Fall 2015; Virginia Beach, VA; Las Vegas, NV
In my heart, I didn’t know how much time was left in me. As the months ticked on, I slowly started to realize that I wasn’t where I needed to be. Even though I loved the flying and all the challenges, I’d long ago stopped having fun. I love to work hard and play harder, but I’d finally come to the realization that as a woman in the fighter community, I was expected to give at least 200 percent, while knowing I’d probably never be ranked or fully accepted as an equal.
Maybe it was that my personality wasn’t a fit, maybe I committed too many faux pas as an FNG in the squadron, or maybe some of the bros were right and I was just an ice-cold bitch. Maybe, maybe, maybe. But through my master’s degree and through living, I’d realized a few things.
First, I have a big personality. Assertive, strong-willed, gregarious, and willing to take risks, I was raised to be open to new experiences and have self-confidence, all prerequisites necessary to survive in a fighter squadron. These qualities, while highly valued for males in my field, when exhibited by a woman, were despised by some. Often women with these qualities are labeled as bitchy, aggressive, or frigid because these traits are not typically thought of as feminine. As an officer and aviator in the fighter community, in a very nontraditional gender role, I needed those characteristics to survive, even though they subconsciously aggravated many of the men I worked with.
By the same token, the aviation community is openly family-centric, in the most traditional, 1950s way, and I was realizing that I’d never be accepted in this family setting as long as I was single. Which was also a double-edged sword. It’s hard enough to meet a guy with the kind of values and qualities I was attracted to, but the squadron lifestyle and constant coming and going made it difficult to meet anyone outside the military. Occasionally, though, I’d catch a glimpse of what life could look like on the outside, even if a fleeting glimpse.
I’d been training for two and a half weeks near Las Vegas, working with Air Force and Army units. During the day, we’d fly and at night we’d hang out on the strip. One night at the end of the trip, my friend Carly, the WSO who’d replaced Taylor in the squadron, and I decided to branch off from the guys (who were headed to a “titter”) and go to a Britney Spears concert. Carolyn, who since our deployment had gone to Fallon, came down to join us. She didn’t come for the music or the fun time, but for me. She knew I was slipping over the edge of an abyss and she did everything she could to pull me back. She was the only person in the Navy I told that I was considering leaving jets. I told her when we were alone in our hotel room, getting ready for a night out on the town. To my shock, she took me aside in Vegas and told me, “Caroline, you can choose a different path. You should choose a different path. You can’t let this bullshit go on. Fuck them all.” I struggled to process the conflicting emotions coursing through me. Carolyn had reached the almost impossible heights that I, and every aviator in F/A-18s, had at one time aspired to. She’d made it, she was on the golden career path. And here was this amazing woman I so admired, the friend who has stood by me when others left my side, telling me it was not just okay to quit, but a good thing. I could only nod and mouth the words thank you. She turned away and looked at me in the mirror, smiling now. “So now we forget about that. Let’s go have a blast, and don’t say shit about what you are thinking to anyone else or they’ll ruin you.”
Entering the auditorium the ushers identified our military discount tickets and we were pulled out of the crowd and escorted to upgraded second-row seats. Cheesy as it sounds, the concert was awesome. We sang our hearts out to the Britney hits we’d grown up with.
Afterward we went to The Chandelier, a luxurious cocktail lounge in the Cosmopolitan hotel. And for a brief spell I was able to turn back time. I felt like we were on deployment doing a port call before things went really bad. It was Caroline and Carolyn together again. At some point, an almost absurdly handsome forty-something guy came toward the table next to us. He smiled a little sheepishly, like he was heading our way on a dare, like a husband away for the weekend with his wedding ring in his toiletry bag. I was apt to ignore him when he spoke with a British accent. “Hi, who are you, girl, and what do you do?”
“Hi, I’m Carolyn, I fly F/A-18s.”
Nod to me. “I’m Caroline, I also fly F/A-18s.”
“Really,” he said, then squinted, making a puzzled, dubious expression. “This isn’t a joke, is it?”
My look said exactly what I was thinking and I was set to turn my back on him when he added, “Because if it’s a joke, I’ll be seriously disappointed. I’ve never met anyone who’s flown an F/A-18. And right now you’ve changed everything I’ve ever thought about the military.”
“Oh,” I said, “what did you think?”
“Let me buy you girls a drink and I’ll tell you.”
It turns out this gorgeous Brit was a marketing executive, in Vegas not for a bachelor party but for work with one of his major clients. After drinking and talking late into the early-morning hours, he invited me to dinner the following day. He had to take a red-eye out that night, so he made it clear that all he wanted was company and conversation.
“Sounds good,” I told him.
As he had business in Vegas, he had been there often and knew the city’s secrets. He started off the night with a tour, showing me some of the gems he’d discovered, like the Paiza Club on the fiftieth floor of the Palazzo, a private gambling establishment that caters almost exclusively to Chinese high rollers. It felt like Beijing, the TVs turned to Chinese stations, the newspapers all in Mandarin, and private gambling rooms with tables that had stacks of $100,000 chips. “The Palazzo will fly you over from China in a private jet if you guarantee you’ll gamble a minimum of one million dollars a week,” he told me.
