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WOMEN
Flirting with Disaster

BRIAN MITCHELL
O n the night of August 20, 1976, UN
forces in Korea stood at DEFCON 1,
with B-52s winging their way toward the
North Korean capital, fighters warming their
engines on the runway, and helicopter gunships
hovering across the border. “We had rounds up
the spout... and every weapon had a target,” said
Major General John Singlaub. War, it seemed, was
but hours away.
But then a funny thing happened.
Commanders throughout Korea were flooded
with requests from female soldiers for transfers to
the rear. War was more than they bargained for
when they joined the Army. Most fully expected
to be evacuated. Many simply abandoned their
posts. Others turned up for duty with their chil¬
dren. And some male soldiers left their posts to
look after the safety of their uniformed wives or
girlfriends in other units.
Surprising? No, argues author and Army vet¬
eran Brian Mitchell. And, more alarmingly, over
the last two decades the problem has gotten far
worse, threatening the U.S. with military disaster
as women make up almost 14 percent of its active
force.
Today only one-third of uniformed women
believe that the military’s primary purpose is to
fight wars. Nowhere in the military do women
meet the same physical standards as men—not in
the military academies, not in basic training, and
certainly not in the field.
Mitchell lays it on the line: The women are not
fit to fight, and the military brass knows it. But
those who expose the truth risk their careers.
Exposing “official” lies and the myths of military
feminists, Mitchell uncovers the truth about...
(CONTINUED ON BACK FLAP)
/3 9094 01732 14
8^0 LONGER UtfVNtU tiY

WAUKEGAN PUBL IC LIBRARY
WAUKEGAN PUBLIC
LIBRARY
GAYLORD R©
Women in the Military
s
* *
V
*
WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
Flirting with Disaster
Brian Mitchell
Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Washington, D.C.
COPYRIGHT © 1998 BY BRIAN MITCHELL
%
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without
permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote
brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, news¬
paper, or broadcast.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mitchell, Brian (Brian P.), 1958-

Women in the military: flirting with disaster / Brian Mitchell.
p. cm. '
Includes index
ISBN 0-89526-376-9 (alk. paper)
1. United States—Armed Forces—Women. 2. United States—Armed Forces
Operational readiness. 3. National security—United States. I. Title.
UB418.W65M5723 1997
355'.0082—dc21 97-43081
CIP
Portions of this book previously appeared in Brian Mitchell’s Weak Link: The
Feminization of the American Military.
Published in the United States by

Regnery Publishing, Inc.
An Eagle Publishing Company
One Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20001
Distributed to the trade by

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Printed on acid-free paper.

Manufactured in the United States of America
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Books are available in quantity for promotional or premium use. Write to Director of
Special Sales, Regnery Publishing, Inc., One Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington,
DC 20001, for information on discounts and terms or call (202) 216-0600.
This book is dedicated to
Charles B. Johnson,
Former Major, United States Marine Corps:
For rising generations it will become a real

problem at what point the policies you are
ordered to carry out have become so iniqui¬
tous that a decent man must seek some other
p rofession....
— C . S . Lewis
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION The G.I. Jane Deception xi
CHAPTER 1 Myths in the Making 1

CHAPTER 2 The All-Volunteer Surprise 17
CHAPTER 3 Eighty’s Ladies 35
CHAPTER 4 “The Last Class with Balls” 55
CHAPTER 5 Damn the Services,
Full Speed Ahead 77
CHAPTER 6 DACOWITS 1, Army 0 99
CHAPTER 7 Confidence is High 123
CHAPTER 8 From Here to Maternity 139
CHAPTER 9 The Fog of Peace 177
CHAPTER 10 Paths of Glory 195
CHAPTER 11 The War Games Commission 215
CHAPTER 12 The Mother Of All Hooks 245
CHAPTER 13 Assorted Victims 279
CHAPTER 14 Schools for Scandal 309
CHAPTER 15 Exposing the Lies 333
APPENDIX Testimony of Brian Mitchell 345
NOTES 351
INDEX 375
*
\
Introduction
THE G.I. JANE DECEPTION
The greatest change that has come about

in the United States forces in the time that
Vve been in the military service has been ''
, ,
the extensive use of women.... That’s even greater
than nuclear weapons I feel as far as our own
forces are concerned.
—GENERAL JOHN A. VESSEY

CHAIRMAN OF THE JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF, IN A STATE¬
MENT TO THE HOUSE ARMED SERVICES COMMITTEE
ON OCTOBER 26, 1997, Sara Lister, assistant secretary of the

Army for manpower and reserve affairs, told a meeting of schol¬
ars, journalists, and military personnel, “I think the Army is
much more connected to society than the Marines are. The
Marines are extremists. Whenever you have extremists, you
have some risk of total disconnection with society. And that’s a
little dangerous.”
General Charles Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps,
told reporters her words “summarily dismiss 222 years of sacri¬
fice and dedication” and “dishonor the hundreds of thousands of
Marines whose blood has been shed in the name of freedom.”
The Aimy, amazingly, defended Listers remarks, saying
that her words were “taken out of context.”1
xii • WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
But the next day Lister was apologizing to General Krulak

and “all current andfcformer Marines” for words she admitted
were “inappropriate and wrong.” Defense Secretary William
Cohen announced that he was “satisfied” with her apology, but
many members of Congress were not. House Speaker Newt
Gingrich fired off a letter demanding Lister’s immediate dis¬
missal, and the House quickly passed a resolution to the same
effect. Within 24 hours Lister was history.
But Lister only said publicly what advocates of women in
the military have long thought and often preached: that the
Marine Corps’s encouragement of “hypermasculinity” con¬
tributes to a hostile atmosphere. The Marines self-consciously
train warriors, and compared to the new, more motherly Army,
the Marines are indeed extreme.
As early as 1982 the Army was treating military police
recruits at Fort McClellan, Alabama, to “the LaBarge Touch,” a
celebrated method of handling female trainees devised by a
drill sergeant named LaBarge. The cardinal tenet of the
LaBarge touch was “Be Nice”—no loud shouting or angry
snarls for which drill sergeants had long been famous, but
smiles and soft words and lots of encouragement.
Drill Sergeant LaBarge, who described himself as a “female
chauvinist pig,” taught his young female recruits that they were
not equal to men but better than men because they had “no
macho mentality” and had better communicative skills.
LaBarge promoted “snobbery” among his women to make them
feel psychologically superior to men. His “attitude check” (a
motto shouted on cue by a formation of troops) for the women
in his charge was: “When God created man. She was only jok¬
ing.” LaBarge encouraged his female MPs to use feminine
charm “when it’s to [your] advantage” and advised them to tiy
breaking up a barroom brawl by “being sweet.” He avoided
unpleasantness'in his training and refrained from telling his
women that the M16 rifle would actually kill if used properly,
telling them instead that the rifle was “made to wound people.”2
THE G.I. JANE DECEPTION • xiii
That was fifteen years ago. Today with many more women
in the ranks and co-ed basic training, the LaBarge Touch has
effectively been extended to all recruits. Drill sergeants still
raise their voices, but not as often. They are forbidden to curse,
call recruits names, or belittle them in any way. Harmless but
humiliating punishments are no longer permitted. At the Navy’s
Great Lakes Naval Training Center, drill instructors carry lami¬
nated cards warning them not to apply any punishment that
might cause a recruit “undue embarrassment,” while recruits
carry “stress passes” they can trade for a convenient time-out *
when the going gets too tough. _
God forbid that a drill sergeant TA7 . ,
o Were it not for intense
should ever actually lay a hand on a
recruit. Instead, recruits are treated p0,itical Pressure, there
with dignity and respect, just as every would be virtually no
mother in America would want her son women, in the military
or daughter to be treated. Problem
. . . , -i today,
recruits receive emotional support and
counseling in stress reduction and self¬
esteem. A trainee is even “offered emotional support... and
given a chance to explore his feelings by pasting cut-out maga¬
zine photos on a piece of cardboard.” Discipline is out; com¬
munication is in. Physical demands are minimal, lower than
many male recruits expect. As one young Navy recruit recently
told the Los Angeles Times, “When you think boot camp, you
think blood, sweat, and tears. But this was laid back.”3
The truth is that after the various sex scandals at training
bases across the country, drill sergeants are no longer trusted
with their troops. “We used to be able to push them to the lim¬
its,” says Army Sergeant First Class Garvin Gourie. “It’s
unheard of now. They call it trainee abuse. As a drill sergeant,
you’re always having to do a mental check. It changes your
spontaneity, and in doing that it changes the way you think. It’s
like you are protecting your own interests.”4
Drill sergeants are not the only men in uniform protecting
their own interests. The profound changes occurring in our mil-
xiv • WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
itary today have all been implemented by military leaders pro¬

tecting their own in&rests, obediently doing as they are told in
the face of intense political pressure. Were it not for that pres¬
sure, there would be virtually no women in the military today.
The military has succumbed to the creeping influence of
1970s social upheaval. In fact, in the late 1960s the participation
of women in the United States military was still following a long
downward trend. A failed attempt to involve large numbers of
women in the military during the Korean War convinced mili¬
tary planners that American women would not play a significant
role in any peacetime force. By 1967 the participation of
women in the American military reached its lowest point since
World War II, with barely twenty thousand women in service,
not including nurses. Women made up less than 2 percent of
the total force.
But then in the early 1970s the trend was abruptly reversed.
The shift to the All-Volunteer Force (AVF) and the political
success of the American feminist movement combined to bring
about a reversal of military manpower thinking and a rapid
expansion of the military use of women. In just a few years, the
number of women increased fivefold. Today, the American mil¬
itary has nearly 200,000 women in active service—almost 14
percent of its total force. Seventeen percent of first-year stu¬
dents at the nation’s service academies are female, and one out
of every five enlisted recruits is a woman. Women are still not
assigned to infantry, armor, special operations, and submarines,
but their assignment to combat aircraft, combat surface ships,
and combat and combat-support ground units places them at
the forefront of any United States military operation.
No other military in the world depends so heavily on
women or has more women as a percentage of its total force.
Israel and Canada tie for second, with 11 percent, followed by
the United Kingdom with 6 percent. No other country has a
military more than 3.5 percent female. Several European
nations, including Germany, Spain, and Italy, have virtually no
women in service. Russia’s four-million-man armed force
THE G.I. JANE DECEPTION • xv
includes just 25,000 women (0.7 percent), who perform largely

clerical and medical work. Israel drafts women, but the jobs
open to them are more limited than the jobs that were open to
American military women during World War II. A handful of
small, secure NATO nations have opened combat units to
women, but the numbers of women involved are very small, and
expectations that they will ever actually see combat are even
smaller.5
The U.S. Department of Defense clings to its official stance
that the integration of women has proceeded without the slight- *
est decline in the combat capabilities of the armed forces.
According to the party line in the Pentagon, the modem volun¬
teer force is far superior to any earlier
force of volunteers or conscripts, and
Nowhere in the U.S. mili¬
women, in official phraseology, are “an
tary do women meet the
integral part.” “We can’t go to war with¬
out them,” say the admirals and the same physical standards
generals; women are “here to stay.” as men, nor are they a
They perform “as well as or better
financial bargain.
than” men. They are promoted faster.
They possess invaluable abilities that
the services cannot do without. They add civility and whole¬
someness to military service. Their effect on morale and readi¬
ness is positive.
In recent years, however, the services have struggled to
maintain this stance in the face of the mountains of evidence
that the presence of women is damaging our armed forces. The
Persian Gulf War dramatized the problem of depending on sol¬
dier-mothers with young children. The trials of the Citadel and
the Virginia Military Institute; the fatal crash of naval aviator
Kara Hultgreen; the discharge of adulterous Air Force
Lieutenant Kelly Flinn; and a rash of other celebrated cases
have exposed the dangerous effects of sex-based integration
and affirmative action on standards, safety, training, and disci¬
pline. These cases underline that nowhere in the U.S. military
do women meet the same physical standards as men, nor are
xvi • WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
they a financial bargain. A presidential commission on women

in the military in 1992 documented the problems of higher
rates of attrition, greater need for medical care, higher rates of
nonavailability, lower rates of deployability, lesser physical abil¬
ity, and the growing number of single parents and dual-service
marriages. More recently the Aberdeen sex scandal and other
related cases have highlighted the persistent—and apparently
ineradicable—problems of fraternization, sexual harassment,
and the resulting breakdown of good order among the troops.
\ None of these problems can be dismissed as temporary diffi¬
culties. It has been twenty-one years since women first forced
themselves into thy federal service academies, where they have
shattered tradition, fractured morale, and confused the acade¬
mies’ purpose—which is to train combat officers. It has now been
nineteen years since the separate womens corps were abolished,
and the services still have not proved that they know how to mix
men and women together without suffering periodic outbreaks of
embarrassing behavior, when men and women forget their oaths
of office and their professional pretensions and behave toward
each other not as soldiers and sailors but as males and females.
All of these problems were apparent when my first book on
this subject, Weak Link, was published in the summer of 1989.
But official pressure to ignore the manifold problems was over¬
whelming. Weak Link was the first—indeed, the only—book to
cast doubt on the stock assurances of Pentagon officials that all
was well with integration and that women were performing
admirably.
But today, the problems have grown far worse. The bottom
line is that with the exception of the medical professions there
is no real need for women in the military. Every other soldier,
sailor, and airman is a potential combatant, and, as the pages
that follow will show, women are not up to that job.
Proponents of women in the military have failed to answer
basic questions: Why, for instance, given the dramatic force
reductions since the end of the Cold War, does the military
need female recruits? Why should America be obligated to pro-
THE G.I. JANE DECEPTION • xvii
vide military careers for women if their effect is to hinder com¬

bat effectiveness? Why is America rushing forward when other
countries with real experience of women in combat—like Israel
and Russia—have pulled far, far back?
Library shelves groan under the weight of books praising
the integration of women into the armfed forces. Women in the
Military: Flirting with Disaster is the only in-depth treatment
that offers an alternative view of the revolution that threatens to
leave the American military no more disciplined, no more effi¬
cient, no more fearsome, no more military than the United
States Postal Service.
Houston, Texas
November 19, 1997
v
\
•>
*
Chapter 1
MYTHS IN THE MAKING
War hath no fury like a noncombatant.
—C.E. MONTAGUE
THE FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN to serve in combat was Molly

Pitcher. Few American schoolchildren escape the lower grades
without hearing the story of Molly’s heroism. They will not have
heard of Alvin York or Audie Murphy, but the image of the
petticoated heroine fetching water and swabbing gun-barrels
for the hard-pressed Continental artillery stands clearly in their
minds. In the minds of modem historians, however, Molly’s
image is much less clear. Was she Mary Hays or Margaret
Corbin? Was she any one woman at all, or a legendary compos¬
ite of hundreds of camp followers who lent a hand in the heat
of battle? While the latter seems more likely, one thing is cer¬
tain: Molly Pitcher made a good story.
Lately, good stories about women in combat are receiving
greater attention. Feminist historians, eager to provide today’s
military women with a heritage of their own, are revising the
history of every American military conflict to include women as
soldiers, sailors, and secret agents. Male historians, say the revi¬
sionists, have heretofore neglected the role of women in war
and habitually minimized the contributions of individual
women. The revised history will correct this deficiency, while at
2 • WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
the same time magnifying the record of the few who did partic¬
ipate. It is history îth a purpose. Every odd and improbable
inclusion is meant to prove that women can indeed be warriors.
Every legendary wonder-woman who defied convention and
credibility by masquerading as a man among men is supposed
to bolster the argument for mustering regiments of riflewomen.
Sometimes, however, the revisionists’ enthusiasm for a good
story overcomes their natural skepticism. Fancy is often mis¬
taken for fact when titillating tales of soft breasts beneath coarse
uniform tunics are accepted at face value. Most such tales
escape close scrutiny, but one that did not involved a prostitute
by the name of Lupy Brewer. Lucy’s tale has come down to us in
a number of recent “histories” of fighting women, few of which
show the slightest inclination to doubt her incredible claim of
having passed herself off as si male Marine aboard the frigate
Constitution during the War of 1812. The revisionists seem to
accept Lucy’s claim on faith alone, without explaining how Lucy
managed to conceal her sex for three years aboard the cramped
frigate. Conditions on the ship alone would have made her mas¬
querade impossible. The ship had no toilet facilities and no pri¬
vate quarters for enlisted Marines. Marine Corps historians have
in fact discovered that Lucy was a fraud. Her published accounts
of her wartime exploits were lifted “almost verbatim” from offi¬
cial after-action reports filed by the Constitution’s commanding
officer. Officially, the legend of Lucy Brewer is a “mockery of the
bona fide traditions” of the Corps.1
The history of American servicewomen truly begins with
the establishment of the Army and Navy Nurse Corps in 1901
and 1908. By the turn of the century, nursing had become an
exclusively female occupation, so the need for nurses who could
be sent wherever and whenever there were troops made neces¬
sary the admission of women to the services as auxiliaries. But
nursing has little to do with soldiering. The first military nurses
held no rank and wore uniforms bearing no resemblance to
the men’s uniforms, and no one seriously referred to them as
soldiers or sailors.
MYTHS IN THE MAKING • 3
The same was true of the first nonnursing servicewomen

inducted during World War I. In need of clerks, typists, and
telephone operators, all of which were recently feminized occu¬
pations, the services avoided the chore of training men for such
work by employing women for the task. The Navy enlisted
some 12,500 “yeomanettes” in the Naval' Reserve, circumvent¬
ing a law requiring all sailors to be assigned to vessels by assign¬
ing the women, on paper only, to riverboats on the Potomac.
The Army and Marine Corps also recruited women for work as
secretaries and telephone operators, but the status of the
Army’s women has been a matter of debate. Some authorities
say the women were never formally inducted as enlisted mem¬
bers. Others say they were. Either way, the participation of
women in the American armed forces during the war is but a
footnote in history. All of the 49,000 women who served in uni¬
form during World War I were returned to civilian life when the
war was over, except for a handful of nurses.
World War II brought more women to arms and into uni¬
form than any event in human history before or since. Some
500,000 Soviet women are estimated to have served among the
7,000,000 Soviet combatants in the war. Great Britain
employed more than 450,000 women in uniform. The United
States ranked third in the world in the military use of women:
350,000 American women donned uniforms of khaki or blue
from 1942 to 1945.
No doubt many women did serve well during the war and
do not deserve to have their personal reputations deflated, but
lately the wartime record of the women’s corps has received
such purposeful and elaborate praise that a critical appraisal of
their contribution to the war effort is in order. The emerging
myth about the use of women in World War II includes a dire
shortage of American men and a stirring response from patri¬
otic American women who supposedly turned out by brigades
to “free a man to fight/ Indeed, had the Army been able to
recruit a million women as it had hoped in 1942, the creation of
a women’s corps might have made a dent in the demand for
men. As it turned out, neither the manpower shortage nor the

mass mobilization |*f American women materialized. At no time
did women amount to more than 2.3 percent of all U.S. forces.
Though 350,000 women donned uniforms, the combined
strength of the womens components and both nurse corps
never exceeded 266,000 at anv one time.2 The difference
between the two figures reveals an astounding rate of person¬
nel turnover for a force whose battlefield casualty rate was
insignificant.
, The truth about women in World War II is that, as soldiers,
sailors, or Marines, they simply were not needed. Twenty-two
million American men registered for the draft during the war;
only ten million were drafted. The duties military women per¬
formed for the .War and Navy Departments in Washington,
D.C., where most military women were stationed, could easily
have been performed bv the men who were not drafted or bv
civilian men and women.3 Their other uses hardly justified the
trouble of establisliing and maintaining separate women's com¬
ponents of the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines. In the
end, the women's components served only to satisfy the ambi¬
tions of a handful of influential women and sympathetic men in
Washington, among them First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt,
Congresswoman Edith Nourse Rogers of Massachusetts, and
Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall.
The establishment of separate womens components of the
armed services was perhaps the most difficult legislative battle
of the early war years. Marshall was an exception among the
nations military leader’s, most of whom were not cominced
they needed womens components. Most members of Congress
were also reluctant to resort to the military' use of women even
after Pearl Harbor. Not until May 1942 did Congress, its arm
twisted by Marshall's projected manpower shortage, authorize
creation of the.Womens Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). Two
months later, pestered by Congresswoman Rogers and prodded
by the First Lady. Congress authorized a women's component
for the Navy, for which the Navy contrived a name to fit the
acronym WAVES: Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency

Service. An unnamed component of female Marines was estab¬
lished shortly thereafter, followed by the Coast Guards SPARS
(short for Semper Paratus, the (’oast Guard’s motto). Last came
the Women’s Air Service Pilots (WASPs). Much mentioned
today in any brief history of military women, the WASPs were
technically not servicewomen but civilians contracted to per¬
form routine flying duties until the services could train enough
male pilots.
Once established, the women’s components fulfilled n6
one’s expectations. Female recruits _
were slow in coming, as the nation’s The truth about women in
women proved much less progressive
World War II is that they
than the activists in Washington. Many
Americans could believe only that the simply were not needed.
kind of women who would join the -

Army were not the kind to take home to mother. As the first few
women wandered in, rumors arose impugning the honor of the
recruits. Tales of rampant promiscuity and lesbianism were met
with indignant denials from the services. Official investigations
found little to substantiate the rumors, but the damage was
done nonetheless.
The Army had both the highest hopes and the least success
in attracting women. WAAC recruits, as members of an auxiliary,
were not given full military status. Their simplified rank struc¬
ture meant nothing to Army men, and their training and facili¬
ties were regarded as inferior to the other services. Worst of all,
their uniforms were ugly and unfeminine. The Army’s experi¬
ence had taught it that soldiers complained about their uniforms
only when they were too hot or too cold. It was surprised to learn
that female recruits were much more concerned with their
appearance and much more likely to join the WAVES, whose
uniforms were more glamorous. Some of the WAAC’s problems
were solved when the auxiliary was reorganized as the Women’s
Army Corps (WAC) in 1943, but the search for more attractive,
more feminine uniforms continued well into the war.
Just as the women’s components were overcoming the pub¬

lic s initial disgust a$kl enjoying some success in recruiting, their
reason for being began to wane. By late 1943 the Army Air
Corps had trained more male pilots than it needed, so the civil¬
ian WASPs were disbanded. The manpower shortage had
always been a matter of having enough trained men in the right
place at the right time, not a matter of there being too few men
in America. In the summer of 1944 the Allies could not get
enough infantrymen into France fast enough. Noninfantry reg¬
iments in the States were deactivated so the men could be
retrained as infantry replacements. Boatloads of support per¬
sonnel disembarking at French ports were instantly reclassified
as riflemen with the stroke of an adjutants pen, an expedient
not available to the modem integrated Army. Then, as the Allies
tightened their grip on the European continent, the flow of
troops through the manpower pipeline suddenly slowed. New
recruits in the States marked time by repeating training cycles
over and over again, being shipped overseas only after the wars
end to replace combat veterans in the army of occupation. The
supply of men had caught up with the demand.4
As the war reached its climax, the enthusiasm of the first
women recruits began to waiver. The morale of the WAVES
sank as the glamor of Navy uniforms wore off and the drear)7
tedium of military service made itself felt. WAVES began to
complain about bad assignments, unrewarding duty, poor li\ing
conditions, and the lack of recreational opportunities. Some
complained about not having enough to do. Others buckled
under the strain of too much work.5
The WAC war effort also faltered. As early as 1943 WAC
leaders noticed a surprising increase in the number of company-
grade officers requesting transfer because they had "gone stale”
and felt they had nothing left to offer their units. The WAC
director, Colonel Oveta Culp Hobby, was able to persuade
Marshall to order the establishment of “refresher training” for
WAC officers, over the objection of the Army’s chief of training,
who argued that no such training was necessary or available for
male officers; there was little else Hobby could do to boost

morale. Some WAC leaders blamed low morale on a lack of
gainful employment arid respect for the corps, but the women
in the ranks filed different complaints in letters to the director.
Wrote one, “We don’t want appreciation; we just want to go
home.”6 '
As morale crumbled, discharges for medical and other rea¬
sons soared. In January 1945 the rate of WAC medical dis¬
charges was twice that of January 1944. The rate of discharge
under other than honorable conditions was many times that of
the previous year. From January to December 1945 the WAC
discharged 44,315 officers and enlisted women for reasons
other than demobilization—almost twice the number demobi¬
lized that year. Other services experienced similar problems.
Attrition among the elite WASPs had ranged between 36 per¬
cent and 40 percent, most of whom chose the alternative of get¬
ting married and going home over the opportunity for
continued service. The experience of WASP leader Jacqueline
Cochran led her to testify against admitting women to the Air
Force Academy thirty years later.
At war’s end all was forgiven if not forgotten. In the glow of
victory only good things were said about the women who had
served. No one had expected them to be anything other than
ladies in uniform, anyway. No one noticed the high rates of
attrition or estimated the cost-effectiveness of the women’s
components. No objective evaluation of the performance of the
women’s corps was ever done. Instead, the women got their
share of exaggerated accolades along with everyone else. In a
postwar interview with a senior WAC commander, Douglas
MacArthur even dubbed the WACs “my best soldiers.”7 Today,
some proponents of women in the military are quite willing to
pretend that he meant what he said.
After the war, the heads of the women’s components and
their staffs expected and sought demobilization of all women
arid deactivation of the women’s corps. But once their foot was
in the door, they found it difficult to remove. First, the armed
forces decided to keep many women in service to speed the

demobilization of dbmbat veterans. Then, as the leadership of
the women’s corps passed into the hands of the minority of
those women who did not choose to return to civilian life, the
services decided to retain the womens corps indefinitely. High-
level staffs had come to depend on women in administrative
and clerical roles, and no one wanted to give up their faithful
and charming wartime secretaries for male draftees fresh out of
clerk school.
\ Demobilization of women proceeded much slower than
most women would have preferred, while the services did what
they could to encpurage women to stay on voluntarily and the
War and Navy Departments petitioned Congress to establish
the women’s corps as permanent features of the new
Department of Defense. In 1947 Congress authorized the inte¬
gration of the nurse and medical specialist corps into the regu¬
lar and reserve Army and Navy. In 1948 Public Law 625-80
allowed women veterans to rejoin the reserves, thus establish¬
ing a permanent place for women of other specialties. In the
next two years, only 4,000 women with prior military service
signed up for reserve duty, so in 1950 the law was amended to
allow women without prior service to join. At the start of the
Korean War, there were still fewer than 22,000 women on
active duty, one-third of whom were nurses or medical special¬
ists. The 15,000 women in the “line” components made up less
than 1 percent of the total U.S. armed forces.
Though small to the point of insignificance, the womens
components had friends in high places. General Marshall was
then secretary of defense, with Anna Rosenberg as his assistant
secretary of defense for manpower. Rosenberg quickly revived
fears of another manpower shortage and began pushing for
greater utilization of women by the services. At her urging,
Marshall created the Defense Advisory Committee on Women
in the Services, a blue-ribbon committee of prominent civilian
women, known since as DACOWITS. With DACOWITSs
assistance, the Defense Department mounted a massive pub-
licity campaign to call American women to arms, shelling out

large sums of advertising dollars. Slogans such as “Americas
Finest Women Stand Beside Her Finest Men” were trumpeted
across the countiy by radio, television, magazines, newspapers,
and billboards.
Aside from insulting the majority ofAmerican womanhood,
the slogans did little else. Rosenberg and DACOWITS had
completely misread the national mood and the ambitions of the
nations women. The campaign fell well short of its objectives,
adding only 6,000 women in the time allotted to recruit 72,000.
Many of the women it did attract were
of the lowest category of recruits, as
Military service was once
Americas finest women apparently had
other ideas about where to stand. a privilege and an obli¬
Female strength peaked in October gation, not a right or
1952 at 47,800, still less than 1 percent
entitlement.
of the total force and well below the
desired 112,000.
Americas female population remained stubbornly unre¬
sponsive to recruiting through the end of the war. By 1955
female strength was down to 35,000. In 1956 Dr. Eli Ginzberg,
a manpower expert with the National Manpower Council, told
DACOWITS, “One cannot turn the country on its head in
order to get a few more women into the services of the United
States.”8 For many in the Defense Department and in
Congress, the nations second failure to mobilize significant
numbers of women on a voluntary basis reinforced the experi¬
ence of World War II and spoiled enthusiasm for women in the
military for the next decade.
Bureaucratic inertia and the firm support of a small group
of women in and out of uniform kept the womens components
alive in the years following the Korean conflict, but the Defense
Department no longer considered them a manpower advan¬
tage. The peacetime draft gave the services all the men they
needed, and abysmal rates of attrition among women made the
components more trouble than they were worth. Seventy per-
cent to 80 percent of first-term female enlistees in the late

1950s did not com Hlete their initial term of enlistment. Most
left voluntarily to get married. Many others were separated
involuntarily for unsuitability, an avenue of exit always more
accessible to women than to men. Pregnancy in or out of wed¬
lock was another cause for involuntary separation. The compo¬
nent directors still believed that motherhood took precedence
over military service and were extremely sensitive to charges of
immorality within the corps. Most staunchly defended the pol¬
icy of discharging pregnant women as a means of protecting the
corps’ honor.
Year after year the components atrophied, as women veter¬
ans hung on to serve out their time before retirement. To their
services, they were little more than window dressing. As such,
it was most important for the token force to look good. The ser¬
vices began requiring full-length photographs of potential
female recruits, taking only the best-looking among them.
Recruits were not instructed in marksmanship or combat sur¬
vival, but they did learn how to apply makeup properly and to
conduct themselves as ladies. Their physical training was
intended to maintain trim figures, not to increase strength,
endurance, or coordination.
Appearance was always important, even in Vietnam. Jeanne
Holm quotes the WAC director writing to a senior WAC officer
in Vietnam in 1967:
I am aware that conditions are bad and it must be difficult

to maintain a neat and feminine appearance.... I do not
want anything to spoil their image or standing as women.
The matter of proper dress is very important to me.9
The director of the WAVES echoed the same sentiment,

reminding her'charges that “WAVES are ladies first and
always.”
While the civilian world was becoming increasingly femi¬
nized, the nation’s armed forces were moving in the opposite
direction. Military jobs open to women shrank. In 1965,

70 percent of enlisted females were in administrative and cler¬
ical work, as opposed to 50 percent in World War II. Another
23 percent were in medical professions. Seventy-five percent of
women officers were in administrative fields. Opportunities for
promotion and assignment dwindled. The strength of the line
components, not including medical women, dropped to 30,600
in 1965 and then to 20,000 in 1967.
The limited role of women in the services meant limitations
on promotions and assignments for women officers. Until 1967
the highest pay grade or rank a woman could hold in any of the
services was 0-6.10 Sometimes the only woman in a service to
hold that rank was the director of the womens component. All
other female officers held lesser rank, depending as much upon
their assignment as anything else. As the directorship rotated
among the most senior female officers, an outgoing director
would sometimes accept a reduction in grade to remain on
active duty in lieu of retirement.11
Though today such limitations on the careers of women are
considered grossly unfair, twenty years ago it was assumed that
the needs of the service came first, and the services simply did
not need more high-ranking female officers. None of the ser¬
vices at that time promised equal opportunity for women; com¬
bat restrictions and the segregation of the ranks meant that
opportunities were inherently unequal. Furthermore, the pre¬
vailing philosophy was that military service was both a privilege
and an obligation, not a right or entitlement. Women, like men,
served at the pleasure of the commander-in-chief and therefore
had no grounds for grievance.
This philosophy of service was lost upon the civilian mem¬
bers of the once ineffectual DACOWITS. Since the Korean
War, DACOWITS had concerned itself with recommending
improvements in the “quality of life” of military women, which
led in time to increasing opportunities for advancement. As
early as 1960, when the size and the role of the womens com¬
ponents were shrinking, DACOWITS began arguing that the
components had reached “a maturity which calls for re¬

examination of thd^structure with respect to the maximum
career potential afforded new recruits.” The committee focused
its efforts on removing restrictions that prevented women from
becoming admirals and generals and on promoting the womens
component directors to 0-7 (one star). DACOWITS felt that
with a flag officer of their own, the women’s components would
receive the professional recognition they deserved and junior
officers would have more toward which to aspire,
v The services unanimously opposed the promotion of the
component directors to star rank for a variety of reasons. First,
they felt the responsibilities of the directors were too limited in
scope to warrant stars. Second, the promotion of a director to
star rank would automatically mean one less admiral or general
somewhere else, since the total number of flag officers was lim¬
ited by Congress. Third, promotion policies as applied to men
meant that women would never truly qualify for star rank.
Selection of officers for promotion to 0-7 was based upon a
variety of things, not the least of which was the assignment his¬
tory and professional experience of the candidate for promo¬
tion. Combat service was naturally a big plus for an organization
which existed for the purpose of doing battle. Candidates who
had not served in combat but were especially qualified in non¬
combat fields were still expected to have a firm professional
foundation in the business of war, as practiced by their branch
of service.
Female officers lacked these primary qualifications. Not
only had they never served in combat, they had never even
been trained/or combat. In the early 1960s few had ever super¬
vised—much less commanded—men in any capacity, since
most of them spent their entire careers within the womens
corps. They were, in fact, the least “general” of officers, for
their experience was limited to a small, vestigial appendage of
the services. None of the women then on active duty had even
enough years in service to warrant consideration for promotion
beyond 0-6, and many men felt that if the ceiling on female
promotions were removed, the promotion of a few unqualified

women as tokens would be inevitable.
But the services were on the wrong side of time. Political
pressure was mounting against all governmental distinctions
between men and women. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act
in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act—with Title VII concerning
women—in 1964. In March 1965 President Johnson ordered
equal treatment, respect, service, and support regardless of sex
for all employees of the executive branch of the federal govern¬
ment. Though the executive order was not aimed specifically„at
the military services, the civilian heads _
of the Defense Department could tell ^
r The Vietnam Memorial
the way the wind was blowing. The
same year, the Defense Department honors 7,500 women—
gave in to DACOWITS s demand and less than one-tenth of
submitted legislation to Congress to * percent of all U.S.
remove the ceiling on promotions for
Vietnam veterans.
women.
But the battle was not over. The
proposed bill died in the Eighty-ninth Congress and was
revived in the Ninetieth only after DACOWITS stepped out¬
side its charter to assume a more active role. Until this time,
DACOWITS s participation in the legislative process had been
limited to recommending and endorsing legislation to the
Department of Defense. Under the leadership of Chairman
Agnes O’Brien Smith, the committee began to deal directly
with Congress. According to Holm:
From the time the DOD [Department of Defense] proposal

was finally drafted until its enactment on 27 October 1967,
committee members pulled out all the stops—soliciting sup¬
port from women’s groups, encouraging letter-writing cam¬
paigns, focusing media interest, and individually lobbying
Congress.... Smith held regular strategy planning sessions
with military women; after each DACOWITS meeting, the
members fanned out over Capitol Hill, paying court to
whomever they knew, gaining support for the legislation.

Many had politi^d connections in the White House and on
the Hill, others direct access to the media, which they used.12
Two former DACOWITS members testified before the

House Armed Services Committee in September 1966, urging
support of the bill, both mentioning their membership in
DACOWITS. Active members, however, were told that they
“are not lobbyists for DOD and are not even to mention
DACOWITS when they urge a congressman to support legisla¬
tion.”13 (Emphasis in the original.)
Considering what they were up against, it should hardly
have taken so much effort. Lawmakers may have lacked enthu¬
siasm for the bill,- but there was no organized opposition. At the
time, Congress, the White House, and the Defense Department
had other things to worry about, and it was easier to give the
women what they wanted than to defend the silent services,
which were muzzled by the Defense Department.
Among those who contributed to the consideration of the
bill, only DACOWITS and its supporters understood the bills
significance. If anyone else on Capitol Hill had any idea how
the bill would affect the military in the future, they were care¬
ful not to show it. Defense Department representatives naively,
if not deceitfully, minimized the bill’s impact. The assistant sec¬
retary of defense for manpower, Thomas D. Morris, testifying
in support of the bill before the House Armed Services
Committee, said, ‘We believe that the Nation still adheres to
the concept that combat, combat support, and the direction of
our operating forces are responsibilities of male officers.”14 The
House report showed the same lack of foresight:
[T]here cannot be complete equality between men and

women in the matter of military careers.... The Defense
Department assured the Committee that there would be no
attempt to remove restrictions on the kind of military duties
women will be expected to perform.
Within the framework of this understanding, the

Committee believes that women officers should be given
equality of 'promotion opportunity consistent with the needs
of the service.15
DACOWITS’s seven-year campaign to improve the lot of

the most privileged military women culminated with the sign¬
ing of Public Law 90-130. “Had it not been for DACOWITS,”
wrote Holm, “the struggle might have taken another seven.”16
The somber service chiefs who were assembled for the signing
heard President Johnson remark, “There is no reason why we
should not someday have a female Chief of Staff or even a
female Commander-in-Chief.”17
Two and a half years after the passage of PL 90-130, the
Army promoted Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington to
the rank of brigadier general. The Air Force followed suit in
1971 by promoting Jeanne Holm. The Navy waited until 1975
to promote Fran McKee to flag rank, and the Marine Corps did
not promote Margaret Brewer (no relation to Lucy) to flag rank
until 1977.
PL 90-130 did more for military women than open the way
to the stars, however, and other effects were more immediate.
The law also opened up promotions for women to other officer
ranks and repealed the 2 percent ceiling on the strength of the
women’s components. At the time, female strength was at its
lowest level since the Korean War, again less than 1 percent of
the total force. But the Johnson administration was looking for
ways to lighten the burden of the draft on the nation s men, and
so it planned to increase female strength from 20,000 to 35,000
in two years, to reach the 2 percent mark in four or five years.
The first increase in female strength in fifteen years came
in 1968, when 6,500 women were added to the rolls. This hefty
boost for the womens components was nevertheless an imper¬
ceptible addition to the mammoth wartime armed forces. The
participation of American military women in the war in
Vietnam was minuscule. The 7,500 women, mostly nurses, hon-
ored by the embellished National Vietnam War Memorial,

accounted for less^than one-tenth of 1 percent of all U.S.
Vietnam veterans. The tribute, backed by many feminist sup¬
porters of women in the military, was late in coming. During the
war, the needs of women veterans were ignored completely by
the strongly pacifist American feminist movement. After the
war, the fight to expand roles for military women further pro¬
ceeded on other grounds, fop other reasons.
Chapter 2
THE ALL-VOLUNTEER SURPRISE
The conscription calls out a share of every class —
no matter whether your son or my son—all must

march; but our friends—I may say it in this room-
are the very scum of the earth.
—THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON
THE EQUALIZATION OF PROMOTION POLICIES for male and

female officers and the removal of ceilings on enlisted women
achieved by PL 90-130 may have been the opening shots in the
assault on the all-male services, but in themselves they were lit¬
tle more than stones thrown in the enemy camp. What was
needed was a Trojan horse that would slip large numbers of
warrior women into the citadel before the defenders knew what
was happening. That horse appeared in the form of the All-
Volunteer Armed Force.
By 1968 the draft had been an accepted part of American
life for twenty years. Since passage of the Selective Service Act
of 1948, the draft had provided the necessary manpower to
back up the nations global commitments and fostered
patriotism, discipline,, and civic responsibility among the
nations restless young men. Most American men who had
served their time in war or in peace saw nothing wrong with
conscription per se and were quite willing to allow younger men

the privilege of searing, whether they wanted to or not. Proud
veterans still outnumbered libertarians who saw conscription as
inconsistent with civil liberty. Civil liberty in the minds of many
Americans, still entailed civic responsibility.
As a result of the Vietnam War, however, organized opposi¬
tion to the draft grew rapidly. Antiwar activists portrayed the
draft as an immoral means of supporting an immoral war.
Hotheads like the Berrigan brothers responded violently by
raiding, burning, or bombing draft board offices. Celebrity cler¬
ics like Bishop James Pike and the Reverend William Sloan
Coffin, Jr., joined Dr. Benjamin Spock in publicly supporting
civil disobedience to draft calls. A handful of draft-age men left
the country. Many more marked time in college or avoided the
draft by other legal means.- The Supreme Court obligingly
broadened defensible grounds for conscientious objection, and
the number of conscientious objectors doubled between 1967
and 1970.
Those who obeyed the draft summons were disproportion¬
ately poor and poorly educated, and among the many good men
drafted were many rotten apples—disgruntled, disillusioned,
disobedient fellows who lacked the intelligence or the foresight
to avoid military service before it was too late. They were the
source of many of the problems that plagued the sendees dur¬
ing Vietnam: desertion (up 300 percent from 1966 to 1970),
drug addiction, racial conflicts, disrespect toward superiors, and
a general breakdown of discipline. Because the draft brought
them in, the draft was sometimes blamed for the trouble they
made. If we took only those who volunteered, thought some
officers and NCOs (non-commissioned officers), we’d have only
happy campers.
Of course, with a war on, ending the draft was out of the
question. The best that President Johnson could hope to do was
to make the draft more equitable. In July 1966 he created the
National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, headed by
Burke Marshall, former assistant attorney general in charge of
♦
• Y
THE ALL-VOLUNTEER SURPRISE • 19
the Civil Rights Division under President John F. Kennedy and

author of the original version of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The
commission submitted its report seven months later, recom¬
mending that draft policy be “uniformly developed and cen¬
trally administered” through five hundred area centers instead
of the much more numerous local draft boards. The report also
recommended random, impartial call-ups and the elimination
of student and occupational deferments. A single sentence in
the report recommended that the services “broaden the oppor¬
tunities” of women and civilians to reduce the number of mqn *
drafted, though no discussion of this
option was presented.1 The Burke
The commission failed to
Marshall report served as the basis for
Johnsons 1967 draft reform proposals, consider the impact of
but little became of the proposals in women drawn into the

