during the 1800s, had published a widely read series of pamphlets
describing how she’d passed herself off as a male Marine serving aboard
the U.S.S.
Constitution during the War of 1812. Lucy’s claims had long since been
disproved by Marine Corp historians. Her accounts of battle were too
precise, drawn nearly word-for-word in some cases from the captain’s
published after-action reports or from newspaper accounts at the time.
In any case, Lucy’s claims that she’d escaped detection for three years
in cramped quarters occupied by 450 men, where the toilets were a couple
of open-air perches at the ship’s beakhead, and where the regulations of
the day required all Marines to strip, bathe, and dress in the presence
of a commanding officer responsible for checking frequently on their
physical condition, were patently ridiculous. There were cases of women
serving aboard ship during that era, usually prostitutes or wives
smuggled aboard without the officers’ knowledge. “Jeannette,” the wife
of a seaman aboard a French warship who was plucked from the sea after
the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, was a well-known example. The story of
Lucy Brewer, however, was almost certainly a complete fabrication, one
given new life only recently by books with feminist agendas and titles
like Jeanne Holm’s Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution.
That hadn’t stopped Conway from adopting “Brewer” as her call sign.
She’d read Holm’s book while she was in flight training at Pensacola,
and that had led her to research Lucy’s history, as well as accounts of
other American women in combat, from Molly Pitcher serving a cannon at
Monmouth to the now-nameless Confederate girl who, dressed like a man,
had died by her husband’s side during Pickett’s Charge. If Lucy
Brewer’s story hadn’t really happened the way she said it had, it still
could have, even should have, for it reflected the attitudes of other
Americans who felt that women ought to have the same right to defend
their homes and loved ones as men.
Not many of the men Conway had served with knew the origin of the call
sign. Most, typically, assumed it had something to do with beer, which
explained why a few like Arrenberger twisted it into “Brew” or
“Brewski.”
Usually, she didn’t mind, not really, not when she’d long ago learned
that fighting every possible slight, put-down, or innuendo did nothing
but wear her own nerves to a frazzle.
Conway was fond of claiming that she was not a militant feminist, but a
military feminist; she referred to herself and others as “girls,” just
as she sometimes called the men she served with “boys” or “the guys,”
and she’d laughed as hard as any man the first time she’d heard the
story of the sailor, the Marine, and the admiral’s daughter. Thirty-one
years old, with eleven of those years in the Navy, she was in every
sense a professional, intensely proud of who and what she was, and of
her success in what for so long had been an exclusively male-dominated
bastion. All her life, since long before the notion of women serving in
combat units had been seriously addressed, she’d wanted to be a Navy
aviator. Her older brother had been a Tomcat driver in VF-41, the Black
Aces, stationed aboard the Nimitz during the late eighties, while her
father had flown Navy F-4B Phantoms off the Forrestal in Vietnam.
The day she’d first stepped onto the flight deck of the U.S.S. Thomas
Jefferson had been a dream come true.
Now, just two weeks later, she was wondering if the dream hadn’t already
begun to take on the shades of nightmare.
Her defenses, she told herself with a sigh, were way, way down. As she
turned a corner and entered a companionway, quick-stepping down a ship’s
ladder to the 0-2 deck, she thought that the worst of it was the
environment, the tight, gray-bounded shipboard atmosphere that was part
of life at sea and stretched on unchanging for day after day after day.
Privacy next to zero; regulations governing everything from when she
could take a shower to how she took that shower to where she could use a
toilet; the inevitable presence of a few bastards like Arrenberger, who