“Sign me up,” I said.
We ended our night with an intimate dinner at STK, an ultramodern, dark, yet inspired restaurant. When the check came, he snatched it off the table before I could offer to pay. “It’s on me tonight.”
I caught a quick glance at the bill. Six hundred dollars. My head spun. Eight with tip.
“Caroline,” he said as we left STK. “You know I’m leaving for London tonight, but I have my room for the rest of the week. It’s yours, if you want it. Just let the butler know how long you’ll be there.” He put the key into my hand and I tried hard not to smile—the Cosmopolitan.
His room was a twelve-hundred-square-foot suite with wrap-around balcony on the thirty-fifth floor.
“Yes!” I threw myself on the freshly made bed, purring with delight like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Showered and under the covers, I looked out at the city, spread before me, twinkling in the night. I laughed out loud, thinking somewhere down below, the guys in my squadron were in a crummy titter hut, jamming dollar bills into G-strings.
Landing from our trip, my pilot and I parked next to Chick’s jet where his wife and boys were waiting to welcome him. It was one of Chick’s last big trips in the squadron, so his homecoming was celebrated with a bit of fanfare and a postcard-worthy family reunion. The handsome aviator strolling toward his dutiful wife holding back tears, her children behind her, warm pink light from the setting sun cast across their expectant faces.
As we all grabbed our bags, the skipper’s wife peeled away from her picture-perfect family and headed over to me. My flight bag, a clunky maintenance book, and my overnight bag were a lot on my back, so I was focused on getting to the squadron as fast as possible when I heard, “Looks like you had fun in Vegas.”
I turned to Chick’s wife. “Yeah, we did, thanks!” I said and kept walking.
“Well, I saw pictures of you on Facebook, and you looked really tired.”
Where’s she going with this? I thought, then told myself, fuck it. I can’t play a game right now. Gotta be direct. “We looked tired?” I stopped and squinted at her, her face now appearing red and agitated in the pink sunlight, like there was lava under her skin, boiling. “What do you mean by that?”
“When you girls stayed on the strip, did you sleep with the guys?”
“Excuse me?” I readjusted the bulky bags on my shoulder and checked her expression to see if she was serious. “Oh, you mean, did we sleep in the admin suite with the guys? Or did you mean something else?”
Her eyes flitted over to Chick, then back at me. “No, I mean, did you share a suite?”
I was tempted to lie and tell her yes, to confirm her suspicions, if only just to see what would happen to her facade when whatever was boiling underneath the surface erupted in front of Chick and in front of her kids. A small part of me wanted to see her crumble right there in the middle of her own fantasy reunion.
It might have felt good to do that—to push her buttons, the ones she was begging me to push. But that’s not me. So I told her, “Absolutely not. With all due respect, I’m not a college kid. I have no interest in sleeping in an overcrowded suite with twenty or thirty of my colleagues.” I wanted to add, or go to strip clubs with your husband and the rest of the dudes every night for the past two weeks. But I just said, “Carly and I got our own room.”
“Okay,” she said, pursing her lips and tousling her hair. “Welcome back.”
After the chat I had with Chick and Beans, I started to notice that even though I was still telling everyone I wanted to stay in the fighter community, I was quietly being sidelined. When Beans orchestrated the semiannual JO job change, instead of keeping me on the golden path, assigning me a more demanding job, he gave me a ground job that was typically forced upon the newest new guy in the squadron—public affairs officer. And even though I’d mastered my last qualifications as a combat division lead and mission commander, I started noticing I wasn’t scheduled to fly any prime events. I was one of the few JOs qualified and capable of teaching and leading, but I was consistently put on odd-houred flights and events that weren’t tactically enhancing.
As these career slights occurred more and more, it was clear—I was being iced out. But at the time, I was so beaten down, I didn’t care. As we say in jets, gas is life, and as I studied my own emotional fuel gauge, I knew I was running on fumes. If the Blacklions seemed not to want me, I would just steer clear. I would set max endurance, conserving what little energy I had left, spending as little time at work or interacting with my squadronmates as possible. My peers reaped the benefits and absorbed all of the good deals dealt out by Beans. I didn’t blame them. In the end, we were all competing against one another for our rankings, which would determine our future jobs and affect our futures in the Navy. The guys needed the harder jobs, better flights, and more prestigious collateral duties so that they could be ranked higher than me.
Around Beans’s one-year mark in the squadron, I was as good as invisible to the Blacklions. My work didn’t matter, I didn’t matter, and no one would have known or cared if I was there one day or gone the next.
The steady drip, drip, drip of criticism, insults, and slights had eroded my confidence. The effect was not just superficial. Like a constant trickle of water on limestone over time can wear away bedrock to create an underground cave, my confidence washed slowly away, and a pit formed inside me. Where I once felt strong and steady and was literally ready at a moment’s notice to rush into war at Mach speed, I now felt empty, fragile, and defenseless.