Congress and the report was soon All-Volunteer Force as
shelved.
substitutes for men.
Flawed though the system was,
selective service itself was strongly sup¬
ported in Washington. In 1967 only two votes were cast in
Congress against a draft extension. Still, when a well-respected
Republican suggested ending the draft, Washington eagerly
submitted. The man to make that suggestion was Richard M.
Nixon.
Running for president as the end-the-war-with-honor can¬
didate in 1968, Nixon departed from the Republican Party plat¬
form by calling for an end to the draft to coincide with the end
of the war. In a radio broadcast on October 17,1968, Nixon told
the American people that it was time to take a “new look” at
selective service. He said that the draft was a relatively recent
invention, that Americans were wrong to think of it as a natural
part of life, and that the dignity of the individual should not be
subject to the supremacy of the state.2
Once elected, Nixoft created the President’s Commission
on an All-Volunteer Armed Force. Headed by former Secretary
of Defense Thomas S. Gates, Jr., the commission included
noted economists Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan; two

former supreme ^Jied commanders; the director of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;
various academicians and businessmen; a student from
Georgetown University; and one woman, Jeanne Noble, New
York University professor and vice-president of the National
Council of Negro Women.
The Gates Commission initiated a number of studies on the
relevant issues, whose conclusions were included in the final
report. To maintain an all-volunteer force of 2.5 million men,
the commission estimated that the services would need to
attract 325,000 men per year; 500,000 men had volunteered for
military service each year of the Vietnam War, and surveys of
volunteers indicated that as many as 250,000 were “true volun¬
teers” who would have enlisted had there been no draft. It
seemed, then, that the services would need to attract only
75,000 more men each year to maintain an all-volunteer force.
The commission was confident that higher pay and other
improvements in service life would easily bring forth the extra
men needed.3
Eight objections to an all-volunteer force were summarily
dismissed. The commissions report admitted that while the
“budgetary expense” of a volunteer force would be greater, the
“actual cost” to the nation would be lower because the nation s
young men would no longer be taxed in time and effort to sub¬
sidize the national defense. The report also argued that the sav¬
ings from the low pay for first-term servicemen represented
“discrimination” which needed correcting for reasons of equity
alone.
Years later, the General Accounting Office (GAO) submit¬
ted a report to Congress on the additional costs of the All-
Volunteer Force, or AVF, as actually instituted. According to
the GAO, the Gates Commission had based its conclusions on
several invalid assumptions and inaccurate estimations. The
commission erroneously assumed that an AVF would have a
lower personnel turnover rate, thus reducing both the number
♦
of men needed each year and die cost of training them. The
commission failed to appreciate the differences between the
Army and the other services and wrongly assumed that an all¬
volunteer Army would enjoy the same success in recruiting as
the others. The commission overestimated the number of “true
volunteers” by failing to consider the declining popularity of the
military. It underestimated the cost of extra inducements for
reservists and critical specialists. It also underestimated the cost
of the more attractive benefits package offered to all new
recruits and the total additional cost of the AVF. Its repoyt
claimed that an AVF of 2.5 million men would cost an addi¬
tional $2.1 billion per year, but the GAO estimated that the
AVF had actually cost an additional $3 billion annually since its
creation, though its total strength never exceeded 2.1 million
men.4
Two of the Gates Commission s errors were not mentioned
bv the GAO. One was that the commission had noted that the
J
population of enlistment-age men would increase in the 1970s

but had failed to warn that the increase would be short-lived
and that the same population would begin to decrease by the
end of the decade. The other not mentioned was that it had
failed to consider the impact of large numbers of women drawn
into the AVF as substitutes for men. In fact, the commissions
report and supporting research barely mentioned women. Not
only did it fail to consider that an all-volunteer force might
become too dependent upon women, it failed even to recom¬
mend recruiting women to reduce the need for men. According
to commission members, the subject simply never came up.
Ironically, the oversight probably helped the commission make
its case for an AVF. A recommendation to greatly expand the
role of women would have strengthened the military’s opposi¬
tion to the AVF.
The Gates Commission delivered its report to the president
in early 1970, having agreed unanimously that an AVF should
replace the current mixed force of conscripts and volunteers as
soon as the war in Vietnam was over. On April 23, 1970, in an
address to Congress, President Nixon used the report to justify

his decision to instate the AVF as soon as possible. For the rest
of his first term, Nixon spoke often of draft reform to goad
Congress into approving the necessary legislation and to remind
the electorate, which for the first time included everyone over
the age of eighteen, to thank the Nixon administration for the
eventual end of the draft.
Nixons decision to shift to the AVF in the early 1970s showed
the worst possible timing. Never was patriotism in shorter supply
throughout the fifty states, nor public confidence in the
American military at a lower ebb. After an inglorious retreat from
Indochina, the military came home to Watergate, womens rights,
and a “zero draft” future. Still shaking the mud off its boots, it was
ordered to pretty itself up for a recruiting drive.
Implementation of the AVF began with the appointment of
the Central All-Volunteer Task Force within the Department of
Defense. The task force quickly developed a twofold strategy to
ensure success. First, it planned to increase enlistments by
offering recruits higher pay, shorter tours, better living condi¬
tions, bonuses for special skills, veterans benefits, allowances
for dependents, and a host of other inducements. Second, it
sought to decrease the need for men by making greater use of
civilians and women, never considering that an all-male military
might attract more men than a thoroughly feminized force.
The reason the task force did not consider an all-male vol¬
unteer military was the coincidence of the AVF and the Equal
Rights Amendment (ERA). In March 1972, while the task force
was still at work, Congress cleared the ERA for ratification by
the states. Debate in both houses was light, considering the
hard road ahead for the amendment. Most of the argument was
not over the wisdom of the amendment itself, but over the need
for special exemptions in the amendment to protect women
from combat and compulsory military service. All such exemp¬
tions were rejected. Feminists feared that any exceptions to the
amendment would weaken it. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana
argued, “If a woman wants to volunteer [for combat], should
she be treated differently from a man?”5 Senator Sam Ervin of

North Carolina led the fight in the Senate against the amend¬
ment and for the combat and draft exemptions, but fifteen sen¬
ators who had favored such exemptions when the amendment
was first proposed in 1970 had changed their minds in two
years. The final version of the amendment, approved by over¬
whelming majorities in both houses, called for nothing less than
absolute equality between the sexes.6
Also in March, the House Armed Services Committee
established the Special Subcommittee on the Utilization ,of
Manpower in the Military, which published its report in June,
flaunting the latest fashion of thought about the place of women
in the military:
We are concerned that the Department of Defense and each

of the military services are guilty of “tokenism” in the
recruitment and utilization of women in the Armed Forces.
We are convinced that in the atmosphere of a zero draft
environment or an all-volunteer military force, women could
and should play a more important role. We strongly urge
the Secretary of Defense and the service secretaries to
develop a program which will permit women to take their
rightful place in serving in our Armed Forces.'
In December 1972, with the ERA rapidly approaching ratifi¬

cation (so it seemed), the Central All-Volunteer Task Force pub¬
lished its own report, marrying the weakness of the all-volunteer
military to the strength of the Equal Rights movement:
The pursuit of these two goals, equal opportunity and

greater utilization, may well bring about the most revolu¬
tionary policy changes experienced in the history of military
women.8
The AVFs future dependence on the ever-expanding uti¬

lization of women was assured. The task force instructed the
services to double the number of women in their ranks by 1977.
Only the Marine Corps, with its high ratio of combat troops to
support troops, escaped with a modest, mandated 40 percent
increase in its tiny female contingent.
At the start of 1972 the womens components composed
1.5 percent of the total force, with 12,600 women officers and
32,400 enlisted women. That year, before the end of the draft,
the services enlisted 13,000 additional women, making them
3.3 percent of total recruitments. It was only the beginning.
On July 1, 1973, following the signing of the Paris peace
accords and the expiration of the selective service authorization,
Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announced the birth of the All-
Volunteer Armed Force, a final step after hundreds of prepara¬
tory changes. The base pay of a first-term enlisted man had
more than doubled, and life in the services had softened con¬
siderably. Open-bay barracks with rows of bunks were being
replaced by dormitories with two- or three-man rooms, which
the occupants were allowed to decorate as they pleased. Mess
halls became “dining facilities,” with carpeting and drapes and
smaller tables with chairs instead of benches. Saturday morning
fatigue duty and inspections were becoming less frequent.
Sailors in port were allowed to live ashore. Soldiers were
allowed to wander on and off post anytime they were not on
duty. Many more officers and enlisted men resided off-post,
and many more privates had wives and children.
But by the same summer, it had already become apparent
that the services were not attracting enough of the right kind of
men. Entrance exam scores plummeted, and the percentage of
high school graduates among “true volunteers” fell from 60 per¬
cent in 1972 to less than 50 percent in 1973. The induction of
college-educated enlisted men, fairly common during the draft,
all but dried up. Personnel turnover, instead of decreasing as
predicted by the Gates Commission, actually increased because
of two-year enlistments and a doubling of the rate of earlv dis¬
charge for indiscipline and unsuitability. Medical and technical
fields requiring special skills and extensive training were the
hardest hit by low enlistments and high attrition, but the ser-
vices also found it difficult to enlist men for the dirty jobs in the
combat arms. The supply of men for reserve components
slowed to a trickle, once the incentive of avoiding the draft by
enhsting in the reserves disappeared.
To solve the problem, the Defense Department set aside
$225 million in 1973 for various bonuses to attract doctors,
nurses, technicians, and infantrymen. It then requested from
Congress another $400 million over the next three years for the
same purpose. The Defense Department also raised its require¬
ment for recruits to 356,000 per annum to maintain a force of
only 2.1 million, rather than the Gates _
Commissions 325,000 for a force of 2.5
The Pentagon saw that the
million. Three years later, the depart¬
ment estimated it needed 365,000 to only way—or the easiest
maintain 2.1 million Americans in way- to meet their enlist-

uniform.
ment quotas was to
Proponents of women in the ser¬
recruit more women.
vices seized upon recruiting shortfalls
and the “low quality” of enlisted men as
an argument for enlisting more women. A report prepared for
the Senate Armed Forces Committee in 1973 recommended
raising the number of women as a percentage of the total force
to possibly as high as 20 percent to make up for the lack of qual¬
ity men. Historically, the womens components had maintained
their integrity by carefully selecting their recruits, who were, on
average, better educated, more articulate, and more intelligent
(according to scores on entrance exams) than men. The Senate
report stated in passing that its recommendation was based on
the assumption that the quality of female recruits would remain
constant as their numbers increased, an assumption that later
proved invalid.9
Yet the services hardly needed to be told by Congress to
recruit more women. Charged with making the AVF work one
way or another, the manpower managers in the Pentagon saw
that the only way (or at least the easiest way) to meet their quo¬
tas for enlistments was to recruit more women. With their very
careers on the block if the AVF faltered, they wasted little

debate on the mtfcter. Contingency plans providing for an
increase of 170 percent in the strength of the womens compo¬
nents were executed on order. The female share of total enlist¬
ments increased from 5 percent in 1973 to 9 percent in 1975.
The Navy and Air Force womens components tripled in size.
By 1975 the anned forces were recruiting more women
each year than the total strength of the womens components
just three years earlier. In the fourth year of the All-Volunteer
Armed Force, there were 109,133 women in uniform, making;
up more than 5 percent of the total force. A contemporary
report by the Bropkings Institution estimated that the United
States had 44 percent more women in uniform than twenty
other major nations combined, including the Soviet Union.10
The trend would continue through the decade, to the alarm of
the nation s warrior chiefs who were taken by surprise by the
unexpected impact of the AVF.
While tire women's components swelled with recruits and the
Equal Rights Amendment gathered state ratifications, propo¬
nents of military women obtained another victory in the case of
Frontiero v. Richardson. Lieutenant Sharron Frontiero was an Air
Force physical therapist married to a veteran. Her husband had
been denied status as an Air Force dependent under a federal law
requiring female service members to prove that drey provided
more than half of their husbands support. The Frontieros sued
the government and won. In May 1973 the Supreme Court ruled
that the federal law in question was unconstitutional and that
military women must receive the same dependent benefits as mil¬
itary men. Four justices sided widi Justice William J. Brennans
opinion that sex, like race, was “inherently suspect as a category
of discrimination, requiring “strict judicial scrutiny.” Three other
justices agreed with the ruling of unconstitutionality but rejected
dre characterization of sex as “inherently suspect.” Only Justice
William H. Rehnquist dissented.11
Feminists were jubilant. Future Supreme Court Justice Ruth
Ginsburg, then of the American Civil Liberties Union, who had
argued for the plaintiff as an amicus curiae, was quoted by U. S.

News It World Report as saying, “It is the most far-reaching and
important ruling on sex discrimination to come out of the
Supreme Court yet. It will spell the beginning of reforms in hun¬
dreds of statutes which do not give equal benefits to men and
women.”12 She had every reason for sufch confidence. Justice
Brennan had made perfectly clear in his written opinion where
he stood on the subject: “There can be no doubt that our nation
has had a long and unfortunate history of sex discrimination.”
His opinion, however, did not stop the Court from turning
around two years later and ruling in Schlesinger v. Ballard that
the Navy could use sex as a discriminator for promotion pol¬
icy—as long as it was used against men. Robert C. Ballard, a
former Navy lieutenant, had sued the Department of Defense
for discharging him after he failed to be promoted twice in nine
years, as was required, though female Navy lieutenants were
allowed thirteen years. Ballard’s counsel argued the Navy’s
nine-year limit violated Ballard’s right to due process under the
Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. Writing for a five-justice
majority. Justice Potter Stewart ruled that Ballard had not been
deprived of due process because the Navy’s different promotion
policies for men and women served a legitimate government
purpose. It provided for the needs of the service and compen¬
sated female officers for their limited military role.13
Just how limited that role was became open to question. In
1972 Senator Jacob Javits of New York nominated a woman to
the Naval Academy. One week after Congress passed the ERA,
Senator Javits and Congressman Jack H. McDonald of
Michigan introduced concurrent resolutions to prohibit denial
of admission to the service academies on the basis of sex. Javits
argued that the services all had women officers, some of whom
were on the academies’ faculties, and that admission to the
academies would improve the women’s chances of promotion.
He also argued that thedERA when ratified would accomplish
the same thing, but not in time for his nominee to enter
Annapolis with the next class. The Senate passed the resolution
easily. The House referred it to the House Armed Services

Committee, chaire^by Congressman F. Edward Hebert of
Louisiana, a strong ally of the Pentagon who had supported the
war in Vietnam and opposed abolishing the draft. In his hands,
the resolution died.14
In 1974 Congressmen Don Edwards and Jerome Waldie of
California filed suit against the Defense Department on behalf
of two women they had nominated for admission to the U.S.
Naval and Air Force Academies. The plaintiffs argued that
excluding women from the service academies violated constitu¬
tional guarantees of equal protection and due process under the
Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments. The Defense Department
countered that excluding women served a legitimate govern¬
ment purpose because the academies existed to train combat
leaders for the Navy and the Air Force, and women were
excluded by federal law from engaging in combat. The U.S.
District Court in Washington upheld the exclusion of women
from the academies, and an appellate court denied an appeal.
But the fight went on. Representatives of the National
Organization for Women (NOW) and the Center for Womens
Policy Studies successfully pressured DACOWITS to endorse
integrating the service academies.15
Momentum was building. In two years, no less than six bills
to admit women to the academies were submitted in the House,
four of them by Congressman Pierre “Pete” du Pont of Delaware.
In 1974 du Pont s bills were referred to the subcommittee on mil¬
itary personnel, which began hearing testimony that May.
Just before the hearings began. Undersecretary of Defense
William P. Clements sent Congressman Hebert of the House
Armed Services Committee a letter outlining the Defense
Departments objections to the bills. The letter argued that the
academies trained men for combat service and sea duty, from
which women were barred by law. If not all graduates sewed at
sea or in combat units, most did. Furthermore, limitations of
funding and facilities would mean fewer men admitted if
women were, and the services were receiving all the women
officers they needed through the Reserve Officers Training

Corps (ROTC) (opened to women in 1972), officer candidate
schools, and direct commissions.16
At the hearings, fourteen representatives of the
Department of Defense, including the three superintendents, a
recent graduate of West Point, and a We^t Point senior, testified
against admitting women, each one echoing the arguments of
Clements letter. Secretary of the Army Howard H. Callaway
testified that 94 percent of West Point graduates entered com¬
bat arms upon graduation, the rest being physically disqualified
from doing so. To dramatize the point, he submitted into the
record General MacArthurs famous “Duty, Honor, Country”
speech, which emphasized combat leadership as the reason for
West Points existence. Lieutenant General Albert P. Clark,
superintendent of the Air Force Academy, testified that more
than 70 percent of the academy graduates entered fields closed
to women and cited higher attrition among female Air Force
officers as a reason why integration was not cost effective.
Several Defense witnesses seemed most concerned about
the disruptive effect the presence of women would have on the
academies. Said Secretary Callaway:
Admitting women to West Point will irrevocably change the

Academy. And all the evidence seems to say that the change
could only be for the worse. The Spartan atmosphere—
which is so important to producing the final product—
would surely be diluted....1'
Lieutenant General Clark concurred: “It is my considered judg¬

ment that the introduction of female cadets will inevitably
erode this vital atmosphere.” He predicted that the academies
would “inevitably find it necessary to create a modified program
to accommodate the female cadet, or, God forbid, be required
to water down the entire program.”18
The Defense spokesmen were seconded by a single private
citizen, Miss Jacqueline Cochran, famed aviatrix, test pilot, and
veteran leader of the Women’s Air Service Pilots (WASPs) in

World War II. Mis^Cochran strongly opposed the admission of
women to the academies on the grounds that the academies
trained men for combat and putting women in combat was
“ridiculous.” Her experiences in World War II convinced her
that women “have no business” in combat. Members of the sub¬
committee pointed out that she herself was just the kind of
woman to be admitted to the academies, but Cochran took a
different view of her own example: “When I was a child I went
to work twelve hours a night in the cotton mill before I was
eight years old without shoes, and I became pretty hardened to
the facts of life. Hdon’t think that is the way women should be
brought up. I certainly don’t think I was properly brought up.”19
On the other side of the issue, two representatives of the
Maritime Administration testified that the Merchant Marine
Academy, recently integrated, was experiencing no significant
problems. Eight concerned citizens, most representing the
Center for Women Policy Studies and the Women’s Lobby, tes¬
tified in support of integration. Nineteen members of Congress
also expressed their support. Among them were Congressmen
Pete du Pont, Don Edwards, and Patricia Schroeder of
Colorado. Schroeder argued that “imminent ratification” of the
two-year-old ERA made integration inevitable. Edwards
accused the Defense Department of opposing integration for
“essentially frivolous reasons and outmoded patterns of think¬
ing.” All of them reduced the argument for integration to a sim¬
ple matter of equity. Most dismissed the largest stumbling block
to integration—the issue of combat—by observing that not all
academy graduates served in combat. One representative,
Congressman Charles B. Rangel of New York, went so far as to
call for the integration of the battlefield also. Rangel pointed to
Israel and the Soviet Union, saying, “If fighting must be done,
women should join men in doing it.”20
The hearings concluded in August with the Defense
Department thinking it had won, comforted by Hebert’s private
assurances that the committee would not report a bill for inte-
gration out to the full House. But other portents were not
encouraging. Not a single member of Congress had dared to
speak openly against integration in the hearings, and in June the
Senate passed a resolution proposed by Senator William D.
Hathaway of Maine in favor of integration.
The House committee had still taken no action by January
1975, when the Democratic Caucus, dissatisfied with Heberts
pro-Pentagon views, forced him from the chairmanship of the
House Armed Services Committee and replaced him with
Congressman Melvin Price of Illinois. There was another push
to put a bill before the House. Early that spring, the new mili¬
tary personnel subcommittee chairman -
allowed the Defense Department to Focusing on self-interest
testify once more against integration,
was the best way to
but the department declined, perhaps
recruit women into the
under the mistaken impression that
integrating the academies was a dead military.
issue.
Activists who wanted to see women admitted to the acade¬
mies in the bicentennial year were running out of time. So in
April 1975 Congressman Samuel Stratton of New York
bypassed the committees and introduced an amendment to a
military appropriations bill before the full House for considera¬
tion. Again, debate centered on the issue of combat. Despite
their enthusiasm for equal rights and the ERA, neither the
House nor the Senate was ready to repeal laws restricting
women from combat service, which the ERA would surely have
done. The matter was finally resolved by drawing a line
between the academies’ responsibility to prepare officers for
combat and their responsibility to prepare officers for careers in
the armed forces. In the words of Judith Stiehm: “By making
this distinction between combat and career training, Congress
sidestepped having to decide whether women should enter
combat; that, it reasoned, was not the central issue.”21
Last minute suggestions that Congress establish separate
academies for women went nowhere. Thus, left to themselves
without the annoying arguments of military men, on May 20,

1975, Congress vcêd by a count of 303 to 96 to admit women
to the service academies in the next calendar year. The Senate
endorsed the amendment by voice vote on June 6. In an after¬
thought, Congress realized that it had overlooked the Coast
Guard in the legislation. Reparative action proved unnecessary;
the Coast Guard announced in August that it would admit
women the following year.'
On October 7, 1975, President Gerald Ford signed a mas¬
sive appropriations bill into law, a small segment of which
would radically alter the nature of the American military’s most
sacred institutions. Public Law 94-106 required the service sec¬
retaries to ensure that:
(1) female individuals shall be eligible for appointment and

admission to the service academy concerned, beginning the
appointments to such academy for the class beginning in
calendar year 1976, and (2) the academic and other relevant
standards required for appointment, admission, training,
graduation, and commissioning of female individuals shall
be the same as those required for male individuals, except
for those minimum essential adjustments in such standards
required because of physiological differences between male
and female individuals.
For feminists, the laws stipulation that admission would be

“consistent with the needs of the services” left too much for the
services to decide. For opponents of integration, the require¬
ment that the authority of the service “must be exercised within
a program providing for the orderly and expeditious admission
of women” meant that there would be no “survival of the fittest”
in the admissions process: the services were compelled to admit
some women pne way or another.
The passage of PL 94-106 was the high-water mark of the
American feminist movement, the crest of a fifteen-year wave
of legislative action. Along the way, feminists won for their flag
a daunting array of campaign streamers: the Equal Pay Act of
1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Title IX of the Education
Amendment of 1972, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act
of 1972, congressional approval of the Equal Rights Amend¬
ment, and numerous other laws to protect and extend the rights
and prerogatives of women in all areas qf public and private
life. They celebrated August 24, 1974, as National Womens
Equality Day and all of 1975 as International Womens Year. In
that year, the ERA was just three states short of the three-
fourths needed to make it the Twenty-seventh Amendment to
the Constitution of the United States. Few expected anything'
but ratification.
Meanwhile, the AVF limped along, inevitably falling back
on the venal and illusory lures of money and easy living. The
Volunteer Army wanted to join you—and to persuade you to let
it, it offered short tours, fast cars, college educations, and off-
post housing. One early recruiting commercial featured actor
John Travolta as a new recruit behind the wheel of a Pontiac
Trans Am. Later ads were equally ignoble. The focus was all on
self-interest.
But self-interest was the best focus for military women.
They discovered a new-found “right to serve.” No longer
were they merely support troops, freeing a man to fight. Now
they had equal status, equal advancement, and equal bene¬
fits, and they were moving in large numbers into previously
all-male units and specialties. Only the laws excluding
women from combat remained, and they seemed doomed by
the ERA.
But it was not to be. State legislatures were finding out that
the ERA was not so popular after all. The very year that saw the
first perfumed plebes enter West Point also saw the ERA sitting
dead in the water, the victim of activist Phyllis Schlaflys STOP
ERA counteroffensive.
The turning point came too late for the nations service
academies. Had they held out a year or two longer, they might
not be integrated today.
\
•f
Chapter 3
EIGHTY’S LADIES
The great thing about those first ten weeks [at

Sandhurst] was that although one was being treated
like mud it was at least grown-up mud. We were
treated like men for the first time in our lives, and
as men we were expected to react.
—DAVID NIVEN IN HIS MEMOIR

THE MOON'S A BALLOON
POETRY GREETS EACH YEAR’S CROP of young civilians enter¬

ing the United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs,
Colorado. As the ragged formation of new recruits marches
down the ramp into the cadet living area, all eyes are affixed to
three words proclaimed in stone from the granite roof over¬
head: BRING ME MEN. So begins the poem entitled “The
Coming American” by Sam Walter Foss:
Bring me men to match my mountains.

Bring me men to match my plains,
Men with empires in their purpose
And new eras in their brains....
In 1976, when the entering class included not just men but
women, the Air Force Academy rejected a suggestion that the
offensive phrase be revised. The rejection was, however, a rare

departure from tfe academy’s policy of easing the process of
sexual integration by thoroughly accommodating the first
female cadets.1
The award for the worst performance by a service academy
in the first year of sexual integration belongs to the Air Force
Academy. It was the only academy where attrition rates for men
exceeded those for women. The Air Force Academy Class of
1980, the first sexually integrated class, lost 23.5 percent of its
male cadets in the first year alone, but only 19.7 percent of its
female members. The same class graduated with barely half of
its original men:-.44.4 percent of those who started in the sum¬
mer of 1976 did not finish, compared to 37.8 percent of the
original women'. Both men and women exceeded the average
dropout rate of 35 percent among pre-integration classes.
Today, the Air Force Academy remains the only academy where
men have left in greater numbers than women, despite innova¬
tive attempts to reduce attrition.2
The Air Force Academy had been the one most enthusias¬
tic about integration. It had begun planning for integration in
1972, when congressional passage of the ERA made integration
seem inevitable to some academy administrators. By the sum¬
mer of 1975, with the integration bill still pending, the Air
Force Academy had already formulated a comprehensive plan
for the admission of women.
Unfortunately, the academy’s head start was in the wrong
direction. Early on in its planning, it misidentified the chief
problem of integration as making the academy attractive to
women. A visit by the academy’s planning committee to
Lackland Air Force Base in 1974 reinforced fears that the sen¬
sitivity of the first women admitted would pose the principal
threat to integration. At Lackland, female Air Force recruits
responded better to encouragement, or “positive motivation,”
than to the harsh discipline applied to male recruits, yet even
the comparatively relaxed atmosphere there was described by
most female recruits as “stressful.”3 Convinced that the much
EIGHTY’S LADIES • 37
more stressful environment of the academy’s fourth-class sys¬

tem would be too much for most women, the committee incor¬
porated in its draft plan several special measures to protect the
women from the worst of cadet life.
The final plan differed from the draft plan in only one sig¬
nificant way. Instead of maintaining a separate women’s
squadron, the women were to be integrated into twenty of the
forty squadrons of the Cadet Wing. For privacy, however, the
women would be quartered together on the same floor of the
same building, off-limits to all males during certain hours. To-'
protect the women from the usual harassment endured by
fourth-class cadets, upperclassmen were instructed to use posi¬
tive motivation on the women.
In the fall of 1975, while scrambling to attract qualified
young women for the class of 1980, the academy began its
search for fifteen qualified female Air Force lieutenants or cap¬
tains to volunteer to serve as Air Training Officers (ATOs), act¬
ing as “surrogate upperclassmen” and role models for the
female cadets. Hundreds of records were reviewed, but only a
handful of women who were physically and professionally qual¬
ified were also interested in the assignment. The following
spring, fifteen female surrogates entered the academy as ATO
candidates to undergo special training, including a three-week
“mini-academy” to introduce them to life as an air cadet.
Unaccustomed to intense physical exertion, the ATOs suffered
an embarrassing rate of injury and fatigue. Two dropped out of
the program before the end of training. The rest fell woefully
short of academy standards.
Fortunately, the first female cadets were a different
breed—younger, more athletic, with a somewhat better idea of
what they were getting into and better reasons for being there.
From more than a thousand applicants, the academy selected
157 of the most athletic, most scholarly women in the country.4
Eighty-four percent were in the top 10 percent of their
high school class; 79 percent were members of the National
Honor Society. Their average SAT and ACT scores were slightly
above the men’s average in verbal skills, slightly below in math

skills. ^
That year, 1,436 male cadets also entered the Air Force
Academy. They too were among the most scholarly, most ath¬
letic young adults in the country. But they seemed nonexistent
to the flocks of journalists who flew in and out of the academy
that summer, clustering around the fledgling female cadets.
In addition to the journalists, the academy played host to
several academicians who stayed for extended periods to
observe the event. Among them were Dr. Lois B. DeFleur, pro¬
fessor of sociology at Washington State University, and Judith
Stiehm, professor of political science at the University of
Southern California. Dr. DeFleur would become a mainstay of
the academy’s efforts to monitor its progress, participating in
nearly every official study of integration conducted at the Air
Force Academy for the next ten years. Stiehm, a philosophical
feminist, would later write a not-too-flattering book about the
first year of integration.
An initial survey of entering cadets found that the only sig¬
nificant difference between the outlook of new male and
female cadets concerned the role of women in society' and in
the military. On such issues, the male cadets were found to be
“significantly more traditional” than civilian males at other insti¬
tutions, while female cadets were found to be less traditional
than civilian females.5 These opposing attitudes inevitably
inhibited assimilation, for which men regularly took the blame
because their traditional opinions were officially out of favor.
Years later, Dr. DeFleur would recommend easing the assimila¬
tion of women by recruiting “a wider variety of people,” prefer¬
ably fewer of the more traditional males, the very men who
have historically shown the greatest interest in the academy.6
Though the survey showed the traditional cast of most of
the male cadets, it also showed that the men of the Class of
1980 were initially neutral with regard to the presence of
women at the academy, willing to wait and see before passing
judgment. They did not have to wait long. By the end of the
summer, the attitudes of male “doolies” had begun a long shift

toward the negative.
Life as an air cadet begins long before the start of the aca¬
demic year. While other recent high school graduates are work¬
ing to save money for college or still cavorting about at the
beach, cadet-recruits are beginning two months of military reg¬
imentation known as Basic Cadet Training, or BCT. Modeled
after West Point’s “Beast Barracks,” BCT is designed to turn
high school kids into air cadets.
There was nothing novel in the Air Force Academy’s'"
approach to this task. Throughout the _
ages, tribes of warriors have performed
The Air Force Academy
the same task with similar rituals, rec¬
ognized as necessary by almost all misidentified the chief
societies. Only in our Western culture problem of integration as

in relatively recent years have both the making the academy
mechanics of the process and the
attractive to women.
rationale for the transformation been
forgotten.
Neither was lost on the Air Force Academy after the first
year of integration, however. A draft report produced in 1977
by the academy’s Department of Behavioral Science and
Leadership showed a clear understanding of the role of BCT in
initiating young cadet-recruits into the Cadet Wing. “The
Integration of Women into a Male Initiation Rite: A Case Study
of the USAF Academy,” by Dean H. Wilson and David C.
Gillman, was perhaps the only official study of the academy’s
integration not heavily influenced by Lois DeFleur. Instead the
authors followed the thinking of Arnold Van Gennep, whose
work predated the feminist takeover of the field of sociology. In
his 1908 book entitled The Rites of Passage, Van Gennep
divided the initiation rites of aboriginal Australian and African
tribes into three phases. Wilson and Gillman used the same
phases to describe the process of BCT.
Van Gennep s first phase, the Rite of Separation, signaled
the separation of the initiates from everything they had known
until then—families, friends, all that was a part of their past life.
At the Air Force Academy, it begins immediately upon arrival
of the new cadet-recruits. The recruits lose much of their per¬
sonal identity by having their heads shaved, donning uniforms,
and marching for the first time in formation with other recruits.
They are assigned rooms and roommates and are grouped into
flights and squadrons under the complete control of the acad¬
emy’s officers and upperclass cadets. The rite of separation ends
late the same day when the recruits are ceremoniously sworn in
as air cadets.
The next phase, Van Gennep’s Rite of Transition, begins
after the swearing-in and lasts the duration of BCT. The first
half of BCT is conducted in the cadet living area and consists of
instruction in close-order drill, cadet regulations, military cus¬
toms and courtesy, Air Force Academy traditions, and physical
conditioning. The second half is conducted at the Jacks Valley
encampment and consists largely of combat and survival train¬
ing. Cadets learn land navigation, patrolling, marksmanship,
weapons maintenance, tactical operations, and survival tech¬
niques. At Jack’s Valley, new cadets are subjected to intense
physical and mental pressure. The grueling experience involves
demanding and sometimes dangerous assault and obstacle
courses. The emphasis throughout this phase is on commonal¬
ity of experience. Having put their personal lives behind them,
the cadets must learn to live, act, and think as a group.
The last phase, the Rite of Incorporation, comes at the end
of BCT, when the cadets who have not dropped out are
awarded the uniform shoulder boards of full-fledged doolies
and accepted into the Cadet Wing.7
These rites of passage are intended to impress upon new
cadets three things: the irreversibility of their separation from
their past, the significance of their transformation, and the
value of their future status as cadets of the United States Air
Force Academy and ultimately as Air Force officers. With these
firm impressions, cadets will commit themselves utterly to the
pursuit of an academy education, enduring years of repeated
academic trials and demanding military training. But the

impressions depend upon the seared memory of the initiation
experience. The rites must be attended not only by stirring cer¬
emony but also by the sharp experience of physical and mental
pain. Without it, the rites will fail. The cadets will not feel the
break between their lives before entering the academy and
their lives after, nor will they think their status as cadets too
valuable to give up.
These things the Air Force Academy knew instinctively
prior to the summer of 1976. Twenty times since its founding it
had successfully repeated the process. But with the first inte¬
grated class, Basic Cadet Training failed to achieve its higher
purposes. It achieved neither the commonality of experience
necessary to bind the integrated class together nor the intensity
of experience to bind the new cadets to the academy. Its failure
would forever curse the Class of 1980.
Behind the failure of BCT was a brazen double standard.
That BCT was to be one thing for women and another for men
was plainly evident on the very day the new class of cadet-
recruits arrived. Flight by flight, cadet-recruits were marched
into the base barber shop. Male recruits came out with stubble;
female recruits escaped with neat and stylish trims. Women
retained both their individuality and their femininity, while men
suffered the embarrassment and dehumanization of fuzzy pates
and radically altered self-images. There being nothing physio¬
logical about the length of ones hair, Congress’s integration law
would have required the womens heads to be shorn also, but no
one dared ask that much of these daring women.
Next, the cadet-recruits were assigned rooms. All of the
women were assigned to the sixth floor of Vandenberg Hall, off-
limits to male personnel mornings and evenings. There the
female cadets enjoyed the easy tutelage of their surrogate sis¬
ters, while real upperclassmen applied intense harassment to
the bald-headed males on the floors below. Even if the ATOs
had tried to match the male upperclassmen in ferocity, there
were simply not enough of them to do so. Though male upper-
classmen matched male recruits roughly one-for-one during

the first summe ^ the ratio of ATOs to female recruits was one
to ten.
Then came physical training. The academy’s physical fitness
test included push-ups, pull-ups, a standing broad jump, and a
six hundred-yard run, but since very few of the women could
perform one pull-up or complete any of the other events, dif¬
ferent standards were devised for them. They were allowed
more time for the run, less distance on the jump, and fewer
pushups. Instead of pull-ups, female cadets were given points
for the length of time they could hang on the bar; one pull-up
earned them considerable extra credit.8
Though the female cadets performed somewhat better than
the ATOs had earlier, their record was not impressive. They fell
out of group runs, lagged behind on road marches, failed to
negotiate obstacles on the assault courses (later modified to
make them easier), could not climb a rope, and sometimes
broke down in tears when confronted with their own limita¬
tions. The rate at which the female cadets sought medical atten¬
tion could hardly have allowed them to keep up the pace of
training. The women averaged eight visits to the medical clinic;
the men averaged only 2.5 visits. Eighty-five percent of female
cadets received medical treatment during the eight weeks of
BCT, compared to 70 percent of male cadets. On the average,
women suffered nine times as many shin splints as the men, five
times as many stress fractures, and more than five times as
many cases of tendinitis.9 With time off for sick call and with
their physical activity limited by medical restrictions, many
female cadets must have watched a lot of BCT.
Such performance would have earned male cadets consid¬
erable harassment from upperclassmen, but because upper¬
classmen were enjoined to use “positive motivation” on female
cadets, their abuse was concentrated on the males who were,
for the most part, performing satisfactorily. Ironically, the men
of the first integrated class received the brunt of the upper¬
classmen’s disgust with integration. They were constantly
derided as “Eighty’s Ladies” and reminded that their BCT was

easier than ever before. Upperclassmen felt that overall stan¬
dards for men and women had been lowered and referred to
the first integrated BCT class as the “coke-break BCT” and
the “Burger King Basics” with “Have It Your Way” as their
theme, r
At the same time, some upperclassmen faulted the new
males for not looking after their female classmates, though
there was no real incentive for them to do so. Stragglers in ear¬
lier all-male classes tended to draw the fire of upperclassmen
away from the rest of their class, receiving in return the support
of the class, which had an interest in keeping the stragglers
from falling out altogether. The women of the Class of 1980
provided no such relief for their male classmates and therefore
received little support. When men did endeavor to pull the
women along with them, they often found themselves not
meeting performance standards. This no-win situation caused
resentment among the men toward the women, and harboring
such resentment, few men saw any reason for helping the
women do what everyone (except the upperclassmen) said the
women could do on their own.10
Most of the women did succeed in BCT, but largely
because the academy overlooked their poor performance.
Wilson and Gillman s survey of those who finished the summer
revealed an increase in the womens confidence in their ability
to survive at the academy. If BCT was not as hard on the
women as it was on the men, it was still harder than anything
the women had experienced before, and much more demand¬
ing than they had expected.
Their male classmates, however, were not impressed:
The male initiates, on the other hand, felt the physical and
mental challenges of BCT were either easier or no different
from what they had expected. The worth of the cadet status
for thie males had not been increased by the discomforts of
BCT as much as for the females. The males’ perception that
BCT was easier led to a less established inner sense of iden-

titij and less pride in being a cadet.11
Wilson and Gillman went on to conclude that the few expe¬

riences actually shared by both male and female cadets served
to diminish rather than increase the attachment of males to the
academy and to their class, particularly to their female class¬
mates. Though shared experiences do serve to bond men
together when “the major social value of a military society is a
warrior image, particularly a masculine warrior image,” at the
Air Force Academy “a new social value of an androgynous war¬
rior was pressed upon the members of the institution.” The
sharing of experience by men and women in order to mold
androgynous warriors would necessarily have made the women
more masculine and the men more feminine, had not the men
resisted this imposition on their inner self. Instead of growing
closer, male and female cadets grew farther apart.12
The Air Force Academy never acknowledged that the poor
performance of female cadets was the chief complaint of male
cadets against them. Indeed, the academy repeatedly insisted
that standards had not been changed and that the negative shift
in male attitudes was attributable to sexist upbringing and “neg¬
ative emotional support” from faculty and upperclassmen. Nine
years after the first females struggled through BCT, however.
Dr. DeFleur, ever the accommodator, recommended that phys¬
ical events in which women did not do well should be aban¬
doned altogether.13
The start of the academic year did little to improve the
acceptance of women at the academy. One mistake was cor¬
rected. At the beginning of the second semester, the academy
decided to integrate all forty squadrons of the Cadet Wing to
eliminate the advantage of all-male squadrons in intramural
sports competition. Intramural sports are a chief means of
developing squadron esprit de corfjs, but the women’s partici¬
pation handicapped the integrated squadrons in competition
with all-male squadrons, causing male cadets to view female
cadets as liabilities on the playing field. Full integration of the

