Spring 2011; NAS Pensacola, Pensacola, FL
Because I was top of my class, I got to put in my preference for what I wanted to fly after primary training: P-3s (which my brother flew), E-6s (big communications planes), or Tailhook (E-2s, E/A-18s, F/A-18s). There was no question in my mind what I would choose. I wanted to fly aircraft that landed on aircraft carriers. I wanted Tailhook.
While on the Tailhook track, our challenges intensified. Formation flying and acrobatics proved particularly difficult since we had to learn it on paper before we put it into practice. Grasping 3-D maneuvers in space, in relation to other aircraft, all moving forward at the same time, made our heads spin. And the descriptions in the Navy training manual were ludicrously abstract—hundreds of pages described physical maneuvers yet only a handful of simplified diagrams showed them in context.
I read aloud to our study group of Navy classmates, Marines, and a Middle Eastern student in training with us. “Okay, does this make sense to anyone? The wingman uses angle of bank to fly along the forty-five-degree bearing as the distance between the two aircraft is closed. Through the continual manipulation of this principle, the joining aircraft is able to maintain a steady bearing line as it approaches the lead aircraft…”
“Johnson, I have no clue what the hell they’re saying.” Matt, a Marine classmate, slammed his book shut. “My head hurts. I need a drink.”
“Me too,” I said, “but the test is tomorrow, and I don’t think any of us could even re-create this stuff with…” My voice trailed off as an idea formed. “Let’s get beers. And bikes. And try the maneuvers on bikes.”
“I like the beer part,” Matt said.
“Great. I have some. Meet me here.” I jotted an address down. “And bring bikes or skateboards if you have them.”
“Where’s this?” Matt asked, glancing at my address, but halfway to the liquor store in his mind. “You live in a trailer park?”
“A class-A RV park actually,” I said. “There’s a big, open parking lot where we can practice. And Matt, don’t you still live with your mom?” I asked, giving it right back.
“Last one there buys tomorrow’s coffees.”
As my classmates arrived at the Avion with bikes, skateboards, and six packs of beer, I could see hesitation on a few of their faces.
“Trailer?” Anwar, our classmate from the Middle East, said skeptically as he stepped up to the tin can and peered in. “How can a woman live in a trailer? And with this … little rat?” Anwar pointed to my hamster, Wizzo, running on her wheel by the window.
“Her name is Wizzo. She keeps me company.” I dropped a few food pellets into her cage.
“Really, you didn’t want a real pet instead? Like a dog, maybe?” Anwar said sarcastically.
He didn’t know the half of it. I would have loved to have had a dog, but with flight school, I worked and traveled way too much to take care of such a high-maintenance pet. I had gotten Wizzo on a lonely weekend after Minotaur and I had broken up over a night of questionable behavior. I named her after my dream job—F/A-18 Weapons Systems Officer, or Wizzo.
Matt, the Marine, was last to enter. “Holy shit, Johnson. All this time we thought you were in some shabby little mobile home. For God’s sake, look at these countertops. This is a princess palace.”
“Thanks,” I said. “My Grammy would be glad to hear that. Now, enough talking. Let’s see if we can figure this out.”
In the golden light of a Florida afternoon, we rode, one bike in lead and one bike behind the lead, in formation, weaving around my trailer park. It was the first time we’d actually had wingmen. I pedaled briskly, calling to my wing, “All right, take spread … back up to parade now … all right, get on bearing line, a little up now, all right, looks just right. Let’s try a breakup and rendezvous now…”
As we rode, the concepts that proved so elusive on paper now became clear as we fell into sync. And quoting Top Gun, my lead called back to me laughing, “You can be my wingman anytime.”
As our maneuvers improved and the beer drinking increased, a few crashes ensued.
“Hey, guys, who feels like a dip?” I said as heads turned toward the pale blue Perdido Key RV Resort swimming pool twinkling on the other side of the park. A few of the guys called their wives over, and our study session turned into a pool party. Nothing crazy, just drinking a few cold ones, telling jokes, enjoying a hot Florida night.
Head tilted back in full recline, Anwar floated over on a giant pink flamingo floatie, sunglasses on, even though the sun had set. “Caroline,” he said. “I really do like this trailer living. I will miss this when I’m back home.”
