wing’s male complement so on edge they sometimes seemed positively
tongue-tied. Morale was being affected, and since Tombstone, as CAG,
was responsible for the fighting trim and efficiency of CVW20, that made
it his problem.
The line to pay for his meal at the Dirty Shirt wardroom was a short
one.
An enlisted man sitting at the door punched his meal ticket, and
Tombstone went straight in. Fluorescent lighting gleamed from metal
surfaces and white tables. A handful of NFOs, all male, sat in small
groups amid the clatter of silverware and the low-voiced murmur of
conversation. Tombstone picked up a tray and started through the chow
line. Fried chicken was on the menu this evening, left over from the
regular mess hours and kept hot for people coming in off duty.
Tombstone didn’t resent the women. No, if he resented anyone, it was
the politicians and bureaucrats back in Washington who continued to use
the entire U.S. military as a test bed for their experiments in social
reform.
The first experiment with women aboard ship had taken place as far back
as 1972, when Admiral Zumwalt, then Chief of Naval Operations, had
issued one of his famous “Z-grams.” Among other innovations, Z-gram 116
had called for 424 men and fifty-three carefully screened Navy women
volunteers to report aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Sanctuary for a
four-hundred-day test at sea.
Officially, the test was an enormous success. Unofficial leaks to the
press, however, as well as the Navy’s own classified reports, told a
different story. Despite regulations, there’d been romantic
relationships between members of the crew, and several pregnancies.
PDAs, Navyese for “Public Displays of Affection,” had been common, and
there’d been a number of fights.
“The situation was becoming serious,” read a memorandum from Sanctuary’s
commanding officer to the CNO, “and was definitely detrimental to the
good order and discipline of the ship’s company.”
Perhaps the most obvious proof that the experiment had been less than
totally successful could be found in the fact that the Sanctuary
returned to port after only forty-two days at sea. She spent most of
her next several years tied to a dock, before being unobtrusively
decommissioned in 1975.
In 1978, after Watergate’s Judge John S. Sirica ruled in Federal
District Court that banning women at sea violated their 14th Amendment
rights, the Navy tried integrating the sexes aboard ship again,
assigning a mixed crew to the repair ship Vulcan. Even before she left
port, several pregnant personnel had to be put ashore, and the media
began referring to the U.S.S. Vulcan as “the Love Boat.”
Eventually, Sirica’s decision was overturned by the Supreme Court in
1981, a ruling that feminists decried as tragic and the ACLU called “a
devastating loss for women’s rights.”
But the matter had not ended there. Women continued to be stationed on
some auxiliary, noncombat vessels. In the early nineties, the destroyer
tender Samuel Gompers had become the next Navy ship to be known as the
Love Boat when three sailors, two men and a woman, videotaped themselves
having sex. One of the men was caught passing the tape around to his
buddies, precipitating court-martial proceedings and yet another Navy
sex scandal.
But there was another side to the larger issue of women in combat than
pregnancies and PDAs. During the Gulf War of 1991, women had served
with distinction, including helicopter pilots operating at the front.
The death of one female pilot in a helicopter crash, and the capture and
sexual mistreatment of another, had been widely reported. Several women
had died in one night when a barracks of the 14th Quartermaster Corps at
Dahran had been hit by an incoming Iraqi SCUD missile.
Finally, the Clinton Administration, coming to office in 1993, ruled
once and for all that there should be no barriers whatsoever to women
serving aboard ship or in combat aircraft. The Air Force, first to
admit women cadets to their academy as far back as 1976, had swiftly
integrated women pilots into front-line aviation, but implementation of
the new policy in the other services had been slow. The Navy’s first
female combat aviators had begun feeding into shore-based fighter
squadrons by the mid-nineties, but it wasn’t until now that a serious