Cadet Wing placed all squadrons on an equal footing, but it
hardly improved the males’ opinions of female physical abilities.
Seven years later the Air Force Academy discontinued inte¬
grated intramurals altogether after discovering that neither
male nor female cadets thought integrated sports conducive to
the assimilation of women.
Many other mistakes in planning went uncorrected, most of
which were intended to shield women from harassment.
Harassment did not end with BCT, but the policy of “positive '
motivation” continued to protect
women from the worst of it. Though
Upperclassmen felt that,
some women complained to the acad¬
emy and the press of sexual harassment because of women, stan¬
in the form of insults and open opposi¬ dards for both men and
tion to integration, nothing came close
women had been lowered
to the fierce and sometimes physical
harassment doolies traditionally faced
throughout the doolie year. Insults had always been the daily
fare of doolies, and every one of them had felt at one time or
another that he had been singled out for persecution by some
sadistic upperclassman who, for unknown reasons, had it in for
him. Pain was the price one paid to belong. Positive motivation
spared the women such pain, but it also barred their acceptance
into the Cadet Wing.
Also inhibiting the assimilation of women was the mistake
of concentrating the women on the sixth floor of Vandenberg
Hall, instead of quartering them with their assigned squadrons.
During the school year, doolies put themselves in harm’s way
anytime they entered their squadron area. They were often
rousted out of bed at an early hour by screaming upperclass¬
men, who dogged them constantly during the five or ten min¬
utes they had to prepare for the morning run. After the run,
they had to hurry again to shower and dress before the break¬
fast formation. Harassment frequently interrupted these mea¬
ger moments of personal time. Just as frequently, doolies were
grabbed to form a detail to clean the day rooms, police the

squadron area, or%irn in laundry. Other details in the evening
took them away from their studies.
The women, however, were spared such interruptions.
Upperclassmen could not roust the women out of bed and send
them scurrying up and down the halls in their skivvies, as they
did the men. After a squadron run, the women returned imme¬
diately to Vandenberg Halh escaping further harassment as well
as the morning details. Out of sight and out of mind, they were
'usually left alone in the evenings. This arrangement produced
the academy’s intended result of making life easier for the
women, but also the unintended result of making their male
classmates resent them more.
The task of Supervising the women in their own area was left
to the fifteen female Air Training Officers, but none of the male
cadets trusted the ATOs to do the job properly. To upperclass¬
men, the ATOs were not and had never been cadets and there¬
fore had no business training doolies. The Air Force Academy
had used surrogate upperclassmen before in its first few years of
existence, but those surrogates had all attended other military
academies and had acted in the absence of upperclassmen, not
in their stead. The female ATOs, on the other hand, had no valid
academy experience and were entrusted with duties that could
have been performed by male upperclassmen, as indeed was the
case at the other service academies. To upperclassmen, the
ATOs were intruders, whose poor performance in training only
proved that they did not belong at the academy.
Through the year, the ATO program caused more harm
than good. Though the ATOs struggled to show that they were
as hard if not harder on the women as the upperclassmen were
on the men, most male cadets suspected that it was all an act.
Indeed, Stiehm recounts one incident in which an ATO and a
female cadet deliberately staged a dressing down, complete
with tears, to impress male onlookers.14
If the ATOs were not easier on the women, they made sure
that male cadets were. When ATOs were present, male cadets
took care not to treat female cadets too roughly, and having
ATOs present whenever possible was standard policy. For their
own protection, the cadets began including their squadron’s Air
Officer Commanding (AOC), an Air Force officer who shep¬
herds cadets through the academy, in any event in which
women were likely to be subjected to hafassment or physical
stress.
Fostering an atmosphere of distrust was another effect of
the ATO program. Their very existence was proof that the acad¬
emy did not trust the Cadet Wing with the task of initiating the, -
first female cadets. The cadets in return distrusted the women
and altered the way they conducted training to protect them¬
selves. Where once it was common for upperclassmen to take
the time to work one-on-one with a doolie on some point of
performance, group instruction became more and more com¬
mon, as male cadets were uneasy dealing with female cadets in
private.
One unacknowledged good the ATO program did accom¬
plish, from the academy’s standpoint, was to lower male expec¬
tations of female ability prior to the arrival of the Class of 1980.
Thus, when the first female cadets performed somewhat better
than the ATOs, upperclassmen were impressed. This of course
did not improve the ATOs’ reputation among male or female
cadets. And the academy discontinued the program a year ear¬
lier than planned, pretending for the press that the program
had met its objectives ahead of schedule and was therefore
“successfully concluded.” Dr. DeFleur was more candid.
“There was an abortive attempt to bring female officers to the
academy as ATOs,” she wrote, eight years later, “but this turned
out to be an untenable role and both male and female cadets
rejected them.”15
Some inequities of integration were unintentional, such as
the different experience of male and female doolies in the cadet
dining facility. Every infamous “square meal” in Mitchell Hall
was an ordeal for doolies. After reciting the menu and serving
the upperclassmen at their table, doolies sat stiffly on the edge
of their seats, chin up, back straight, eyes always level. When
they were not r&ponding to questions or requests from upper¬
classmen, they ate in a mechanical manner, conveying food to
their mouths via right angles above their plates. The amount of
food a doolie was able to ingest under these conditions was gov¬
erned by the whim of upperclassmen and reflected the doolie’s
performance of the required tasks. Doolies who performed
poorly went hungry. N
Most female doolies escaped this torture by joining one or
x more of the academy’s many womens athletic teams. With
more slots on teams than female cadets to fill them, women
who had neve* participated in organized sports in their lives
became instant collegiate athletes. One advantage was that it
frequently took them away from the pressures of the academy
for weekend games or meets. Another advantage was that it
permitted them to sit with their teammates at separate “jock
ramps” during meals, where harassment was forbidden and
even doolies ate like normal people. The women therefore
rarely went hungry. Many developed what the cadets called
CHD,” or Colorado Hip Disease, caused by the high caloric
value of meals in Mitchell Hall. (West Point cadets noticed a
similar phenomenon and dubbed it “Hudson hips.”) At least
one member of the womens cross-country team was enrolled in
the academy’s weight-control program.
Other persistent inequities were deliberate results of the
academy’s policy of special protection. Those charged with
making integration work were not about to risk their careers by
taking seriously their own boasts about equal treatment and
able young women. To guard against failure, they devised a
number of ways to uphold the appearance of success and keep
the female attrition rate down. Double standards on physical
tests hid the poor female performance compared to male per¬
formance. Higher ratings for women from AOCs made up for
the lower scores they received in peer ratings and military stud¬
ies, thus ensuring that women ranked as high as men on the
Military Order of Merit. Even in academics, where they hardly
needed it, women were allowed special protection. In class,

women as a group performed nearly as well as the men, slightly
less well in the hard sciences. Even so, male doolies with low
grades were dismissed and sent home, whereas similar female
doolies remained.
The academy’s reluctance to let women leave contrasted
sharply with its lack of concern about men, later much regret¬
ted. The custom had always been that doolies who wanted to
leave were sent packing with little effort by the academy to
change their minds. Traditionally, the very act of quitting'
revealed a weakness of character that confirmed that a doolie
did not belong at the academy. For males, this custom contin¬
ued, but for females indicating a desire to leave, the academy
required mandatory counseling in the hope of persuading them
to stay. In one unprecedented exception, a female doolie who
voluntarily left the academy before the end of the first year was
allowed to return the very next year as a sophomore.16 Such
exceptions made men of the Class of 1980 feel that the academy
considered it more important for a woman to graduate than for
a man.
Individual acts of insensitivity further irritated the Cadet
Wing. According to Stiehm, male cadets were offended by the
inclusion of females in the squadron selected to march in
President Carters inaugural parade. The squadron that won the
honor during the first semester was originally all-male, but by
the time of the inauguration, the squadron had been integrated.
When a number of cadets were cut from the squadron to
reduce the size of the formation, not one of the new female
squadron members was among them. Knowing that the new
commander-in-chief was keen on women in the military, acad¬
emy officials rearranged the formation to place women con¬
spicuously in the front rank and on the left flank, contrary to
military custom and Air Force regulations, which require the
shortest in a formation to march in the rear.
The unkindest cut of all, in the eyes of male cadets, was the
academy’s dishonesty on the subject of integration. Many
inequities would have been more tolerable if the academy had

been willing to a$hht that they existed. Instead, the academy
consistently denied the use of double standards or the serious
difficulties of integration. The official line was that, yes, a few
cadets were having a hard time accepting the change, but they
would adapt, and, no, the essential nature of the academy was
not in the least affected by the integration of women. Changes
to academy standards were “insignificant.” The academy
needed only a little more time to modify a few outdated or mis¬
conceived policies, and everything would work out fine. And of
course, the women performed superbly.
The worst offender was the academy superintendent him¬
self, Lieutenant General James R. Allen. Stiehm quotes upper¬
classmen saying; “The guys at West Point and Annapolis knew
their ‘supe’ didn’t want girls, but our ‘supe’ didn’t back us.”17
Allen repeatedly annoyed cadets with public proclamations of
the integration’s success. In October cadets were shown an Air
Force promotional film that included scenes of female cadets in
BCT, with Allen saying, “The women are undergoing the same
training program that the men are undergoing... with some
insignificant changes.” Later in the year, Allen told the Denver
Post, “The only problem we’ve had is finding that there’s no way
to hold the women back to equal effort.... They’ve been work¬
ing harder than the men all summer.”18 Male cadets were out¬
raged by what they read as both a lie and an insult. Attempts by
the academy cadre to explain away the affront did little good.
What was needed was a confession and an apology from the
superintendent himself.
Cadets were limited in the ways they could express their
disgust at the academy’s hypocrisy. The December issue of The
Dodo, a cadets-only humor serial, mocked the policy of positive
motivation and the public relations line that “all is well.” A later
issue poked fun at the academy’s crackdown on squadron nick¬
names that eliminated the sexually suggestive and otherwise
unsuitable. 1 he official reading oi the Wing’s pulse was taken by
Dr. DeFleur, whose surveys showed male approval of integra-
tion dropping throughout the academic year. By spring, the atti¬

tudes of male cadets, particularly upperclassmen, were “signif¬
icantly less positive’’ toward women at the academy and in
combat and significantly more traditional toward women in
general.19
Some male cadets, however, did grow to like having women
around. By the end of the first year, there was one wedding, one
engagement, and an unknown number of romances, many of
which were violations of the rule forbidding fraternization
between doolies and upperclassmen. Some cadets avoided dis^
covery by exchanging letters through __
the mail or, in one case, communicating
Academy officials would
by two-way radio. Others were less
not risk their careers by
careful. Seven percent of the comman¬
dant’s Disciplinary Boards dealt with taking seriously their own
fraternization, and seventeen frat boasts about equal treat¬
offenders were on conduct probation.
ment of women.
The first female cadet to leave the
academy due to pregnancy was appar¬
ently not the victim of a ramp-side romance, however. She
probably entered the academy pregnant, for, according to
Stiehm, she planned to have the baby during spring break and
to return to the academy afterward. Six days before the cadet
was to go on leave, she went swimming, acted in a school play,
and ran several miles. Her condition was discovered when she
was admitted to the hospital later the same day. This remark¬
able story was reported only in the Denver Post, which gave
none of the details but noted that the academy had officially
admitted to what the paper called an “inevitable first.”20
As a rule, the nation’s media ate up everything the academy
fed them and regurgitated nothing but hurrahs for both the
bastion-breaching women and the breached academy. The seri¬
ous press was committed to heralding a feminist triumph. The
not-so-serious press was infatuated with delightfully boyish
coeds in their spiffy little uniforms. Both saw everything about
the first year of integration through rose-colored glasses pro-
vided by the academy. "So Far, So Good,” said U.S. News 6-

World Report’s Headline. The story beneath it quoted a female
air cadet testifying, without contradiction, that male cadets
were finally growing warm to the idea of women at school.21 It
wasn’t true, but everyone who wanted to believe it, did.
At least one article did report that integration had been less
than satisfactory at the Air Force Academy. Science News called
it “a rough start” and linked the high rate of male attrition to the
presence of women.22 Wilson and Gillman were right. Basic
v Cadet Training failed to foster sufficient pride and a strong
sense of belonging among many male doolies, and the rest of
the year only njade things worse by undermining the cadets’
respect for both the academy and the Air Force. As a result,
when things got tough many male doolies saw little reason
to stay.
Ironically, because the academy never openly admitted its
mistakes, the blame for high attrition rates, for the failure of the
women to assimilate, and for much of the difficulty with inte¬
gration fell upon those men who stayed to graduate. For not
“going along with the program” in the beginning, the Class of
1980 never quite earned the full confidence of the academy
staff. Eighty’s Ladies were branded a troubled class, to be used
later by academy cadre as a negative example for later classes
not to follow. “Don’t be like the Class of ’80,” they counseled.
“It’s got problems.”
By its own narrow measure, the academy’s plan for integra¬
tion was a success. It got what it wanted: the percentage of
women to finish the first year was the highest of any defense
academy. The academy’s success, however, was the Air Force’s
loss. The women who finally graduated did not make up for the
loss of men. The Air Force got far fewer pilots, navigators, mis¬
silemen, science officers, and administrators for the increased
trouble and expense of educating the Class of 1980.23
But the real losers were the men of the first integrated
class. All of the men who entered the academy in the summer
of 1976 were cheated out of much of the pride they might have
felt in their status as air cadets. Those who finished the first year
were betrayed by some of the very officers who talked to them
of honor and integrity. Those who finally graduated were so
burned by the bungling of integration that it is hardly likely they
share with earlier classes the same fondness for and devotion to
the Air Force Academy. At least one graduate of the Class of
1980 was so embittered by the experience that he applied for
and received, upon graduation, a service-transfer to the United
States Army.
Chapter 4
“THE LAST CLASS WITH BALLS”
Your mission remains fixed, determined, invio¬

lable—it is to win our wars. Everything else in your
professional career is but corollary to this vital ded¬
ication. All other public purposes... will find others
for their accomplishment; but you are the ones who
are trained to fight; yours is the profession of arms.
—GENERAL DOUGLAS A. MACARTHUR TO THE

WEST POINT GRADUATING CLASS OF 1962
THE U.S. MILITARY ACADEMY at West Point and the U S.

Naval Academy at Annapolis avoided some of the early mistakes
made by the U.S. Air Force Academy, but after the first year of
integration none of the academies could resist pressure for
greater accommodation of women. In a very short time, the
academies were converted from “bastions of male chauvinism”
to institutions officially dedicated to the feminist principles of
equality and androgyny. Those principles were pushed upon the
men at the academies with little success. Though opposition to
integration outside the academies had been routed and scat¬
tered, inside the conquered and occupied academies resistance
went underground.
One difference in the first year of integration at West Point

and Annapolis wafthat male cadets and midshipmen believed
academy officials were opposed to integration. They knew that
some academy officials had opposed integration before the con¬
gressional mandate, and those who now supported integration
somehow managed to avoid offending the cadets and midship¬
men with exaggerated public pronouncements of integrations
success. West Point and Annapolis intended to make as few
adjustments as possible to accommodate women and adopted
"a policy of equal treatment, in contrast to the Air Force
Academy’s policy of special protection.
This is not tasay that the first women at Annapolis or West
Point experienced the same torture that men traditionally
endured. A survey of male and female midshipmen at
Annapolis showed that less than 5 percent of both sexes thought
female plebes were treated the same as male plebes. Almost
two-thirds of the male midshipmen said upperclassmen showed
favoritism toward women. Three-quarters said women received
favoritism from physical education instructors (a third of the
women agreed), and half said the same about company officers,
academic instructors, and executive department officials. Most
of the women thought men received favoritism, especially from
upperclassmen. Certainly some upperclassmen deliberately
harassed the women more than men, hoping to make them quit
the academy. But most found it difficult not to be gentlemen.
“It s tough to discipline a soldier when she blinks her baby-blue
eyes or slips you a dimple,” explained an Army colonel at West
Point.1
Women performed less well academically and suffered
higher rates of attrition than did men at West Point and
Annapolis. At Annapolis, the first year’s attrition rate for women
was 22.2 percent, twice the rate for men. At West Point, it was
28.6 percent, compared to 23.8 percent for men.
Despite the disparity between the attrition rates of men and
women, many believed the first year of integration had been a
success. Proponents of integration were relieved that the
THE LAST CLASS WITH BALLS” • 57
women s attrition rates were not higher. The Carter administra¬

tion publicly praised the Air Force for its “success” and kept
criticism of the Army and Navy quiet to avoid giving the
impression that integration had failed. To many critics of inte¬
gration, the results of the first year were a psychological defeat.
Underestimating both the kind of women admitted in the first
year and the academies’ willingness to accommodate them,
many old soldiers and sailors had expected most if not all of the
“ladies” to wither like roses in the desert. When that didn’t hap¬
pen, and life at the academies seemed to go on as before, some'
gave up and joined supporters in proclaiming integration’s suc¬
cess, while others retired in silence, privately bemoaning the
brave new world.
Of course, nothing short of mutiny among male cadets and
midshipmen would have stamped the first year of integration as
a miserable failure. The question answered by the experience of
the first year was not whether integrated academies would suc¬
ceed or fail, but how the presence of women would change the
academies. Male students at all of the academies registered
overwhelming disapproval of the changes. Surveys of midship¬
men at Annapolis showed that 81 percent of upperclassmen and
74 percent of plebes still opposed integration. The survey also
showed a slight shift toward a less traditional view of women in
society among male midshipmen, but the report of the survey
warned “the more the situation touched these men personally,
the less likely they were as a group to endorse equal opportu¬
nity for women.”2
The most common complaint heard from male cadets and
midshipmen was that integration had lowered the academies’
physical standards. Physically, the women simply could not
keep up. The dropout rate on morning runs during West Point’s
“Beast Barracks” was 23 percent for women and less than 3 per¬
cent for men. In the seventh week of training, 26.3 percent of
female cadets reported for physical “reconditioning” instead of
the morning run, compared to 5.6 percent of men. Women
reported for sick call an average of 6.8 times per female cadet,
compared to the male average of 1.7 times. They suffered more

than ten times a^many stress fractures as men. Attrition during
the first summer was 16 percent for women, 9.7 percent for
men. Even after a year of regular physical training, West Point
women in the first integrated class suffered five times as many
injuries as men during field training. The following year, the
injury rate for women in field training was fourteen times the
rate for men.3 '
Even when the women were healthy, they could not perform
to male standards. On their first timed two-mile run, 85 percent
of the female plebes at West Point received a score of D or lower
according to the male standard. When 61 percent failed a com¬
plete physical test, compared to 4.8 percent of male plebes, sep¬
arate standards were devised for the women. Similar adjustments
were made to other standards. At Annapolis, a two-foot stepping
stool was added to an indoor obstacle course to enable women to
surmount an eight-foot wall. At West Point, women carried M16
rifles for rifle-runs and bayonet drills, while men continued to
carry much heavier M14s. On parade, West Point women were
initially allowed to brace the M14 on their knee when drawing
back the bolt for inspection. Later, the bolt springs were short¬
ened to reduce tension, making the bolt easier to draw.
Like the Air Force Academy, West Point and Annapolis also
made allowance for some differences between the sexes that
were not based on physiological differences, as the law
required. Women were thought to require more privacy than
men and so were issued shower curtains though men were not,
and of course none of the women had their heads shaved.
Likewise, the substitution of classes in karate and self-defense
(and “interpretive dancing” at the Coast Guard Academy) for
classes in boxing and wrestling had more to do with what the
academies thought becoming of women, than what physical
risks the sports presented to them. It didn’t seem to matter that
the purpose of training men to box and wrestle was to develop
physical courage and aggressiveness, neither of which was
achieved by most of the alternatives offered to women.
These differences were not missed by the male cadets and

midshipmen. In her book Mixed Company, Helen Rogan
explains how men at West Point felt:
The separate grading scale on the ohstacle^course and the

three-mile run meant that a female cadet could get a low
score and pass, while a male who got the same score had to
go to summer school to make up—and this in an institution
that was making so much triumphant noise about equal¬
ity. ... Furthermore, since the women learned neither to box
nor to wrestle, and their close-quarters training emphasized
self-defense, they never had bloody noses. The men were
outraged, since deep down they knew war was about bloody
noses.4
To combat the “misconception” among male cadets that

separate standards meant lower standards, the academies tried
to point out that standards for men had not changed since the
admission of women. Later, they developed the doctrine of
“equivalent training,” which held that physical training was
intended to elicit from each cadet “equal effort rather than
equal accomplishment.”5 Since women were often frustrated by
their failure to meet male standards, “dual standards” were
established as attainable levels of performance.
Male cadets saw little difference between dual standards
and double standards, a term never used by academy officials,
and they overwhelmingly rejected the doctrine of equivalent
training as another strained attempt to accommodate women. It
applied only to physical requirements and only to differences
between the sexes. Short males were still expected to meet the
same standards as tall males. Effort mattered only if one were
female. Otherwise it was performance that counted.
Some requirements still embarrassed and frustrated women
despite the double standards. In those cases, it was easier to elim¬
inate the requirement than to manipulate the standards. One
such requirement was West Point’s Enduro run. The Enduro run
was a timed event requiring a cadet to run 2.5 miles wearing

combat boots an helmet and carrying a rucksack, rifle, can¬
teen, and poncho. Coming near the end of summer training for
third-class cadets, the run was the last event a cadet was required
to complete successfully to be awarded the Recondo patch.
Since the run was viewed as essentially a combat task and
women were not being trained for combat, the West Point
cadre debated over whether to devise a double standard for the
Enduro run or simply excuse female cadets from the require¬
ment. For the Class of 1980, they decided that women would
participate in the event but their performance would not be
used to determine who received the Recondo patch. Only
42 percent of the women completed the run on time, but
73 percent were awarded the Recondo patch, whereas 89 per¬
cent of the men passed the run, but only 75 percent received
the patch. Naturally, the men were not happy with the devalu¬
ation of a once-coveted award.
The next year, the academy sought to avoid the outrage of
male cadets by requiring female cadets to complete the Enduro
run to the same standards as the men. Forty-two percent of the
women of the Class of 1981 passed the Enduro run, but only
32 percent qualified for and were awarded the Recondo patch.
Ninety-seven percent of the men passed the run, and 82 per¬
cent received the patch.
In the third year of integration, the academy changed its
mind again, this time to spare female cadets the stigma of fail¬
ure by eliminating the Enduro run altogether, for both men and
women. The final official report on integration at West Point
hailed this as a good example of “the academy’s attempt to nor¬
malize physical requirements.”6 Dual for double, normalize for
lower—anything could be fixed to accommodate women if only
a suitable euphemism could be found.
The doctrine of equivalent training was bound to under¬
mine the importance of physical activity at the academies. It
held that men (but not women) were required to perform pull-
ups, not because pull-ups were of any value in themselves, but
because the academy wanted the men to exert themselves phys¬

ically—it wanted to see them sweat. Sooner or later, cadets
would have asked why they should sweat over something that
was not itself important.
Thus, before the doctrines effect could be fully felt, offi¬
cials were pushing for the preeminence of academics over all
else. Defenders of integration insisted that nothing had
changed. “Academics have never taken a backseat to military
education at the academy and certainly never should,” wrote
Rear Admiral William P. Lawrence, superintendent d(
Annapolis.' But critics like James _
Webb, a 1968 Naval Academy graduate
Each superintendent felt
and later Reagans second secretary of
the Navy, charged that making men free to dismiss long-
combat leaders had been the acade¬ established traditions and

mies’ central concern right up until the
make his academy what
admission of women. In 1979 Webb
he wanted it to be.
wrote, “Harvard and Georgetown and a
plethora of other institutions can turn
out technicians and intellectuals en masse-, only the service
academies have been able to turn out combat leaders en masse,
and they have ceased doing so.”8
The new emphasis on academics coincided with the liber¬
alization of the academic curriculum—more electives, more
courses in the humanities and social sciences, fewer courses in
military science, fewer required courses in the hard sciences,
and academic majors in fields other than engineering. At all
three academies, it also meant the end of the Order of Merit,
the age-old practice of ranking each class by academic record.
“We want to recognize that each individual has his own aca¬
demic profile,” explained West Points second superintendent
after integration, Lieutenant General Andrew Jackson
Goodpaster. “It is no longer possible to reach a high level of
competence across the board... I do not want to stereotype or
categorize a man according to a single number. Everyone has
more dimensions than that.”9
Liberalization was a boon for women, who usually per¬

formed less well & the hard sciences than the men, but it was
not initiated merely to accommodate them. The trend began
after World War II, proceeding with stops or starts for thirty
years with each change of superintendents.10 The admission of
women, however, accelerated the process precipitously by
allowing superintendents to make whatever changes they
desired. Unbound by respect for the way the academies had
always been, each superintendent felt free to make his academy
what he wanted it to be, without regard for traditions.
Goodpaster had replaced Lieutenant General Sidney B.
Berry as West Point superintendent after the first year of inte¬
gration, ostensibly to restore integrity to the academy’s educa¬
tional program after the 1976 cheating scandal. Berry had
publicly opposed integration but accepted the task of integra¬
tion with soldierly stoicism. “We have our orders, and it is our
responsibility to implement them to the best of our ability,” he
told the academy’s alumni in 1976.11
Goodpaster was another kind of soldier. Second in his class
at West Point in 1939, with two master’s degrees and a doctor¬
ate from Princeton University, he had retired as a four-star gen¬
eral in 1974 after serving as supreme allied commander in
Europe and returned to active duty to assume the superinten¬
dency in 1977. To some, he was a scholarly intellectual in the
mold of Maxwell Taylor, an ideal choice to lead the academy
through coming changes. To male cadets at West Point, he was
the kill-joy dean of the movie Animal House.
Goodpaster initiated the most sweeping reforms in West
Point’s history, many of which had little to do with academics.
To West Point alumnus James Salter, writing for Life magazine,
it was “a ruthless pruning of outmoded traditions.”12 There
were fewer parades and formations. Gym shoes replaced com¬
bat boots on morning runs, and rifle runs were much less fre¬
quent. Plebes were sent home for Christmas and were no
longer required to recite a litany of useless trivia about the
academy before being allowed to eat their fill at mealtime.
Breakfast was made optional for upperclassmen. Shouting in

plebes faces was replaced with eyeball to eyeball instructing in
a firm voice.” Mental pressure at the academy should be aca¬
demic, not abusive or demeaning, explained Goodpaster.
Academy officials passed many of these reforms off as fall¬
out from the 1976 cheating scandal, in which ninety-four third-
class cadets were expelled and forty-four resigned after a cadet
honor board found them guilty of cheating on a take-home
engineering examination. The scandal prompted a thorough
review of the cadet honor code, which critics said was unrealis-'
tically rigid. Changes were made to the code, and those who
were forced out were allowed an opportunity to reenter. Still,
the breadth of reforms instituted by Goodpaster far exceeded
expectations. Even critics of the academy’s harsh discipline
thought it was over-reacting. Cadet Timothy Ringgold, a central
figure in the scandal who had filed suit in U.S. district court to
get the honor code ruled unconstitutional, told the New York
Times in 1978, “The academy may have gone overboard on eas¬
ing military discipline.”13
The same thing was happening at the other academies,
without a cheating scandal as an excuse. At the Air Force
Academy, the doctrine of positive motivation was extended to
all cadets, not just women. At the Naval Academy, traditional
forms of harassment were losing their sanction among the offi¬
cer staff. Many were outlawed entirely. Plebes no longer
“braced up” anytime they entered Bancroft Hall, nor reported
to upperclassmen for “come-arounds.”
The common denominator among the academies was the
presence of women. Some reforms were intended specifically
to help them. Peer ratings were discontinued at the Naval
Academy when it saw that women consistently received lower
ratings than men. Without peer ratings, the selection of mid¬
shipmen for leadership positions depended entirely upon the
evaluation of the officer cadre and was thus susceptible to
manipulation to advance women. Many male midshipmen felt
that women needed only “good grades and a modicum of pro-
fessionalism,” in Tames Webb s words, to make rank at the acad¬

emy. One middre told Webb, “The academy has used a lot of
pressure to establish women as stripers. Women are groomed
from plebe year. The scary thing is that it’s creating the pre¬
sumption that women can command troops.”
Other reforms were the result of a growing feminine sensi¬
bility among academy officials. Female cadets and midshipmen
had shown little sympathy for the practice of hazing and even
less understanding of its purpose. To the women, hazing was
either a deliberate attempt to drive them from the academy or
a childish and unnecessary display of malicious machismo. As
upperclassmen,' the women never indulged in the more severe
forms of hazing. As plebes, they sometimes tearily reported
incidents of relatively mild harassment to the academy cadre.
Webb tells of one such incident in which a senior at Annapolis
ordered a female plebe to eat with oversized utensils as punish¬
ment for poor table manners. The woman cried to her room¬
mate, the roommate complained to her company commander,
and her company commander reprimanded the senior for
harassing the woman. At West Point, two third-class cadets, a
man and a woman, resigned after the woman was goaded by her
classmates into biting the head off a live chicken. At a press
conference, they denounced the sexist nature of hazing at the
academy.
Actually, biting the head off a chicken was a routine event
during survival training at West Point. After demonstrating any
of the various ways to decapitate a chicken, the instructor, usu¬
ally a noncommissioned officer, would offer a bird to the class.
In the absence of volunteers, the class often pushed forward the
most squeamish among them to do the deed. In this particular
case, the woman claimed she had been selected because her
classmates disapproved of her romantic relationship with the
cadet who later joined her in resigning.
To the press, such an event was sensational, and when
accompanied with charges of official toleration for sexist harass¬
ment, it was scandalous. “West Point Concedes Some Hazing
Tactics Have Become ‘Sexist,’” read the headlines. Goodpaster

relieved anyone’s doubts about the academy’s official line. He
denounced such sophomoric antics” as no longer appropriate,
saying the time for foolishness over the matter of women at
West Point is long past.”14
For the academies to side regularly with plebes against
upperclassmen was a serious blow to the fourth-class system.
“The whole place has been pulled down to the level of the
women,” a midshipman told Webb.
It was bad enough when the academy cadres began inter¬
fering in what were traditionally student affairs. It was worse
when uninitiated outsiders began second-guessing the deci¬
sions of duly appointed student committees. In 1978 a federal
judge in Brooklyn issued an injunction to stop the expulsion of
a West Point senior accused of fraternization with a female
plebe and lying. The following year, Secretary of the Army
Clifford L. Alexander intervened on behalf of a sophomore also
charged with fraternization and lying. Upon the recommenda¬
tion of a cadet honor committee, Goodpaster had ordered the
cadet dismissed, but Alexander countermanded the order and
had the cadet reinstated, an unprecedented act which incensed
the corps of cadets, as well as many officers at the academy.15
Like hazing, fraternization was an issue over which male
cadets and the rest of the world seemed hopelessly at odds. A
minority of men considered any social contact between male
and female cadets fraternization. Many more thought romantic
relationships between members of the same company or squad
inappropriate. Most supported a conservative interpretation of
the official policy, which defined fraternization as social or
romantic contact between upperclassmen and plebes, and
between cadets or midshipmen and members of the academy
staff.
Female cadets and midshipmen were decidedly more lib¬
eral on the issue than the men. More than a third of West Point
women favored relaxation of the ban on fraternization, while
almost none favored tighter restrictions. Those who favored the
status quo did not consider fraternization a serious offense.

Male cadets complained that women often failed to support the
ban fully by neglecting to enforce it.
Women had much more to gain from relaxing the ban on
fraternization tl\an men. With a male to female ratio of better
than nine to one, many more women than men could expect to
start both a career and a family upon graduation. Half of the
women graduating with the first integrated class at West Point
were married within a year or two of graduation, the great
majority to other academy graduates. At the Air Force
Academy, 90 percent of the women of the Class of 1980 had
been romantically involved with someone at the academy (offi¬
cer, cadet, or civilian) during their four years there. Of the first
twenty-five women to drop out of the Naval Academy Class of
1980, twenty married former midshipmen.
The academies gradually accepted the view that social rela¬
tions between the sexes were further proof of integration s suc¬
cess. Marriage had always had a stabilizing effect on male
officers, and everyone assumed that it would have the same
effect on the women. Romance in the ranks was thus seen as a
healthy social development.
The academies were looking on the bright side. As every¬
one knew, unhealthy social developments were impossible to
prevent as long as men and women lived in close quarters. The
best the academies could do was to keep them quiet. The num¬
ber of times a cadet walked into his room to find his roommate
in bed with another cadet cannot be counted. But between
1977 and 1981 the Naval Academy punished twenty-nine mid¬
shipmen of both sexes for sexual misconduct. The worst offense
was committed by five men and one woman who videotaped
themselves having intercourse in Bancroft Hall, while a crowd
of middies cheered from outside the window. A 1984 study
at the Air Force Academy found an “exceptionally high rate
of pregnancy among women cadets” and widespread concern
for what the cadets derisively called “the USAFA dating
game.”1(i
Originally, all of the academies dismissed women for

becoming pregnant. West Point and Annapolis also dismissed
men for causing a pregnancy. But the Air Force Academy, as
early as November 1977, changed its policy to allow a pregnant
female to take a leave of absence, have the baby, and then
return as a cadet in good standing. Subsequent recommenda¬
tions by the Air Force Academy staff have shown the same will¬
ingness to do anything but discourage sexual promiscuity. One
report recommended the following: a liberal dorm-room visita¬
tion policy for both sexes to stop cadets from “sneaking"
around”; mandatory courses in human
sexuality; “assertiveness training” that
_ . « i i ji ,, . , r The thoroughly feminized
must clearly address date rape from
both the male and female perspective”; service academies con-
an assault and rape hotline; widespread tinue to live by a double
dissemination of information on hospi- ^
r standard.
tal and clinic services; readily available
“contraception, rape management and
counseling, and sex education.” Such information “must be
common, firsthand knowledge to every cadet.... There is no
way we can oversaturate this information (original emphasis).”17
What no one addressed was the effect of fraternization and
sexual promiscuity on the cadets’ respect for the academies.
“All summer we were lectured about the high standards we
were expected to meet,” one midshipman told Webb. “Our
squad leaders talked about honor, performance, and account¬
ability. Then before you knew it, they were going after the
women plebes, sneaking some of them away on weekends.”
When the academies were unable or unwilling to deal effec¬
tively with such violations, the cadets turned cynical.
Sometimes it seemed as if only the male cadets were willing to
defend their academy’s honor by prosecuting other male cadets.
But aside from fraternization and sexual immorality, the
integration of women had a much more general effect on the
social nature of the academies. A new factor had entered the
equation. A force more powerful than the call of duty, the pride
of honor, or the bonds of comradeship completely reversed the

social relationships at the academies. Even self-disciplined men
could not remain indifferent. Wrote Salter:
There were women in the barracks. There were cadets with

beautiful, boyish hair; like that of a shipmate on a cruise. It
was an appeal that touched fantasies—on a clear autumn
morning or in the winter dusk, the image of a tender cheek
beneath a military cap, the trace of a smile, the womanly
figure in rough clothes....18
The men were charmed. They could never see the women
as just cadets, and they could never treat women as they treated
men. Men who remained critical of women in general could not
be so critical of individual women they had come to know. The
women were just too hard to hate. Some men could bluster
threats and insults from a distance, but when they came face to
face with the enemy, they quailed out of natural affection and
decency. If they were sticklers for equal treatment and espe¬
cially careful of themselves, the men could succeed in bringing
pressure to bear on a female plebe, but not without careful
scrutiny of their own feelings and actions, and they were never
sure if they had been too tough or too easy.
The academies were also charmed. They were no longer
the strange and cold conclaves of unsentimental militarism,
where young men first learned the pain of separation, where
love was delivered in sealed envelopes at distant intervals,
where alienation made plebes on leave feel like strangers at
home, where cadets could prepare for lives of sacrificial hard¬
ship and deprivation, where they could learn leadership and
gain confidence without the fearful disruption of suddenly
running into someone with whom they were falling in or out
of love.
Women brought the world into the academies—the world
with all its mystery, romance, jealousy, and pain, with its flirting,
and with its fumbling in a private darkness. Women were not
just one part of the world hitherto excluded, as black males had
once been; women were the world itself, they were what life
was all about. In comparison, the ancient military glory of the
academies seemed parochial and quaint, and the traditions that
attended that glory purposeless and anachronistic. Their virtue
and distinction were gone. They would never again mean as
much to those who went there. Never again would a graduate’s
last conscious thoughts be of “the Corps, and the Corps, and the
Corps.”19
“The plebe experience, in particular, was not modified in
the slightest because of women and remains as intensive today
as during my time as a plebe thirty years ago,” wrote Admiral
William P. Lawrence, superintendent of the Naval Academy,
responding in 1980 to James Webb’s charges to the contrary.20
It was the standard, official response: nothing of consequence
had changed, the women were doing everything the men were
doing, and they were doing it as well as or better than the men.
Still, those embarrassing attrition rates had to be explained.
Attrition rates for women at graduation exceeded those for men
for all classes at all of the academies, except for the Air Force
Academy classes of 1980 and 1986. No one knew why. Surveys
of those who quit revealed little, as women gave the same
answers as men. Some suggested that maybe the academies
were recruiting the wrong kind of women, or maybe women
came to the academies without an accurate expectation of what
life would be like there. West Point proposed to seek new
sources of qualified women and advise female candidates to
expect the worst.
The only other possible answer given by academy officials
was that the lack of acceptance by the men drove the women
out, and if so, “then strong negative sanctions must be enforced
to discourage this from happening.”21 Sanctions included pun¬
ishment for cadets (and officers) who voiced opposition to inte¬
gration or whose words or actions revealed sexist tendencies.
But it wasn’t enough for cadets to keep their opinions to
themselves; they had to become believers. The academies
became fervid propagandists for the very beliefs they had so

staunchly resislhd only a few years before. West Point’s
“Institutional Plans to Overcome Sexism” called for tighter con¬
trols on the gathering of data related to integration to “avoid
research activities which have sexist consequences.” It also
called for stopping publication of all documents and manuals
containing such words as “gentlemen,” “star man,” and “he.” Air
Force Academy cadets were taught the supposed “male penal¬
ties of sexist behavior (heart attacks, repressed emotions).” At
all of the academies, classes on sexism and sex-role socializa¬
tion, taught solely from the feminist perspective, were manda¬
tory. Feminism was the official orthodoxy, the measure of
morality, and if cadets or cadre were not among the faithful,
“then they’re in the wrong line of work,” warned General
Goodpaster.22
These campaigns showed a crusader’s contempt for what¬
ever beliefs the men already possessed. Like barefooted boys
from the backwoods of Borneo, cadets were assumed to be
ignorant, superstitious primitives. They were not allowed opin¬
ions, only “attitudes.” If they did not support the doctrine of
equivalent training, it was because they did not “understand” it.
If they were “helped to understand the women’s perspective,”
they would be more “open-minded” to “pluralistic beliefs” and
therefore more accepting of integration. No study produced at
any of the academies suggested that women needed to under¬
stand the male perspective, except, as mentioned earlier, on the
subject of “date rape.” Only the men needed to have their
minds changed. If they resisted, they were considered morally
defective.
It was all for naught. It only succeeded in suppressing overt
expressions of opposition to integration. The absurdities of dual
standards and equivalent training were too obvious, and the
defense of such absurdities only incited resentment, disrespect,
and cynicism, though of course cadets were smart enough to
keep such things to themselves, at least most of the time. The
Naval Academy Class of 1979 chose Omni Vir as its class motto.
The West Point Class of 1979 proudly professed to be “the last

class with balls.” A picture in The Howitzer, West Points year¬
book, showed members of that class holding a variety of balls:
footballs, baseballs, basketballs, and balls for golf, tennis, and
billiards.
Opposition to women at the academies did not end when
the Class of 1979 graduated, as many integrationists had pre¬
dicted. When Kristine Holderied received her diploma as vale¬
dictorian of the Naval Academy Class of 1984, there was only
polite applause from the crowd and the class, nothing to com-''
pare with the ovation Dean Miller received as salutatorian. The
midshipmen knew and the spectators knew who should have
been first in the class. That same year, surveys of cadets and
midshipmen revealed widespread opposition to women at all of
the academies. Administrators were shocked. Three out of five
midshipmen said women were not accepted at Annapolis. A
study group at the Air Force Academy admitted that many pre¬
conceived notions of the success of integration were “inaccu¬
rate, unfounded, misguided and/or shallow.”23
But the grip of radical feminism on the academies was too
strong for any hope of redress. The response of the Air Force
Academy was reflexive. It was interested only in redressing the
grievances of female cadets, and the solution for that was even
greater accommodation. “Are certain tasks in basic training or
some of the athletic competitions really central to the primary
goals of the academy?” one academy researcher asked. If not,
then those tasks should be eliminated because “as males
observe and learn’ that young women do not perform well in
some areas, there is an immediate decline in favorable orienta¬
tions towards women.” Other suggested solutions included
admitting more women to the academy, recruiting a “wider
range of people” with fewer traditionally-minded males, and
making “the entire academy milieu” less military, “less discon¬
tinuous” from the rest of society.24
The results of an eight-month investigation by a committee
of academy faculty members came up with similar recommen-
dations. The committee called for: a standing watchdog com¬

mittee to mee^monthly to discuss the status of integration;
classes on “power relationships” and “powerless to power bro¬
ker” to assist the “sociosexual development” of “well-adjusted
human beings”; the segregation of integrated intramural sports
to prevent men from learning the wrong things; an expanded
definition of combat that would include duties to which women
are assigned; greater emphasis in the classroom on Air Force
support functions and less emphasis on its mission to “fly and
fight”; and a crackdown on “expressing ‘anti-woman in the mil¬
itary’ feelings.” The committee s report stated, “The intent is for
everyone to be aware of potential anti-woman feelings and to
insure people do not consciously or unconsciously contribute to
it.”25 (Emphasis added.)
None of these recommendations is likely to change things
at the academies. Men and women are essentially different
both physically and psychologically. And the purpose and
nature of the academies only highlight sexual differences.
The biggest difference is that men and women do not come
to the academies with the same interest in the militarv.
J
Their
higher attrition rates, both before and after graduation, and
their consistently poorer performance in history and military
science prove that women at the academies simply do not want
to be soldiers or sailors or airmen as much as men do. Nothing
can explain why women score lower in history except that his¬
tory does not much interest them. Nothing can explain why
60 percent to 70 percent of the women at West Point score
below the mean in easy military subjects like map reading, mil¬
itary heritage, and tactics, except that they do not much want to
be soldiers.
Surveyed after graduation, many male West Point gradu¬
ates said the academy should have required more courses in
military history; none of the women made the same recom¬
mendation. Because the academies now teach less military his-
tory, officers learn most of what they know from what they have
read on their own. Because few young girls grow up reading
Landmark Classics about D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge, and

few develop such an interest later, female academy graduates
are likely to be dangerously ignorant of the history, art, science,
and psychology of war.
When the first of these women graduated from West Point,
20 percent of them had decided already that they would leave
the Army after serving their initial commitment, as opposed to
only 2 percent of their male classmates. Six years later, the attri¬
tion ratios for the women and men of the classes of 1980 were
40 percent to 25 percent for West Point graduates, 23 percent to
11 percent for Air Force Academy grad- _
uates, and 32 percent to 24 percent for The benefits of sexual
Annapolis graduates who had entered
integration of the service
the Navy. Of the first women to enter
the Marine Corps from Annapolis, academies are few.
more than half (57 percent) had left the
Corps by 1986, as opposed to only 27 percent of similar males.
Academy officials have minimized the import of these sta¬
tistics, which they say may not reflect significant trends. The
Class of 1980 was not typical of other classes because they bore
the scars of blazing the trail. Fewer men were eligible to resign
in 1986 because of extended service commitments for flight
training and other assignments. And lastly, the first women
were encouraged to expect too much from the services and may
have become disappointed as the years passed when they found
their opportunities limited by combat exclusion laws.
But ample evidence shows that differences between male
and female graduates will persist in all classes of all academies
for the foreseeable future. Interviews and surveys of West Point
graduates found that women rarely listed any positive aspect of
their West Point education except physical training; they were
more likely to say that there should be less infantry training at
West Point, and that they had more trouble as cadets dealing
with noncommissioned officers; and they were more tolerant of
unethical behavior at the academy, preferring to live and let live
in most cases.
Of life in the Army, the women were less tolerant of adverse

conditions like^mg hours and unpleasant surroundings and
much more concerned about the imposition of work on their
personal lives. When asked to talk about their jobs, three-
quarters of the jnale graduates interviewed mentioned positive
aspects of their jobs as sources of satisfaction, but less than a
quarter of the women mentioned any source of satisfaction.
Men were most likely to list “successfully completing a job, see¬
ing a job done right, completing a mission, doing a good job” as
their primary source of job satisfaction. Women were much less
likely to agree. The number one reason for job satisfaction
among womemwas “working with troops, helping troops.”
Asked about sources of “life satisfaction,” most men and
women cited marriage and family as primary sources, but in
varying degrees: 26 percent for men and 18 percent for women.
Men were next most likely to list their job (12.5 percent),
women to list travel, sports, and their job (all 7 percent). Thirty-
five percent of women officers felt negative about their Army
careers, while only 2 percent felt positive.
Marriage, which had a stabilizing effect on male officers,
had the opposite effect on female graduates of the academy. Of
those who were married within five years of graduation, almost
all married other officers. Problems with joint-domicile assign¬
ments, conflicting work schedules, and family priorities made
married life much more difficult for the women than for the
men. “Problems of spouses’ commitment seem to be much
more severe among females than males,” the surveys found.
One-third of the husbands of female graduates of West Point
did not want their wives to stay in the Army.26
Not surprisingly, children also increase dissatisfaction with
military life among women. One 1981 graduate of the Air Force
Academy had five children within five years of graduation.
Generally, the families of female graduates had fewer children
than the families of male graduates, but even one child is
enough to alter a woman’s desires for the future radically. Many
resign. Others accept less demanding assignments in order to
be with their families. When Rebecca was born, I knew I could

never go back to sea,” said Liz Belzer, now Liz Semcken, a 1980
graduate of the Naval Academy. According to her male class¬
mates, Belzer was one of the women who were “groomed for
stripes” by the academy staff. After graduation, she married a
Navy pilot of the Class of 1978 and became a surface warfare
officer because officers at the academy had convinced her that
she would excel there. She left the Navy in 1987. “To the world,
being in the first class was probably the most significant thing
I’ve done,” she said in 1985. “But in my own life, there’s no
question—its Rebecca.”27
A report by the U.S. Military Academy on the post-gradua¬
tion beliefs of male and female graduates recommended a more
sophisticated joint-domicile assignment system to relieve the
stress of family separation for “dual career couples,” and greater
career opportunities to prevent women from becoming dis¬
couraged with their careers. Some would add expanded military
child-care to the list. The report contained an admission that
was unremarkable for its truth but astounding for its frankness.
The services rarely say things so plainly:
All of these [suggested] changes are in the direction of

accommodating the Army to the officer, rather than the
other way around. Changes in the other direction, requiring
accommodation by female officers, are likely to accentuate
the negative aspects of an Army career and drive more
women out.28
The thoroughly feminized academies continue to live by a

double standard. Wherever necessary, allowance is made for
the unsuppressed girlishness of female cadets. There was a time
when uncontrollable fear was called cowardice by military men,
but now “intellectual discipline” is more important at the acad¬
emies than physical courage or discipline of any other sort. A
female first-class midshipman can flatly refuse to complete a
mandatory requirement for graduation because of her fear of a
thirty-four-foo^Jump into the water, which simulates abandon¬

ing ship. One woman who did so was granted a waiver, allowed
to graduate, and commissioned as an unrestricted line officer in
the United States Navy.
The benefits of sexual integration of the service academies
are few. “The place looks quieter,” one observer has said.
Others have spoken of an improvement in the quality of stu¬
dents. Todays cadets and midshipmen are cleaner, better
behaved, and more refined than the brutes of yesteryear. “If
there was one thing that was irrelevant to my preparation for
combat it was refinement,” Webb wrote. As secretary of the
Navy, Webb directed that Naval Academy graduates on orders
to the Marine Corps will attend “Bulldog” training, formerly
required only of Marine officers from other sources of commis¬
sion. His concern was that Marine officers needed to develop a
certain toughness they no longer develop at the Naval
Academy.
There were women at the academies who, like Webb,
wished the academies still prepared cadets and midshipmen for
combat. They were ambitious women who were not happy with
the combat exclusions. In 1981, when an admiral at the Naval
Academy, speaking to an assembly of midshipmen, told a
female middie why women were excluded from combat, the
woman interjected, “Maybe women shouldn’t be here at all!”29
The mostly male assembly responded with vigorous and sus¬
tained applause. The Class of 1979 was not the last class with
balls after all.
•V
Chapter 5
DAMN THE SERVICES,

