish we had a lot more. I wish we had as many women as men.”

  To which his listeners said, “Whaat?” Did he really mean that?

  “Definitely,” he said. “Here’s why. Because then each one wouldn’t be unique, a cause célèbre. We could treat everyone alike—flunk them or pass them on their performance and not their goddamn minority status.”

  Which sounded good—in theory. The trouble was, most of the men pilots in the Navy believed the problem was more fundamental than just performance and evaluation. Among most was the gut feeling that flying combat jets was something women were inherently not qualified to do, no matter how many of them you threw into the equation.

  In other words, flying was a man’s game. This premise was an extrapolation on the more cherished theory that war was a man’s game. Gender integration amounted to a double assault at their manhood: first you had women thinking they should join in the manly sport of war, and now they wanted to fly your goddamn airplanes too!

  What you heard in the men-only ready room conversations was:

  “It’s like replacing one of the Washington Redskins with a woman. You can dress her up in the uniform, shoulder pads and helmet and all, and throw her in there. And she might even be able to keep from getting killed. But it doesn’t mean she can do the same job as the other players. In the meantime, what have you done to the team?”