“I’m sure you’ll miss a lot of things—the beers, pepperoni pizza, young Pensacola girls?” I raised my eyebrows, smiling.
Anwar laughed, fingers dipping in the water. “For the rest of my life.”
“So,” I asked him. “When you go back, will you marry?”
“Next year, I will probably marry my first wife. And in two or three years, I will probably marry my second.”
“Geez, Anwar, how many wives do you think you’ll have?”
“Two or three,” he answered, without a trace of irony. “Caroline, tomorrow will you help me with the syllabus?”
Anwar had changed so much since we started primary flight training. Like most of the Middle Easterners, initially he wouldn’t talk to me because women in his culture were not respected at work. But that all changed as soon as he realized I could help him.
“Sure,” I said. “Happy to help.”
Training progressed rapidly from flying the T-6A Texan IIs—the small, fast planes with glass canopies and front- and back-seat configurations—to T-39 Sabreliners, little Learjets with degraded F-16 radars. Fairly nimble and high-performing like the T-6’s, Sabreliners had one distinct difference—they were jets.
Pensacola flight traffic is a five-ring circus. Due to the amount of military training, the airspace is filled with the same amount of planes as airports in New York City, but most of the aviators flying around Pensacola are just learning. In many cases, students have only been in the air a few weeks or months. Add to this volume of air traffic and the variation in flying tactics (everything from basic turns to performing aerobatics to elaborate war games with multiple aircraft), and being in the sky around the Florida Panhandle is simply dangerous. Flying with safe, experienced pilots is critical.
The best of the best instructors are known as the Grey Eagles, retired Marine and Navy pilots, many of whom are Vietnam veterans and former A-6 Intruder or F-4 Phantom pilots who simply love to fly every day and want to teach the next generation of aviators. They look like a geriatric baseball team but have hundreds of thousands of hours of flying time and hundreds of years of combined experience as military aviators, flying the squirliest, most dangerous planes the US owned. They had swagger, superior skills of the saltiest pilots, plus the humility that comes from extensive combat experience, including surviving ejections or having been shot down.
Flying with Grey Eagles was unlike anything else in flight training. For one thing, their purpose was to prepare us for a dangerous occupation more than it was to weed us out. In the air, it was businesslike and controlled, but they still knew how to push it. Of all the complex maneuvers we performed, my favorite was high-speed, low-level flying. We navigated solely off of ground features whizzing by—power lines, TV towers, interstates, mountains, and towns. So low, it felt like we were in a video game, our wings nearly clipping tall trees. But it was no video game, and all we had to do to remind ourselves of that was look at the scarred mountainside, a barren patch of dirt stretching the span of a football field, where ROKT 21’s last flight ended only ten months prior. Three flight students, one Navy instructor, and a Grey Eagle had perished in the crash.
At the beginning of flight school, I’d been made to do the cursory, morbid tasks of signing a waiver in case of my death and writing a letter to my parents. While I had girlfriends back home planning weddings, I made my funeral arrangements at the ripe old age of twenty-three. I looked into doubling my life insurance, even though I didn’t have more than a hamster and my parents as beneficiaries. On paper, the dangers felt very abstract, but they came to mean something altogether different at five hundred feet off the ground, going 350 miles per hour in a jet.
After completing intermediate flight training and again finishing number one in my class, I had to report to Lemoore, California, for centrifuge training. In Lemoore, you show up to a giant, hangarlike building in the middle of Nowhere, California, and there, in the center of a cavernous room, you are strapped into a porta potty–sized chamber suspended on the end of an extended gimbal rotating around an axis. You sit and wait to feel the spinning and the Gs coming on.
The goal—exerting extreme g-forces on the body—is to teach us how to counteract the blood leaving our brain and vital organs and pooling in our feet. This same sensation in the jet is what causes you to pass out. We had to train our bodies, learning to sequentially flex and clench all our muscles, from toes, to calves, to glutes on upward to keep the blood where the body needed it. Being spun around in a box with no visual reference, strapped to a chair like a monkey getting sling-shot into space, naturally induces nausea.