FULL SPEED AHEAD
The first quality of a soldier is the ability to support

fatigue and privations.... Poverty, privation, and
misery are the school of the good soldier.
—NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
ON AUGUST 18, 1976, a detail of American soldiers was prun¬

ing a tree in the Joint Security Area separating North and South
Korea when they were suddenly attacked by a truckload of axe-
wielding North Korean guards. Two American officers were
killed. Nine other soldiers were wounded.
An appropriate response to the attack was hotly debated at
all levels. “There was no question in the minds of anybody in
Korea that we had decided to take limited military action,”
recalls Major General John K. Singlaub, then chief of staff of
U.S. forces in Korea. Neither was there any doubt that a mili¬
tary response, however limited, might be misinterpreted by the
North. While the White House weighed the risk of provocation
with the necessity for some show of force, United Nations
forces in South Korea prepared for the worst. Ground units
assembled and moved forward into battle positions, and air
forces were called in from Alaska and Japan. On the night of
August 20, UN forces in Korea stood at DEFCON 1, with

B-52s winging ther^way toward the North Korean capital, fight¬
ers warming their engines on the runway, and helicopter gun-
ships hovering above the border. “We had rounds up the spout
and hands on the lanyards, and every weapon had a target,” says
Singlaub. For all that anyone in the ranks knew, they were going
to war.
Early on the morning of August 21, American soldiers cut
down the half-pruned tree and dismantled a few unoccupied
shacks built by the North Koreans in the Joint Security Area.
The timid response provoked no one, and the emergency soon
passed, but not before U.S. Army commanders observed a dis¬
turbing reaction among their troops. As soon as it became clear
that the alert was no ordinary training exercise, commanders
throughout Korea were flooded with requests from female sol¬
diers for transfers to the rear. War was more than these women
had bargained for when they had joined the Army. Most fully
expected to be evacuated in the event of hostilities, but when
the question was raised at higher headquarters, Singlaub nixed
the idea immediately and ordered all soldiers to their posts.
Later, when the emergency was over, Singlaub learned that
his order had not been strictly obeyed. Many women had aban¬
doned their posts near the border and headed south on their
own. Some turned up later in units well to the rear. Others
reported for duty with dependent children in tow, since their
arrangements for child-care did not cover the event of war. In
some instances, male noncommissioned officers had left their
posts temporarily to tend to the safety of their wives and girl¬
friends in other units.
The Korean emergency dramatized the growing concern
among commanders in the field about the presence of women
in the ranks. Four years after the marriage of the All-Volunteer
Force (AVF) to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the hon¬
eymoon was over and the debilitating effects of integration had
begun to show. Social and sexual relationships between male
and female service members defied bans on fraternization
' V
I
DAMN THE SERVICES, FULL SPEED AHEAD • 79
between ranks. Marriages between service members were on

the rise. Incidents of sexual assault soared. For the first time
ever, commanders and supervisors throughout the services
were confronting problems with sexual harassment, dating,
pregnancy, single parenthood, in-service couples, and joint
domicile. Most had never served with women and were just
beginning to learn the vastly different art of managing women.
Their knowledge and experience as leaders of men were of lit¬
tle use.
In December 1976 the Army completed the first of several'
studies of the problems relating to integration. The report, enti¬
tled simply Women in the Army, drew much criticism from pro¬
ponents of integration, for while it identified and explored most
of the problems caused or aggravated by the presence of
women in the ranks, it did not compare the advantages and dis¬
advantages of women versus men. One whole chapter discussed
problems caused by pregnancy among Army women, but there
was no discussion of the disciplinary problems caused by men,
though it was widely known that men presented much higher
rates of indiscipline.
Worse was the reports timing. Jimmy Carter had just
defeated Gerald Ford in the race for the presidency, and no
study, however valid, would have altered the president-elects
commitment to the feminist movement. “I am fully committed
to equality between men and women in every area of govern¬
ment and in every aspect of life,” declared candidate Carter in
July 1976. As president, he recited the same oath of commit¬
ment to securing for women “every choice” and an “equal role”
whenever the occasion, and the women around him called for
him to do so.
The Carter administration vigorously supported any pro¬
gram that White House feminists thought would advance their
cause, from special federal grants to schools that provided “non¬
sexist” education and girls football teams, to programs under
the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA)
that trained and encouraged women to become plumbers and
welders instead of secretaries or nurses. The president and

First Lady also todk a very active role in pushing the states to
ratify the stalled ERA, so much so that Phyllis Schlafly accused
the Carters of violating the constitutional doctrine of separation
of powers. The Carters personally telephoned pro-ERA state
legislative leaders ,to offer encouragement and sometimes to
dangle federal funds as a lure for ratification. When these
efforts failed and time ran%out on the proposed amendment,
Carter met monthly with pro-ERA leaders to plan strategy to
win an extension.
Feminists could not have asked for a more loyal president,
but they might have asked for a more effective one. Carters
biggest help to their cause was his personal program of affirma¬
tive action whereby he appointed women, always ardent femi¬
nists, to high-level government positions. Of his 2,110 political
appointments, 22 percent went to women, including twenty-
eight federal judges, four cabinet heads, three undersecretaries,
twenty assistant secretaries, five heads of federal agencies, and
thirteen ambassadors. Heading up this network of federal fem¬
inists was Sarah Weddington, special assistant to the president
for womens affairs, chairwoman of the Interdepartmental Task
Force on Women, and publisher of a newsletter touting admin¬
istration achievements for women and of a network directory.
Your Guide to More Than 400 Top Women in the Federal
Government.
The Defense Department was by no means exempt from
the infiltration of feminists. Those near the top in the Pentagon
included: Kathleen Carpenter as deputy assistant secretary of
defense for equal opportunity; Deanne Siemer as Defense
Department general counsel; Antonia Handler Chayes as
undersecretary of the Air Force for manpower, reserve affairs,
and installations; Jill Wine Volner and Sara Elisabeth Lister as
general counsel of the Army; Mitzi M. Wertheim as deputy
undersecretary of the Navy; Patricia A. Szervo as deputy gen¬
eral counsel of the Navy; and Mary M. Snavely-Dixon as deputy
assistant secretary of the Navy for manpower. None of the
above had ever served in the military. Most had no connection

with the Defense Department before 1977. All were commit¬
ted to expanding opportunities for military women even if it
meant drafting women for combat.
Not all feminists in the Pentagon were women, however.
Both Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and Secretary of the
Army Clifford J. Alexander, Jr., distinguished themselves by
expanding the prerogatives and privileges of military women.
One week after taking office. Secretary Brown ordered an
appraisal of women in the services. The task fell to another man''
much impressed with modem women,
Navy Commander Richard W. Hunter.
The honeymoon was over,
In the course of his study, Hunter con¬
sulted Martin Binkin and Shirley Bach, and the debilitating
who were already at work on an inde¬ effects of integration had
pendent study of the same issue. Binkin
begun to show.
was a fellow at the Brookings Institu¬
tion, a liberal think tank in Washington,
D.C., for which Hunter had worked in the early 1970s while on
loan from the Navy. Bach was a lieutenant colonel on loan to
Brookings from the Air Force. Their study, though unfinished,
had piqued the interest of the new civilian chiefs in the
Pentagon, for they already knew that the study would conclude
that the services could make greater use of women.
Based largely upon the findings of Binkin and Bach,
Hunters report, entitled Use of Women in the Military, reduced
the entire issue to a simple matter of cost and quality. High-
quality female recruits were less expensive to attract than high-
quality male recruits, wrote Hunter, and were more desirable
than low-quality males. So, to save money and improve the
quality of the enlisted force, the services should recmit more
women and fewer men. Hunter figured the services could save
$1 billion annually by 1982 by doubling the number of women
in service. Only two factors might limit the number of women
the services could employ: women were physically weaker than
men and were excluded from combat. All other arguments
against employing more women were dismissed as “centered on

emotionalism” or ^supported by unsubstantiated generalities,
or isolated examples.”1
The Hunter study gave the Defense Department the green
light to expand the number of women in the services, but the
study that laid the foundation for all future arguments for
women in the military was Binkin and Bachs Women and the
Military, published by the Brookings Institution later in 1977.
The study invalidated a crucial assumption of the Gates
■Commission—that the population of enlistment-eligible men
would increase through the 1970s. Binkin and Bach showed
that it had already begun a long decline which would continue
into the 1990s. The post-World War II baby boomers were
moving out of the ages of eligibility. If the AVF needed to
attract one in eleven eligible males in 1977 to maintain a force
of two million plus, by 1992 it would need to attract one in
eight. On that fact alone, the study concluded that the AVF
would be forced to make greater and greater use of women to
sustain current levels of manning.2
Another important contribution of Binkin and Bach to die
integrationist argument concerned the issue of how many
women could be absorbed by the services without degrading
their ability to accomplish their missions. Given that the mili¬
tary was becoming increasingly dependent upon technology
and that the ratio of combat troops to support troops was
shrinking, Binkin and Bach figured that women could fill more
than 600,000 positions—almost a third of all military jobs—
without harmful effect. On the other hand, the statutoiy ban on
women in combat and at sea and the number of women inter¬
ested in military service made that level of participation unat¬
tainable. Binkin and Bach suggested 22 percent as a more
realistic level.
Binkin and Bach also argued that women were cheaper to
attract, more intelligent, and better behaved than most men.
Female recruits scored higher on entrance tests and were more
likely to have finished high school and to have had some col-
lege- They were also generally older and much less prone to dis¬
ciplinary problems than men. All of which, argued Binkin and
Bach, made them a better investment of defense dollars and
better qualified for many of the more technical jobs in the mod¬
em military, in which brains were assumed to be more impor¬
tant than brawn.
But the Binkin and Bach study did have its faults. The
authors wrongly assumed that the mental quality of female
recruits would remain the same no matter how many women
were recruited. Later studies would find that as the number of
female recruits increased, their “quality” dropped precipitously.
When the services were forced to equalize entrance standards
for men and women, the advantages of recruiting women over
men evaporated. Four years after publication of the Brookings
study, women were still older, better behaved, and more likely
to have high school diplomas, but test scores had evened out,
and dramatically higher rates of attrition among low-quality
women made men the better investment.
Naturally the study gave short shrift to all objections to inte¬
gration. A single chapter handled the problems of attrition,
pregnancy, menstruation, physical strength, fraternization,
emotional and psychological differences, effects on group per¬
formance, and the military’s prestige abroad. The study did not
touch on the impact of single parents and in-service couples on
the services. It did not substantiate the assumption that tech-
nology had alleviated the need for physical strength in the many
jobs that women were supposed to fill. It ignored evidence that
the greater aggressiveness of men is rooted in biology and not
solely the product of socialization. It doubted that women inter¬
fered with male-bonding in groups, noting that terrorist groups
enjoyed intense camaraderie despite the inclusion of female
terrorists, a worthwhile observation only if the minds of Carlos
the Jackal and G.I. Joe were more similar.
Most problems mentioned in the study were dismissed sim¬
ply for lack of documented evidence that they actually existed.
Again and again the authors confronted the limitations of social
science: "Virtually no information is available... evidence is far

from conclusive... largely unknown... inadequately researched
and poorly understood.’’ An exclusive reliance upon the work of
other sociologists led to absurd admissions of ignorance when
common sense would have sufficed. "Precious little is known
about the effects of combining men and women,” the authors
wrote. But such holes of knowledge did not prevent Binkin and
Bach from drawing optimistic conclusions about the use of
women by the services. Though Binkin now insists the study
was meant to determine how many women the services could
employ given the combat exclusion policies, not to recommend
how many womeji the services should employ, most of those
who used the study never made that distinction.
In the years following the publication of the Binkin and
Bach study, the Carter Pentagon tried to “paper over” the holes
of knowledge with tests and studies showing the apparent abil¬
ity of women to perform all kinds of tasks without degrading
unit performance. The Army led the way in 1977 with two tests
of women in combat support units in a field environment. The
first test, called MAX WAC, lasted only three days, hardly
enough time to evaluate any unit for any purpose properly. The
second test, called REF WAC 77, lasted ten days and employed
fifty “observers” to evaluate the effects of integration during
RE-FORGER operations in West Germany. A number of diffi¬
culties were observed during the test. First, 29 percent of the
women assigned to units scheduled to participate in the test
were excused from going to the field for “personal reasons,” as
opposed to 15 percent of the men. Many of the women who did
participate were not required to perform much of the physical
labor of loading and unloading trucks and setting up and tear¬
ing down equipment. The women complained about the
absence of shower facilities and disliked using field-expedient
slit-trench latrines. Some refused to leave their tents at night
for fear of the dark. Male coworkers resented doing the
women’s share of heavy lifting and dirty work, and most super¬
visors identified eighteen support specialties as being too phys-
ically demanding for women. Still, the official bottom line of

both MAX WAC and REF WAC was that no evidence had been
found that women worsened the performance of units in the
field.
Another test designed to support the Carter administra¬
tion’s policy of expansion was the Army’s Female Artillery Study
conducted in 1979. Thirteen handpicked female volunteers, all
over 110 pounds, were given extensive physical conditioning
and additional training and were then tested on their ability as
gun crews to meet standard rates of fire for 105mm and 155mm,
howitzers. The study’s conclusion, as summarized later by the
Department of Defense, was that the women “showed the abil¬
ity and aptitude to perform all the artillery assignments given
them,.”3 (Emphasis added.) In other words, the women achieved
the standard rates of fire.
If achieving minimum standard rates of fire were all that
gun crews are required to do, the Army’s artillery study might
have served a legitimate purpose. But gun crews are tested on
their ability to do much more. One common task is called a
“hipshoot.” A battery on the move is suddenly ordered to stop
and fire a few rounds down range. Each crew must hurriedly
emplace the gun, unload the ammunition, fire the mission, and
pack it all back up. Speed is essential, and physical strength is a
must. The women were not required to emplace or move their
guns, or even to unload their ammunition. They were tested
only on their ability to adjust elevation and deflection by means
of a handcrank, load a round into the breech, close the breech
block, and pull the lanyard. The test was conducted under ideal
conditions, without the strain of combat or fatigue or simple
boredom. Even so, only pairs of the tallest women were able to
perform the test’s most difficult task, loading the ninety-five
pound projectile into the breech of the 155mm howitzer.
The artillery test’s limited scope enabled the Carter
Pentagon to marvel at yet another demonstration of female
ability and to help persuade Congress to repeal the combat
exclusion laws. Armed with a battery of such studies, Secretary
of Defense Harold Brown, in 1978, ordered the services to dou¬

ble the number of^vomen in uniform to 200,000—11 percent
of the total force—by 1983. The following year, 1979, the goal
was raised to 236,000 by 1984 and 265,500 by 1987. This meant
99,000 women for the Army, 53,700 women for the Navy, 9,600
for the Marine Corps, and 103,200 for the Air Force. The Air
Force would have both the most women and the highest per¬
centage of women: 18.7 percent.
The Air Force presented the least resistance to expansion.
Only 10 percent of all Air Force personnel billets were closed
to women under Section 8549, Title 10, U.S. Code, which pro¬
hibited Air Force^women from flying combat missions. Fewer
jobs in the Air Force than in the other services involved physi¬
cally demanding work, and most jobs had a relatively pleasant
work environment. Not surprisingly, it had the least difficulty
attracting female recruits. From 1977 to 1980 the Air Force
added twenty thousand women to its rolls, a 50 percent
increase. By 1981 women made up 11 percent of the Air Forces
enlisted force and 9 percent of its officer corps.
Most advances for Air Force women under the Carter
administration affected only officers. Since women were barred
by Title 10 from flying combat missions, the Air Force had not
trained women for flight duty. The Carter administration
quickly persuaded the Air Force to change its mind and begin
training female officers as both pilots and navigators. The Air
Force also began assigning women to all-female Titan II missile
crews and was under pressure to open Minuteman crews to
women.
In the rush for expansion, the Air Force disappointed the
Carter administration only once. In 1979 it closed the security
specialist field to women after a three-year test program
showed exceptionally high rates of attrition among female secu¬
rity specialists. Less than half of the women admitted to the
field remained after one year, compared to 71 percent of the
men. The closing brought howls of protest from administration
feminists, but the field was not reopened until 1982, by the
Reagan administration.
Unlike the Air Force, the Navy presented formidable obsta¬
cles to increasing its number of women. From 1972 to 1977 the
number of enlisted women in the Navy had already more than
tripled. Since Section 6015, Title 10, U.S7 Code, barred Navy
women from serving aboard ship, they were concentrated in the
Navys “rotational base” of shore billets. This meant fewer bil¬
lets open to Navy men when they returned from sea duty and
therefore more time at sea. The Carter administration’s solution ■
was to open sea duty to women.
The Navy had experimented with
As the number of female
women aboard ship before. In 1972 the
unconventional Admiral Elmo R. recruits increased, their
Zumwalt, then chief of naval opera¬ “quality” dropped
tions, authored the notorious “Z-
precipitously.
grams,” which ordered sweeping
changes in the Navy way of doing
things. The promulgation of Z-gram 116 would open the door
for Navy women to a host of opportunities in the civil engineers’
corps, the chaplains’ corps, naval ROTC, and command of
shore units. Z-gram 116 also initiated an experiment involving
424 Navy men and 53 thoroughly screened volunteer Navy
women aboard the hospital ship Sanctuary. Publicly, the Navy
claimed the test went very well, but press reports and the
Navy’s own official report told another story. The ship was
under way for only forty-two days of the four hundred-day test,
and while the women performed most of their shipboard duties
well, they often required the assistance of men to perform phys¬
ically demanding tasks. Romantic relationships developed
between crew members, several women became pregnant, and
public displays of affection, or PDA, were demoralizingly com¬
mon. “The situation was becoming serious and was definitely
detrimental to the good order and discipline of the ship’s com¬
pany,” reported the ship’s commanding officer. A ban on PDA
was announced, and the ship’s company assumed a more pro-
fessional appearance, which satisfied the commanding officer

that all was well.4 fv
The Navy itself, however, was not so easily satisfied. Many
senior officers, including the director of the Womens Naval
Reserve, doubted whether the Sanctuary experiment proved
anything except that putting women on ships would cause prob¬
lems that the captains could very well do without. A command¬
ing officer also had to consider the reaction of Navy wives,
many of whom were opposed to women on ships for obvious
reasons. It seems that everyone, except Martin Binkin and
Shirley Bach, knew enough about men and women to predict
what would happen on a sunny cruise through the South
Pacific. The Sanctuary spent most of its time in port as a float¬
ing dispensary before being quietly decommissioned in 1975.
To the Carter administration, however, no inconvenience
justified limiting the opportunities of a handful of women. In
1977, to make room for more women, the Department of the
Navy sponsored an amendment to Title 10 to permit women to
serve permanently aboard noncombat ships such as hospital,
transport, and supply ships, and temporarily (up to six months)
aboard all other ships. In 1978 the amendment was added to
the Defense Authorization Act of 1979, which was still under
consideration by Congress when a federal district court in
Washington, D.C., threatened to preempt the democratic
process by judicial fiat. In the case of Owens v. Brown, a group
of Navy women seeking assignment aboard ship brought a
class-action suit against the Department of Defense. In July
1978 Judge John J. Sirica of Watergate fame ruled that the
statutory ban on women at sea wrongly denied women their
right of equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of
the U.S. Constitution. The ban, wrote Sirica, “tends to suggest
a statutory purpose more related to the traditional way of think¬
ing than to the demands of military preparedness.” His assump¬
tion was that traditional ways of thinking about the sexes never
justified democratic legislation and were always unconstitu¬
tional. Sirica dismissed all practical reasons for wanting to keep
women off ships, saying, “whatever problems might arise from

integrating shipboard crews are matters that can be dealt with
through appropriate training and planning.” He stopped short
of ordering the Navy to integrate its ships, however, noting
imminent approval of pending legislation.
In the summer of 1978 Admiral James L. Holloway, Chief
of Naval Operations, issued a call for Navy women to volunteer
for sea duty, and in November, the first female sailors were
piped aboard the repair ship Vulcan. Within a year, the Vulcan
was christened the “Love Boat” by the press, when three preg-/'
nant sailors were returned to shore before the ship had even
put to sea.
The Navys female enlisted strength increased 53 percent
from 1977 to 1980. Very few of them volunteered for sea duty.
Later, when the call for volunteers failed to provide as many
enlisted women as the Navy had hoped, the Navy was forced to
send women to sea involuntarily.
In the same three years, the Marine Corps’ female enlisted
strength almost doubled, though the number of women
Marines remained relatively small. Since a greater proportion
of Marines were considered combat troops and Marine units
went to sea aboard combat ships, the Marine Corps was better
able to defend its desire to keep down the total number of
women. By 1980 women still made up only 3.7 percent of
enlisted Marines and 2.7 percent of officers, the lowest levels
among the services.
The Army, however, was in some ways more vulnerable to
expansion than even the Air Force. No law excluded Army
women from combat. When the exclusion laws were written in
1948, the authors could easily keep Navy and Air Force women
out of combat by keeping them off ships and aircraft, but they
could not decide where to draw the line with the Army. That task
was left to the secretary of the Army, with the understanding that
Congress intended combat to be off-limits to women. For
twenty-five years, the Army had lived by the understanding, mak¬
ing sure women were kept as far as possible from the battlefield.
The influx of women into the Army in the early 1970s

forced women inti'* many jobs and units previously closed to
them, so that by the time of the Korean emergency in 1976,
women were already serving in units which operated regularly
within the wartime “combat zone,” defined by Army doctrine as
anywhere forward of the rear boundary of a corps in the field.
But when the Carter administration proposed further increases
in the number of women, Army leaders balked, raising the issue
of combat. Soon calls came from Carter appointees in the
Department of the Army and the Defense Department for a
new definition of the word combat. War had changed, said
many who had never known it. There were no more friendly
lines or enemy lines, they argued; the modem battlefield was
much more fluid.
Did this mean that the Army needed a broader, more inclu¬
sive definition of combat? Or that units which once operated
safely behind friendly lines should be closed to women because
they were now endangered by the fluid nature of modem com¬
bat? On the contrary, the same civilians who argued that war
was now more fluid also argued that war was now more techni¬
cal, more tidy, and thus more suitable for women. Modem
war meant pushing buttons in an air-conditioned bunker.
Since decades of typing orders had proved that women could
push buttons as well as men, the new definition of combat, said
the activists, must allow for expanding the role of women in
the Army.
To do so, the definition of combat was narrowed drastically.
It no longer made any reference to boundaries or distances. It
had nothing to do with where one was in relation to the enemy
or how close to the fighting. The single definitive factor of the
new term combat was an individual or units primary duty or
mission. If a soldiers primary duty was to engage the enemy
with lethal force, he was considered a combat soldier; a unit
with the same primary mission was designated a combat unit.
As for women, the Army’s new combat exclusion policy stated:
“Women will be excluded from units and positions which have
as their primary mission or function crewing or operating direct

or indirect fire weapons.”5 This policy allowed the Army to
make the widest possible use of women while still pretending
that congressional intent and the will of the American people
protected them from combat.
The only issue remaining concerned the size of the unit to
be included in combat. Infantry and armored divisions could
have been considered combat units, as indeed they always had
been, because they exist only to maneuver against and engage
the enemy. On the other hand, the Army’s 1978 Evaluation of
Women in the Army (EWITA), interested primarily in expand-
ing opportunities for women, defined a unit as any element
company-size or smaller and recommended opening thousands
of positions in maneuver battalions, excluding women from only
20 of the Army’s 350 Military Occupation Specialties (MOS).
The Army ultimately decided to bar women from combat units
battalion-sized and smaller, a policy so liberal that if it had been
in effect in World War II, women would have parachuted into
Normandy.
During the Carter years, the Army’s female enlisted
strength increased 40 percent. At the end of 1980 the Army had
more women than any other service, with 61,351 enlisted
women (9.1 percent of its enlisted strength) and 7,609 female
officers. Some support units were as much as 40 percent
female.
By now, only 4 percent of enlisted specialties were closed to
women by the new combat exclusion policy, with no limits on
the number of women who could enlist. Potential female
recruits were encouraged to select nontraditional career fields,
and many were steered into a nontraditional MOS when they
were told that their first choice was not available. The deactiva¬
tion of the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1978 and the
administrative integration of women into the regular Army
brought Army women as close as they have ever come toward
absolute equality with Army men. Even basic training was inte¬
grated at the squad level.
The Army would have added even more women if it had

been able to recruitithem. It was the only service that failed to
meet the Carter administration’s recruitment quotas for
women. Since high-quality women were not as easy to attract as
Binkin and Bach had predicted, the Army twice lowered its
standards for female recruits. In 1979, after Army General
Counsel Jill Wine Volner settled out of court a suit brought by
the American Civil LibertiesxUnion (ACLU), the Army equal¬
ized entrance standards for men and women, dropping the
requirement for women to have a high-school diploma. It also
made available to women special enlistment options like the
buddy plan, whicji allowed three or four recruits to enlist
together for the same training and assignment.
Recruiting barely improved. The Army fell short of its quo¬
tas for women in three consecutive years, from 1978 to 1980. It
achieved 91.5 percent of its 1979 goal and 95 percent of its 1980
goal, once it began accepting women without high school diplo¬
mas. Later, the Army realized that its attempts to channel
women into nontraditional jobs had turned many women away.
Women of both high and low quality preferred jobs with no
heavy lifting, no dirty fingernails, no days in the motor pool, no
rainy nights in the field. Of all the services except the Marine
Corps, the Army had more to offer of just such discomforts, and
the recruiters pitch could hide only so much.
Nevertheless, the ease with which the Army, unhindered by
Title 10, was able to make room for women was an inspiration
to womens rights activists in the Pentagon. As early as February
1978 the Defense Department formulated a proposal to repeal
the statutory combat exclusions. In May 1979 Deanne Siemer,
the Defense Departments general counsel, sent a letter to
Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, Speaker of the House of Representa¬
tives, offering to submit legislation to amend Title 10 and repeal
the combat exclusions. The offer was later backed by Defense
Secretary Harold Brown.
Much had changed since 1967, when Congress and the
Department of Defense had assured each other that having
women in the services would not mean sending them into com¬
bat. And even in 1979 the ultimate goal of feminists in the
Pentagon—putting women in the infantry—was too much for
Congress and the general public. The request for repeal was
draped with assurances that women would not be placed in
direct combat roles; it would only grant the secretaries of the
Navy and the Air Force the same authority already vested in the
secretary of the Army.
During hearings held in November 1979 Defense Depart¬
ment representatives testified that the need to provide greater '
“flexibility and efficiency” in the use of _
military manpower was the primary The Army’s women-in-
reason for requesting repeal, although
combat policy is so liberal
repeal was also a matter of fairness and
equality. that, if it had been in
The weight of testimony, and the effect in WWII, women
persons giving it, suggest that tilings
would have parachuted
were actually the other way around.
into Normandy.
Anytime the Defense Department is
allied with the ACLU, something is
likely to be wrong. The Defense Departments Kathleen
Carpenter, deputy assistant secretary of defense for equal oppor¬
tunity, had earned a reputation as “the unguided missile” of the
Defense Department. Carpenter once told author George Gilder
in an interview that “while men have greater upper-body
strength, women have greater midsection strength,” so the ser¬
vices were restructuring jobs to make better use of the female
midsection, thereby “enriching the work experience for all.”6
Flexibility and efficiency received only brief mention
before being abandoned in favor of an endless refrain of
careerism and equality. “There must be policy changes to assure
women that they can satisfy personal career goals and ambitions
by moving up the ladder to senior management,” argued
Antonia Flandler Chayes, undersecretary of the Air Force.
“What we achieve by barring women from combat roles is an
obstacle to career advancement.”7
On the other side of the issue was a hastily organized bat¬

tery of witnesses ^called to arms in just four days by Phyllis
Schlaflys Eagle Forum, the organization that had led the STOP
ERA movement. Besides Schlafly herself and retired Army
Brigadier General Andrew J. Gatsis, Eagle Forums military
advisor, witnesses against repeal of the combat exclusions
included General William C. Westmoreland, former Army
Chief of Staff; Admiral Jeremiah A. Denton, Jr., a former pris¬
oner of war in Vietnam and future senator from Alabama; Dr.
Harold M. Voth, a psychiatrist with the Menniger Foundation
and an admiral in the Naval Reserve; and Brigadier General
Elizabeth P. Hoisington, a former director of the WAC.
Dismissing the supposed need for flexible and efficient use
of manpower as a fig leaf for the feminist agenda, Schlaflys wit¬
nesses concentrated their fire on the issue of women in combat.
They repeatedly referred in their testimony to James Webbs
article Women Can’t Fight,” which had just appeared in the
November issue of The Washingtonian magazine. Of the Carter
administrations efforts to prove that women could fight,
Hoisington said, “Studies cannot duplicate the realism of battle
in a Vietnam jungle, in the cold Korean hills, the trauma from
killing or witnessing death and terrible wounds.”8 Mrs. Schlafly
targeted the politics behind the Defense Department’s cam¬
paign for sexual equality. “What a way to run the armed forces!”
she said. ‘AVe must be the laughing stock of the world.”9
The subcommittee closed the book on the request for
repeal. The antirepeal side had won, but they would not know
how important their victory was until two years later.
Undaunted, the Carter administration tried again
O
in
January 1980. Two events—the takeover of the American
embassy in Teheran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan—
caused the Carter administration its first serious concern for the
nation’s security. In his 1980 State of the Union address,
President Carter called for registering young men for selective
service. When the request went forward to Congress one week
later, the legislation included young women on an equal basis
with young men. In defense of the request, Carter stated,

There is no distinction possible, on the basis of ability or per¬
formance, that would allow me to exclude women from an
obligation to register.... My decision to register women is a
recognition of the reality that both men and women are work¬
ing members of our society.”
Having just heard numerous witnesses denounce the
Carter administration’s understanding of women and war, the
House Armed Services Committee defeated by voice vote a
motion to include women in the bill.
In the Senate, however, feminist activists pressured Senator
Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas to sponsor an amendment to
include women in the Senate version of the bill, but before the
Senate could hold hearings on the bill, Schlafly’s Eagle Forum
had formed the Coalition Against Drafting Women, consisting
of prominent military, religious, and civic leaders, and had col¬
lected 200,000 signatures on “Don’t Draft Women” petitions.10
The inclusion of women found more friends in the Senate
but not enough. After hearings and debate, the Kassebaum
amendment was defeated fifty-one to forty in June 1980.11
Both the ACLU and NOW had testified in favor of requir¬
ing women to register. Although both opposed registration and
the draft on principle, they regarded a men-only draft as a
greater evil. The difference, they said, was between a law that
was evenly unjust and one that was unevenly unjust. When a
men-only registration law was enacted, the ACLU assembled
sixteen draft-age males to file a class-action suit in federal court
challenging the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that
it discriminated on the basis of sex. Not to be outflanked, Eagle
Forum assembled sixteen draft-age women, who opposed a
genderless draft and petitioned the same court for the opportu¬
nity to present opposing arguments.
Then, to everyone’s surprise, a federal district court in
Philadelphia exhumed a ten-year-old unresolved suit involving
two men who had challenged the constitutionality of the draft
law in 1971, using the same argument of sex discrimination.
The suit had been tabled by the court when the draft was dis¬
continued in 1973 tnd had remained inactive until 1980, when
draft registration resumed. In July the three-judge panel in
Philadelphia ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, and the case of
Rostker v. Goldberg was brought to the U.S. Supreme Court on
appeal.
The defense of the men-only registration law before the
Supreme Court was officially the responsibility of the Justice
Department, which, under the Carter administration, was less
than enthusiastic about the task. U.S. News b World Report
noted that “some Justice Department officials hope the
Supreme Court strikes down the draft-registration law that
their agency is formally defending.’ Defense of the law fell
upon the brief of Eagle Forums sixteen young women, filed by
eminent constitutional lawyer Nathan Lewin as an amicus
curiae.
NOW filed its own amicus brief calling the men-only draft
law blatant and harmful discrimination” against women. The
NOW brief held nothing back, however implausible. Excluding
women from the draft, NOW argued, deprives women of “polit¬
ically maturing experiences,” consigns women to a second-class
status, increases “the incidence of rape and domestic violence,”
and ‘causes harm to women by increasing the prospect of vio¬
lence in their daily lives.”
With the fate of all future generations of American women
in the balance, the nation’s media were conspicuously silent.
Only the Washington Post seemed interested. Members of
Congress showed greater concern. While the Court deliber¬
ated, they moved to fix the case by proposing legislation to with-
(h aw jurisdiction from all federal courts over laws and
regulations treating men and women differently with regard to
military service. A finding against the government might have
inspired the first serious check of judicial power in the history
of the Constitution.
In June 1981 the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s
decision and ruled that the men-only registration law was con-
stitutional. The majority opinion written by Justice William

Rehnquist reasoned that men and women were “not similarly
situated because women were barred from combat by Title 10
of the U.S. Code. A dissenting opinion filed by Justice Byron
White, joined by Justice William Brennan, argued that men and
women were similarly situated with regard to noncombat posi¬
tions that would also have been filled by a draft.12
To feminists, the ruling was “tragic” and “outrageous.” The
ACLU called it “a devastating loss for womens rights and civil
rights generally.” Eleanor Smeal, then president of NOW, said '
the Court had “taken away our voice of protest. We can’t even
say, ‘Hell no, we won’t go.’”
To Phyllis Schlafly and the unbeatable Eagle Forum, it was
another brilliant victory, but one which, to their surprise,
hinged upon their earlier victory against repeal of the combat
exclusion laws. No one had guessed that the desire of a tiny
minority of female officers to fill combat slots in peacetime
would have made all women subject to compulsory military ser¬
vice and possibly combat duty in time of war.
•
Chapter 6
DACOWITS 1, ARMY 0
Our Army is not a “corporation.” Defending this

nation is not an “occupation.” And being a soldier
is not a “job.” There is no other business firm any¬
where that has, as its foremost objective, the
requirement to fight and win the land battle.
—COLONEL DANDRIDGE MALONE,

AN ARMY OF EXCELLENCE
IN EARLY NOVEMBER 1980, Ranger Class 2-81 bid good-bye

to the world and disappeared into the woods of Fort Benning,
Georgia. The class was composed of a few junior enlisted men
assigned to the Army’s two Ranger battalions and many more
brand-new second lieutenants, mostly infantrymen and West
Point graduates of the Class of 1980. For the next three months,
they would have no rank, no names, no rest, and nearly no news
from the outside.
At ten o’clock in the evening of the first long day the class
was struggling to stay alert after hours of classroom instruction in
patrolling when a bull-faced Ranger instructor stepped forward
and announced that Ronald Reagan had just defeated Jimmy
Carter in the presidential election. The class erupted into a riot
of fist-pounding, boot-stomping, hat-throwing, war-whooping
joy. While their instructors stood by grinning, the would-be

