Annie Get Your Gun

By Bruce W. Nelan

At the infamous 1991 Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, when male Navy officers and reservists were not assaulting frightened women or drinking from the navels of cooperative ones, they took part in a series of professional seminars. A female naval officer asked a panelist at one such session when women would be permitted to fly combat airplanes. Her question drew hisses and boos and the call "We don't want women!" from the audience. The senior officer on the panel, an admiral, treated it as a joke by ducking under the table.

Female officers insisted those assaults and jeers at Tailhook were two forms of the manhandling that would go on until the second-class status of women in the Navy was ended. To get respect and a fair chance at promotions, they said, they would have to be allowed to serve on warships and fly jet fighters and bombers. "Women will never make it into the Star Trek generation," said Lieut. Paula Coughlin, who exposed the Tailhook scandal, "until they're given equal opportunity to do the jobs open only to men."

The path to the stars, especially those worn on uniforms, was opened last week. Defense Secretary Les Aspin ordered all the services to remove restrictions on women flying combat aircraft and said he would ask Congress to lift the ban on women serving aboard warships at sea. The change has long been visible on the horizon, but it was hurried along by a Navy eager to do something to smooth the choppy wake left by its official report on Tailhook. As the damaging document was readied for release two weeks ago, Navy brass quietly assured servicewomen at the Pentagon that, as one put it, "something was coming up soon that we would really like."

Aspin called the new role for women "historic." There are only about 800 female pilots in uniform now, so the number of women combat flyers will be relatively low for some time -- a few hundred out of more than 41,000 pilots in all the services. It is still a dramatic departure in American society and its armed forces. The new era was symbolized at Aspin's Pentagon press conference by Air Force Captain Sharon Preszler, 28, a soft-spoken strawberry blond. "I can be a killer," she said firmly. "I can and will kill in defense of my country."

That vision, of America's mothers and daughters going into battle and coming back maimed or in body bags, was precisely what traditionalist commanders had fought against for so long. Just last month, the Air Force Chief of Staff, General Merrill McPeak, told a group of female officers, "I think it is a mistake to open up bombers and fighters to women. I have a culturally based hang-up. I can't get over this image of old men ordering young women into combat." Elaine Donnelly, president of the Center for Military Readiness in Livonia, Michigan, blasted the Administration after last week's announcement, accusing Bill Clinton of preparing "to order the nation's daughters into killing zones and rape motels which he himself avoided."

The general and the country were in fact overtaken by events. Whatever the rules may have said, 40,000 American women went to war in Operation Desert Storm as technicians, drivers, tanker and helicopter pilots and dozens of other hazardous occupations. Some were killed, some were captured, some earned Purple Hearts. "That was the defining moment for women in combat," says one of Aspin's senior aides. "All the old bugaboos were met and proved no big deal."

"Women in combat is no longer a question," says Air Force Captain Sandy Kearney, who flew a C-141 cargo plane in the gulf. "We've already been there." Other Desert Storm veterans agree that women have proved that they can operate in combat as well as men. "War is not a hormonal event," says Major Rhonda Cornum, an Army flight surgeon who was shot down, wounded and captured by the Iraqis. "It is a profession with discipline."

Although older officers still resist the idea of serving alongside women in combat, many younger male pilots thought the move was overdue. Women have long been handling difficult assignments in heavy transport planes and refueling tankers with great skill and professionalism. Navy Lieut. Michael Pocker flies helicopters along with women pilots at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego. "We've been doing it for eight years," Pocker remarks. "It works. The standards for men and women are the same, period."

But there are standards, and there are double standards. On Navy supply and repair ships where women have been serving for years, male and female sailors privately talk about the subtle daily tensions. Men don't want women aboard; women say they aren't accepted. Men say the women are slackers who can't or won't do the hard, greasy work; women say they have to work twice as hard to get half as much recognition. Men only grudgingly take orders from women; women say they have to prove themselves every day on board and any mistake they make reflects on all women. Women complain of sexual harassment; men complain that officers favor women over men.

"A lot of men in the Navy think women belong in the kitchen and pregnant," says Petty Officer 3rd Class James Guillory, aboard the U.S.S. San Diego. He says he favors greater opportunities for women -- but that his wife does not. "She worries about me going to sea with women," he says. "She doesn't worry about what I'll do; she worries about what they'll try to do to me."

If the services still want to bar women from certain jobs, they will have to provide official explanations of why and receive special approval. The Navy is likely to try to keep women off submarines and amphibious assault craft, mainly because of privacy. Its support ships have been reconfigured to provide separate bunk space and toilets for the 8,900 women already on sea duty, but submarines and some other ships are too cramped for this to work well. Even so, the number of women at sea will double or triple.

The issue of women in combat is still not entirely resolved. Before Aspin's order went out, about half the 1.75 million slots in the armed forces were closed to the 201,000 women in uniform because they could not serve in combat units. Under the new rules, they are still ineligible for about 40% of the slots. The reason: those assignments are in "combat arms" of Army and Marine ground forces, mainly infantry, armored units and artillery. While a few slots might open up for women in missile artillery, no one is talking about putting women into tanks or foxholes. A reporter last week asked General Gordon Sullivan, the Army Chief of Staff, if he would favor women "hitting the beach." Sullivan replied, "No."

In fact very few women are calling for the chance to become a grunt. "Nobody is pressuring us on this count," says a Defense official. Women Air Force and Navy pilots are officers, eager to rise through the ranks to senior command. Combat units in the Army and Marines are made up mostly of enlisted personnel without the same opportunities. Some women do argue that any female who meets the physical requirements for combat units should be able to volunteer, but there is no sign of a ground swell. Captain Melea Riley, who commands a training battalion including both men and women at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, says, "I have never come across a woman who said she would like to be in a combat infantry unit." Cornum, the bemedaled flight surgeon, now back at Fort Rucker, Alabama, confirms that. "Personally," she says, "I've never met a woman who wanted to be in the infantry."

Last week's decision does open the door to another intriguing debate -- about the draft. The Supreme Court ruled in 1981 that women were excluded from registration because any reinstated draft would be intended to increase the pool of people available for combat. Now that combat planes and ships are open to women, might they be considered part of the available personnel pool in a major conflict? The Pentagon says that for now it has no plans to ask for any changes in the Selective Service system.

With reporting by Nancy Traver and Bruce van Voorst/Washington