When my turn came, instead of focusing on not passing out or puking, I couldn’t stop thinking about how my life had become the centrifuge, the Navy spinning it while all I could do was grit and resist the forces. I thought about Minotaur back in Florida and how soon he’d be finding out where he was going for his next round of training, painfully aware that the relationship we were shakily building together might not weather distance. I clenched my body, unsure if I had been inside the chamber ten minutes or ten hours, but I knew if I passed each of the four different profiles the first time, I’d only have to spend fifteen minutes spinning.
Finally the centrifuge slowed, the door creaked open, and an instructor had to help me out of the chamber because my legs were too wobbly to make it down the stairs. Luckily, the night before, I’d decided to rein in the margaritas and Mexican dinner whereas several in my training group enjoyed their tequila and nachos twice. Two of them even blacked out.
Conflicting thoughts tumbled around in my head on my trip back from centrifuge training, like emotionally I was still in a spin. Life in the military, in general, is difficult on relationships. There is no planning things out. You live and die by the schedule the Navy makes for you, and by and large, the Navy doesn’t care if you get engaged, or have a date planned, or have a child. Well, if you are getting married, they will try to make an exception, but ninety-nine times out of one hundred, nuptials are scheduled according to Mother Navy’s plan. When orders come down, in a matter of days, or sometimes even less, you are forced to move on to another phase of your life, often separated from friends and family. When service members are deployed overseas or must change duty stations stateside, the Navy doesn’t always provide resources for the families to come along.
This uncertainty helped to make life with the Minotaur both thrilling and annoying. We never could reliably plan to be together, since our flight schedules were only written twenty-four hours out. Though we never discussed it, within a moment’s notice one of us, or both, could be sent to the other side of the country or could die in the line of duty. This ephemerality forced us to live moment to moment, trying to suck as much out of that moment as we possibly could.
I also found it exquisitely annoying when I was hoping to enjoy one of those sweet life moments with my boyfriend, but because we were around his friends, he’d call me “buddy” or “kid.” As in “Hey, buddy, whatcha doin’? Why don’t you come over and sit next to me, kid?” Every time I heard those words, I wanted to punch him. And no doubt, he would have preferred a punch in the face rather than give way to openly showing affection or having a conversation about our relationship or discussing life plans. Not that talking about feelings was something I wanted to do, either. I’m pretty stoic, but compared to that guy, I’m like a tearful guest on Oprah.
As the plane touched down in Pensacola, Minotaur was there to greet me. In the airport he strode toward me with a cockeyed grin.
“She’s back.” He hugged me tight, smelling of salt and deodorant.
“Been swimming?” I asked.
“Paddleboarding.” He took my bag from my shoulder. “So where do you want to eat—and pick somewhere nice ’cause we’re celebrating.” His face, normally as chipper as a statue on Easter Island, was near giddy with excitement.
“What’s the occasion?” I asked, coyly.
“I got Whiting.” He opened the passenger door of his truck and motioned for me to climb in. “I’m staying right here.”
“Oh” was all I could say, but my smile said it all. “You happy?” I asked.
Kona, likely feeling the excitement in the cab of the truck, crawled into my lap, panting and glancing back and forth between us.
“Yeah,” he said, patting her head. “Kona’s gotten used to being a beach pup.”
And suddenly I was spinning again, knowing that this had bought us time. He would be at the local helicopter training base, Whiting Field, until he finished flight school, which meant we’d be together until I finished flight training. It also meant neither of us had to confront what we would do if the military separated us. All those questions remained unexamined, at least openly, as we literally drove into a pink sunset.
When I showed up for VT-86, I knew I needed to level up, but the amount of work the Navy threw at us surprised me. And that was exactly the point. To overwhelm us. There was another surprise waiting for me on the first day of class.
As usual, I arrived early, coffee in hand, hair damp from a shower, endorphins still pumping through me from my morning jog. I took my usual place at the middle center of the class with my dog-eared notebook open on the desk when something unusual breezed past me.
Was that a … bun? Yep. I could smell her shampoo as she took the seat right in front of me. I stared in utter disbelief. For the first time in a very long time, I wasn’t the only girl.
Our instructor blazed into the room, firing off questions and scribbling on the chalkboard. Before he even paused to ask a question, her hand shot up like one of those mechanical moles Craig and I used to whack at the arcade. Not only was she female, she was smart, and suddenly I smelled more than the aroma of Pantene in the air. I smelled winds of change.