Ranger lieutenaf&s and privates abandoned military courtesy and
classroom decorum to join each other in cheering the defeat of
their commander-in-chief.
No president before him earned less respect from the uni¬
formed men than Jimmy Carter. From the top down, the
American military disliked Carter for his weak personal bear¬
ing, timid foreign policy, opposition to defense improvements,
and putting politics before military preparedness. At last, the
chiefs of staff could candidly address the problems that con¬
fronted them, not the least of which was the hasty expansion of
the role of women.
The United States entered the 1980s leading the world in
the use of women in the military. In ten years the number of
women in the military had increased sixfold. In 1981 women
accounted for 14 percent of all new recruits and 9 percent of
the total force. Numbers aside, American military women were
more widely employed than military women anywhere else:
95 percent of all military jobs were open to them, and 28.5 per¬
cent of all women were employed in nontraditional jobs. In
every possible way, the Defense Department had attempted to
equalize the treatment of men and women, so that by 1981 all
of the services except the Marine Corps had integrated basic
training. No other country had gone so far.
While Jimmy Carter was in office, the nation s top military
leaders were under great pressure to portray integration and
expansion as completely successful and to support repeal of the
combat exclusions. Dissent was not tolerated. Carter had chas¬
tised General Donn A. Starry for speaking too plainly about the
Soviet threat in Europe and fired Major General John K.
Singlaub for criticizing the presidents proposed troop with¬
drawal from Korea. But though the services were officially muz¬
zled, the civilian press turned up story after story exposing
problems with integration. Letters to the editor from female
service members complained of being “defeminized to the
point of depression. Junior officers complained that fraterniza-
DACOWITS 1, ARMY 0 • 101
tion and pregnancy were increasingly common. One article

reported that nearly half the women assigned to a military
police company in Germany had become pregnant within nine
months, although only two of the nine women were married.
Publicly, the Army advised commanders to treat pregnancy as a
temporary disability and to work around it as they would work
around casualties or desertions in wartime. Privately, Army
commanders complained to the chief of staff, General Edward C.
“Shy” Meyer, that something had to be done.
Meyer himself was well aware of the problems with inte¬
gration. As commanding general of the 3rd Infantry Division in
1975, he had witnessed the dismay and confusion of officers
and NCOs when the first batches of women were dumped into
unprepared combat support units. Soon after taking over as
chief of staff in 1979, Meyer had asked a trusted personal
friend, retired Lieutenant General Arthur S. Collins, Jr., to take
a firsthand look at the Army in the field and assess its condition.
Author of the book Common Sense Training, Collins was widely
respected for his insight and judgment. His informal report
added other problems to those raised during the 1980
Commanders’ Conference and strengthened suspicions that
the presence of women was sapping the Army’s strength.
Meyer did not wait for Jimmy Carter to leave office before
advising Defense Secretary Harold Brown and Army Secretary
Clifford Alexander that a thorough review of women in the
Army was needed before proceeding toward the Carter admin¬
istration’s goal of 87,000 enlisted women in the Army by 1986.
Brown and Alexander acquiesced unenthusiastically in the fall of
1980 to Meyer’s proposal to freeze the strength of Army women
at 65,000 until a review had been completed. One month after
Reagan’s inauguration, formal notice of the Army’s freeze, or
“pause” as it was called, was delivered to the new defense secre¬
tary, Caspar W. Weinberger. In May 1981 Meyer established the
Women in the Army (WITA) Policy Review Group, a four-man,
one-woman team of handpicked Army experts. Their initial
report would take a full eighteen months to prepare.
Shortly thereafter, the Defense Department initiated its

own study of \tbmen in the services, adding to the public
impression that the Reagan administration was out to roll back
Carter plans for women. In March 1981 Deputy Secretary of
Defense Frank C. Carlucci directed the services to conduct a
joint background review on the impact of present and projected
numbers of women on readiness and on the ability of the ser¬
vices to accomplish their missions. Completed in October, the
review confirmed the existence of a number of problems that
commanders in the field already knew too much about. Women
suffered higher rates of attrition, medical “noneffectiveness,”
and out-of-wedlock pregnancies. There was a rapidly growing
number of couples with both partners in the sendee, about a
third with children. Women were not suited for physically
demanding duties and were more prone to injury than men.
They joined the services for different reasons than men and
were not attracted to nontraditional jobs. Both their morale and
their opinion of the services were lower than the mens.
Yet the background review tried hard to minimize the seri¬
ousness of these problems. Not enough was known about their
impact on the military, said the review, echoing Binldn and
Bachs Women and the Military. There was “no concrete evi¬
dence” that single parenthood adversely affected readiness.
The testimony of officers in the field did not count unless it was
backed by some study, and most of the available studies were
the work of the Carter administration: MAX WAC, REF WAC,
and a number of other ideologically tainted works were all given
the benefit of the doubt in the absence of anything else. Data
collected by the Carter administration were accepted at face
value, though they had sometimes been manipulated to support
established policy. The background review used the Army’s tally
to conclude that single parenthood was not “a female issue”
because men accounted for three-quarters of all single parents.
It did not point out that the Army under Carter had included
servicemen paying child support in its tally of single parents and
that Navy statistics showed that women were seven times more
likely than men to be single parents with custody of their

children.1
The background review did make several original contribu¬
tions to the study of women in the military, though these were
not noted in the review’s executive summary: as the services
concentrated on recruiting more and more women, the propor¬
tion of male high school graduates dropped. In 1972 the ser¬
vices attracted 17 percent of all eligible men with high school
diplomas; by 1980 they were attracting only 13 percent. Only
the Marine Corps had concentrated on recruiting “a few good
men,” and only the Marine Corps had increased its share of the
market.
Also not noted in the executive summary was the discovery
that, for the second time in the history of the AVF, the experts
had been fundamentally wrong in their assumptions and pre¬
dictions. Just as the Gates Commission had wrongly assumed
that the supply of eligible males would increase through the
1970s, the experts at the Brookings Institution had wrongly
expected that the advantages of recruiting women would
endure regardless of how many women were recruited.
Women on average were still older than men, but, said the
review, “all other selected characteristics have either narrowed
or been reversed.” Binldn and Bach had figured that women
were cheaper to enlist because they were less likely to be mar¬
ried and therefore have dependents, but the review found that
by 1980 female recruits were more likely than males to be mar¬
ried. Commander Hunter had argued that women were higher-
quality recruits. But as entrance standards were lowered, test
scores among female recruits plummeted until there was “no
appreciable difference” between the scores of men and women.
Women were still more likely to have graduated from high
school, but the percentages of men and women in the lowest
mental category were very nearly the same.
The only remaining advantage was that women were better
behaved and missed fewer duty days for medical reasons than
men missed for disciplinary reasons. Even this was not true for
the service that made the greatest use of women. Air Force
women had sligl$dy higher rates of absenteeism, courts-martial,
and desertion than Air Force men. Comparing the number of
duty days lost by both men and women for all reasons, the Air
Force figured, “If the FY 1980 force were all male, end-
strength could F>e reduced over 600 spaces. FY 1986, end-
strength cost of female nonavailability will be more than 1000
spaces.’ 2 All told, the Ai{- Force expected to incur additional
costs of $20 million to $30 million a year to meet the Carter
administrations 1986 objective for female strength. The back¬
ground review’s executive summary did not mention this addi¬
tional cost.
Though the background review did recommend that the
services be given greater latitude to establish their own policies
regarding women, that latitude was not meant for anything
other than minor adjustments to accommodate further expan¬
sion. Clearly there were still those in the Defense Department
who were more concerned about integration’s political sensitiv¬
ity than about the services. The review was, in fact, prepared by
the office of Dr. Lawrence J. Korb, who, after leaving the
Defense Department, joined the liberal Brookings Institution
and became an outspoken proponent of expanded use of
women in the military.
Unlike the background review, the Army’s WITA Policy
Review Group was charged with the dual task of reviewing the
issues and formulating policy. General Meyer’s dictum was that
the Anny should be prepared to go to war tomorrow with what
it had today. Sometimes members of the review group doubted
whether their recommendations would be politically accept¬
able, but they never doubted Meyer’s desire that they confine
themselves to consideiing what was for the good of the service.
To narrow its focus, the review group began by categorizing
issues related to women into those which were institutional and
those which were “soldier specific.” Institutional issues were
those that involved all soldiers. They included problems with
attrition, clothing, hygiene, medical care, child care, being a
single parent, physical ability, lost time, career development,

and sexual harassment, though many of these were never con¬
sidered problems until integration. Soldier specific issues were
those that resulted directly from integration. They were further
categorized as those specific to women only ^nd those relating
to men and women together. Initially only pregnancy was con¬
sidered “female specific,” but later the review group added
combat exclusion policies. Male and female issues included
fraternization and intra-Army and interservice marriages.
The WITA Policy Review Group referred all of the institu¬
tional and male-female issues to other
Army staff activities, except the issue of
No president before him
physical requirements for the Army’s
many Military Occupational Specialties earned less respect from
(MOS). A brief examination of the the uniformed men than
problem of pregnancy revealed that
Jimmy Carter.
16 percent (10,577) of Army women
were pregnant in 1980. Defense
Department pohcy prohibited pregnant women from entering
service, but if a woman became pregnant after entering, the
option to stay in or get out was hers. Of the Army women who
became pregnant in 1980, one-third aborted their babies at
their own expense and remained in the Army, a third chose to
have their babies and remain in the Army, and a third chose to
leave the Army. The review group noted that the commanders
believed that pregnancy weakened the Army’s mission and that
the peacetime Army was unprepared for war, but because the
policy on pregnancy had been established by the Defense
Department, the issue was out of Army hands. The review
group therefore confined its work to the issues of physical abil¬
ities and combat exclusions.
The problem with the Army’s combat exclusion policy was
that it did not exclude anyone from combat. The definition of
combat upon which the exclusion policies were based did
exactly the opposite of what was intended: it limited job oppor¬
tunities for women in the Army without providing women
much protection from danger. The authors of the Army’s 1978

combat exclus^n policy had ignored the realities of war, in
which many soldiers assigned to so-called “noncombat” jobs
work shoulder-to-shoulder with others assigned to “combat”
jobs. Intelligence personnel operate ground surveillance radars
collocated with front-line grunts, engineers are responsible for
blowing bridges after combat units have withdrawn to the rear,
and military police are often the last to leave an evacuated area.
At the same time, many dangerous Army jobs have safe¬
sounding civilian job titles. An Army plumber, for instance, is
responsible for laying and clearing minefields and priming and
emplacing explosives. Supply and communications personnel
work with combat troops near the frontlines. The realities of the
battlefield made the Army’s MOS-based combat exclusion pol¬
icy nonsensical. Women could not serve in specialties primarily
responsible for killing the enemy, but they could serve in spe¬
cialties that exposed them to an equal opportunity of being
killed.
In July 1981 an Army survey of women in the United States
V Corps in West Germany found 175 women assigned to units
operating forward of friendly lines, in constant contact with
the enemy; 727 women were assigned to units operating in the
Main Battle Area. A total of 3,799 women were assigned to units
operating in the “combat zone,” a pre-1978 Army designation.
To restore some integrity to its policy, the Army had two
choices: it could drop the combat exclusions and admit that
women were already filling combat roles; or it could make the
combat exclusions meaningful by removing women from all
combat-related jobs. The first option was politically impossible.
Congress could not admit to the American people that it was
allowing the Army to commit young women to mortal combat.
And even if the Army were allowed to drop the combat exclu¬
sions, it would still have wanted to exclude women from certain
vital units for reasons of efficiency and effectiveness—reasons
the courts were unlikely to recognize over the demands of
“equality.”
The second option presented the problem of arbitrariness.

If the Army appeared arbitrary in reducing opportunities for
women, it left itself open to second-guessing by the courts. The
Army’s problem was to devise a method of arbitrarily drawing a
line between combat and noncombat that did not appear arbi¬
trary. In response, the WITA Policy Review Group created
Direct Combat Probability Coding (DCPC), a seemingly scien¬
tific way of determining which jobs should be closed to women
and which should not.
DCPC involved assessing each and every position in the
Army for the probability of its being involved in “direct com¬
bat,” an ambiguous designation that in practice meant “too dan¬
gerous for women.” The WITA Policy Review Group made the
term official and gave it essentially the same meaning as the
term close combat:
... engaging an enemy with individual or crew-served

weapons while being exposed to direct enemy fire, a high
probability of direct physical contact with the enemy’s per¬
sonnel, and a substantial risk of capture,2
To ascertain the probability of direct combat for each posi¬

tion, the WITA Policy Review Group asked the Army’s author¬
ities to respond to questions concerning the position’s assigned
duties, the parent unit’s mission, its place on the battlefield, and
tactical doctrine. The results would give each position a numer¬
ical probability code of 1 to 7. Positions with the highest prob¬
ability of involving a soldier in direct combat were coded PI,
and those with the lowest, a P7.
General Meyer decided that women would be excluded
only from positions coded PI, which included 53 percent of
Army enlisted positions. Rased upon the recommendation of
the WITA Policy Review Group, Meyer closed twenty-three
specialties, in addition to the thirty-eight already closed to
women. Many Army leaders favored a more complete exclu¬
sion, but politics made the PI exclusion, in Meyer’s view, the
best the Army could do.
The nex^great accomplishment of the WITA review group

was to establish physical strength requirements for each MOS.
Army commanders had long complained that women were
unable to perform many routine physical tasks associated with
their assigned specialties. Their complaints were substantiated
by a 1976 study of the utilization of women in the military by
the General Accounting Office (GAO). The GAO found that
women trained as ammunition storage specialists had trouble
handling rounds of ammunition that weighed between 58 and
120 pounds. Female medical specialists assigned as ambulance
drivers had trouble loading and unloading patients, braking and
steering ambulances, and changing tires on ambulances.
Women trained as wheeled-vehicle mechanics faced similar dif¬
ficulties. When women were unable to perform their routine
duties, they were often assigned clerical or administrative
duties instead, while male soldiers picked up the slack.
The GAO s recommended solution was simple: gender-free
strength testing of potential recruits to enable recruiters to
match the man or woman to the MOS. The solution was so sim¬
ple that the 1978 Evaluation of Women in the Army (EWITA)
made the same recommendation, saying, “The Army cannot be
assured of accomplishing the ground combat mission if women
are randomly accessed into positions with physically demanding
tasks exceeding their capabilities.”3 The Defense Departments
1981 background review repeated the recommendation, prais¬
ing similar tests in use by the Air Force.
In 1981 members of the WITA Policy Review Group veri¬
fied the GAOs findings with their own eyes. At Aberdeen
Proving Grounds, Maryland, they were amazed that women
being tested and certified as ammunition handlers appeared to
have no trouble moving and sorting large crates of ammunition,
until they discovered that the women were moving empty
crates because full crates were too heavy for them. At Fort
Hood, Texas, they found that more than half of the female track
vehicle mechanics assigned to some units were working outside
their MOS because they were dissatisfied with the job and frus-
trated with their inability to perform routine tasks, such as sep¬

arating the links in a vehicle s track with a sixty-eight—pound
track wrench.
The review group then began the task of constructing a
means of matching the physical abilities of each recruit, regard¬
less of sex, to the physical requirements of each MOS. It started
with the Department of Labor Occupational Classification
System, devised in 1939, that divided jobs into five categories
according to physical demand: sedentary, light, medium, heavy,
and very heavy. Each category was defined as requiring the
following:
Maximum Lifting Frequent Lifting
Sedentary 10 pounds —
Light 20 10 pounds
Medium 50 25
Heavy 100 50
Very Heavy in excess of 100 50
(In time, the sedentary category was deleted, and “moderately

heavy”—lifting of eighty pounds and frequent lifting of forty
pounds—was added.)
Next, the review group set about categorizing each MOS
using four simple physical tasks: lift, carry, push, and pull. After
extensive observations and many interviews, the review group
assigned 64 percent of the Army’s positions to the very heavy
category, 12 percent to the heavy, and the remainder were dis¬
tributed evenly among the moderately heavy, medium, and
light categories.
The next step was to develop a test to be administered to
potential recruits to determine their ability to meet the physical
demands of their preferred MOS. The Military Enlistment
Physical Strength Capacity Test (MEPSCAT) consisted of four
components: a skinfold measurement to determine body fat
content, a hand-strength test using a dynamometer, a dynamic
lifting test, and a stress test for cardiovascular fitness.4
If valid, the MEPSCAT system offered several advantages

to the present practice of randomly assigning recruits to an
MOS. Obviously it would provide the Army with soldiers better
able to perform their assigned jobs, but the Army also expected
the system to reduce attrition, job migration, and “malutiliza-
tion,” especially, among women. Forty-nine percent of women
in jobs rated heavy and very heavy did not complete their three-
year enlistments. Supervisors often assigned them duties unre¬
lated to their MOS, and the women were more likely to change
specialties to find less demanding work.
The disadvantage of the MEPSCAT system was that it
would concentrate the great majority of women in a fraction of
the positions. No job or position would be closed to all women
on the basis of physical demands, but tests at Fort Jackson,
South Carolina, had shown that veiy few Army women were
likely to be able to perform work rated heavy (8 percent) or very
heavy (3 percent). This meant that over 90 percent of Army
women would be concentrated in less than a quarter of the
Army’s positions.
Before the results of WITA were ever announced, the study
had found strong enemies. The Army’s Recruiting Command
was greatly opposed to standards that would make its recruiting
goals any more difficult. Besides making it harder for recruiters
to please potential recruits with their choice of jobs, the
MEPSCAT test would completely disqualify many women who
were physically weak. The review group had considered this a
plus because it would turn away such women before the Army
became liable for injuries they were likely to suffer during train¬
ing, but the Recruiting Command doubted its ability to achieve
recruiting objectives if recruits were required to meet the
MEPSCAT standards. Meetings between the Recruiting
Command and the WITA Policy Review Group, championed
by the deputy chief of staff for personnel, General Maxwell
Thurman, were tense contests between the best of both camps.
Resident experts from the Recruiting Command picked and
poked at any angle of the review they thought vulnerable, while
the chief of staff and the vice chief of staff looked on. In the
end, the review group prevailed. General Meyer was thor¬
oughly satisfied that the recommendations of the WITA Policy
Review Group were for the good of the service.
Implementing the recommendations wouldn’t be easy.
Hundreds of women held specialties recommended for closing,
thousands were assigned to PI positions, and more than half of
all Army women were working in jobs rated heavy or very
heavy. But the strongest opposition came from women not in
the least affected by the changes, women outside the Army ''
whose concerns were strictly ideologi¬
cal. Leading the fight was DACOWITS.
Excluding women from the
There was no special reason why
theater of operations
the Army should have feared the oppo¬
sition of DACOWITS. The committees would expose that they
thirty-year career was an unremarkable were unnecessary to
one, beginning with its failed attempt to
the military’s essential
draw women into the Korean War.
After the war, DACOWITS attracted function.
little attention with modest recommen¬

dations for improving the standard of living among service-
women and for enhancing career incentives for nurses and
medical specialists. The military in those days was no longer
interested in expanding the ranks of military women, and the
directors of the women’s components disliked the kibitzing of
fifty civilian women with no military experience. DACOWITS
survived for many years as little more than an opportunity for
the wives of prominent Washington men to hobnob with
famous women. Early members included anthropologist
Margaret Meade, actress Helen Hayes, Vassar’s president Sarah
Blanding, and Dr. Lillian Gilbreth, the mother portrayed in the
book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen.
DACOWITS s one triumph in its early years was the pas¬
sage of PL 90-130 in 1967, after which the committee’s enthu¬
siasm waned rapidly. As the Vietnam War s unpopularity grew,
members of DACOWITS lost interest. The year the first
women were made generals, only thirty-one of DACOWITS s

fifty members bothered to attend its fall meeting. By 1972
DACOWITS had earned a reputation as “a nice little group that
doesnt do very much.”5 As a result of its inactivity, its autho¬
rized strength shrank from fifty to twenty-five, with only
twenty-three actually appointed in 1976.
Another reason for the committees shrinking membership
was the shifting emphasis among DACOWITS members.
Radical members wanted revolutionary change within the mili-
stary and began pushing DACOWITS to become more politically
active. “This group has got to become an action group,” argued
Sarah McClendgn, a Washington correspondent and columnist
appointed to the committee by the Nixon administration.
Complaining that many committee members knew little about
the military, McClendon, who had served as a WAC officer in
World War II before being discharged for pregnancy, worked to
bring in retired female officers who shared her revolutionary
dreams. McClendon also agitated to open DACOWITS meet¬
ings to the press and public, a move opposed by many of the
more conservative committee members who feared becoming a
“focal point of the womens rights movement.” DACOWITS did
open its meetings to the public in late 1973, but only after die
radically feminist Center for Women Policy Studies filed suit in
federal court to force the issue.
Opened to outside influences, DACOWITS meetings
became semi-annual schutzenfesten, providing feminist organi¬
zations the opportunity to hurl abuse both at the military for
oppressing women and at DACOWITS for not doing enough
about it. The committee began to make regular headlines in
military newspapers not for what committee members said or
did, but for what its audience complained about. In 1974 out¬
siders were already calling for the repeal of the combat exclu¬
sion laws and die integration of the service academies. That
year, the committee passed on the issue of combat but did rec¬
ommend that the services begin planning for the “inevitable”
integration of the academies. The committee also recom-
mended that the Defense Department submit legislative pro¬

posals to Congress to “equalize [promotion] opportunities for
women... regardless of available billets.” DACOWITS wanted
more female generals and admirals, whether the services
needed them or not.6
Thereafter, the committees recommendations to the
Defense Department were merely modulated renditions of the
demands of professional feminists. When the Center for
Women Policy Studies complained that the absence of women
at the academies “seriously compromises their military career
opportunities,” DACOWITS strengthened its call for the ser¬
vices to integrate the academies without waiting for legislative
authorization. And when NOW complained that enlisted Army
women were handicapped by their inability to win decorations
for battlefield bravery and combat service, DACOWITS asked
the Army to “clarify” its definition of “combat duty” and “com¬
bat assignment,” with an eye to opening more jobs to women.7
The committees less radical members faded away, and by
1976 the takeover was complete. The feminist minority had
become the majority. In a classic demonstration of the dynam¬
ics of revolutionary politics, the former military advisory com¬
mittee was reborn as an active antimilitary lobby with legislative
and “civic action” subcommittees.
DACOWITS stepped off the deep end in 1976, calling the
combat exclusion laws “arbitrary and unnecessary.” Barely two
years after exposing itself to organized feminism, the commit¬
tee recommended
[t]hat laws now preventing women from serving their coun¬

try in combat and combat related or support positions be
repealed. Rationale: Self-explanatory 8
In the same meeting, DACOWITS condemned the Veterans of

Foreign Wars for discriminating against women and asked the
Defense Department to sever ties with the organization. It also
asked the services to review their physical standards
to ascertain if height and physical standards are valid

requirements %ihd necessary for job performance... or
shoidd they be replaced with other job related
qualifications.9
The qualificatioqs the committee had in mind were high-school

diplomas and entrance exam scores, often used as easily mea¬
surable proof that womemmade better soldiers and sailors. The
committees rationale for this recommendation included the
v following:
In keeping with current changes in the military as well as in

the civilian work world, it has been proven that an individ¬
ual, regardless of sex, can fulfill the requirements of jobs on
the basis of their capabilities. According to medical science
it is commonly known that women are shorter in height and
have other physical differences but have proven they have
the capabilities to do a given task.
What has been proved? That, regardless of sex, all individuals

can fulfill all requirements? Or that some individuals can fulfill
the requirements of some jobs? And why do thirty prominent
women need “medical science’ to tell them what is “commonly
known”? What the committee seemed to be saying was that
women were just as capable as men of doing anything in the
military, their physical limitations notwithstanding. Certainly,
that was what was what was implied in what they said to the edi¬
tors of Air Force Times, whose report on the event was head¬
lined: “Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do.”10
Ironically, the Carter administration posed a greater threat
to DACOWITS than any other presidential administration. In
its enthusiasm for advancing the cause of women in the military,
the Carter Pentagon hardly seemed to need the advice of
DACOWITS, and DACOWITS feared it would be disbanded
as unnecessary. But as it happened, the Carter administration
bolstered DACOWITS with increased membership appoint-
merits and additional full-time administrative support. Among

those appointed in 1977 was retired Air Force Major General
Jeanne Holm, a trusted advocate of the advancement of
women. As director of the Women’s Air Force in 1972, Holm
testified before Congress in favor of integrating the service
academies, though the directors of the Army, Navy, and Marine
Corps women’s components testified against it.
During the Carter years, DACOWITS knew no restraint. It
called for the assignment of a general officer to head the pre¬
dominantly female Army Medical Specialist Corps, for no bet¬
ter reason than that without one “the implication is that the
corps mission is not as important as other medical corps.” It
wanted women appointed to the Court of Military Appeals and
assigned to Minuteman missile silos. It demanded the elimina¬
tion of sex bias in recruiting literature, which it faulted for being
“predominantly male-oriented.” It denounced open bay bar¬
racks, cushion-sole boot socks, and the ban on abortion in mili¬
tary hospitals. It endorsed tube socks, private entrances to
officer quarters, and the ERA. DACOWITS attacked and tried
to suppress the Air Force study upon which it based its decision
to close the security specialist field to women. It blamed all of
the medical problems that women experienced on poorly
designed clothing and equipment and continued to recommend
repeal of the combat exclusion laws.
The defeat of Jimmy Carter inspired fears that the Reagan
administration would silence DACOWITS by packing the com¬
mittee with antifeminists. But the committee maintained its
ideological continuity partly because members were appointed
by the secretary of defense for three-year terms, partly because
new members were often selected upon the recommendation
of old members, but mostly because the Reagan administration
never opposed feminists in any significant way, except on the
issue of abortion. Many of the women the Reagan administra¬
tion appointed were establishment Republicans who, if not self-
described feminists, nevertheless supported most feminist
aims. Under pressure from senior members of the committee,
the audience at DACOWITS meetings, and especially the com-

mittees profemi&st military advisors, the new members were
quickly caught up in the committees enthusiasm for radical
reform.
Nevertheless, in the early Reagan years, DACOWITSs
paranoia manifested itself in new complaints. In 1981 it blamed
the services for too successfully promoting the view that women
were needed to make the AVF work:
The services’ focus on the expected shortage of available

males in the next 10 years fosters the perception that women
are merely “fillers” and not professionals contributing to the
defense effort.11
Never mind that DACOWITS had itself done much to foster

the same view. It also reported sinking morale among military
women, particularly Army women, as a result of “gender spe¬
cific actions. The Army’s “womanpause,” as the press rendered
it, and the WITA review were of special concern. General
Meyer had tried to allay the committees apprehensions by
enlisting several present and former DACOWITS members as
advisors to the WITA review group, but the review group had
neglected to keep them informed of the reviews progress.
DACOWITS had no idea where the review was headed. One
year after the review was begun, the Army was still keeping
DACOWITS in the dark about the physical demands analysis
and the combat probability coding. In April 1982 spokesmen
for the WITA review group talked instead about problems
related to pregnancy, which the review group decided was the
responsibility of the Defense Department.
While the Army plotted major policy changes affecting
women, the civilian leadership in the Pentagon hastened to
assure military women that the Reagan administration was not
a threat to their careers and firmly supported equal opportunity
for military women. In February 1982 Assistant Secretary of
Defense Korb told a group of Navy women that the Defense
Department was working “to break down any institutional bar¬

riers that still exist” within the services. In August 1982 the
Army’s new assistant secretary for manpower and reserve
affairs, Harry N. Walters, told DACOWITS that the WITA
review would be a “positive thing” for women. Assuring the
committee that the Army was still committed to providing
women “the same career advancement opportunities” available
to men, Walters explained that the Army had “jammed an extra
55,000 women into the system without any thought being given
to where they should be assigned.” WITA was just trying to
“unravel all the problems” caused by
the hasty increases. Secretary of
T--, r • u i i i Approximately 90 percent
Detense Caspar Weinberger, who had
been briefed on the results of the of Army women would be
review by General Meyer and Army concentrated in less than
Secretary Tohn O. Marsh, promised , ,
^ , „, r a quarter of the positions.
DACOWITS chairwoman Maria Elena
Torralva that present Army policy
would not change until the WITA review was approved by the
Defense Department. Torralva was reassured. “I feel much bet¬
ter about what is happening,” she told the committee. The
study would be “a positive one for women.”
No doubt owing to these assurances, the reaction to the
release of the WITA Policy Review Group’s draft report in late
August 1982 was mixed and relatively mild. Carolyn Becraft of
the Womens Equity Action League (WEAL) said that the
report was better than she expected, that the review needed to
be done, and that the Army had responded properly to “politi¬
cal pressure by women, DACOWITS, women’s organizations,
and press reports.” Sarah McClendon was “upbeat” about the
report: “The report said women can do the job.” Representative
Patricia Schroeder of Colorado, a member of the House Armed
Services Committee, was more cautious. “Every time there is a
new study, it never helps morale,” she said. Kathleen Carpenter,
deputy secretary of defense for equal opportunity under Carter,
called the report’s unexplained recommendation that the Army
add 5,000 enlisted women and 4,000 female officers a “public

relations move t&divert attention from the review’s impact.
Three months later, the mood had changed. “DACOWITS
Rips Army Women Study,” read the headlines in Army Times,
after a stormy, confrontational” meeting in November, during
which members and spectators railed against Army representa¬
tives with charges that the study represented “poor Army man¬
agement” and was “nothing but a snow job.” Sarah McClendon,
one of the unused advisors, suddenly wondered “why the hell
they wanted us to help.” Jeanne Holm told committee mem¬
bers that the study had created morale problems for women
who felt the Army was blaming its mistakes on them. An Army
enlisted woman said, “I’m not to be blamed for the problems.
These are management problems.”
Management’s attempts to solve its problems were
defended by William D. Clark, deputy assistant secretary of the
Army for manpower and reserve affairs, and Lieutenant
General Maxwell R. Thurman. They argued that WITA suf¬
fered from poor public relations, that the methodology
employed was reliable, and that, in any case, the study still
needed to be validated. If the validation process revealed prob¬
lems with the study’s findings, then changes would be made.
Meanwhile the Army would make every effort to smooth tire
implementation of the recommended changes.
Specific criticisms of the review were fielded by the mem¬
bers of the WITA Policy Review Group themselves.
DACOWITS questioned everything, and for everything the
review group had an answer. Many of the committee members’
criticisms were made out of ignorance of the Army in combat.
Margaret M. Scheffelin, an educational researcher charged
with spearheading DACOWITS’s attacks, could not understand
why women were to be excluded from the job of air traffic con¬
troller (ATC) when civilian women supposedly made especially
good ATCs. Reading from an Army manual describing the
duties of an ATC, a member of the review group pointed out
that Army ATCs are required to do much more than sit in front
of a radar screen. Other duties include clearing airfields and

landing zones and erecting runway lighting systems, sometimes
behind enemy lines.
By the third day of the meeting, the Army’s defense of
WITA had been so successful that one member of the commit¬
tee admitted privately that the Army had managed to “take the
wind right out of our sails.” But the final report admitted only,
“We are extremely concerned about the impact of this study on
women in the military and on morale.”
In the months following the meeting, members and friends
of DACOWITS groped for ways to attack the study. The Labor
Departments categorization of jobs according to physical
demand was too old to be valid, they said. The sampling of
female recruits at Fort Jackson was too small to predict the abil¬
ities of Army women accurately, they said. Even if both objec¬
tions had been true, the Army’s determination of strength
requirements for specific jobs still stood on its own. The objec¬
tions continued. One critic complained that the creation of the
“moderately heavy” strength category amounted to “statistical
sorcery” and that long-range weapons made close, physical con¬
tact with the enemy part of the Army’s “historical memory, not
its current operational concepts.”12 A 1985 study by the Air
Force dismissed WITA’s findings on physical strength because,
it said, the WITA study group had assumed but not proved that
soldiers who lacked the strength to perform their assigned tasks
actually degraded unit effectiveness.
In April 1983 DACOWITS rallied its disheartened troops
at another meeting, from which came recommendations that
the Army establish an “objective panel,” chaired by a retired
female general officer and staffed with active and retired offi¬
cers and senior noncommissioned officers, “with a predomi¬
nance of women members.” The proposed panel would review
the WITA study and report its evaluation directly to the secre¬
tary of the Army. Concerned again for the morale of military
women, DACOWITS requested that all of the services dissem¬
inate articles and reports to the field “showing the positive per-
formance of women in the military.’’ And the executive board

would draft a letter to send to the secretary of defense explain¬
ing the concern of DACOWITS for WITA’s impact on morale
and career progression.
Signed by DACOWITS Chairwoman Mary Evelyn Blagg
Huey president of Texas Womans University, and dated June 6,
1983, DACOWITS’s rambling letter abandoned most of the
criticism already leveled at the study. Instead, it fell back on the
very arguments the committee had accused the services of
' overusing. WITA’s probability-based combat exclusion
“deprives our Army of many skilled soldiers” and “reduces
available manpower. The effect of the combat exclusions on
career development and promotion “poses concerns for morale,
enlistments, and the continued success of the all-volunteer
Army.” And so on.
The only specific criticism was the charge that the Army’s
definition of combat was out of date. Modem combat, said
the letter, is “of a fluid—and frequently remote—character.”
No mention was made of WITA’s physical demands analysis,
and no fault was found with the review’s methodology.
Nevertheless, the letter questioned the integrity of the review
group and its motives:
We have serious questions regarding the merit of the contin¬

ual studying women’s military participation, [sic] As a study
reaffirms the positive performance and contribution by
those of our gender, a new one seems to be ordered. This
finally raises the question of whether objectivity or the
“right answers” is the purpose.13
The lettei also requested that a Marine Corps study of women

marines be postponed indefinitely.
Secretary Weinberger’s reply to Dr. Huey, dated July 27,
1983, was sympathetic and conciliatory. He assured Huey that
the Defense Department was committed to ensuring that
“women will be provided maximum opportunities to realize
their individual potential” and that restrictions on women in the

services were based solely on the intent of the combat exclusion
laws. Regarding the Army’s definition of combat, Weinberger
agreed that the nature of combat was fluid, noting that “if hos¬
tilities break out, men and women in uniform are at risk no mat-
ter where they may be located.” Though the Marine Corps
study would proceed, Weinberger promised that implementa¬
tion of any policy affecting women would be closely monitored
by Assistant Secretary of Defense Korb to ensure that “artificial
or institutional barriers to career progression are systematically
broken down.”14
Weinbergers July 19 memorandum to the service secre¬
taries, enclosed with his letter to Huey, put things more bluntly.
Recent press reports, said the memo, had given the impression
that the Defense Department had changed its policy toward
women. That impression was wrong. Women would be pro¬
vided full and equal opportunity with men to pursue military
careers:
This means that military women can and should be utilized

in all roles except those explicitly prohibited by combat
exclusion statutes and related policy.... The combat exclu¬
sion should be interpreted to allow as many as possible
career opportunities for women to be kept open.15
The Army might have successfully defended WITA had it

not been for two important changes of personnel that occurred
before the summer of 1983. “Shy” Meyer retired and was suc¬
ceeded by General John A. Wickham, Jr.; Delbert L. Spurlock,
Jr., replaced Harry Walters as assistant secretary of the Army for
manpower and reserve affairs. Spurlock was a civil-rights lawyer
with no military experience before becoming Army general
counsel in 1981, no previous involvement with the WITA
review, and no interest in defending it. After Weinberger talked
to Korb, and Korb talked to Spurlock, Spurlock’s recommenda¬
tion to Wickham favored the emasculation of WITA. Wickham,
who was not prepared to fall on his sword and end his stint as
chief of staff so soon, dutifully presided over the greatest peace¬
time defeat in the history of the United States Army.
In the fall of 1983 Spurlock informed Korb that WITA had
been “revalidated” after certain unnamed errors of methodol¬
ogy had been corrected. In fact, validation by an independent
civilian agency. Advanced Research Resources Organization of
Bethesda, Maryland, found no fault with the review.16 In
October 1983 the Army briefed DACOWITS on the changed
WITA. Thirteen of the twenty-three specialties closed to
women by WITA were reopened. The Direct Combat
Probability Coding of many units was adjusted to keep as many
positions as possible open to women. The physical capabilities
test, long the answer to the problem of recruits who were phys¬
ically incapable of performing their required tasks, was reduced
to a recruiters “counseling tool.” An Army representative sug¬
gested that it took courage to reassess the study, but a
DACOWITS member replied, “I don’t think it is an act of con¬
siderable courage to do what they should have done in the first
place.”
\'
Chapter 7
CONFIDENCE IS HIGH
My policy? Sir, I am a soldier.

I do not have a policy.
—FRENCH GENERAL HENRI GIRAUD
NOT SINCE THE PASSAGE of PL 90-130 a decade and a half

earlier had DACOWITS achieved a greater victory. In sup¬
pressing WITA, the committee had done more than merely
overcome the apathy of lawmakers; it had overcome the Army.
It had bullied and embarrassed an organized opposition
through loud, persistent, and sometimes irrational protest. In
the end, the arguments of neither side mattered. The lesson
learned was that the side that clamors loudest carries the day.
DACOWITS was exultant and emboldened. It emerged
from the conflict full of fight, vowing to direct its appeals
directly to the secretary of defense on other matters. Less than
a year after questioning the objectivity and worth of repeatedly
studying women in the military, DACOWITS was recommend¬
ing that the utilization of women be “continually re-examined
[but only] with a view to improving force readiness by making
maximum use of this valuable human resource. 1
New fears that the Reagan administration would silence the
successful committee by appointing more conservative mem¬
bers quickly faded. By 1984 all of the members of DACOWITS
had been appointed under Reagan with no discernible shift in

the committee s ideological bent. The only woman who regu¬
larly deviated from the committee’s radical consensus was
Elaine Donnelly an Eagle Forum member who had led the
fight against the ERA in her home state of Michigan. Donnelly
fought hard against the push for repeal of the combat exclusion
laws and often raised embarrassing questions about pregnancy,
dual-service couples, and the. lesser physical strength of women,
but all too often she found herself alone.
v In the year of the ‘gender gap,” the Reagan Pentagon was
interested only in deflecting criticism by pleasing the feminist
lobby. The Defeqse Department spent $70,000 to dress the
Pentagon s Military Womens Corridor with exhibits and propa¬
ganda. (The hall was soon dubbed Rroadway” by the sexist
denizens of the Pentagons shabbier corridors.) DACOWITS
was treated to repeated pronouncements that women were an
integral part of the nation s defenses and the committee itself
was “an integral part of the Defense team.” Such flattery was
intended to dissuade members from seeking to make
DACOWITS a statutory committee, responsible directly to
Congress or to both Congress and the Defense Department.
Assistant Secretary of Defense Lawrence J. Korb told the com¬
mittee that a statutory committee would create “an investigative
or adversarial relationship between the committee and the
military. The effect would be polarization of women from the
military community,” said Korb.2 Of course, both situations
already existed. The Pentagon nevertheless had good reason to
fear closer ties between DACOWITS and Congress.
Both Korb and Weinberger strove to develop a more ami¬
cable relationship between the committee and the Pentagon.
Korb, himself a true-believer in greater utilization of women,
assured DACOWITS that “no issue has taken more of my time
than women in the military. 1 Weinberger was described by a
former DACOWITS chairwoman as “fatherly” and “almost
sweet” in his desire to please the committee. He assured them
of his personal commitment to the continued expansion of
CONFIDENCE IS HIGH • 125
opportunities against the seemingly elastic combat exclusion

laws, praised the achievements of women whenever the occa¬
sion required him to do so, created the Department of Defense
Task Force on Equity for Women, and loudly called upon the
services to accept more women into their ranks and open more
jobs to them. Yet for all his efforts he nevef quite escaped the
suspicion of insincerity. Some proponents of women in the mil¬
itary sensed that his policy was secretly one of appeasement: he
was willing to give women an inch whenever they demanded
one, but he showed no initiative to act without prodding and
dodged the issue of combat at every turn.
The debate over women in combat was one battle Caspar
Weinberger would not fight. His entire tenure in office was
spent temporizing on the issue, trying both to please and pro¬
tect his commander-in-chief, who was known to oppose women
in combat, and to avoid angering the feminist lobby. He assured
President Reagan that women could become “grease monkeys
if they want to and things like that” but not combat soldiers.4 He
secretly advised the service chiefs not to worry about women in
the combat zone because the president would order them with¬
drawn when the shooting started, an unsettling prospect for the
chiefs because of the number of women in critical positions.
And he suggested in an interview on NBC’s Nightly News that
evacuation of women from a combat zone was a possibility but
qualified it by adding that the “value of having women in those
positions [in combat], the value of leaving all career avenues
open, is greater than the problems of dealing with [the] com¬
parable small disruption.” In fact, DACOWITS had already
been told by Korb that evacuation was not a possibility: “We
cannot afford to pull women back or protect them from the haz¬
ards of their duties. No one should expect otherwise.”5
Weinberger would admit to being personally opposed to
women in combat, but he always left his position conspicuously
undefended. When pressed on the issue by DACOWITS, he
proffered only flattery and a patronizing apology for his recalci¬
trant chauvinism:
Either I’m too old-fashioned or something else is wrong with

me, but I simpff feel that that is not the proper utilization
[of women]. And I think, again to be perfectly frank about it
and spread all of my old-fashioned views before you, I think
women are too valuable to be in combat 6
Whatever his real reasons, he did not dare reveal them, not
even to argue against repeal of the combat exclusion laws.
Instead, he washed his hands of the issue and shoved it back at
-Congress, but only after surrendering all grounds for defend¬
ing the exclusion laws as they existed. The greatest favor
Weinberger grafted feminists was to establish the Defense
Department’s current position—that there were no military
reasons why women should be excluded from combat, that
present limitations on the role of women were based solely on
present law, and that the law was based solely on the prefer¬
ence of the American public. As far as the Pentagon was con¬
cerned, the law’s repeal was a matter properly decided by the
public’s elected representatives—strictly without benefit of
military counsel.
Despite its boasts, the Defense Department under
Weinberger did not lead the way toward greater use of women
by the military, but it did allow itself to be goaded steadily in
that direction by complaints from Congress and the feminist
lobby. After its humiliating defeat, the Army buried WITA
unceremoniously. Army leaders were so intimidated that they
made no attempt to explain the study to the troops in the field,
who knew nothing about WITA except what they read in Army
Times, where criticism of the report grabbed all the headlines,
and charges of bias and faulty methodology were reported but
never examined for their validity. Before retiring, General
Meyer, who later said he would have resigned as chief of staff
before allowing WITA to be emasculated as it was, had wanted
to make a videotaped explanation of WITA for dissemination to
the field, but he was persuaded to let General Thurman make
the videotape instead. Thurman’s videotape was never released.
A member of the WITA Policy Review Group prepared a

painstaking explanation of the study for publication in Army
journals, but that too was spiked. To explain why WITA made
sense would have placed Army leaders in the difficult position
of having to explain why so many of its recommendations had
not been implemented. The two-year studyf they decided, was
best forgotten.
By 1988 the Army had added more than 10,000 officers and
enlisted women, raising the number of women to almost
11 percent of its total strength. As a counseling tool, the
MEPSCAT physical test had no appre- _
ciable effect on the placement of per- ^ . .
r r The Pentagon wanted no
sonnel in specialties, as recruiters were
not about to discourage potential Part in decidinc, whether
recruits from entering the MOS of their to employ women in corn-
choice. Direct Combat Probability bat—that was up to the
Coding suffered gradual erosion as
? i , , elected representatives.
exceptions overrode the rule whenever
PI vacancies went unfilled. By 1986,
4,000 Army women in Europe were assigned to PI positions.
The following year, the coding system was “fine-tuned” to pro¬
vide greater flexibility in personnel assignments and more com¬
mand opportunities for female officers. Nearly 12,000 active
duty positions were opened to women in forward support bat¬
talions, which provide direct support to combat units forward of
the brigade rear boundary. More than 2,000 women were
assigned to such units.
The Air Force also continued to move toward greater and
greater use of women. In five years under Reagan the Air Force
opened more than 30,000 new positions to women. Only 3 per¬
cent of jobs remained closed to them. With the reopening of the
security specialist field in 1984, Air Force enlisted women could
serve in all but four career fields, and all officer career fields were
open to them. In 1984 women were assigned aboard Airborne
Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft. In 1986, RC-135
reconnaissance aircraft and EC-130 electronic countermeasures
aircraft were both opened to women, and the Air Force began
assigning women tj* Minuteman missile crews, with plans to
make 20 percent of Minuteman crews all-female. Since 1980 the
female share of total Air Force personnel strength had risen from
11 percent to 13 percent, and it continued to rise.
But not everyone was satisfied with the Air Forces rate of
progress. In 1984 members of Congress sought to force the Air
Force to increase its number of female recruits faster. The 1985
Defense Authorization Act required the Air Force to raise its
recruitment quota for women from 14.7 percent of all recruits
to 19 percent in 1987 and 22 percent in 1988.
The act also ordered the Air Force to study the effect of
recruiting more women and deliver its report to Congress.
Written so as not to offend feminist supporters in Congress, the
Air Forces report nevertheless concluded that the congression-
ally mandated quota would lower mission effectiveness,
increase manpower costs, and aggravate attrition. The report
said that women were less available for daily duty, less available
to travel for temporary duty because of personal reasons, and
less likely to deploy quickly. Because of the quota, the number
of dual-service couples and single Air Force parents would dou¬
ble. Recruiting costs would increase because young civilian
women showed less interest than men in military service, as
would training costs because female recruits showed less apti¬
tude for critical electronic and mechanical jobs and therefore
required more training.7
The report rejected the theory that forcing the Air Force to
recruit fewer men would significantly increase the number of
men available for recruitment by the other services. Citing
behavioral and motivational differences between Air Force and
Army recruits, the report estimated that only one out of twelve
men turned away by the Air Force would join the Army as a sec¬
ond choice. The report also predicted an increase in the num¬
ber of quality male recruits for the Air Force by 1993.
But Congress refused to back off on its mandated quotas.
The following year, the House committee recommended repeal
of the 19 percent quota for 1987 but left in place the 22 percent
quota for 1988. Later, Congress delayed the 22 percent quota
until 1989. The Air Force finally succeeded in having a repeal
amendment added to the fiscal year 1989 National Defense
Authorization Bill. Nevertheless, it expected women to make
up 19.6 percent of total Air Force accessions in 1989.
Like the Air Force, the Navy sailed ahead under Reagan
with expanded opportunities for women, opening more jobs,
more sea billets, and more command slots, and increasing the
total number of women in service. The number of Navy officers
and enlisted women increased 52 percent from 1980 to 1986. In
the fifth year of the Reagan administration, 10 percent of Navy
officers and 9 percent of its enlisted personnel were women.
Plans called for adding another 4,000 enlisted women to reach
the goal set by the Defense Department of 51,300 by 1989.
But, as with the Air Force, not everyone was pleased with
the Navy’s achievements. Female surface warfare officers found
their opportunities for sea duty limited by their exclusion from
ships of the Mobile Logistics Support Force (MLSF). When
their complaints reached the ears of DACOWITS, the commit¬
tee began calling on the Navy to open these clearly labeled
“support” ships to women. The Navy argued that MLSF ships
fit the definition of combat vessels accepted by Congress when
it amended Title 10 to allow women on noncombat vessels in
1978. That definition excluded women from permanent assign¬
ment aboard any “unit, ship, aircraft, or task organization”
whose primary mission was to “seek out, reconnoiter, or engage
the enemy.” MLSF ships regularly moved as part of a battle
group and therefore were classed as combat vessels.
DACOWITS was unconvinced. “The Navy has to develop a
more definitive determination of what constitutes a combat
ship and what constitutes a support ship so that women will stay
with that service and be fully utilized,” said Constance B.
Newman, DACOWITS chairwoman, in January 1986.8
Some women blamed the secretary of the Navy, John F.
Lehman, Jr., for the MLSF restriction. A female naval officer at
a DACOWITS meeting said, “There are two words that explain