Even though it was the first time in my life I felt like I had no fight left in me, there were two things I wanted to accomplish. The first was finishing my master’s degree. Channeling all of my work frustrations and energy into finishing my coursework and using many of my experiences in the squadron, I wrote about leadership in my thesis and completed the master’s with a 3.72 grade point average.
The other thing I wanted to do was join a Navy business trip to Denmark. Our squadron had been tasked by higher ups in DC to support a Boeing trip to an air show in Copenhagen. We would be there to help sell the F/A-18 to the Danish and other potential European buyers.
Denmark had contracted to buy the F-35 joint strike fighter years prior, but because the program was so plagued with delays and problems, the Danish government was looking at other options. Our Super Hornet was one of the top contenders. When our squadron found out about the opportunity, Beans put out an email requesting volunteers for the trip. I responded immediately with a note expressing all the reasons why I should go. I was the senior-most JO at the time, I had experience from the Academy in foreign affairs, and I was fluent in German. I knew there would be German press there, and as the squadron public affairs officer—the crappy job Beans had pawned off on me—I was the person designated to represent our squadron at these types of events. A few days later, when I heard rumblings among the officers about who’d been selected to go, my name wasn’t in the mix. I mustered every ounce of fight I had left in me, went straight to his office, and knocked.
“Sir, you got a minute?” I asked and he motioned to a chair. “Sir, I was just wondering … I’ve heard rumors that the Boeing trip has been decided, and my name isn’t on that list.”
Beans didn’t look up from his paperwork, so rather than waste time with small talk, I dove right in. “Of all the JOs, we both know I’m undeniably the most qualified. So I’m just wondering why … I’m being passed over.”
“Dutch,” he sighed, pushing back in his chair. “I can appreciate your desire to go, but I don’t think this is the best job for you right now. I’ve already assigned other crews that will be going.”
“But, sir, this type of trip is exactly where I can do my best work. I’m the perfect person to talk about the capabilities of the Super Hornet. I’ve employed her in combat, dropped bombs, and employed live missiles. I’m articulate, fluent in German, and I’ve dealt with high-level European diplomats and leaders on deployment.”
“I really do understand what you are saying, Dutch, but I’ve already made up my mind.”
The conversation went back and forth. I had one ace up my sleeve that I didn’t want to use. I wanted to earn this trip on merit. Because I was the right person to join the team, but when all of my arguments and reason fell on deaf ears, I pulled out the trump card.
“Sir, in addition to everything I’ve told you, I also deserve to go on the trip.”
“Deserve?” Beans said. I had his attention now for sure.
“Yes, sir. When we were on deployment for nine months, I was the only aviator in the squadron who was not sent on a detachment.” Detachments are like short breaks from deployment; usually aviators are allowed off the ship to join one of our allies at their home base to fly and train for three to four weeks.
“Well, Dutch, that’s because you wouldn’t have liked living in a tent in Oman or Djibouti or any of those other countries. Also, women weren’t allowed on most of those trips.”
“With all due respect, I would’ve been just fine. No one ever asked if I wanted to go. And actually, there were females on those detachments.” I found it funny how quickly Beans forgot that I lived with Carolyn and women from other squadrons on the boat who’d been chosen for the detachments.
“I deserved to go, I asked to go, and yet you and skipper never let me,” I said, feeling like a hotshot litigator delivering closing arguments. “I haven’t said anything until now, and to be honest, I didn’t ever want to bring it up, but it isn’t right. All I ever expected or wanted in the Blacklions was fair and equal treatment, and so far that hasn’t happened.”
Trying to hide his sheepish look, he cut his eyes over to his computer screen. “Look, Dutch. I can’t change how you feel about the squadron. Sometimes that’s just how life is. You can’t always get what you want. The list is decided.”
Furious but contained, I said coldly, “Roger that, sir. Just want you to know that I deserve this opportunity before I leave the squadron. And if I don’t go on this trip, this won’t be the last you’ll hear of it.” I did not need to remind Beans that the top brass had a mandate to ensure the Navy at least appeared fair and equal among the sexes. I had learned in combat that when the enemy threatens you, you must be ready to escalate to the next level of force.
At that point, Beans must have known what would happen if he didn’t fix his mistake. Clearly, I felt, he wanted to put me out to pasture, but he must have known he had to cover his own ass. I’d never played the gender card before, but I was so emboldened at Beans’s audacity to deny me an opportunity, I laid all my cards on the table. I don’t know what went through his mind after I brought up the detachments and made my threat, but I can tell you what he knew about me. One, he knew I could do the work. I knew the business as well as anybody else. Period. Two, he knew that I was aware of his penchant for playing favorites and by confronting him, I wasn’t afraid to stand up for myself. And three, deep down I think he knew I was right, and it wasn’t fair. I deserved to go.
As I turned to leave his office, he took a long breath. “Okay, Dutch, let me see what I can do.”