Her name was Andrea, and I knew an old western shootout lay ahead of us. Andrea commissioned through NROTC at Northwestern University and then, like me, went to flight school as a SNFO. Until that moment, we’d only really known of each other. In a number of ways, she was my opposite: short, petite, and dark, with a deep, sexy radio voice, while I was tall and fair, my speaking tone bubbly and higher-pitched under the Gs of the jet. I’d come to find out later that like Ali, Andrea was also the product of a hardscrabble childhood. She grew up with a single mom, while I had parents whose support would have rivaled June and Ward Cleaver. But we were also cut from the same mold: hardworking, driven, and competitive.
Now, looking back at the experience, the most shocking part of having another girl in class with me was not the fact that it took almost a year and a half of flight school for that to happen, but that—and I say this in all humility—she was the only person to truly threaten my position as number one.
Andrea and I both knew we were never going to be best friends, though we quickly realized we made an amazing pair, sharpening each other at every turn. We competed in everything—in class, in the air, out partying in town, and even in who had the best boyfriend—Minotaur, or her scrawny but smart SNFO boy toy who was a class ahead of us in training. Everything became an unspoken battle, each of us trading first and second place over and over again. It was like the rest of the class disappeared, and we were in a knock-down, drag-out, albeit unspoken, contest.
The hypercompetitive environment was nothing new. Put twenty high-performing guys in together, and the level of competition rose, as did the stakes. Add a female to that same mix, so there were nineteen guys and one girl in the room, and the stakes shot even higher. No one wanted to lose to that girl. Coming in second place to a chick who lived in a floral-accented trailer and giggled at Hugh Grant rom-coms at night was just as bad as coming in dead last.
As flight school progressed to advanced training and winnowed all three intermediate classes down to just fifteen, I realized I’d become addicted to beating out the guys. So much so that I would do anything—study harder, stay up later, practice longer in the sims—to reach that number-one position. The real secret to being female in this rough-and-tumble man’s world is that when you get to the top, it’s so freaking fun, and so rewarding, that you’ll be damned if you slip down through the ranks. And it wasn’t until I met Andrea that I realized other girls knew the secret, too.
I won’t lie—her scrappy way of getting to the top pissed me off, but in the end it only made me better. Not only did I work harder than I’d ever worked in my life, but I measured myself against the best competitor I’d yet encountered in the Navy. I humor myself to think I helped raise her game as well.
Soon the boys came up with a nickname for Andrea and me—the fembots—a reference to the robotic babes from Austin Powers, beautiful ditzes who unleashed lethal bullets from machine guns mounted in their nipples. Any time we got together in a class or activity, the boys would say “The fembots are at it again,” moving their arms in robotic motions.
While we were graded individually, at VT-86, the class’s reputation also rested on how well we performed as a whole. As the saying goes, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” So each person’s individual performance had overall importance, and because of this, despite the very real competition, deep down we all pulled for each other and tried to help the entire group along. When you get this far into flight school, it’s sad when you see your fellow officer—your friend—not go the distance.
Shortly after Andrea and I were branded as fembots, two guys in our class really highlighted themselves as serious underperformers, and truthfully, their effort simply sucked. They were likable enough and had friends toward the top of our class who could have easily intervened, but instead, our instructors and classmates asked us fembots to try to convince the subpar pair to dig a little deeper.
I’m not really sure why they asked us to do this. Maybe it was because the guys often gave girls the more unpleasant tasks, including things like hosting holiday parties for the children of our classmates and instructors, or cleaning the squadron popcorn machine. They also could have thought that since we were women, we’d likely be gentler in how we dealt with these stragglers. Or, maybe they hoped that if we were in stone-cold fembot mode, we’d machine-gun them down.
We tried both sweetness and tough love, and though I wanted the fembot intervention to work, ultimately, the pair washed out.
“Those guys were self-loading luggage,” I heard one of our instructors say about the two after they were gone. Beer in hand, the instructor wrote off their future in the Navy in a short sentence, “They’ll be lucky if they wind up as ‘tunnel rats’ in a P-3.”