why women arerft serving on MLSF ships: John Lehman.”9
Lehman himself told DACOWITS in November 1986 that
opening MLSF ships to women was a “possibility, but we would
need to adjust the legislation. Lehman belittled the problems
of putting women aboard ship but said the move might provoke
opposition from the wives of MLSF sailors. The Navy was
“antifamily” enough without putting men and women together
on ships, said Lehman. “That is the same excuse we heard about
Âir Force wives when women were being sent into silos,”
Carolyn Becraft of WEAL retorted. An aide to Senator William
Proxmire of Wisconsin, a stalwart supporter of women in com¬
bat, observed that the National Military Family Association had
endorsed the idea of women on ships, “so I think Mr. Lehman
doesn’t have to worry about Navy wives.”10
Not long afterward, the Navy reaffirmed its exclusion of
women from the MLSF and renamed it the Combat Logistics
Force. In March 1987 Vice Admiral Dudley L. Carlson, the
Navy’s chief of personnel, defended the name change before
the Senate Armed Services Committee s subcommittee on per¬
sonnel by showing pictures of World War II ships burning and
sinking after enemy attacks. “This is a picture of a combat logis¬
tics ship burning,” said Carlson. “The people on that ship
thought they were in combat.” Not known for tact, Carlson
tossed the grenade back into the lap of Congress, challenging it
to do what it seemed to want the Navy to do. Said Carlson, “Our
position is, if you want to change the combat exclusion law, fine.
But, please don’t mandate which ships are combat and which
are not.”11 Congress backed off.
Other problems plagued the Navy during the years of
expansion. The msh of women into the nations sea service was
not a rush to sea, because most female recruits preferred tradi¬
tional jobs comfortably ashore to dirty work on the rolling
waves. In 1983 three-fourths of Navy enlisted women were con¬
centrated in one-fourth of Navy ratings, leaving very few sea
billets in those ratings for women to fill. The Navy had opened
more than 6,200 sea billets to women but could fill only 5,000
because there were not enough women in other ratings.
Because of this problem, the Navy was not enthusiastic
about increasing its total number of women. More women only
aggravated the problem of sea/shore rotation. When Congress
tried to increase the Navy’s female strength fr&m 46,000 women
in 1986 to 55,000 in 1987, Admiral James D. Watkins, chief of
naval operations, made it known that the Navy had all the
women it needed. Watkins’s successor. Admiral Carlisle A.H.
Trost, came to the same conclusion after several months in the
job. In February 1987 Trost ordered a
five-year freeze on the number of Navy
The Task Force on Women
enlisted women. Instead of proceeding
in the Military contributed
toward the Reagan administration’s goal
of 51,300, Trost intended to hold nothing new and never
women to 46,796—9 percent of Navy left the confines of its
enlisted personnel. Unfortunately for
Pentagon conference room.
Trost, he had neglected to forewarn the
secretary of defense or the secretary of
the Navy before making his decision public. Two days after the
decision was announced, Weinberger met with DACOWITS
chairwoman Jacquelyn K. Davis to hear her complaint about
the effects of the decision on the Navy women, then brusquely
countermanded the order.
Another defeat involved civilian women employed by the
Navy as technicians to work on Navy vessels. One such techni¬
cian, Pamela Doviak Celli, was barred from going aboard a Navy
submarine for sea trials and filed suit with the Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), charging the
Navy with sex discrimination. Celli’s suit argued that Title 10
applied only to Navy servicewomen, not to Navy civilians, and
that excluding her from sea trials had harmed her career
advancement. The EEOC ruled in Celli’s favor. The Navy at first
resisted the EEOC intervention on the grounds that it had no
jurisdiction over the service, but on the last day of the EEOCs
ultimatum, the new secretary of the Navy, James H. Webb, Jr.—
Naval Academy graduate, wounded Marine Corps veteran, best¬

selling author, an (ôutspoken opponent of women at the sendee
academies—ordered that Celli be allowed to participate in sea
trials aboard submarines. Webb also ordered that decisions to
allow anyone aboard ship should be left to ships’ commanders,
but that the basic policy that female employees shall have full
opportunity to participate in sea trials still applies.” Soon after,
female officers began complaining to DACOWITS that civilian
women could serve aboard ships closed to naval officers.
\ Webbs first appointment as assistant secretary of defense
for reserve affairs in 1984 was opposed by feminist groups and
some Pentagon officials, but Weinberger wanted him anyway.
To better Webbs chances for confirmation, Weinberger sub¬
mitted a letter to the Senate committee announcing that Webb
had reversed” his views regarding women in the military and
was fully in line with administration policy. To Webb, the
announcement was a slap in the face. Though he admired and
respected Weinberger greatly, he disliked being treated, in
Webbs words, “like a reformed smoker.” In fact, he did not
recant his earlier views, though he did promise not to try to
“turn back the clock.”
Webb s appointment as secretary of the Navy was less con¬
troversial because of his apparent good behavior. Nevertheless,
as if to test his sincerity, Jacquelyn Davis and DACOWITS
toured Navy and Marine installations in the Far East in August
1987 and returned with a platterful of unappetizing issues that
it served up to the Navy with great fanfare—sexual harassment;
fraternization; pregnancy; lesbianism; the burden of dependent
children; problems with uniforms; troublesome male attitudes;
lack of decent housing; inadequate female medical care; insuf¬
ficient promotion opportunity; poor communication between
women and Navy leaders; and restrictions of women from the
CLF, the P-3 Orion antisubmarine aircraft, and the Marine
Corps embassy guard program. The report harped on the
theme that the “institutional hierarchies” of both services “con¬
tinue to project attitudes that are biased against women.”12
Secretary Webb had already ordered a comprehensive

review of the “progress” of women in the Navy. The review was
completed in December 1987, and Webb announced his
approval of several of the reviews recommendations in January
1988. More women would be allowed to compete to enter Navy
ratings, and more women would be assigned to aviation units,
aboard P-3 aircraft, and to sea duty. Three kinds of CLF ships
(oilers, ammunition ships, and store ships) would be opened to
women, and the Navy’s definition of combatant would be
changed to include units, ships, aircraft, and task organizations
which have as their primary missions “to seek out, reconnoiter,
and engage the enemy.” The 1978 definition required combat¬
ants to perform only one of the three tasks, instead of all three
tasks. Webb himself was not keen on these changes, but the
admiral responsible for the study insisted they were for the
good of the Navy.
Webb also had directed the Marine Corps to review its poli¬
cies regarding the growing number of women Marines. In some
ways, the Marine Corps remained the most conservative of the
services. It still had fewer women as a percentage of its total
force than any of the other services, and women Marines did
not begin weapons training until 1987. But in six years under
Reagan, the Marine Corps’ female strength increased almost
50 percent, exceeding the Carter administration’s goal of 9,600
women Marines in service by 1987. The Women Marine
Review of 1984 set the “ideal” strength at 10,500, with 3,800
women in the Fleet Marine Force. The study also approved the
deployment of women with a Marine Amphibious Force and
with headquarters units and air combat elements of a Marine
Amphibious Brigade, but kept them out of battalion and
smaller units.
The study ordered by Webb was not completed until after
he had resigned over unrelated differences with the new secre¬
tary of defense, Frank Carlucci. The study produced 83 rec¬
ommendations, of which 66 were approved for implementation
by the commandant of the Marine Corps, General Al Gray.
Women would be assigned to many new jobs and units, includ¬

ing Hawk anti-llrcraft missile battalions; barracks would be
integrated to discourage lesbianism; the Marine Corps would
seek expanded child care and recreational facilities for women;
and the Corps would work with the Navy to make female med¬
ical care more convenient. Gray did not approve several of the
more controversial recommendations. He refused to allow
women to crew C-130 transport aircraft and several small pas¬
senger jets, to deploy aboard amphibious ships, to undergo the
same combat training as men, and to be assigned to the Corps’
new security force battalions, which recently had taken on a
counterterrorism mission.
Gray also rejected a recommendation that women be
assigned as embassy security guards on the grounds that
embassy guards are expected to be more than just fancy-dress
doormen, but on that count he was overruled by Carlucci.
Carlucci also later ordered women admitted to Marine security
force battalions. While briefing DACOWITS on the results of
the study, Gray made known his displeasure at being overruled
as a result of the committee’s meddling and disputed
DACOWITS’s claim that many women Marines wanted to be
embassy guards. I believe that was a carry-over from your
agenda, he told DACOWITS. “I’m getting hustled along here.
I’m having the opportunity to do what’s best for my people
taken away from me, and that gets my attention.” At one point,
he asserted that he was the only government official completely
responsible for the good of the Marine Corps, saying, “I
am the one who is totally responsible for their well-being.... I
am the one who will make these kinds of decisions always,”
adding under his breath, “or you can get yourself another com¬
mandant. The remark was played up by the press, but
subsequent statements by Gray and Carlucci denied that the
two were at odds. A spokesman for Gray explained, “What the
commandant really meant was that DACOWITS made a
recommendation directly to the secretary without passing
through him.”14
The appointment of Frank Carlucci to replace Caspar

Weinberger as secretary of defense did not help the Pentagon
to withstand the feminist lobby. As deputy secretary of defense
in the early years of Weinbergers watch, Carlucci was largely
responsible for shaping the Defense Department’s official non¬
position on women in combat. Later, he confided in subordi¬
nates that he didn’t share “Cap’s hang-up about women in
combat.” Carlucci’s wife, Marcia Carlucci, had been a member
and supporter of DACOWITS from 1984 to 1986. Before that,
she had helped Marybel Batjer, the youthful director of politi¬
cal affairs for the strongly feminist _
National Women’s Political Caucus, get ....... ,
b The men in the field and
the job of special assistant to both the
secretary and the deputy secretary of fleet were Prohibited &»»
defense. Batjer saw to it that most joining the debate.
offices were filled with people sympa- -
thetic to women in the military. The joke around the Pentagon
was that a candidate had to be conservative enough to
please the White House and liberal enough to please Marybel
Batjer. James Webb made it past Batjer because of Wein¬
berger’s patronage, but some of Webb’s associates were not so
fortunate.
As secretary of defense, Carlucci responded to
DACOWITS s Far East visit by creating a new Task Force on
Women in the Military headed by Dr. David J. Armor, a sociol¬
ogist serving as principal deputy assistant secretary of defense
for force management and personnel. Membership included,
among others, Marybel Batjer, who had recently joined the staff
of the National Security Council as deputy executive secretary,
and Delbert Spurlock, the assistant secretary of the Army
responsible for emasculating the WITA study. Jacquelyn Davis
acted as an official observer. The task force was charged with
examining three issues affecting women: career development,
combat exclusions, and how women were regarded by their
male counterparts. The task force contributed no new knowl¬
edge and never left the confines of its Pentagon conference
room. It presented its brief report to the House Armed Services

Committee s military personnel subcommittee in January 1988.
Most of the task force s recommendations were modest ren¬
ditions of demands made by DACOWITS. To aid the career
development of servicewomen, it recommended that the secre¬
tary of defense direct the services to develop plans to draw
more women into nontraditional career fields, which they had
been trying to do for years. To combat sexual harassment, the
task force recommended that the services: improve sexual
x harassment training, establish a means outside the chain of
command for reporting incidents of harassment, improve
support facilities to "eliminate conditions that detract from
servicewomen becoming full and equal members of their
units, and enforce the policy of providing servicewomen
priority over dependent women for obstetrical and gyneco¬
logical care.
The task force s only original contribution concerned com¬
bat exclusions. It recommended that the secretary of defense
instruct the services to adopt a new method of determining
where women may or may not serve, based upon the principle
of “equal risk.” Noncombat units could be closed to women
provided that the type, degree, and duration of risk is equal to
or greater than that experienced by associated combat units.”
To the Army, the principle of equal risk would mean “opening
those [infantry or armored] brigade positions which, like for¬
ward support battalions, experience less risk than regular com¬
bat battalions.” To the Navy, equal risk might mean opening
more ships of the CLF, depending upon how the Navy decided
to measure risk, said the task force. To the Air Force, any air¬
craft not incurring an equal risk with similar combat aircraft
would be open to women. The task force expected that the Air
Force’s comparison of risk would keep some tactical reconnais¬
sance aircraft, like the RF-4 Phantom, closed to women, but
would open strategic reconnaissance aircraft like the SR-71
Blackbird, the U-2, and the TR-1. Some search and rescue air¬
craft might also be affected.
If applied to provide maximum opportunity to women, the

doctrine of equal risk could have virtually the same effect as a
bill sponsored in the 100th Congress by Senators William
Proxmire of Wisconsin and William S. Cohen of Maine and by
Congressman William L. Dickinson of Alabama. The Proxmire-
Cohen bill would have permitted women to be assigned to all
units, vessels, and aircraft that “have as their mission the direct
support of combat units,” no matter where they might be
located or what threat they might face. The Air Force would
have been forced to open all positions aboard tactical and
strategic reconnaissance aircraft and transport aircraft, though
they routinely operate over hostile territory. The Navy would
have been forced to open all CLF ships, and the Army would
have been asked to open an estimated 140,000 positions in the
main battle area.
The bills sponsors insisted that the bill was a “moderate,
combat support measure,” not intended to “undermine” the
combat exclusion laws but to provide a more efficient use of
manpower and allow women greater opportunity for advance¬
ment. Members of their staffs, however, admitted that the bill
would be a big step toward repeal of the combat exclusions.
Others on Capitol Hill said the bill was intended not to become
law but to please tire feminist lobby by goading the Defense
Department into extending womens roles. After serving its pur¬
pose, the bill died in committee.
The Defense Departments policy of “equal risk”—bringing
women closer to combat—increased the threat that the courts
might one day rule the combat exclusions laws unconstitutional
on the grounds that the distinction between combat and non¬
combat was purely arbitrary. In Rostker v. Goldberg, the
Supreme Court upheld the exemption of women from the draft
by reasoning that the draft existed to provide the military with
combat troops, and because women were barred by law from
combat, the draft exemption served a legitimate purpose. But
by not then addressing the issue of the constitutionality of the
combat exclusion laws, the high court missed an opportunity to
validate those laws when legal grounds for their constitutional¬

ity still existed. ^
Since Rostkerv. Goldberg, the Reagan Defense Department
had pulled all of the pillars of legal support out from under the
combat exclusions by insisting that the exclusions rested solely
upon the will of the American people. In the late 1980s opinion
polls were already showing that a majority of Americans favored
women in combat, although most would have qualified the
proposition with “if they can do the job.” They had not heard of
VWITA and knew nothing of the political dangers facing anyone
who dared say that many women cannot do the job. They had
only the report of high-level Pentagon officials who were reliably
effusive in their public praise of women in uniform. The men in
the field and fleet were prohibited from joining the debate.
Chapter 8
FROM HERE TO MATERNITY

&
The whole of military activity must... relate directly

or indirectly to the engagement. The end for which
a soldier is recruited, clothed, armed, and trained,
the whole object of his sleeping, eating, drinking,
and marching is simply that he should fight at the
right place and the right time.
—KARL VON CLAUSEWITZ
FOR MANY YEARS, the party line in Washington was that all
was well with women in the military, that with the exception of
a few minor annoyances to be dispelled by the magic wand of
policy, sexual integration was proceeding smoothly without
degrading military readiness. Women were “an integral part” of
the nation’s defense, and they can do the job “as well as if not
better” than their male comrades, said responsible officials.
The proof, they said, was in the women’s consistently faster
rate of promotion. In the spring of 1987, the Army promoted
33 percent of eligible women to the rank of E-7 but only 16 per¬
cent of eligible men. Throughout the services, women are pro¬
moted with less time-in-service than men to every grade from
E-2 to 0-7. Female officers are promoted to rear admiral and
brigadier general (0-7) fives years earlier than men, on average,
140 • WOMEN IN 7%E MILITARY
and enlisted women to senior NCO or chief petty officer rank

(E-7) two to four years earlier than enlisted men.
But there are several reasons for doubting the significance
of promotion comparisons. Higher rates of attrition and lower
rates of retention trim much of the dead wood from the
women’s ranks. In the past, those who survived until retirement
were intensely dedicated women who forsook marriage and
family for the sake of their careers. Today less dedicated women
are favored by promotion systems that emphasize education,
test scores, and personal appearance—areas where women
tend to outdo men. Moreover, promotions are centrally con¬
trolled and therefore not immune from manipulation. The ser¬
vices not only exert considerable pressure to safeguard the
advancement of women; they use rigid quotas to guarantee that
women succeed. (See Chapter 11.)
The assertion that women in general are performing as well
as or better than men has by no means been proven. No doubt
some women outperform some men, but the many good ser¬
vicewomen who excel at their jobs do not compensate the ser¬
vices for the problems that women overall have caused them,
problems that have been known for many years, but which are
religiously ignored for political reasons.
PHYSICAL LIMITATIONS
The general lack of physical strength among servicewomen
bears directly upon their ability to perform assigned duties. Yet
the notion that technology has alleviated the need for physical
strength is almost universally accepted. Say the words “modern
wai fare and the minds of many Americans fill with images of
control consoles and video displays. “There’s an awful lot of
button-pushing going on out there,” says a reporter for Time
magazine who thinks the physical demands of the military have
been exaggerated.
There is, however, no evidence that technology has in fact
reduced the need for physical strength and endurance among
military men and women. Endurance-has only increased in
FROM HERE TO MATERNITY • 141
importance; operations are now conducted around the clock

and throughout the year, whereas they were once limited to the
daytime in seasonable weather. Many modern military jobs still
require more physical strength than most women possess.
Technology has not provided the Air Force with automatic
litter-loaders to move wounded soldiers onto MEDEVAC air¬
craft, a task women are unable to do, nor of sorting artilldry
rounds by hand. What technology has done is to make service
members able to do more, thereby making more for them to do.
Many of the buttons that need pushing are attached to large
pieces of equipment that must be hauled in haste back and
forth across the battlefield.
Women’s physical advantages are that they are less suscep¬
tible to altitude sickness and, normally, have a greater tolerance
of cold temperatures due to their extra body fat. But by all other
measures, men have enormous advantages physically. The aver¬
age female Army recruit is 4.8 inches shorter, 31.7 pounds
lighter, has 37.4 fewer pounds of muscle, and 5.7 more pounds
of fat than the average male recruit. She has only 55 percent of
the upper-body strength and 72 percent of the lower-body
strength of the average male. She is also at a significant disad¬
vantage when performing aerobic activities such as marching
with heavy loads and working in the heat, since fat mass is
inversely related to aerobic capacity and heat tolerance. Her
lighter frame, moreover, makes her more likely to suffer
injuries due to physical exertion. An Army study of 124 men and
186 women done in 1988 found that women are more than
twice as likely to suffer leg injuries and nearly five times as
likely to suffer fractures as men. Women were, consequently,
less available for duty.1
There is without doubt a significant gap between the phys¬
ical abilities of men and women. Tests of men and women
entering the West Point class of 1980 found that, on average,
the upper-body strength of women was 56 percent the strength
of men, their leg strength 80 percent, and their gripping
strength 69 percent. Even when height was kept constant,
142 • WOMEN IN f*HE MILITARY
women possessed only 80 percent of the overall strength of

men. After eight weeks of intensive training, male plebes
demonstrated 32 percent more power in the lower body and
performed 48 percent more work at the leg press than female
plebes. At the bench press, the men demonstrated 270 percent
more power and performed an extraordinary 473 percent more
Work than the women.2
Little wonder that servicewomen should find so many
workaday duties beyond their ability. Even in the modem Air
Force, routine tasks are often too much for them. The GAO
found that 62 of 97 female aircraft mechanics could not per¬
form required tasks such as changing aircraft tires and brakes,
removing batteries and crew seats, closing drag chute doors,
breaking torque on bolts, and lifting heavy stands. Female mis¬
sile mechanics often lacked the strength and physical confi¬
dence to harness and move warheads and to maneuver large
pieces of machinery. Some had trouble carrying their own tool
boxes.
In the late 1970s the Air Force began screening recmits
using the X-Factor” strength indicator, but Army researchers
found that the screening had degenerated in practice into a
meaningless question-and-answer drill. Had the X-Factor actu¬
ally kept women out of jobs for which they were unfit, it would
have gone the way of the Armys MEPSCAT. The very7 presence
of women in the ranks was made possible only by lowering or
eliminating physical standards. When the services found that
weight standards for recmits excluded 22 percent of potential
female recmits but only 3 percent of potential male recruits, the
standards were revised to resemble the insurance industry's stan¬
dards, excluding 7.3 percent of women and 5.8 percent of men.
A five-loot-six-inch female may now enlist in the Army weighing
a hefty 165 lbs. All of the services have double standards for men
and women on all the events of their regular physical fitness tests.
Young male marines must perform at least three pull-ups to pass
the test, but women marines must only hang from the bar with
arms flexed for sixteen seconds. In the Army, the youngest
women are given an extra three minutes to complete a two-mile

run. All of the services require men to perform more situps than
women, though the Army just pledged to change this.
To justify the double standard, the American military aban¬
doned the worldwide consensus of the purpose for physical
training in the military—that soldiers should be tougher, faster,
stronger, and more physically able than the rest of the populate.
The U.S. military prefers weak but healthy people because they
are cheaper in the long run. Physical training is meant to
“ensure a minimum level of fitness, not to delineate any mea¬
sure of job-related productivity,” thus “the premise that men
‘do more" because they must achieve higher physical fitness
standards is not a valid one.”3
Of course, on the job, men actually do more to make up for
the limitations of their female coworkers. As long as there are
enough men around, commanders can pretend that women
have not degraded a unit’s ability to accomplish its mission. But
as their number increased, the concentration of women in some
support units began to threaten mission accomplishment. Naval
Air Station Adak in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska recently
boasted a fire department that was 76 percent female. The
women were issued special, lighter fire-fighting equipment,
and portions of the International Fire Service Association man¬
uals were rewritten to cover how the women should cope with
physically demanding tasks. But because the women were still
unable to open and close fire hydrants, connect large diameter
hoses, advance hose lines, and control nozzles, the department
was forced to assign five women to engine companies that nor¬
mally required only four men—a 25 percent increase in per¬
sonnel to do the same job.
Aboard ship, the entire crew is charged with fire-fighting
and rescue duties, and here the substitution of women for men
can have deadly consequences. A 1981 Navy study found
female recruits woefully unable to perform five common
damage-control tasks: carrying stretchers up and down ladders
and across level surfaces, moving and starting emergency
144 • WOMEN IN 1§HE MILITARY
pumps, turning engine bolts, and directing fire hoses. Test

results are shown below:
Number of Recruits Not Capable of Performing Damage-Control Tasks4
# of Women # of Women # of Men # of Men

before after before after
Task training training training training
Stretcher carry level 63 38 0 0

Stretcher carry up/ A
down ladder 94 88 0 0
Fire hose 19 16 0 0
P250 pump, carry down 99 99 9 4
P250 pump, carry up 73 52 0 0
P250 pump, start pump 90 75 0 0
Remove SSTG pump 99 99 0 0
Torque engine bolt 78 47 0 0
The implications were ominous. “Unless the Navy has the lux¬
ury of customizing damage control assignments based upon the
capabilities of individual sailors, the lack of physical strength
among female soldiers can only decrease the survivability of
Navy vessels, wrote Dr. Paul Davis, an exercise physiologist, in
an article for Navy Times. “Seen in this light, the Navys recent
enthusiasm for putting more and more women aboard ship
makes little sense, unless the Navy doesn’t mind sacrificing sur¬
vivability (and possibly the lives of its sailors) for the sake of
enhancing opportunities for women.”5
Army experts who were not personally involved in the
WITA study have innocently compared a soldiers need for
strength to an athlete s, without considering the implications for
women. According to Major James Wright, chief of the Exer¬
cise Science Branch of the U.S. Army Fitness School:
Upper-body strength is an important component of virtually

every Army task. There are still hundreds of manual-type
tasks which require strength. There mil always be a lot of
setting up and tearing down of equipment when units go to
the field. In fact, several studies show that the lack of upper-
body strength is actually a limiting factor for our overall
military readiness,6
Navy Lieutenant Ed Marcinik, an exercise physiologist working

with the Naval Health and Physical Readiness Program, agrees:
/*
There are general shipboard tasks that every sailor must

perform, all requiring upper-body strength: extricating
injured personnel, controlling fire hose nozzles, handling
stores, and opening and securing watertight hatches, doors,
and scuttles.'
Marcinik says that fully 84 percent of all shipboard duties

involve heavy lifting, carrying, or pulling. Four ratings
(boatswain’s mate, gunners mate, hull technician, and machin¬
ist’s mate) are among the most physically demanding jobs in the
military.
Before the Navy became so sensitive to the feelings of
women, it developed a program of shipboard weight training
called SPARTEN, or Scientific Program of Aerobic and
Resistance Training Exercise in the Navy. One part of
SPARTEN involved the installation of nautilus equipment on
ships like the battleship New Jersey.
To military women, however, such emphasis on physical
strength is anathema. When men in the military are encouraged
to think that being strong and quick is good, the professional
reputation of military women suffers. Because the services are
committed to protect and advance women as equals, they
devalue physical prowess as a professional virtue, which is why
programs like SPARTEN are only marginally effective.
Apart from the lack of strength and speed, the smaller size
and different shape of women has caused innumerable prob¬
lems solved only by a boom in special clothing and equipment.
The defense inventory has burgeoned with end-items specially
designed for both sexes or women only, including smaller every-
thing from snowsl|pes to flight suits: smaller wire-cutters,

longer wrenches, lighter firefighters’ helmets, specially cut
boots; special helicopter seats because women complained of
back pain; flak vests to accommodate female breasts; gas-masks
to fit softer, smaller; less bony faces; and a disposable cardboard
tube to enable female soldiers to urinate in the field without
dropping their trousers (developed but not adopted). In the
interest of uniformity and standardization, the Army has tried
to develop clothing that will fit both men and women with
minimum variation, but the unsightly compromises fit neither
sex well.
■A
A more serious result of the differences of shape and size is

the relaxation of anthropometric standards devised to fit the
operator to the equipment. The services have always been will¬
ing to relax standards for height, weight, and reach in order to
admit women to special programs and training. None of the
first women to undergo Navy flight training in 1975 satisfied the
Navy’s own stringent standards that excluded many men. In
1983, to enhance pilot safety and aircraft performance, the
Navy tightened requirements for sitting height, leg length,
buttock-to-knee length, and functional reach, but when female
aviators complained that only a quarter of them would qualify,
the Navy backed off.
Anthropometric differences also affect the design of new
systems and equipment with potentially serious consequences.
There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all high-performance
jet fighter. For the safety of the pilot and for the performance
of the aircraft, cockpits are made to be tight fits. When design¬
ers introduce a 25 percent variable in the size of the pilot,
something must give.
The need to accommodate smaller, weaker soldiers played
a part in the Army’s decision to replace the M1911 .45 caliber
Colt pistol with the 9mm Beretta. The best buy the Army ever
made, the .45 automatic was designed to stop a drug-crazed
Moro warrioi dead in his tracks. It served all of the services well
in every war since World War I, but lately fell victim to com-
plaints that it was difficult to use effectively because it was

unwieldy and heavy—so heavy that female military policemen
were issued .38 caliber revolvers instead.
The Army insists that the .45 s ineffectiveness and the need
for standardization within NATO, not the inability of women to
use it, motivated the change, but this raises the question of why
the Army is not also considering a replacement for the M16
rifle. Since its adoption, the M16 has been criticized by experi¬
enced soldiers as being mechanically unreliable, lacking in stop¬
ping power, ineffective at long ranges, and too fragile for
combat use. The NATO standard rifle _
caliber is 7.65mm, but the M16 is a Women.s rates of attritlon
5.56mm rifle and United States is the
i . . vUTr,, a. t) . are consistently higher
only country in N A10 to use it. But any
7.65mm alternative weighs many than those of men.
pounds more than the M16, posing a -
significant problem for female soldiers. And in almost every
instance the good of equal opportunity takes precedence over
the good of the service.
Ultimately, of course, the lack of physical strength among
women will directly degrade the ability of units to fight and sur¬
vive on the modem battlefield, inevitably resulting in a greater
loss of life and a greater risk of defeat.
MEDICAL DIFFERENCES
Lack of physical strength contributes to another problem with
women in the military: they need greater medical attention.
Women in all of the services are hospitalized two to three times
as often as men. In the 1970s the percentage of Navy women
requiring hospitalization fluctuated between 25 percent and
30 percent, while hospitalization of Navy men declined from
13 percent in 1966 to 11 percent in 1975. When men and
women are subjected to the same work requirements and living
conditions, as during recruit and cadet training, women’s hospi¬
talization rates are significantly higher than men’s rates for
nearly all diagnoses: mental disorders; musculoskeletal afflic-
tions; acute upper-respiratory infections; medical and surgical

aftercare; rubella; infective and parasitic diseases; and digestive,
diarrheal, and genitourinary disorders.8
A 1990 study of medical requirements aboard ship found
that the monthly sick-call rate for women was nearly twice the
rate for men. Women visited sick call more than men for most
illness categories, including many common ailments such as
strep infections, sunburn, poison ivy, acne, nose-bleeds, head¬
aches, fainting, fever, fatigue, insomnia, conjunctivitis, diarrhea,
and mental problems. Men visited sick call more than women
for athletes foot, jock itch, ingrown facial hair, ingrown toenails,
skin infections, arid obesity. About 25 percent of all illness-
related (noninjury) sick-call visits by women were for female-
specific problems, including pregnancy and related conditions,
genitourinary disorders, and sexually transmitted diseases. The
study found that 20 percent of female crew members became
pregnant during the year-long study (5 percent per quarter),
despite the ready availability aboard ship of virtually every
form of birth control. As a result of all this, the study recom¬
mended assigning more Navy doctors to sea duty—bad news
for the Navy, which has long had special problems recruiting
doctors.9
Other studies have shown that, in the services at large, dif¬
ferences in military occupation and off-duty behavior mean dif-
feient rates of hospitalization. Men are generally more prone to
injury (fractures, lacerations, and dislocations) because of their
poorer driving records and greater involvement in hazardous
work and athletics, though Navy women in the lower grades
assigned nontraditional jobs have shown considerably higher”
rates of injury than similarly assigned men, probably because of
their lack of physical confidence, mechanical experience, and
upper-body strength.10 Women generally are still more prone
to mental illness, genitourinary disorders, and disease, with
pregnancy-related conditions accounting for one-third or more
of all women hospitalized. Among mental disorders, men show
higher rates of schizophrenia, alcoholism, and drug-related
conditions, while women show higher rates of neuroses, eating

disorders, and “transient situational disturbances.”11
Though many military women deny or downplay the effects
of premenstrual syndrome (PMS) on the behavior of women,
medical experts estimate that 5 percentrio 10 percent of all pre¬
menopausal women experience severe PMS-related symptoms,
including incapacitating depression, suicidal thoughts, extreme
mood swings, self-abuse, and violence. “These are women who
suffer chronic, debilitating distress—women who are often
unable to take care of themselves or their family,” says Nancy
Reame, associate professor of nursing at the University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor.12 Most women experience milder
symptoms such as bloating, headaches, backaches, irritability,
depression, breast tenderness, and food cravings. Roughly half
of all women who suffer PMS characterize the condition as
“mildly distressing.” Only about 10 percent of premenopausal
women experience no symptoms of PMS. The impact of PMS
on unit effectiveness is compounded by the natural, involuntary
tendency of women living in close quarters to synchronize their
menstrual cycles.
Much of the debate about the medical cost-effectiveness of
women versus men has focused on rates of “noneffectiveness”
or “nonavailability,” the amount of duty time service members
miss while receiving medical attention. The medical nonavail¬
ability rate for women is consistently 2 to 2.5 times the rate for
men. Much of the difference is attributable to pregnancy, but
the womens rate exceeds the men’s rate for all diagnoses. The
women’s nonavailability rate compared to the men’s is 8.7 times
for genitourinary disorders, 2.6 times for morbidity (disease),
1.4 times for mental illness, and 3.8 times for spurious com¬
plaints. Women lose five times as much time as men for
attempted suicide but are successful at suicide only half as
many times as men.13
But, proponents of women in the military argue, if women
lose more time for medical reasons, men lose more time for dis¬
ciplinary reasons. These, however, are quite different problems.
The lack of discipli^ among men is itself the fault of a femi¬

nized force, a force that fails to instill discipline during basic
training because of its be-nice-to-privates approach. Still, a
commander has much more control over a units disciplinary
problems than its medical problems, and indiscipline varies
dramatically from Unit to unit and from time to time. Since
1980—the last time the comparison of nonavailability for all
reasons was made—better quality recruits have resulted in
declining rates of indiscipline among men. The Defense
Department no longer knows whether men or women lose
more time overall.
In contrast, the medical demands of women in the peace¬
time force have been relatively steady. Modifications of clothing
and equipment have reduced their need for medical attention
only slightly. Sex education has done little to reduce pregnancy.
If the medical nonavailability rates of women change at all, they
will likely increase as more and more women are assigned non-
traditional duties for which they have not the physical ability.
Nonavailability will also increase if women are employed closer
to wartime fighting. The services can expect an increase in
mental illness and infectious disorders among women. And
unsanitary conditions combined with inevitable shortages of
such items as sanitary napkins will aggravate genitourinary
infections. In Honduras, servicewomen were forced to use
sponges and birth control pills when there was nothing else. In
future wars, even those poor comforts may be luxuries.
That servicewomen place a considerable additional burden
on the already overburdened military medical system is gener¬
ally admitted, but the weight of the burden is unknown and not
likely to become known for political reasons. In 1985 the
Defense Departments Health Studies Task Force recom¬
mended that the department fund an independent study of the
full impact of integration on the health care requirements of the
services, at a cost ol $780,000. The task force noted that a joint
study by the Defense Department and the Veterans
Administration would cost less but would be 'suspect in the
civilian community and among various womens groups” and

might ‘ provoke a political controversy.”14 No study, indepen¬
dent or in-house, has ever been done.
PREGNANCY AND ATTRITION

One problem with women in the military that does receive
some attention is attrition—the failure to complete an enlist¬
ment contract. Attrition reduces service strength, increases per¬
sonnel turbulence, and robs the service of its training
investment. Women consistently attrit at higher rates than men.
The difference is most dramatic between male and female high
school graduates, the very people the services want most to
keep. In 1981 nearly half of all Marine Corps female high
school graduates failed to complete their enlistment contracts,
more than double the male rate of high school graduates:
48 percent to 23.5 percent. In the Army, the attrition rate for
female graduates was two-thirds higher than for male gradu¬
ates: 40.3 percent to 24.8 percent. More recently, attrition
among all servicewomen compared to males has been 36 per¬
cent higher: 34 percent to 25 percent.' " The difference is least
in the Navy, in which men see an unequal share of sea duty. As
more women are required to go to sea involuntarily, their attri¬
tion rates will soar.
Defenders of women in the military once argued that the
combat restrictions frustrated the ambitions of women and thus
contributed to their higher rates of attrition, but this was not
supported by the evidence. Attrition among women in nontra-
ditional career fields is consistently higher than among women
in traditional career fields, and studies indicate that women
who attrit tend to hold more traditional views regarding the
roles of men and women. A Marine Corps study identified “tra¬
ditional family and career orientation” as the most important
factor among women who attrited.16 Thus, those inclined
toward leaving service are not likely to be persuaded to stay if
offered opportunities for non traditional work, and those who
complain about limited opportunities are not likely to leave ser-
vice because their a$»bitions are not fully satisfied. As the ser¬
vices push more women into nontraditional jobs, including
combat, attrition among women will increase.
By far the largest reason for attrition is pregnancy—25 per¬
cent to 50 percent of women who fail to complete enlistment
contracts do so because of pregnancy. Pregnancy and parent¬
hood accounted for 23 percent of all women discharged in
1980; an estimated 7 percent to 17 percent of servicewomen
become pregnant each year. As mentioned earlier, the Army
found that one-third of the women who became pregnant opted
for voluntary discharges under the policy that leaves the deci¬
sion to stay in or get out in the hands of the woman.
The services once handled pregnancy very differently.
Executive Order No. 10240, signed by President Truman in
1951, authorized the services to involuntarily separate women,
married or unmarried, who were pregnant, gave birth while in
service, or had custody of dependent children under eighteen
years of age. For twenty years, the heads of the womens com¬
ponents zealously defended this right for the good of all con¬
cerned: the service, the womens components, the mother, and
the child. A few activists like Jeanne Holm thought the policy
discriminated against women because men were not similarly
treated for fatherhood. They adopted the argument that the
ultimate responsibility for the care and welfare of children
rests with the parent, not, we submit, with the Air Force.”17
Most senior officers, however, took the view of Brigadier
General Elizabeth P. Hoisington, director of the WAC,
who held that different treatment was justified because
mothers and fathers in service were, in legal terms, not simi¬
larly situated:
...no basis exists to consider equalizing Army policy for

male and female members concerning parenthood through
adoption or other means. A valid comparison cannot be
made between the civilian wife of a male member and the
military ivife of a male member. The interests of the Army
will best be served by women who are free to travel. The

interests of the children will best be served by women who
have no military obligation.18
Hoisingtons successor, Brigadier General Mildred C. Bailey,

repeated the argument in 1974:
No matter what you say about equal opportunity you can¬

not deal with the situation of ari expectant father and an
expectant mother in the same way. Mothers have a role in
child rearing that is different from fathers and we have to
think about the effect this has on mission readiness and our
ability to be available for worldwide assignment.19
In 1972, however, servicewomen were granted two new

options which might have defused the issue: requesting waivers
to stay in service or having an abortion. The first came because
the AVF needed to retain more women and the services wanted
to avoid negative publicity and court challenges. Waivers were
liberally granted by all services. While the Army granted
waivers to 60 percent of the women who applied, the Air Force,
Navy, and Marine Corps granted waivers to more than 90 per¬
cent. The second option came as a result of the Supreme
Courts decision in Roe v. Wade striking down laws in all fifty
states banning abortion and allowing servicewomen to have
abortions at government expense, until Congress banned feder¬
ally funded abortions in 1978.
But court challenges still continued until the 1976 federal
circuit court case of Crawford v. Cushman ruled that the dis¬
charge of a pregnant marine was an unconstitutional violation
of the Fifth Amendments guarantee of due process. Pregnancy
was a “temporary disability,” the court noted, and no other tem¬
porary disability resulted in automatic involuntary discharge.
Rather than fight the ruling, the Defense Department ordered
the services to stop involuntarily separating pregnant women
and to allow voluntary separations.
The classification of pregnancy as a “temporary disability”

had long been an objective of feminist litigation against civilian
employers. The term secured job-related medical benefits for
civilian women and prohibited civilian employers from penaliz¬
ing pregnant employees for the inconvenience their condition
caused.
In the military, however, the term protects women from
involuntary discharge but serves no other purpose. The military
already assumes full responsibility for the medical health of its
members regardless of the cause or nature of their infirmity.
The term “temporary disability” itself does not protect service-
women from adverse personnel actions because, unlike civilian
employees, service members can be court-martialed under
Article 115 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for any self-
inflicted disability that interferes with their performance of
duty—from shooting themselves in the foot to avoid combat, to
lying on the beach long enough to become too sunburned to
wear a uniform. If a soldiers own negligence or misconduct was
the proximate cause of his injury, whether intentional or unin¬
tentional, the soldier can be made to reimburse the government
for his medical expenses.
Pregnancy is the only temporary disability that service
members can inflict upon themselves without fear of punish¬
ment. It is also the only temporary disability that earns a service
member the right to decide whether to stay in the service or get
out, no matter the desires of her commander or the needs of
the service. The court’s ruling that pregnancy is like any other
temporary disability has been applied only to favor and protect
women.
The service comes out ahead only if the woman elects to
have an abortion. Otherwise, either the woman contributes to
the problem of attrition or she becomes a burden to her unit.
Resttictions vary from service to service, but typically, the
pregnant service member must not be made to stand at atten¬
tion 01 parade rest for more than fifteen minutes (no parades
or ceremonies). She must not be exposed to harmful chemi-
cals or vapors (no chemical warfare training, no painting, lim¬

ited duties in the motor pool). She must not receive routine
immunizations (no deployments overseas). She must not
remain aboard ship in port past her twentieth week and must
not go to sea (no sea duty). She must not be assigned to
remote installations where there are limited medical facilities.
She must not be assigned duties in which nausea, easy fatigue,
sudden lightheadedness, or loss of consciousness would be
hazardous to her or anyone else (no flying, driving, diving, <3r
operating large machinery). The Navy bars pregnant sailors
from participating in swim tests, _
drown-proofing, field training, and
Many of the most dedi¬
weapons training. The Army exempts
cated men and women see
pregnant women from over-night duty
and limits their work week to forty motherhood and military
hours or less, with frequent rest service as conflicting
periods.
obligations.
Pregnant service members may
choose to have their babies at the mili¬
tary hospital nearest their home and are allowed up to six weeks
of paid leave not charged to their leave account. Difficult preg¬
nancies may prompt a doctor to relieve a servicewoman of all
duties for as long as necessary, sometimes six or seven months
before birth, during which the woman is a complete loss to her
unit, though her unit is not permitted to request a replacement
because she is still on its roster.
Needless to say, pregnancy is not viewed by many as just
another temporary disability, like a hernia or a broken leg. Most
men and many women, particularly women officers, view it as a
unique indulgence for no good reason. Many of the most dedi¬
cated men and women see motherhood and military service as
conflicting obligations. Many military men still like to think that
they endure the danger and hardships of service so that moth¬
ers and children can be safe at home. The sight of a pregnant
woman at the head of a formation of troops does not increase
their confidence or dedication. It is an absurdity. It is a combi-
nation of opposites t|*at only proves how unmilitary the military

has become, for mothers can be soldiers only when soldiers
cease being warriors.
Pregnancy is perhaps the single greatest obstacle to the
acceptance of women in the military among military men.
Charles Moskos, professor of sociology at the Northwestern
University, after interviewing Army women with their units in
Honduras, concluded, ‘"When there are no pregnant women,
thp incorporation of women into nontraditional roles is great¬
est.” He added, “If there is an absolute precondition of the
effective utilization of women in field duty, it must be exclusion
of pregnant women.”20
The policy of tolerating pregnant women in uniform, forced
upon the military from above, has put the services in an impos¬
sible position. The services are duty bound to reduce pregnan¬
cies to improve readiness but legally and politically bound to
honor pregnant women as fully accepted service members in
good standing. Far from discouraging women from having sex,
the services’ nonjudgmental, safety-first approach tends to
encourage promiscuity, even advising female soldiers on how
properly to have sex in the field. Following the scout’s motto, a
pamphlet entitled “Feminine Hygiene in the Field Setting,”
published and distributed at Fort Meade, Maryland, tells
women always to be prepared:
Sex does not just happen in the garrison setting. If you are
on birth control pills, make sure that you bring enough
packs along to last you for the exercise, and an extra pack in
case something happens to the pack you ’re currently on.
MOTHERHOOD AND MARRIAGE

