CARRIER 6: COUNTDOWN By Keith Douglass

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

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