A P-3 is a large, four-engine prop plane that conducts anti-submarine operations and surveillance for the Navy. P-3s are used for hugely important functions, but by and large, they are big, slow, safe planes and their flights are less intense than jets. My brother is a P-3 pilot. He flies around the world for the Navy on top-secret missions, and he’s done everything from busting a million dollars’ worth of cocaine down in Central America to surveilling in the South China Sea, getting joined on by aggressive Chinese fighter jets.
So as I got further down the naval aviation pipeline, I was beginning to understand the different reputations and even stigma that came with various aircraft platforms. I knew the course I’d chosen after that first flight with Hardass was going to be a difficult one. Jets was a long subway ride with lots of stops to let people out.
Another Jet Girl mentor came into my life at this time. Gringa had gotten her call sign because she herself was Hispanic and she was also married to a Mexican-American aviator. Though she was the Air Force equivalent of an NFO, she’d been one of the few females in the jet community, and one of its pioneers. I suspected that she wasn’t a Bonnie, my tormenter at the Academy, but an operator at the core. Like many women in the military, it was more important to Gringa to meet military regulations than to maintain the feminine mystique. Her jewelry was simple and modest, hair and makeup minimal. She didn’t have the star quality of J. Lo, but she was still a Jet Girl and an instructor, and I wanted her to like me.
I met her for the first time on an overnight trip to New Mexico. We’d taken two jets up to Taos for training purposes, but since it was the weekend, we got to rent a chateau and ski. These trips, while fun, were not just about arriving at an exotic location, they were a way for our instructors to get to know us and evaluate us. It was on these trips that the real evaluations, at least those that mattered, occurred.
Ashley, my bubbly and beautiful friend from the Academy, had also gone jets. She was three months ahead of me in flight school so once again, I followed her lead from a style and social perspective (she made being a student aviator look so cool); she also taught me all the tricks and tips to succeeding in flight school, as the concepts she’d learned (and mastered—she was crushing flight school) were still fresh in her mind to pass along.
On the first night after we’d arrived in Taos, Ashley and I were stocking the kitchen with the food and booze we’d bought when one of the instructors called out, “Fifteen minutes and we meet downstairs to leave for dinner.”
“Fifteen minutes?” Ashley said as we hurried up the stairs. “More like an hour.”
Gringa followed us into the room and shut the door. “All right, girls.” She looked us dead in the eye. “The guys expect us to be late. This is the way it’s going to be your entire career. They’re used to their wives needing extra time, but that’s not us. We’re gonna beat them back downstairs. Set the tone and they’ll owe us the first round at dinner.”
Our suite turned into a backstage dressing room during a mid-act costume change. The bags popped open, tossed on the bed. Our ski-bunny chic outfits flew like pigeons across the room. Shower, makeup, a blast of hot air from the hairdryer, and Gringa, Ashley, and I were back downstairs, drinking Bombay Sapphire martinis, dressed to kill. Or at least to maim. After all, we were in the Navy, so we kept it respectable.
“What took so long?” I asked as the guys stumbled down the stairs.
“Yeah, you dudes did some serious primping.” Ashley held her glass out for Gringa to clink.
On these trips, it was not uncommon for friends or family who lived nearby to join us during our off time. We all knew that what we were doing was dangerous. You never knew if your next flight or training exercise would be your last, so aviators always prioritized seeing family, even if it meant the family joined the party.
So when my parents, who lived in Colorado, knew I would be relatively close in Taos, they came down for the weekend and met us for dinner at a crowded Mexican cantina. My dad is a pilot himself, and a huge military aviation buff, so midway through our appetizers, he was already grilling Gringa, a seasoned F-15 WSO, on maneuvers. I was trying not to listen to the conversation, but after a raft of questions, she politely interrupted, “You know what—”
I immediately tensed.
“Even after only knowing your daughter a short time, I can see she’s going to do great in this community. And after her first fleet tour, she should really think about Topgun.”
I nearly choked on my beer. Me? Topgun? I sank back into the booth and hid my smile. I had not even sat in a Super Hornet, much less thought about what I would do in my career four or five years down the road, and yet an instructor—a combat-hardened Jet Girl herself—felt I had the potential for such an incredible challenge.
Maybe she’s just being nice. I didn’t know. I didn’t care, either. True or not, her confidence in me poured fuel onto the fire burning inside of me to reach number one, to fly in F/A-18s and serve my country to the absolute best of my ability.