Problems for the service and the servicewoman do not end with
delivery. Having elected to keep the child and remain in ser¬
vice, the woman must struggle to fulfill her duties as a mother
and as a soldier, sailor, airman, or marine. She is required to cer¬
tify in writing that provisions have been made for the care of
her dependents during regular duty hours, extended duty

hours, readiness exercises, unaccompanied tours, temporary
duty, changes of station, and actual emergencies. If overseas,
she must arrange for someone to escort her dependents during
a possible evacuation of noncombatan'ts. Should any of her
arrangements fail, she is still required to report to duty Failure
to provide for the care of her children or to perform her mili¬
tary duty is grounds for receiving a bar to reenlistment or being
involuntarily separated. But few women are separated for such
failure, because commanders are reluctant to punish young
mothers so severely and most have more important things to do
than checking to see that everyone’s child-care plan is working.
The dependent care certificate is, in most cases, a bureaucratic
formality. A recent Navy survey found that only half of all Navy
mothers even had them.
All problems multiply if the mother is single, as an esti¬
mated 24,000 service mothers—or 12.5 percent of all service-
women—are. And estimates indicate that more than a third of
all pregnant servicewomen are unmarried.21
For years the Defense Department confused the issue of
single parents by secretly including noncustodial single parents
(e.g., a divorced serviceman paying child support) in its count
of “sole parents.” There is, of course, a vast difference between
the obligation to pay a few hundred dollars a month to support
a child in someone else’s custody and the obligation to care for
a child in one’s own custody, but by lumping the two together
the Defense Department could tell the world that “more than
three-quarters of the military sole parents are males.”22
The truth has been known since 1980, but it was ignored to
exculpate women for the problem of single parenthood. In 1980
the services defined single parents differently. The Army and
Marine Corps included those with custody and those paying
child support. The Navy and Air Force counted only service
members with actual custody, producing the embarrassing truth
that Navy women were eight times as likely and Air Force
women were five times as likely as Navy and Air Force men to
be single parents.23 Tjiese statistics, along with the inflated fig¬

ures of the Army and Marine Corps, were reported in the
Defense Department’s 1981 background review, with footnotes
explaining the inconsistency. Nonetheless, throughout the
1980s, the Defense Department included noncustodial single
parents in its count to deceive the public.
The ratio of male single parents to female single parents
shrinks as the number of women in service increases. In 1988
the Air Force, with women as not quite 14 percent of its per¬
sonnel strength, estimated that half of its single parents were
men and half were women, making Air Force women more
than six times more likely to be single parents. The sex of single
parents may vary considerably among the services. A 1988 sur¬
vey of an 11,000-man (13 percent female) Marine headquarters
battalion at Twenty-nine Palms, California, found that female
Marines were fourteen times more likely to be single parents
than male Marines.24
Single parenthood would not exist if there were no women
in the services. Prior to the 1970s the services often separated
service members who became single parents by any circum¬
stance. But when the services were forced to protect service¬
women, the present policy was adopted, and today some 50,000
service members are single parents. The peculiar policy of tol¬
erating service members who become single parents while not
enlisting people who are already single parents has invited
numerous lawsuits on the grounds that it illegally discriminates
against women because the great majority of civilian single par¬
ents are female. So far, the ban has withstood all assaults, but
because of the continuing cry of discrimination, Congress in
1986 amended Title 10 to permit single parents who had previ¬
ously served in the regular armed forces to enlist in the
reserves, so long as their single parenthood was not the cause of
their discharge from service.
By and large, single parents in the military are a sorry lot.
Duty calls at odd times, and single parents are often scrambling
to arrange for somebody to take their children. All of the nor-
mal inconveniences of service life—overnight duty, field exer¬

cises, sudden deployments, early morning physical training, and
late nights in the motor pool—cause problems. Some bring
their children to their unit, some leave their children alone at
home, sometimes all day. y
The problems of many married service mothers are much
the same. Two-thirds are married to servicemen and almost
none have husbands who stay at home with the children.
Deployments, emergencies, and evacuations are still a problem,
but most married service mothers can at least afford to pay for
child-care when it is available.
The military is rapidly expanding the number of child care
facilities to accommodate the growing legions of dependent
children. In 1988 there were 581 military child care centers on
412 installations, with another 100 centers planned for the next
six years. Though current capacity is suitable for more than
20,000 children, the Defense Department estimates that
80,000 spaces are needed. The cost of caring for everyone’s chil¬
dren has already eaten up funds for other projects. For 1987
Congress approved more than $20 million for nearly all child
care construction projects requested by the services, but denied
funding for nearly all other facilities related to morale, welfare,
and recreation—chapels, libraries, theaters, exchanges, com¬
missaries, and recreation centers. For fiscal year 1989 the
Defense Department estimated needing $80 million for opera¬
tion and construction of child care facilities. Fortunately for the
services, the child care boom is one military buildup Congress
still enthusiastically supports.
With or without children, marriages between service mem¬
bers are a problem. One-third of all servicewomen are married
to servicemen. In 1981 there were some 45,000 “dual-service”
or “in-service” couples (90,000 service members). By 1988 the
number had grown to^more than 56,000 dual-service couples.
Some involve both officer and enlisted personnel, others
involve members of different services, and more than half
involve children. Dual-service couples are not simply “levied”
to Korea or Turkey. ICach assignment for a dual-service couple

must be negotiated with special assignment managers who han¬
dle only “joint domicile” assignments. Elaborate computerized
systems for making such assignments have not alleviated the
need for sacrifice, either their time together or their careers.
Usually the couple is asked to decide whose career will take
precedence and who will simply tag along. Cost-cutting mea¬
sures that keep military personnel in one place longer exacer¬
bate the problem. Where the Army could once boast of
providing joint domicile assignments (within fifty miles) to
90 percent of dual-service couples, it has lately warned that
such assignments “may get increasingly difficult to approve.”25
Not surprisingly, the demands of family take a heavy toll
among female officers and enlisted personnel. Reenlistment
rates are consistently lower for women than for men in all of the
services, particularly in the middle grades. “We must find ways
to retain [women],” the vice commandant of the Coast Guard
told DACOWITS. “If family rearing is a major factor, we must
explore alternatives.”26 Alternatives to what, he did not say. A
Marine Corps study made a similar recommendation that the
Corps help women develop short-term alternatives to mar¬
riage and pregnancy for overcoming loneliness.”27 It gave no
examples.
FRATERNIZATION
The problems of pregnancy, single parents, and dual-service
couples were made possible largely by the erosion of the age-
old ban on fraternization between the ranks. To be sure, the
American military has been moving toward greater and greater
egalitarianism for some time, but nothing has done more to
cheapen rank and diminish respect for authority than cute little
female lieutenants and privates. Military customs and regula¬
tions are no match for the forces that draw men and women
together in pairs.
The services could hardly prevent nature from taking her
course, but they might have had greater success if servicewomen
had not been so opposed to their efforts. The call for liberaliza¬
tion of social restrictions has characterized the military service of
American women from World War II and to the present day.
Many women consider the customs of service quaint, silly, and
boyish. Few understand the necessity for restrictions on social
relationships.
Instead of making servicewomen conform to the service,
the services have conformed to the women. Fraternization was
traditionally understood to occur anytime persons of different
rank dealt with each other as equals. Now the term “frater¬
nization” is used only to describe cer¬
tain officer-enlisted relationships
r iii tt r 1 r Pregnancy is perhaps the
forbidden by the Uniform Code of
Military Justice (UCMJ). All other rela- single greatest obstacle to
tionships between persons of different the acceptance of women
rank are permitted so long as one of the ..
q ® among military men.
persons does not exercise supervisory
authority over the other and the rela¬
tionship does not result in favoritism or harm morale.
The Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force still prohibit
romantic relationships between officers and enlisted personnel.
The Army however, liberalized officer and enlisted relations
years ago. Announcing its new fraternization policy in 1984, it
insisted that the old policy had simply been “clarified—not
relaxed.” But the practical effect of the clarification was to legit¬
imize many relationships which were previously considered
improper. Today, officers must avoid social involvement only
with those directly under them. The finer points of propriety—
such as whether a lieutenant should escort his enlisted girl¬
friend to an officers’ dining-out—are left to the individual to
decide. But the burden of proof rests with the accuser and the
negative effect of the decision upon the service must be
“demonstrated and documented.”28
Instead of clarifying the issue, the new policy only caused
confusion. Its authors had failed to consider the complexity of
the problem. Commanders complained that the new policy was
too permissive an closet no clear rule for what was and was not
proper, especially for less experienced soldiers. Commanders
themselves were unsure what they should or should not con¬
done. The Army’s explanation of the policy included examples
of inappropriate relationships that caused a “noticeable drop in
morale,” but what is noticeable to one commander might not be
noticeable to another, and experienced commanders are likely
to notice before the effect becomes documentable. “Clearly
predictable” harm to morale was also highly subjective and sure
to invite second-guessing by higher authorities in any contested
case. Commanders therefore permitted more than they would
have preferred to permit.
Increasingly, rank is seen as something one puts on before
breakfast and takes off before dinner. Distinctions of class, cul¬
ture, and calling, never well understood by Americans, are now
not even acknowledged, and traditions that once seemed self-
evidently sensible are surrendered without argument to an ide¬
ological imperative.
It does not speak well for American military professionals
that the policymakers indulge in much devious rhetoric to
argue that liberalization is actually good for the military and not
simply an easy way to avoid a difficult problem, as evident in
this letter from the adjutant general:
Personal relationships have always had a positive side.

Close relationships are desired and required if we are to
build cohesive units that can fight, survive, and win on the
battlefield. Building this cohesion requires a professional
sensitivity toward one another.29
The ancient Spartans took a similar view of the connection

between personal relationships and unit cohesion, believing
that homosexuality increased the bond between eomrades-in-
arms. The modern American military also benefits from homo¬
sexuality in ways it will not admit.
HOMOSEXUALITY
Lesbianism has always been common in the military, but for
many years, with so few women, the services preferred to
ignore its existence. The truth, according to Helen Rogan,
author of Mixed Company, was that after World War II, the
womens components became havens for female homosexuals,
who were naturally attracted to the opportunity for intimate
association with other women and to the authoritarian structure
of the services, in which personal relationships are based upon
“dominance and submission.”30
Despite the wholesome, feminine image of servicewomen
presented to the public by the scandal-sensitive services, Rogan
found that the style among lesbian members of the WAC was
exaggeratedly masculine. The stereotypical image of the homo¬
sexual dyke was well founded in fact. “If you were going to be
gay, you wanted to be like a guy, because they were the ones
who could get things on,” says one lesbian veteran in a docu¬
mentary film quoted by Rogan. Women cut their hair in mens
styles, donned men’s clothing when off-duty, sat and walked the
way men do, and even wore Old Spice aftershave. They partied
together and sat around in the clubs drinking beer and were
active in sports.
Within the womens components, lesbians created a secret
society with their own informal chain of command that some¬
times ignored traditional distinctions between ranks. Rogan
quotes one woman whose homosexuality began when she was
seduced by her company commander:
As a baby troop, I noticed there was an in crowd, and all of

them, all the important and nice-to-know people, were gay.
It was desirable to be gay. The straight young enlisted per¬
son finds that out, and then she has to decide what to do.
The assumption teas that we didn’t need men, not for our
jobs.31
Senior WAC ofj^cers, most of whom had come up through

the ranks, were more careful to avoid the appearance of les¬
bianism than enlisted personnel and junior officers. “Oh, sure,
of course there were gays [among senior officers], but never
publicly,” one veteran told Rogan. Low-ranking lesbians
respected the need of senior officers to be more discreet in
their conduct, and senior officers, in turn, protected everyone’s
career and the reputation of the Corps by turning a blind eye
toward homosexuality. The male heads of the Army left the
women to themselves, and no place was safer than Fort
McClellan, Alabama, the home of the WAC. There, women
lived their lives as they pleased. “We had no need to conform to
an artificial standard [of heterosexuality],” one woman told
Rogan. “Women were entrenched at Ft. McClellan, with real
power.”32 (Emphasis in the original.)
Ironically, the expanded use of women by the services in
the 1970s was unwelcome to many lesbians already in service.
The influx of large numbers of heterosexual women eroded the
power of gays over straights, and the integration of the womens
components into the services stripped lesbians of their insula¬
tion against the heterosexual world. Once male commanders
were relieved of their naivete regarding lesbianism by com¬
plaints from heterosexual women, the nation’s newspapers
began to sizzle with sordid stories of secret homosexual rings
among American servicewomen. In 1980 the USS Norton
Sound earned an unhappy reputation as “the Ship of Queens”
when twenty-four of sixty-one women aboard were accused of
homosexual activity. In February 1984 the Army charged eleven
women stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, with homosex¬
uality. In October 1986 eight of thirty-five female military
policemen assigned to the Military Academy at West Point were
discharged for the same reason. In March 1988 the Defense
Department revealed that women were three times more likely
to be discharged for homosexuality than men. The disparity
between the sexes in the number of investigations for homo-
sexuality is even greater, with those involving women being four

times the rate of investigations involving men.
Servicewomen accused of lesbianism have often denied the
charge and argued that they were being persecuted for their
masculine mannerism. Members of DACOWITS have opined
that perhaps the services are not enforcing the ban on homo¬
sexuality with equal vigor among men and women—“perhaps
the women are just more visible and get caught more readily”
because “they don’t have the places to go for homosexual bars
like the men do,” one member suggested.33
All indications are, however, that homosexuality is many
times more common among female than male service mem¬
bers. Several female West Point graduates told Army
researchers that they had been approached by lesbians,
whereas no male graduates mentioned being approached by
male homosexuals. Charles Moskos, professor of sociology at
Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, found that les¬
bianism was a common cause of complaint among women
deployed with U.S. forces in Honduras in 1985. “Accounts of
lesbians would come up spontaneously in most extended inter¬
views with female soldiers,” he wrote.34 Most recently,
DACOWITS heard numerous complaints of lesbianism from
Navy and Marine Corps women during a 1987 tour of installa¬
tions in the Far East. Lesbianism was reportedly so rampant
that one barracks was widely referred to as “Lessy Land.”
Naturally, DACOWITS blamed the Navy for allowing women
to live in substandard quarters which contribute “to conditions
in which extremist behavior [lesbianism] is fostered and, in
some cases, supported by the chain of command.”35 (Men are
often quartered in squalid barracks without any apparent
increase in the same kind of “extremist behavior.”) Yet when the
Marine Corps moved promptly against eight female Marines
accused of homosexuality, among other offenses, at Camp
Lejeune, North Carolina, DACOWITS Chairwoman Jacquelyn
Davis complained that the committee had not intended to spark
a “witch hunt” for lesbians.36
For once, the bâst of the homosexual community that gays

comprise 10 percent of the population sounds modest. Some
lesbians have estimated their strength among servicewomen to
be closer to 20 percent. In some jobs and assignments, lesbians
may even predominate. Drill sergeant duty has always been a
favorite among lesbian NCOs because of the power it gives over
young and impressionable female recruits, and lesbians are
attracted to small, remote installations and to duty aboard ships,
where they can exert greater influence over other women and
receive greater protection and opportunity for license.
DACOWITSs charge that the chain of command some¬
times supports or encourages lesbianism is not entirely without
merit. Few men view lesbianism with as much revulsion as they
view male homosexuality. Many have been fooled into believing
that the dyke stereotype has no foundation in fact and are waiy
of appearing, even to themselves, like crazed homophobes. All
too many officers have adopted a relativist moral attitude which
inclines them toward tolerance, despite law and policy. Then,
too, lesbians are often their best female soldiers. Lesbians
thrive in the military not only because it proxides them the soci¬
ety of other lesbians, but also because it allows and encourages
them to act like men. Lesbians are generally at home in the mil¬
itary. And they never become pregnant.
For these reasons, commanders are reluctant to investigate
allegations of lesbianism thoroughly. Many commanders are
especially averse to reporting such allegations to their sendees
security clearance custodian, as required by regulation. A com¬
mon procedure is to collect statements and evidence, confront
the accused, and hope that she submits quietly to an adminis¬
trative discharge. Most accused homosexuals are discharged
under officially honorable conditions. Very few are prosecuted
for the criminal offense of sodomy. Of 4,316 men and women
discharged for homosexuality from 1984 to 1987, only two were
discharged following courts-martial.17
PSYCHOLOGICAL DIFFERENCES
Underlying all of the problems with women in the military are
the significant psychological differences between men and
women. At one time, all who were interested in the issue of
women in the military were eager to analyze the ways in which
men and women behaved differently. But this became politi¬
cally dangerous in the early 1980s, and ever since the party line
has been that there are no significant differences. Official
research efforts seem intent upon proving that assumption.
Sociologists studying academy graduates marvel at the psycho¬
logical similarities between men and women, and when excep¬
tions are granted, they are usually presented to show that
women are in some way superior to men.
Significant differences do exist, however, and few are to the
womens advantage. One obvious difference is that the military
is still far more popular among young men than among young
women. “Women do not grow up with the notion that they’re
going to be a soldier,” explains the Army’s chief of personnel.
“They need a lot of convincing.”38 The expansion of the 1970s
quickly exhausted the small pool of high-quality women who
were eager to enter the military. Today, the supply barely meets
the demand. Army recruiters must approach three times as
many women as men for each enlistment, and the quality of
female recruits is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
Plans to recruit more women will only force recruiters to lower
standards further.
Already, quality is no longer an advantage of recruiting
women over men, as the quality of male recruits has improved
dramatically in recent years. The number of men entering the
Army with high school diplomas rose from 54.3 percent in 1980
to 90.8 percent in 1986. Today, more than 90 percent of active-
duty enlisted males in all of the services have high school diplo¬
mas. Test scores for men have also improved, so that men now
score higher than women on five out of eight tests of the Armed
Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB). And the ASVAB
tests on which men score better than women are those most
likely to indicate aptjtude for the majority of jobs in the modem

military: general science, arithmetic reasoning, auto/shop infor¬
mation, mathematical knowledge, and electronics. The tests on
which women score better than men are those most closely
related to traditionally female jobs: reading comprehension,
numerical operations, and coding speed. Researchers have con¬
cluded that men are better suited for most military jobs and
that women are best suited for those traditional jobs to which
they are most attracted.39 In view of these differences, the
Defense Department’s commitment to putting more women in
nontraditional jobs makes little sense.
Men and women entering the services also differ in what
they expect of their military careers. Charles Moskos found that
few enlisted women saw themselves as future NCOs, certainly
not in nontraditional jobs or assignments with extended field
duty: “Most of the enlisted women, in contrast with the men,
saw NCO status as inconsistent with their life goals and present
or future family plans.”40
The Defense Departments 1981 background review found
that while men evaluate military jobs in the same manner as
they do civilian jobs, being willing to accept less satisfying occu¬
pations to increase promotion opportunities, women tend to be
less career-minded: “Findings indicate that women forgo pro¬
motion opportunities in favor of job settings less likely to inter¬
fere with commitments to husbands and children.”41
Even when men and women in the military make the same
choices, they often do so for different reasons. Their motiva¬
tions for entering the military are widely separate. Women are
much more likely to list practical, selfish reasons for joining the
services, such as education, travel, and money. Women simply
do not feel the same attraction and attachment to military ser¬
vice that men feel. They are much less interested in military his¬
tory and world affairs. A 1986 poll by CBS News found that only
25 percent ol American women knew which side the United
States was supporting in Nicaragua, as opposed to 50 percent
of the men. The same disparity exists among members of the

military.
Men tend to give other reasons for joining the military such
as patriotism or love of country, but these lofty sentiments usu¬
ally hide other, less currently respectable reasons. Most are too
embarrassed to confess that they derive a profound sense of
personal importance from their role as protector. Navy
Lieutenant Niel L. Golightly, a fighter pilot and Olmsted
Scholar, is not embarrassed. He writes:
//
[Cjonsider the young man underfire and neck deep in the

mud of a jungle foxhole, sustained in that purgatory hy the
vision of home—a warm, feminine place that represents all
the good things that his battlefield is not. Somewhere in that
soldier’s world view, though he may not be able to articulate
it, is the notion that he is here... so that all the higher ideals
of home embodied in mother, sister, and girlfriend do not
have to be here.42
Not too long ago, this was conventional wisdom, admitted

unabashedly by everyone from Harvard to Hollywood. In a
scene from the movie Operation Petticoat, the crew of a sub¬
marine watches in awe as a group of nurses is brought aboard.
The boat’s executive officer says to a sailor, “If anybody asks you
what you’re fighting for, there’s your answer.” Today the line
would evoke snickers at this caricature of sexism.
Many men are attracted to the military by its intensely mas¬
culine and deeply romantic character. The uniforms, the rank,
the danger, the purposefulness, the opportunity to earn the
respect of men and the admiration of women—all contribute to
the military’s enduring hold on the imagination of men and
boys, and all are now threatened by the military’s eagerness to
present a female-friepdly face. These things which have
inspired many men to greatness are looked upon today as
embarrassingly puerile. Progressive society prides itself with
having evolved to a higher level where ancient impulses are
deplored as childish machismo and where the most socially

respectable motivations are, ironically, the most material and
the most selfish. Young men today dare not confess their capti¬
vation with the romance of martial glory, even to themselves.
Instead, when asked why they entered the military, they say
“patriotism.” The more thoughtful have better answers, but
they are equally evasive. Ask a young man why he enters a ser¬
vice academy, and he is likely to answer “to get a good educa-
v tion” or “to pursue a military career.”
Women, however, are not impressed with physical prowess,
do not relish competition, are not intrigued by danger, do not
need to prove their manhood, and see little reason to hide their
weaknesses, psychological or physical. One researcher has sug¬
gested that women have higher rates of morbidity because they
are not as reluctant as men to report feeling sick, perhaps
because it is generally more acceptable for a woman to complain
of sickness or injury and because the role of the patient is more
compatible with the womans passive, dependent role in society.43
But in war, physical prowess is important, and dangers must
be faced. The military quite naturally encourages the suppres¬
sion of personal hurts and stigmatizes those who hurt too easily
or too often as “gimps” and “snivellers.” Good soldiers pride
themselves on ignoring illness and enduring pain, on never
being found among the “sick, lame, and lazy.”
Smart, ambitious female officers know this and do their
best to assume masculine attitudes toward everything, as sev¬
eral studies have shown. Success depends upon becoming male
as much as possible. They drive fast cars, compete fiercely at
sports, disdain weakness, reject association with other women,
devote themselves totally to their careers, and adopt male atti¬
tudes toward sex, marriage, and family. Women of the 1980
West Point class showed less interest in marriage and family
than their male classmates. They also tended to describe them¬
selves as psychologically more masculine than they were before
entering the academy. Older female officers tend to view mar¬
riage and family as incompatible with military service for
women. Despite assurances from feminist ideologues that they

can have both, these women often choose to remain single for
the good of their careers.
Unfortunately for the services, most women do not manage
or even attempt to convert to masculinity. Even among the
many dedicated military women it is too much to ask. They
would be kicking against the goads of Nature by adopting man¬
nish ways, since many fundamental behavioral differences
between men and women are firmly rooted in biology. ''
Many feminists of course reject the possibility that sex dif¬
ferences are biologically based and
therefore beyond the reach of social
Nothing has done more to
reform. Some cite the work of Howard A.
cheapen rank and dimin¬
Moss of the National Institutes of
Health, whose experiments showed ish respect for authority
that men and women respond differ¬ than fraternization
ently to newborn baby boys and girls
between men and women.
and thus unwittingly influence their
future sex differentiation. Moss made
no overall claim, but his findings have been accepted as the last
word on the subject by feminists. The reaction of a female
Army colonel is typically dismissive: “Don’t give me any of that
hormones shit! I’ve had it up to here with hormones!”
The evidence is fairly conclusive, however, that hormones
do play a significant role. A study by John Money and Anke A.
Ehrhardt found that baby girls who had been exposed to andro¬
gen-like hormones in the early stages of growth in the womb
developed “tomboy” characteristics such as an interest in vigor¬
ous outdoor activities and competitive sports. They were also
slower to develop an interest in boys and dating, though still less
aggressive than most boys of the same age.44
Similarities between boys and tomboys diminish as both
sexes reach puberty. Tomboys develop into young women with
the introduction of the female sex hormone estrogen, while
boys receive an extra charge of masculinity in the form of the
male sex hormone testosterone. As an artificial steroid, testos-
terone is sometime^, used by athletes to improve their perfor¬

mance. It accelerates their metabolism, heightens their urge for
exertion, and quickens their recovery. Before the use of steroids
was outlawed in the Olympics, a U.S. Olympic athlete privately
confessed, “I take One steroid that makes it possible for me to
go through a brick wall. I take a second steroid that demands
that I go through the brick wall.” The “demand” steroid was
testosterone.45
, Testosterone’s effects on behavior are plainly seen in the
greater aggressiveness of men, “one of the best established, and
most pervasive, of all psychological sex differences,” say femi¬
nist scholars Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin of Stanford
University. In The Psychology of Sex Differences, Maccoby and
Jacklin write:
(1) Males are more aggressive than females in all human

societies for which evidence is available. (2) The sex differ¬
ences are found early in life, at a time when there is no evi¬
dence that differential socialization pressures have been
brought to bear by adults to “shape” aggression differently
in the two sexes. (3) Similar sex differences are found in
man and subhuman primates. (4) Aggression is related to
levels of sex hormones, and can be changed by experimental
administration of these hormones.46
Traditional socialization merely confirms what has been ordained

already by biology. It ensures that a child’s physical development
and psychological development proceed in the same direction,
and it teaches boys and girls to make sense of themselves, their
bodies, and their relations with the opposite sex.
A favorite feminist theory holds that proper, nonsexist
socialization can, over time, correct biology, producing women
as psychologically aggressive and as physically capable as men.
But there is no evidence that the biological contribution to sex
differences can be completely overcome without modern
drugs.
v
Some feminists argue that modern warriors need not be as

a§§ress^ve as warriors of the past, or that the lack of aggressive¬
ness offers definite advantages to the modem military. Women
make better soldiers, they say, because they are well behaved,
less dangerous to themselves and others; and better suited for
many routine tasks that men find tedious. Two Army studies
indicate that women are better at routine, repetitive tasks. One,
during World War II, found that women performed much bet¬
ter than men when assigned the monotonous task of monitoring
a radar screen for an anti-aircraft battery in Nova Scotia. The
other, in 1984, found that female officers were quicker than
men to decide on a course of action when presented with famil¬
iar situations, but slower in unfamiliar situations.
If war were always tedious and routine, women would be
better suited for it. But war is not always tedious and routine.
Even in peacetime, many military jobs require quickness and
daring. Female intelligence personnel once assigned to shadow
Soviet Military Liaison Mission (SMLM) vehicles proved too
timid to keep up the chase through crowded German towns and
on the open autobahn, where speeds in excess of 130 mph are
common. The implications of this example for female fighter
pilots are obvious, but Defense officials will not admit that
women lack the killer instinct. Proof of their deficiency must
await their first actual dogfights with real, all-male enemies.
A final problem with women in the military, one that has
nothing to do with comparative abilities of men and women, is
the impact of the presence of women on the behavior of men.
It is not just a problem of morale, which has hardly been a con¬
cern during the integration process. When integration of the
academies caused bitter resentment among males, integrators
dismissed the low morale as sexist irrationality. But when Navy
surveys showed junior enlisted men aboard integrated ships
approving women, integrators attributed the higher morale to
the presence of women.
The different responses among men to integration are an
indication of the complexity of the problem. On the one hand,
the best educated and most intellectual men with a keener

appreciation of military ethics and tradition overwhelmingly
opposed the presence of women. On the other hand, the less
educated, less intellectual, and less career-minded men enjoyed
their presence. At the same time, charges of sexual harassment
are aimed most often at junior enlisted men, while senior
enlisted men and officers are more prone to fraternization and
are usually the most outspoken in defense of women. Clearly
the integrators are mistaken in believing that opposition to
women comes from older men simply because they are old-
fashioned, and the lowest ranks simply because they are uned¬
ucated. Things are not that simple.
The roots of group behavior among men run deep into our
being. All-male groups have existed in virtually every known
society. Most anthropologists agree that all-male groups pro¬
duce a peculiar kind of nonerotic psychological bond that men
crave and cannot find elsewhere. In some societies, bonds
between male friends are stronger and more sacred than bonds
between husbands and wives. In his book Men and Marriage,
best-selling author George Gilder writes:
The closest tie in virtually all societies, primate and human,

is between women and children. But the next most common
and strong connection may well be the all-male bond. The
translation of the rudimentary impulse of love into intense
ties between specific men and women appears to have been
emphasized and sanctified later, in the course of creating
civilized societies.47
Typically, says Gilder, the all-male group is strongly hierarchi¬

cal, placing heavy emphasis on leadership, loyalty, and excite¬
ment. Members are admitted and ranked according to their
demonstrated ability to contribute to the group s common pur¬
pose. Competition is the key to entry and advancement. It is
also a source of excitement. Leaders command the loyalty and
respect of inferiors because they best personify the values of the

group.
The military is also strongly hierarchical. It begs for leader¬
ship, demands loyalty, and lives for excitement. It is this way,
first, because it was created by men, and', second, because such
characteristics make it effective at making war. The military
depends upon men acting as a team at the very moment when
every man is under great temptation to seek his own safety. The
personal bonds that men form with each other, as leaders, as
followers, as comrades-in-arms, often enable ordinary men to
perform acts of extreme self-sacrifice when ideals such as duty,
country, or cause no longer compel.
The presence of women inhibits male bonding, corrupts
allegiance to the hierarchy, and diminishes the desire of men to
compete for anything but the attentions of women. Pushing
women into the military academies made a mockery of the
academies’ essential nature and most honored values.
Integration of Army basic training undercuts the motivation of
male recruits. When this was first done under the Carter
administration, drill sergeants noticed that the remaining all¬
male companies regularly exceeded training standards for tests
of motivation and endurance, such as the twelve-mile road
march, while integrated companies rarely exceeded standards
for such events. When the difference, dubbed a “stretch factor,”
was brought to the attention of the Army’s chief of staff,
General Shy Meyer, in 1982, basic training was resegregated.48
The impact of the presence of women on all-male units was
a major reason why military leaders for so long opposed inte¬
gration of combat units. In the public debate over integration,
however, politics has forced the military to concede all ground
on the issue. Today, the services themselves are the first to
assert that women have nothing but a positive effect on the
behavior of men—assertions made possible by a social phe¬
nomenon that has received practically no attention from either
side of the debate.
The services ha|*e not yet noticed the effect of charm on the
daily relations of men and women. Men like women, and
because they like women, they cannot treat women as they treat
other men. They are rarely as firm, as harsh, or as critical with
women as with other men.
Charm does not affect all men equally. Older men of senior
rank tend to be most susceptible because their superior-
subordinate relationship with women closely resembles tradi¬
tional sex roles, and women find the maturity and authority of
their male seniors attractive. Because of this affinity, the ser¬
vices have made special efforts to warn commanding officers of
the dangers of fraternizing with women in their command.
Even if charm does not lead to fraternization, it does affect
a woman’s treatment and prestige. Charles Moskos reported
that male supervisors of the women he interviewed in
Honduras were “defensive” about their women and reluctant to
criticize their performance.49 ROTC cadets have complained
that women “get babied too much by the drill sergeants.”50
Comely and confident women who perform well will almost
always win exaggerated praise. Some are more successful at
their jobs because they can easily elicit the cooperation of
charmed men. It is not usually a matter of flirting to get their
way, or of using sex as a bribe. This does happen, especially at
the lower ranks, but most women benefit from the difference of
sex in a more subtle way. All they have to do is let men act as
men rather than as sexless bureaucrats. “Anyone who doesn’t
think he’s a man first and a soldier second just isn’t paying atten¬
tion, says one old soldier, explaining his practice of sending his
pleasant and attractive female sergeant to brief senior officers.
Unfortunately for the services, there are too many senior
officers who aren’t paying attention, too many who believe that
our deepest thoughts can be easily manipulated, that the way
men have always been is not the way they are now or will be
soon. These men pretend that sex can be easily ignored. They
insist that professionalism means putting aside ones manhood
as a relic of prehistory and that the difficulties caused by having
women in the military are merely “management problems.”
Chapter 9
THE FOG OF PEACE
Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury,

not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.
And the only possible way to accomplish this
great change is to accord to women equal power
in the making, shaping, and controlling
of the circumstances of life.
—SUSAN B. ANTHONY
SPEECH ON SOCIAL PURITY, 1875
THERE IS CONFUSION in the camp and division in the ranks.

