aircraft against blasts of wind, natural or manmade, across the flight
deck. The crew chief turned a key and unfolded a ladder from the
fuselage. The canopy popped open, then raised itself back.
Tombstone focused the binoculars on Lieutenant Commander Conway and the
aircraft’s Radar Intercept Officer, Lieutenant Damiano. Still seated in
their aircraft, bathed in the harsh glare from a light on the carrier’s
island above their heads, they seemed unshaken, running through their
shutdown procedures with the professionals’ routine and unflappable
calm.
Not for the first time, Tombstone marveled at the changes that were
overtaking Jefferson’s air wing … that were sweeping throughout the
entire American military. He’d thought that the high casualties off
Norway, the graphic horrors of modern naval warfare, would have had the
exact opposite effect on recruitment and training policies and American
popular opinion than that he’d been witness to these past few months.
Sometimes it was still a bit hard to believe.
Through the binoculars, he watched Conway and Damiano remove their
helmets and hand them to their crew chief, then begin unfastening the
harnesses. Tricia Conway’s blond hair was cut short to accommodate her
helmet; Rose’s hair was jet black and a bit longer. Their flight suits
could not completely disguise the decidedly female curves of their
figures.
Lieutenant Chris Hanson, having just clambered out of her Tomcat parked
a few yards away, reached the foot of the ladder and was shouting
something at Conway, giving her a happy thumbs-up.
This, Tombstone decided, was definitely a whole new Navy from the one
he’d joined over a decade before. Twenty-eight new flight officers,
pilots and RIOs, had reported aboard the Jefferson at Norfolk two weeks
ago. Of those twenty-eight, twelve were women.
The great, long-awaited social experiment, American women in combat, was
beginning aboard the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson.
CHAPTER 2
Tuesday, 10 March
2210 hours (Zulu -1)
0-3 deck
U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson
Navy fliers never referred to themselves as pilots. The Air Force had
pilots, men who landed on fifteen-hundred-foot runways, stationary
runways, men who didn’t have to contend with pitching decks or equipment
failure in the recovery gear. The Navy had aviators, and naval aviators
wore that word as a badge of supreme accomplishment, pride, and honor.
Could a woman be an aviator? That was the question. Tombstone Magruder
still wasn’t entirely sure of his own feelings regarding women aboard
combat ships or flying combat missions. To be honest, he had no doubts
whatsoever about their technical ability. Tricia Conway and the other
women who’d come aboard in Norfolk two weeks earlier were hot pilots, as
good as any rookie Tomcat drivers Tombstone had seen. With seasoning,
with experience in the form of a few hundred more hours flying off the
Jefferson day and night, in all weathers and in all types of seas,
they’d be as good as any man in CVW-20.
In time, he supposed, they’d be real aviators and accepted as such by
the hitherto all-male fraternity of naval fliers.
His real problem with women serving aboard ship was on a different level
entirely.
Tombstone’s destination was the Dirty Shirt Mess, so called because
officers could show up there for a bite to eat at almost any time
without having to change from working clothes to clean uniform, as was
expected in Jefferson’s more formal officers’ wardroom. He’d missed the
regular mess call because he’d been tracking the evening’s CAP in
worsening weather, first from CATCC, Jefferson’s air traffic control
center, and then from up in Pri-Fly.
Now that Conway and her girls were safely down, he realized that he was
hungry and wanted something to eat.
Conway and her girls. Every sensitivity session on women in the
military that Tombstone had sat through during the past several years
had emphasized that you don’t call an adult, professional woman a
“girl.” It was demeaning, sexist, insensitive.
Yeah, right. Like it was demeaning for Tombstone to talk about his
“boys.” Conway herself referred to her people as her “girls,” though
some of the female Naval Flight Officers bristled when a man called them
that. The semantic distinction seemed less important to the enlisted
personnel on both sides of the line, but the whole issue had the air