Having won battle after battle, many feminists have begun to
think they might have lost the war.
The source of their unsettledness is feminism itself. In her
recent book Women and War, Jean Bethke Elshtain, feminist
author and professor of political science at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, writes:
From its inception, feminism has not quite known whether

to fight men or to join them; whether to lament sex differ¬
ences and deny their importance or to acknowledge and
even valorize such differences; whether to condemn all wars
outright or to extol womens contributions to war efforts. At
times, feminists hê done all of these things, with scant

regard for consistency.1
Certainly some military feminists have been willing to

argue anything in order to get what they wanted. DACOWITS
claims alternately that women are needed to make the AVF
work and that the view of women as “fillers” to make the AVF
work harms womens morale. Antonia Handler Chayes, as
undersecretary of the Air Force, told the House Armed
Services Committee in November 1979, “The Air Force would
be pleased to exceed its goal [for women]. Many of the most
critical shortages—engineers, scientists, pilots—can be filled by
qualified women.” One month later, she told a conference on
the AVF, “The fact is, we don’t find large numbers of women to
fill the technical areas, neither enlisted nor officers. Its very
hard to find women engineers.”2
Often feminists cannot agree among themselves on the way
to achieve their goals. Since 1974 feminists have argued for an
ever narrower definition of combat that would open as many
jobs to women as possible within legal constraints, but in 1984
feminists at the Air Force Academy recommended expanding
the definition of combat to cover jobs in which women are
already serving, so that male cadets could not complain that
women do not belong at the academy because they do not serve
in combat. Sharon Lord, deputy assistant secretary of defense
for equal opportunity under President Reagan, decried the
resegregation of Army basic training in 1982, saying, “If soldiers
are going to be asked to support and trust one another, it is
important to believe that they have completed strenuous train¬
ing. ! Two years later, Air Force Academy feminists recom¬
mended resegregating cadet intramural sports to keep male
cadets from noticing the physical limitations of female cadets.
A further indication of serious trouble beneath the feminist
flag is the deep division that exists between female officers and
female enlisted personnel. While female officers clamor to get
into jobs previously closed to them, enlisted women are quite
\
THE FOG OF PEACE • 179
satisfied with those traditional jobs they already hold. The ser¬
vices have expended considerable effort to channel women into
nontraditional jobs with some success. A third are working in
traditionally male jobs, compared to only 3 percent of women
in the civilian work force. /
Still, enlisted women in nontraditional jobs are more dissat¬
isfied and have higher rates of attrition than officers. Many
enter these jobs as a second choice and migrate to traditionally
female jobs at their first opportunity.
“The plain fact,” wrote Charles Moskos, after his visit to
Honduras, “is that the two female groups [officer and enlisted]
had different career agendas and therefore different attitudes
toward their positions in the Army.” He continued:
Female officers often expressed resentment, sometimes

anger, at emerging career constraints within the military.
Female enlisted saw their time in the Army as a stepping
stone from an unsatisfactory pre-military existence to a
more hopeful post-military life. Female officers tended to
deemphasize physiological and emotional differences
between men and women while female enlisted were much
more likely to acknowledge distinctions between the sexes.4
Enlisted women almost always referred to themselves as

“girls” though female officers rarely did. Female officers were
also much more concerned about presenting a good view of
women in the military than were female enlisteds, who readily
complained about conditions in the field, the lack of privacy,
and approaches from lesbians. They also favored a special chain
of communication for reporting female complaints, but female
officers thought it an impediment to complete assimilation. The
only complaints more often heard from female officers con¬
cerned sexual harassment. Enlisted women defined sexual
harassment narrowly as unwanted sexual advances. Female offi¬
cers defined it as anything that offended their feminist sensibil¬
ities, including sexist language, traditional sex roles, and combat
restrictions. Enlisted women tended to think that individual

women were responsible for defending themselves against sex¬
ual harassment without involving the chain of command, while
female officers saw it as a command responsibility.
Female officers and enlisted women are most at odds on the
issue of combat. Half of the enlisted women Moskos interviewed
thought that women should not be allowed in combat, while the
other half thought they should be, but only if they volunteered.
Among officers, however, half said that women should be
allowed to volunteer for combat, and half said that women
should be ordered into combat involuntarily, just as men are.
None of the enlisted women said they would volunteer for com¬
bat if it were possible, but several of the officers said they would.
Comparisons by other researchers confirm Moskoss find¬
ings and vividly show that the views of female officers arid
enlisteds are not just different but fundamentally antagonistic.
Michael Rustad quotes enlisted women complaining about the
harshness of Army life: “I don’t feel we should have to work
more than eight-hour days. I think the military should treat us
as persons and not as instruments,” says one. Another says, “I
cannot understand why military persons have to be so tough
and callous.”5 These women would be horrified by the coarse
bravado of lunchtime conversation among female officers at
West Point, reported by Helen Rogan. “Women can easily do
Ranger school,” says a female officer. “As for that business
about men and women sharing foxholes, if you are next to a
male in a foxhole in a combat situation and you need to urinate
or change your Tampax, you’ll just go ahead and do it!” says a
second officer. (Emphasis in the original.) “Why, I’d just bleed
right through!” says a third, to the laughter of the group.6
At times, it seems, feminists want all people to be more like
women. At other times, they want themselves to be more like
men. Today we find mention of two groups among feminists:
“equity feminists,” who stress equal opportunity and the same¬
ness of the sexes, and “gender feminists,” who stress the
estrangement of the sexes and the superiority of women.
At first, feminists agitated for a limited equality, requiring

only that men and women be treated the same for certain spe¬
cific purposes. As early as 1869, when Susan Brownell Anthony
first used the slogan “Equal Pay for Equal Work,” feminists
held that sex should not matter as long as individual women
are capable of performing specific tasks of a given job.
Considerations that might still have motivated different treat¬
ment for men and women, such as an employers personal pref¬
erence, religious beliefs, or broader sociological concerns, wpre
deemed irrelevant and unjust and were finally outlawed a hun¬
dred years later with passage of the
Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil
Rights Act of 1964. Having won the battles-
Though neither act applied directly many feminists now think
to the military, the reasoning behind they might have lost the
both was used later to speed integration
of the services. The argument moved
away from the general nature of mili¬
tary service to specific requirements for individual jobs. This
tactic was deftly exposed by William J. Gregor in an essay enti¬
tled “Women, Combat, and the Draft: Placing Details in
Context.” Gregor, an Army officer then on the faculty at the
U.S. Military Academy, argued that feminists ignored the com¬
plex reality of both combat and most combat organizations in
order to reduce military service to performing a limited num¬
ber of job-related tasks. Their assumption was, in his words, “If
you place in a position a person capable of performing the tasks
assigned to a position and train the person in those critical tasks,
those tasks will be performed and the unit will be effective.”7
Tests like REFWAC, MAXWAC, and the Female Artillery
Study all focused on the completion of limited, easily measur¬
able individual or unit tasks. Completion of the tasks led auto¬
matically to the conclusion that women did not adversely affect
the ability of a unit to accomplish its mission.
This approach yields feminists two advantages. First, it per¬
mits them to eliminate many concerns of war-wise military men
without ever addre|§ing them. Any old soldier who tries to

express his gut feelings about the effects of integration on
morale is dismissed as lacking empirical evidence to support his
opinions. The second advantage is that it permits the integra-
tionists to pick and'choose among job requirements for those
that favor women. Academics rose to supreme importance at
the academies because the grade point averages of women
compare favorably with those of men. High school diplomas are
preferred as a qualification for enlistment because women are
more likely than men to have them. But requirements that tend
to favor men are attacked as unrelated to job performance.
Boxing, observed Judith Stiehm, is “an activity in which [Air
Force officers] would never participate in combat” and there¬
fore should be eliminated from the Air Force Academy’s cur¬
riculum. Likewise, the practice of shaving the heads of male
recruits should be abandoned in favor of unspecified “new ways
to encourage group bonding” that do not exclude women.
This tactic can go only so far, however. Feminists must still
confront the reality that some differences between the sexes do
matter much more in the military than in most other sectors of
society. But rather than concede the point, many feminists
argue that all sex differences, physical and mental, are due to
environmental influences. In the controversy over Nature ver¬
sus Nurture, they side solidly with the environmentalists, who
argue that the way we are raised determines who and what we
are, the assumption being that the nurturing process can be
altered to minimize if not eliminate sex differences. These fem¬
inists theorize that the participation of women in activities pre¬
viously closed to them will cause women to develop greater
physical strength and aggressiveness. They reject all evidence
that sex differences are rooted in biology and therefore beyond
the reach of social reform.
Yet, for all their talk of equality, many feminists still evince
a strong belief in the moral superiority of women over men.
They did not originate the idea. No doubt long before
Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, peace-loving women have been a
reproach to warlike men. Feminism received a boost in the

nineteenth century from the belief, common in many
Protestant Christian churches, that women were morally supe¬
rior, though today feminists often denounce Christianity as a
male religion. /
In the view of these “sexist” feminists, freeing women to
participate in the governing of society is not so that women
might enjoy the thrill of killing, but so that society will be less
violent and more peace-loving. Pacifism has been a constant
characteristic of the feminist movement, as in, for example, the
antiwar 1960s and womens peace and disarmament groups of
the 1970s and 1980s. Mary Jo Salter wonders in The Atlantic
Monthly whether “we might not have invented war” had the
world been populated solely by women.8 Betty Friedan in her
book The Second Stage, presses for an ever greater role for
women in politics and in the military not for equality’s sake,
but as a way of weakening the forces of aggression in the world.
Ultimately the thinking of such feminists leads to a view
that men and women are naturally not very much alike, for if
society alone is responsible for making men and women what
they are, then the nonviolence of women is the product of
patriarchy.
Many feminists have actively opposed militarizing
American women. Some have organized antirecruiting cam¬
paigns; others have openly attacked proponents of women in
the military in print and in person. In 1976 at DACOWITS’s
twenty-fifth anniversary meeting, the only opposition to the call
for repeal of the combat exclusion laws came from three
women representing the ACLU who found DACOWITS’s
argument that women were needed to make the AVF work
repellent:
Military studies refer* to the utilization of women (one might

ask by whom). And articles in both the civilian and military
press refer to women as filling the gaps recruiters can’t plug
with men.9
The trio equated utilization with exploitation and argued that

women should not give up “feminist ideals of nurturing, caring,
and life-giving concerns” so that they might be used by the mil¬
itary. Women should, instead, work “to have their fellow sol¬
diers think of all humans as human beings first rather than
animals to be casually slaughtered.”
Nevertheless, environmental, egalitarian feminism tries
hard to convince that women can be warriors, too. Neither paci¬
fism nor the supposed moral superiority of women holds great
appeal with the American public. Integration of the military
would never have happened if its purpose had been to make the
American military less military. Many prominent feminists seem
quite willing to walk all over feminisms traditional pacifism to
advance the cause of military women. Dr. Nora Scott Kinzer,
employed by the Carter Pentagon, told Mary Jo Salter, “We are
brought up with a myth that women are nicer than men, that
they are the keepers of the hearth and the mothers....”10 When
asked by the House Armed Services Committee in 1979 about
the aversion to violence and killing among women, Antonia
Handler Chayes, Carters undersecretary of the Air Force,
replied:
I do not see that there is any sex or gender difference in the

degree of pacifism or willingness to go to war.... 1 think that
is a cultural concept that really does not necessarily accord
with the truth now.... I think that women throughout his-
tory, even in mythology, have taken up arms, and very
effectively. Look at the Amazons.11
In the past decade, military feminists have looked fre¬

quently at the Amazons, often in hopes of finding some evi¬
dence that they actually existed. After ten years of research for
her book The War Against the Amazons, Abby Weltan
Kleinbaum, professor of social science at the City University of
New York, concluded that they did not. To some, her book was
an unwelcome revelation:
At least one woman told me that when she read in my intro¬

duction that the particular Amazon nation described in the
well-known stories told by Greek and Latin authors proba¬
bly never existed, she felt like crying.12
Many feminists seem unable to understand that the ancient

Greeks and Romans entertained themselves with stories of
Amazons for much the same reason that people today enjoy
stories about vicious aliens from outer space. It was the
very barbarity of a society ruled by women that excited their
imagination, not the actual or possible existence of such a
society.
Many myths—like the nonexistent Amazons—have served
to advance the cause of military women. The most popular is
Israeli women. The tough but womanly Israeli sabra who
bravely deals death to the enemies of her embattled nation is
almost entirely a creation of Hollywood. The truth is so much
less glamorous that informed feminists never mention the
Israelis in any debate. If Israel is discussed at all among femi¬
nists, it is as an example of failure—a country founded originally
by men and women with radically egalitarian ideals that was
forced by a hostile environment to adopt more traditional ways.
In her book Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myth, fem¬
inist author Lesley Hazelton dispelled three common fallacies
about Israeli women. First, the early Zionist settlers were no
more sexually liberated than anyone else at the time. Second,
the Israeli army during the War for Independence did not make
great use of women in combat. Third, Israeli women today are
far less feminist than most Western women.13
In 1948 a handful of women did see combat with the
Haganas fighting arm, the Polmach, but their presence resulted
in both sides suffering higher casualties. Israeli men risked their
lives and missions to protect their women, and Arab troops
fought more fiercely to avoid the humiliation of being defeated
by women. The women were withdrawn after three weeks.
Hazelton quotes Yigal Allon, a leading Polmach commander:
The girls stormed^pt any proposed discrimination, arguing

that it ran counter to the spirit of the new society being
built in Palestine. ...In the end, the wiser counsel prevailed:
the girls were still trained for combat, but placed in units of
their own. Wheriever possible, they were trained for defen¬
sive warfare only.14
For the rest of the war, the role of women was strictly sub¬
ordinate and supportive. ‘"When things got too hot the women
would clean and reload the rifles for the men, so they could
increase their rate of fire,” wrote Hazelton. Most served as
radio operators, nurses, quartermasters, or couriers. They were
particularly useful for smuggling arms, ammunition explosives,
and other contraband past chivalrous British guards who would
not search women.
Today, the Israelis use women far more conservatively than
most NATO nations. Conscription is universal, but with exemp¬
tions for marriage, motherhood, religion, health, and unsuit¬
ability, barely half of all eligible eighteen-year-old women are
required to serve. (Female recruits joke that the Hebrew ini¬
tials of the Israeli Defense Force [IDF], THL, stand for three
Hebrew words meaning “We should have gotten married.”)
Only the IDF’s training units use women in nontraditional
roles as instructors of weapons and tactics and temporary lead¬
ers of men. But their effectiveness is debatable. Using women
as instructors is supposed to spur men to excel on account of the
sexist belief, accepted among many Israelis, that if a woman can
do it, so can any man. But, according to Israeli military historian
Martin Van Creveld, the credibility of the women is limited by
their lack of real operational experience; they are used, never¬
theless, to free more men to fight.
Elsewhere in the IDF, the jobs open to women are few.
Members of the womens component, the Chen, serve mostly as
secretaries, clerks, teletypists, nurses, teachers, and army social
workers. Chen women are barred from many jobs involving
physical strain, adverse environmental conditions, or combat.
They do not serve as pilots, nor on ships, nor where there are
no shower facilities. They do not pump gas and they do not
drive trucks. As a Chen colonel explained to Hazelton, “And
even if a girl could drive a truck, where would she drive it in
wartime? To the front. And we don’t send girls to the front in
wartime.”15 Israeli law requires that women be evacuated from
the front in the event of hostilities. The experience of women
captured in 1948 and of men captured by the Syrians more
recently has confirmed fears that women would suffer unspeak¬
able tortures if captured today.
Chen women do not have equal status with male soldiers.
They are paid less and serve only two
years instead of three for men. Training
The views of female offi¬
for both officers and enlisted personnel
is segregated by sex. Chen training cers and enlisteds are not
emphasizes traditionally feminine skills just different but funda¬
and touches lightly on basic soldiering
mentally antagonistic.
skills for morale purposes. Weapons
training is cursory and does not include
their combat use. Chen women are taught to assemble and dis¬
assemble weapons, to clean and to operate them, but they do
not practice marksmanship. After basic training, the only time
most Chen women carry weapons is on parade, a photo oppor¬
tunity for journalists interested in perpetuating a myth.
Only in the Nahal, a special corps charged with protecting
frontier settlements, do women routinely carry weapons and
train to use them, but according to Lionel Tiger and Joseph
Shepler, authors of Women in the Kibbutz, “even in the Nahal,
the attitude to female military activity is relatively unserious,
and the military functions of women are sharply curtailed.”16
Standing orders are for women to take to the bunkers in the
event of attack. Nahal women are armed with older, inferior
weapons, and target practice is often the occasion of light¬
hearted ridicule of the women’s marksmanship. No one, least of
all the women, takes their participation in the military seriously,
whereas a man’s standing in the army greatly affects his status
in the kibbutz. The?duality of the sexes is everywhere apparent

in Israeli military service, a fact much bemoaned by Israeli fem¬
inists, who, according to Hazelton, see military service as rein¬
forcing traditional sex roles and the subordination of women.
The fact that “Chen,” an abbreviation of Cheil Nashim or
“womens army,” is also a Hebrew word meaning “grace” or
“charm” is not entirely accidental. “We never disregard the fact
that the girls here are going to be married and become moth¬
ers,” a Chen commander told Tiger and Shepler, “We don’t
want to impair their feminine personality in any way.”17
The Israeli military’s respect for sexual duality reflects
Israeli society as a whole. Israeli art quite often uses medieval
imagery to romanticize Israeli women as damsels in distress and
Israeli fighter pilots and paratroops as their knightly champions.
One senior Chen officer told Hazelton:
A woman’s just not built for fighting, physically or mentally.

Her aspirations lie in another direction altogether—marry¬
ing and having children.... I don’t think women should
fight, not because they’re soft, but because their purpose in
life is to tend to the next generation.18
To most Israelis, a woman’s primary civic responsibility is to

be a wife and mother. Her brief stint of military sendee is to
free men to fight. As for the idea of women in combat, Hazelton
reports that 90 percent of Israeli women oppose the idea. Those
who favor it are not in the Chen.
In the desperate search for precedent, some feminists turn
to the Lucy Brewers of revisionist history. Others admire the
exploits of women pressed into military service by wartime
totalitarian states, though our knowledge comes solely from
state propaganda, and today none of these states employs many
women in the military or any in combat. Still others see hope in
the deadly daring of suicidal female terrorists and the rising rate
of homicides committed by women.
The world nevertheless does not see angry bands of women
rising up in arms against their male oppressors, and even femi-
nists who would relish such a sight admit that women, whether
feminist or not, are, in the words of Judith Stiehm, “de facto
pacifists. Says Stiehm, "Women have almost no credibility with
regard to the use of force; they are believed to have no capacity
lor forceful insistence or retaliation.”19^ If women were to sur¬
prise the world by assuming fully the male role of warrior and
protector, says Steihm, “it will be a change so radical that one
must turn to fiction rather than history to find a parallel.”20
And this is in the making. Feminists are rapidly writing the
fiction they need to further their cause, creating the illusion
that military women deal well with danger and privation in the
field. Many women are overly impressed with their ability to
endure what men consider minor inconveniences. Consider the
following report filed by a feminist sociologist employed by the
Air Force to speak professionally on the subject of women in
the military at the Air University:
The living and working conditions for everyone during this

entire period were very primitive and dangerous. At no time
was this made clearer than on the day when an Army air¬
borne unit just 20 miles south of us suffered 120 injuries
and 4 fatalities. Hostile environment conditions, which
played a large part in this incident, also plagued our unit,
and even though we experienced no fatalities and only a
limited number of injuries ourselves, the knowledge of what
had happened to a unit so close by had a sobering effect
upon our morale for days.21
What caused the four deaths and hundred odd injuries?

Frostbite? Wild boars? In fact, they were all caused by high
winds and peculiar topography, a special danger only to para¬
troopers participating in a mass tactical parachute drop. The
author of this fiction was assigned to a safe and stationary radar
site with tents, showers, hot meals, and portable latrines, yet
she leads the reader to believe that her unit faced the same dan¬
gers as the unfortunate paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne
Division.
Other more objective researchers have contributed in their

own way to the fiction that women perform well “in the field.”
The women in Honduras interviewed by Charles Moskos for his
report entitled “Female GIs in the Field,” enjoyed the comforts
of televisions, stereos, hot showers twice a day, electrical light¬
ing, a local post exchange, and frequent trips into town. To a
dogfaced infantryman, these are all the comforts of home.
None of the women in the military today has endured the
discomforts that infantrymen bear regularly. Despite proud
boasts that women can easily “do Ranger school,” no woman
presently in service has done anything like it. Not one of
them has ever walked day and night through freezing rain, up
and down the Tennessee Valley Divide with a seventy-pound
ruck on her back and a twenty-three-pound machinegun in her
arms. Not one of them has gone nine days without sleep, with a
single cold meal a day and nothing over her head but a can¬
vas cap.
Such are the discomforts not of combat but of training.
Combat—the business of barbarians, Byron s “brain-spattering
windpipe-slitting art”—is many times worse. Of his time as a
Marine platoon commander in Vietnam, James Webb wrote:
We would go months without bathing, except when we

could stand naked among each other next to a village well or
in a stream or in the muddy water of a bomb crater. It was
nothing to begin walking at midnight, laden with packs and
weapons and ammunition and supplies, seventy pounds or
more of gear, and still be walking when the sun broke over
mud-slick paddies that had sucked our boots all night. We
carried our own gear and when we took casualties we car¬
ried the weapons of those who had been hit.
When we stopped moving we started digging, furiously
throwing out the heavy soil until we had made chest-deep
fighting holes.... We slept in makeshift hooches made out of
ponchos, or simply wrapped up in a poncho, sometimes so
exhausted that we did not feel the rain fall on our own faces.
Most of us caught hookworm, dysentery, malaria, or yaws,

and some of us had all of them.
We became vicious and aggressive and debased, and
reveled in it, because combat is all of those things and we
were surviving. I once woke up in the middle of the night to
the sounds of one of my machine gunners stabbing an
already-dead enemy soldier, emptying his fear and frustra¬
tions into the corpse’s chest. ,..22
. ■
Webbs experiences were not unique, for soldiers in all wars

have known similar hardships, equally gruesome. A Korean War
veteran recalls the battle for Pork Chop Hill:
As I called for my final protective line fires, I looked up

from the trenches, the enemy seemed to blanket the whole
hillside. Men were screaming and shouting.... The fight was
mass confusion and exhausting. We were like vicious ani¬
mals in the hand-to-hand fighting that followed....
As daylight broke that morning, we could see the hill
was covered with bodies, some of which had been there sev¬
eral days from previous battles. Our first task was to clean
out the trenches by throwing the dismembered hands and
limbs, caused from grenade and artillery explosions, over
the tops of the parapets....
Later that morning the hot summer sun, with no wind,
began to bear down upon the bare hilltop and the deathly
scent of ripened bodies, several days old, created such an
unendurable nausea that aircraft had to be called upon to
spray the area 23
Such experiences should hardly need retelling. In the late

twentieth centuiy, macabre depictions of wars horrors in art
and literature have become so commonplace that they no
longer shock. Yet everyday combat seems less and less horrible
to many in Washington and elsewhere who think of military ser-
vice as, in Webbs v^prds, “something akin to a commute to the

Pentagon.” A reflexive opposition to war remains, but the hor¬
ror of old-fashioned, hand-to-throat combat is hidden in a fog
of forgetful peace, allowing the rhetoric of sexual equality to
turn the brain-spattering art into a career opportunity.
This changing view of war once had feminism confused and
divided. Thoughtful feminists did not miss the irony that a
movement dedicated to womanly nonviolence and life-giving
concerns had been largely, if not solely, responsible for trivializ¬
ing war. Yet few feminists rose up to denounce the work of the
integrationists, though many quietly lamented the changing
face of feminism. The half-heartedness of their objection to the
new feminism evinced a growing ambivalence toward “the mil¬
itarization of womens lives.” Many feminists were caught
between an automatic revulsion at anything military and the
recognition that, like it or not, the military was doing what paci-
fistic feminism was not. It was changing American society. “The
armed forces have done as much, if not more, to advance the
social and economic role of women in our society than practi¬
cally any other factor or organization I can think of,” said Sue
Berryman, a researcher for the Rand Corporation, in 1986.24
Her perspective, shared by many, was that “the country’s verbal
and legal war over whether women should be trained and used
in combat can ultimately be seen as a war over women’s rights
and obligations not only in the military but also in the larger
society.”
It is the power of the military to direct society that united
feminists in pursuing a greater role for military women. Power
is a favorite word among all feminists, and they are not at all
embarrassed to use it. Carolyn Becraft, who for years headed
the Womens Equity Action Leagues Military Project, told a
panel on the military at the Eighteenth Annual Conference on
Women and the Law, The issue of women in the military is
really an issue of power—power, policy, and women in policy
positions. DACOWITS never ceases to demand that women
be placed in policy-making positions. When the Marine Corps
S'*
established two panels to investigate complaints from Marine

women, a Marine spokeswoman boasted that the panels
would include “enough women to have real influence.” A study
group at the Air Force Academy recommended that cadets
receive classes on “power relationships’mnd on the transition of
women from “powerless to the power broker” positions. Lois
DeFleur, long the academy’s adjunct feminist, once com¬
plained that “it is clear to everyone at the academy that the
power is in the hands of males and the current positions of
females confirm this.”26 She recommended putting women in
the “power positions” of commandant and superintendent.
Power is what the military has to
offer all feminists—not just power for
The rhetoric of sexual
individual women over others in the
military, but power for all women over equality turns “brain-
all of society. Writing for Parameters, spattering” combat into a
the journal of the Army War College,
career opportunity.
Judith Stiehm explains:
Women, who are rarely collectively violent, may not realize

that their lack of violence represents a political limitation....
Women have been deliberately and often legally excluded
from society’s legitimate, organized, planned, rewarded,
technological force—the force applicable by the police and
the military,2'
Stiehm presents a sound, practical argument against women in

combat but nevertheless endorses their involvement in combat
because “the implications of exempting women from combat
thus seem to include the exclusion of women from full citizen¬
ship.” Stiehm sees “full citizenship” as an end and power as a
means to an end, but she is unclear as to the value of full citi¬
zenship, except insofar ms it empowers women to wield more
power in society’s political arena.
Other women, those who benefit directly from the
advancement of all women in the military, are clearer about
194 • WOMEN IN THE .MILITARY
their objectives. Hden Rogan witnessed a brash displav of per¬

sonal power by senior military women at the second biennial
reunion of the WAC. She tells of General Elizabeth R
Hoisington telling the crow d. "On the program it savs Mistress
ol Ceremonies.' I m no mistress of ceremonies. I'm master of
ceremonies." A former director of the WAC said. "I was sitting
next to General Hoisington on the stand, and when it started to
rain she told it to stop, and it did." Says Rogan. "It was the first
time I had seen powerful women joke so openly about their
power.”28
Such boastfulness would have been considered extremely
bad form coming'from military men. Pretensions of personal
power are incompatible with the ideal of selfless service. In am
civilized military, the force exerted bv superiors over subordi¬
nates is not pow er: it is authority. Men who exercise authority
acknowledge that they themselv es are subordinate to others.
Men who wield power answer to no one. In the armed forces of
a democratic republic, the only power that should matter is fire¬
power.
Chapter JO
PATHS OF GLORY
Ij we can’t win a war without our mothers,
what kind of a sorry fighting force are we? ''

Even the evil Saddam Hussein
drjesn’t send mothers to fight his war.
—SALLY QUINN
WASHINGTON POST
WHEN THE UNITED STATES invaded Panama in December

1989, some six hundred women deployed with their units for
Operation Just Cause. One, Army Captain Linda Bray, com¬
mander of the 988th Military Police Company, became the first
American woman to lead men into combat.
The initial press report of Brays heroics was written by a
reporter for the Scripps Howard News Service and appeared in
the Los Angeles Times. It described a fierce three-hour firefight
to secure a kennel of vicious attack dogs defended by the
Panamanian Defense Forces. The battle climaxed with a daring
assault by Captain Bray herself, crashing her jeep through the
gates of the kennel, machine guns a-blazing. A female soldier
“single-handedly captured an enemy prisoner. No less a source
than Marlin Fitzwater, White House spokesman, confirmed
many details. Fitzwater told the New York Times, It was
heavily defended..^ Three PDF men were killed. Gunshots

were fired on both sides. American troops could have been
killed.... It was an important military operation.... A woman led
it, and she did an outstanding job.”1
A week later a very different story appeared in the Los
Angeles Times. Unnamed Army officers were quoted saying the
original report of Brays heroics was “grossly exaggerated.” The
kennel was lightly held, the firefight lasted ten minutes, and no
qne was killed or injured. Bray was not present during the fire-
fight but was half a mile away at her command post. Arriving
late for the fight, she stood by while her driver used the jeep to
force the gate open. By then, the kennels defenders had fled.
The lone Panamanian captured was a harmless civilian who
showed up later to check on the dogs. The dogs really were
vicious, so the MPs slaughtered them in their pens.
Bray herself appeared on national television to set the
record straight. Looking tense and uncommunicative, she gave
every indication of having been chastised by her superiors but
took no responsibility for the exaggerations of her actions.
Shortly thereafter, while covering an unrelated hearing on
Capitol Hill, I ran into Peter Copeland, the reporter who broke
the story for Scripps Howard. With the look of a man who knew
that no one would believe him, Copeland insisted that he had
written up the incident just as it was described to him by
Bray and her MPs. In his view, he had made her a hero by
reporting what she had told him, and she had turned around
and disowned him to protect herself. (Bray was later med¬
ically discharged from the Army, after suffering stress frac¬
tures in both legs—injuries she blamed on the extra weight
she carried on road marches to prove herself to her male
colleagues.)
Of course, events could indeed have happened as initially
reported, and it is not at all unusual for combatants to embroi¬
der their war stories. But the Army was clearly concerned that
the incident would be used politically to challenge the service's
ban on women in combat roles, as indeed it was.
PATHS OF GLORY • 197
This episode contrasted sharply with the slight stir caused

by another incident involving women and combat in Panama.
Two weeks after the truth about the captain came out, CBS
News reported that two female truck drivers stood accused of
cowardice in the face of the enemy fdr tearfully refusing to
drive a company of Rangers to the site of the fiercest fighting.
The accusation appeared in the after-action report of the
infantry battalion the women were supporting. An early draft of
this report had included the recommendation the use of female
drivers in combat be reevaluated.2 The commander of the
infantry battalion complained to the commander of the support
battalion, to which the women belonged. The drivers were
"counseled” for their behavior, which means in Army parlance
that they were chewed out by their supervisors, but no further
action was taken until the story made the evening news. Only
then did the Army in Panama conduct a hasty investigation, the
purpose of which quickly became obvious.
Just two days after the investigation began, and several days
before it was completed, the Armys public affairs office in the
Pentagon publicly absolved the women of any fault. An Army
colonel told USA Today that the women had been driving for
nine hours and had asked to be relieved because they were
tired and feared they might endanger the lives of their passen¬
gers. “Does that indicate cowardice? I don’t think so,” he was
quoted as saying. An Army spokeswoman, Paige Eversole, told
the Washington Times, “They were driving through fire all night
long.... There’s no indication we had anything other than two
exhausted soldiers.” The Washington Post quoted an unnamed
Army official saying the women “performed superbly.”3
None of the spokespersons denied the women had cried
before being relieved of their duties, a point not lost on The
New Republic, which called the Army’s praise of the women
“ludicrous and patronizing.”4 The media were overwhelmingly
far less critical, however. If they had reported the initial accu¬
sation, which few had, they later reported the Army’s excuses of
the women and left it at that. CBS News itself followed up with
only a terse statement of the Army’s final official version. It was

an isolated incident, “just two women out of how many others,”
said a reporter for Army Times, an independent newspaper, to
explain why his paper had not pursued the matter even after
receiving additional details from sources in Panama that con¬
tradicted the Army’s official account.
But according to officers of the infantry battalion the women
were supporting, the women had not been driving “under fire”
for nine hours. They had come under fire briefly only in the first
hour of the invasion and had spent the next eight hours peace¬
fully awaiting their next mission. (At one point they had to be
rousted out of their barracks rooms and made to stay with their
trucks.) Only after they were told where they would be driving
did one of the women object. When she began to cry, the second
woman said she didn’t want to go, either. The men at the scene
had no doubt but that the women were afraid, not bred.5
The investigation did not in fact exonerate the women.
Rather, it recommended against prosecution on the basis of
dubious complicating legalibes. The investigating officer, an
Army lawyer, reasoned that the women could not be prosecuted
for failing to obey orders which came from someone outside
their chain of command and because the spirit of the so-called
combat exclusion laws made it unlawful to order women on a
combat mission. One thing was certain: the women did not flat-
out refuse to obey orders. But when they broke down in tears,
the NCO replaced them with male drivers.
This tale did nothing to quiet calls for repeal of the combat
exclusions, all made in the name of Linda Bray. For the popu¬
lar press, the case for repeal was finally proven. Shortly after¬
ward, Representative Patricia Schroeder introduced a bill to
repeal the Army’s combat exclusions for a four-year trial period,
but at House hearings in March most military witnesses politely
opposed the proposal. I don t feel that the test is necessary,”
said Lieutenant General Allen K. Ono, the Army’s deputy chief
of staff for personnel. “I think we can learn what is needed to
be learned by other means.”6
Several enlisted women were less circumspect, arguing that

enlisted women, unlike female officers, by and large do not
want combat: “I think we’re setting ourselves up for failure,”
said Army Staff Sergeant Christine Brown, an intelligence ana¬
lyst with the XVIII Airborne Corps. “I don’t think women are
emotionally or physically ready to do it,” said Specialist Rose
DeBerry, an administrative specialist with the 16th Military
Police Battalion.7
Legislators were also lukewarm, praising women but admit¬
ting doubts and advising caution. The bill died quietly. It was
bom a year too early.
THE GULF WAR

The Gulf War against Iraq was a watershed in the history of
women in the military. Shortly after the war, the military’s timid
arguments against expanding military womens roles were swept
away in a gush of media admiration.
The war began in August 1990 with Operation Desert
Shield. Hundreds of active and reserve units were mobilized
and deployed to the war zone, in expectation of a momentous,
highly lethal ground and air war. Six percent of the troops were
women, 35,000 women in all: daughters, wives, girlfriends—
and mothers.
It was a sight the world had never seen before: young moth¬
ers saying good-bye to their newborn babies before trooping off
to fight a foreign war. Virtually every major newspaper in the
country printed the Associate Press photo of a helmeted Hollie
Vallance, Army specialist and brand-new mother, wearing big
bug-eye glasses and battle dress uniform, cradling her seven-
week-old infant daughter before leaving Fort Benning,
Georgia. Vallance would not see her newborn again for more
than six months.
The images and accounts of such heartbreaks provoked an
outcry in unexpected quarters. Sally Quinn, sometime journal¬
ist and wife of Washington Post editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee,
wrote an outraged article for the Post in which she asked, “If we
can’t win a war without our mothers, what kind of a sorry fight¬
ing force are we? Even the evil Saddam Hussein doesn’t send
mothers to fight his war.”8 Quinns perspective was personal.
Growing up as an Army brat, she remembered when her father
shipped out to fight in Korea when she was nine. “I was trau¬
matized by his leaving, couldn’t retain any food, and was hospi¬
talized. ... I was fed by IV for nearly a year,” she wrote.
Quinn quoted Harvard pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton,
ydio had stepped forward publicly to volunteer his opinion that
sending mothers to war was “terrible, reprehensible, and not
necessary.... A child whose parents leave has two resources.
Either to mourn and turn inward or to say, ‘I’m bad. Why did
my mommy leave me?’ Or, ‘Is my mommy bad because she left
me?’ I can’t imagine a country doing that to its children.” Quinn
also quoted military child psychologists warning of lasting
wounds that children can suffer from being separated from
their mothers. One told her:
For the very young child, the absence of a parent is like the
death of a parent. You create an orphan if you send the
main caretaker away. ...We are going to have to protect
these children. Their mothers are conflicted and tom....
They have to use denial in order to go. They can’t face
what’s happening to their kids.
Dr. Jay Belsky, a psychologist at Pennsylvania State University,

told the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women
in the Armed Forces:
[T]o voluntarily send off single paren ts or both parents, and

psychologically, from the child’s perspective, abandon them,
I contend is immoral, and nobody has the right in a nation
that’s not being attacked to do that.... In fact, one of the
things I m struck by when we have the issues of children
and the issues of careers (and typically female careers )
posed against each other, we have this new emergent
language of child development. All we hear about is their

resilience. Lost is the language of vulnerability. And I con¬
tend to you, every time you hear resilience spoken, you will
hear simultaneously, really, a driving motivation which is
an adult’s career development.9 f
Psychologist Brenda Hunter warned the commission of the

injury done to children abandoned by their parents, but also of
the injury done to mothers who are forced to abandon their chil¬
dren. Hunter quoted Harvard pediatrician Brazelton saying,
“When mothers know they must leave
their babies for either full-time employ¬
ment or war, they retreat and withdraw Quite a few military
emotionally. They withdraw not because women were willing to
they don t care, but because it hurts to raise the white flag in the
care.” Citing other authorities as well,
« ., fight for equality.
Hunter said that when mothers are
separated from their young children
over a long period of time, their feelings of maternal love are apt
to cool.” Thus, said Hunter, not only do abandoned children suf¬
fer while their mother is away, they also suffer after their emo¬
tionally detached mother has returned. Quinn quoted another
child psychologist for the military saying, “We’re going to be
dealing with the effect of what we’re doing for a long time.... It’s
the children who are paying the price.”
Other voices questioned the nation’s priorities. “It is not in
the public interest to gain a few thousand more hands for a mil¬
itary or any other public mission, at the expense of severely
undermining the basic personality development of several
thousand children,” wrote Professor Amitai Etzioni of
Georgetown in The Responsive Community, a “communitarian”
publication with a liberal bent. Newspapers across the country
asked the editorial question, “Should Mothers Go to War?”—
generally answering in the negative.
Even familiar feminist bulldogs in Congress took up the
issue, although with their own agenda. “This is not a mommy
issue per se. This a parent issue,” Pat Schroeder told Quinn.
Some 1,200 military couples (mother and father both serving)
and 16,300 single parents deployed to the Persian Gulf, leaving
more than 17,500 children, many quite young, without their
usual “custodial parent” to care for them. At least to remedy this
situation partially, Representative Barbara Boxer (now a U.S.
senator) sponsored a bill called the “Military Orphan
Prevention Act” designed to prevent the assignment of both
parents of minor children from being sent to a combat zone.
The bill would not have spared Spec. 4 Vallance and her daugh¬
ter Cheyenne, or the 16,300 single parents, but it would have
spared others—at the expense of military readiness.
Representative Jill Long went even further with her own bill,
called the “Military Family Preservation Act,” which would
have prevented the military from deploying single parents any¬
where there were not “reasonably available” child-care facili¬
ties—things not usually found in war zones. Another bill,
similar to Longs, was introduced by Representative Beverly
Byron, chairwoman of the military personnel subcommittee of
the House Armed Services Committee.
The Pentagon, however, opposed any attempt to compli¬
cate its assignments for men and women further. In hearings
before Byrons subcommittee, Defense officials emphasized
that members of the military have all “freely assumed the duty
and obligation of military service in full knowledge of its
requirements. “Expecting the same sacrifices of all military
members, married or single, with children or without, is the
only understandable and fair policy and one which is con¬
sistent with the American tradition of equality,” said
Christopher Jehn, assistant secretary of defense for force man¬
agement and personnel.10
Admitting that women are “more likely to be single par¬
ents, Jehn warned that if Congress forced the services to
exempt single parents from deployment, the services would be
forced to close many units to such service members, resulting
in fewer job opportunities for women, “with deleterious effect
on their promotability.” In coolly impersonal terms, he outlined

the various administrative “procedures” for dealing with “ser¬
vice members” who cannot provide “adequate dependent child
care. He boasted of the military’s “family support infrastruc¬
ture,” which had increased its counseling staff and “instituted
special programs for children,” with expert advice from
National Association of School Psychologists and a special task
force to monitor the family support effort through the war. The
bureaucrats were convinced that providing child care for aban¬
doned dependents was an easily absorbable military activity.
Military doctors in Saudi Arabia, however, were doling out
valium to heartsick young mothers too distraught to do their
duty. No number of counselors could ease the hurt of having
left their little ones behind. When a reporter for the Colorado
Springs Gazette Telegraph asked a female truckdriver about her
two children, the woman suddenly broke down in tears. “It’s
like this: I’m a woman and a mother before I’m a soldier,” she
sobbed. “Out here I think more about my family than my job....
If this is a test, I’m gonna fail. A lot of other women are, too,
and I guess we’re just going to have to accept that.”11
The New York Times profiled Lori Moore, a former Army
sergeant and self-described “gung-ho careerist”—until the
Army ordered her to the Persian Gulf and she was forced to
send her three preschool children across country to live with
relatives they had never known. Moore was so overcome by
guilt and grief that she refused to deploy, so the Army mustered
her out. “[W]hat I came up with is a mother should be left with
her children,” Moore told the Times. “I hate to say it because it
doesn’t fit with the whole scheme of the women’s movement,
but I think we have to reconsider what we’re doing.”12
Quite a few military women were willing to raise the white
flag in the fight for equality. “I’d rather be home cooking and
cleaning, all those things I’ve been complaining about for
twenty-six years,” one woman told a reporter. “I don’t think
females should be over here. They can’t handle it,” said another.
“Those feminists back home who say we have a right to fight are
not out here sitting in the heat, carrying an M16 and a gas mask,
spending sixteen hours on the road every day and sleeping in
fear you’re gonna get gassed.” Their male comrades were
understandably resentful. “It took us this long to get used to the
idea of women in' the Army, and now they say they don’t want
to be here,” said one. “What are we supposed to think?”13
In several instances, the services sent mobilization orders to
female reservists who had left active duty specifically to care for
their new babies. The Times found one Army reservist,
Sergeant Twila Schamer, preparing to leave her ten-week-old
son. Her husband had already deployed. Said Schamer, “I’ve
tried to convince myself that it’s going to be OK and displayed
that attitude to other people. If I didn’t, I’d be in a constant
state of emotional breakdown. I’d be crying all the time.”14
Many such women simply refused to respond, hoping the ser¬
vices would back down, which they did.
Although motherhood did not automatically exempt from
serving, pregnancy did. Many active and reserve units had a
month or more to prepare for deployment. In that time, at least
four of the twenty-two women assigned to the 360th
Transportation Company from Fort Carson, Colorado, became
pregnant. I can t say whether they did it on purpose to get out
of this, but they knew we were going for more than a month,”
said Captain Steve Fraunfelter, company commander.15 Other
units reported similar problems. It was like an epidemic at
Fort Riley,” a female staff sergeant told a reporter for the
Washington Post. “We knew in August we would probably go,
but we didn’t leave until the end of October. When these
women saw the deployment start, they said, ‘Come on, honey,
let’s go to bed and get working on this baby. I’m not going over
there.’”16
During the Gulf War, women were more than three times
less likely to deploy with their units than men, primarily due to
pi egnancy, which accounted for nearly half of all women who
failed to deploy. This meant that even if the military routinely
discharged women for pregnancy, as they had prior to 1972,
women would still be less likely to deploy than men. Marine

Corps women were nearly four times less likely to deploy, and
fully one-fourth of Marine Corps women whose units were
ordered to the Gulf did not go with them. Between August
1989 and August 1991, rates of voluntary and involuntary dis¬
charge “for the convenience of the government” were roughly
twice as high among women as among men, and up significantly
over previous years.17
Rates of nondeployability did not include women whp.
deployed to Saudi Arabia only to be shipped home early for var¬
ious reasons, including pregnancy.
Doctors at some sites in Saudi Arabia
were reported to have run out of preg- The military resigned
nancy tests, with women coming in to itself to rampant sex
be tested time and time again, "because within the ranks
a positive test would be a ticket _
home.”18 There were also rumors of
pregnant women selling their urine to others to fake their preg¬
nancy. Of course, servicewomen were under no obligation to
continue their pregnancy after evacuation, and there was no
attempt to redeploy women if their pregnancies were termi¬
nated, either by abortion or miscarriage.
During the war, when the press and the public were most
interested in the performance of women, Pentagon spokesman
said the services were not keeping statistics on the number of
women evacuated from the war zone because of pregnancy.
The services did keep detailed statistics on all medical evacua¬
tions, but pregnancy was not classed as a medical condition.
After the war, the services produced statistics showing that rates
of early return were higher for women than for men by at least
25 percent, although precise statistics were still not available.19
In all likelihood, the problem of nondeployability and early
returns was worse than the Pentagon was willing to admit. The
Defense Department was not particularly interested in docu¬
menting potential problems with women during the war, and the
services were under no mandate to keep careful statistics on such
matters. After the y$ar, they had no reason to expose the problem,
so they downplayed it. Thus it fell to the GAO to reveal that the
services screened reservists to avoid calling up those who could
not deploy, thus masking the full magnitude of the problem.20
Not all women who deployed to the Gulf were eager to go
home. Some were reported to be making out like bandits, selling
black market condoms for forty or fifty dollars each. The con¬
doms were actually provided to troops free of charge by Uncle
Sam, prompting one female soldier to complain, “Who do they
think those guys are going to use them with, the ladies in veils?
That’s like telling them its OK to, you know, do it with us.”21
For “R&R,” troops in Saudi Arabia were rotated on and off
a cruise ship dubbed “the Love Boat.” The female troops on
board were under intense pressure from men in all-male com¬
bat units who had been stationed in the desert for months.
Many women found male patrons to protect and comfort them.
Army Reserve Sergeant Lori Mertz, testifying later before the
presidential commission, said, “The friendships helped us get
by, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” Asked if
by friendships” she meant sexual relationships, Mertz
answered, “There were some that were sexual, there were some
that were—you know, if you kissed him or whatever. And that
happened, and there were friendships.”22 The testimony of
Army Sergeant Mary Rader of the 213th Supply and Sendee
Battalion brought her to the verge of tears:
Sgt. Rader: ...I served in Desert Storm, also, and it

was a very bad situation. ...We had very—quite a few males
and quite a few females, and it was just an all around bad
situation— I feel there was a lot of very u nprofessional
behavior out of the lower enlisted personnel.... We had
female—one female in particular that we could not keep out
of one of the male bunks. She was caught sleeping in the
male tent more than once. We had females and males that
would go to guard duty together and be caught necking,
and they’re supposed to be out there protecting us and
pulling guard duty at 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 o’clock in the morn¬

ing. And they had no idea what was going on out there.
Commissioner Elaine Donnelly: Did this happen
to—was it—were a large number of people involved or was
it a small number, was it a few, half most?
Sgt. Rader: It was vei~y heavy. Our company only has
69 people, and it was very heavy in our E-4s and below. It
didn’t just stop there. We had a captain and an E-4 having
an affair; and he went to a sexual harassment board for it. I
had a female officer who had an affair with an E-5 male
that she worked with. It was very heavy.
Commissioner Donnelly: So when you say, ‘"Very
heavy, ” would you say more than a majority, a heavy
majority?
Sgt. Rader: Yes.
Commissioner Donnelly: When these things hap¬
pened, what kind of discipline was there?
Sgt. Rader: There wasn’t any.
Commissioner Donnelly: There was none?
Sgt. Rader: (Shaking head) No....23
One might excuse the military for assuming that some sol¬
diers would have sex with each other, but the military went well
beyond simply assuming as much. To prepare soldiers for
return to normal life, the Army distributed a “Guide to
Developing and Conducting Reunion Programs.” Intended to
be used by Army chaplains, the guide reads as if it were written
by Dr. Ruth:
If you choose to be sexually intimate with someone else

while on deployment, should you tell your wife or girl¬
friend. .. well, we can’t give you a “yes” or “no” answer?...
Who benefits from yow telling and what are your reasons
for telling? Is it to relieve your guilt feelings or is it that
somehow in the telling, your relationship back home will be
strengthened? Also, what are the risks of not telling?...
Experimentaticq^ and new positions... give it time, she may

be suspicious of where you learned about these ideas!
(ha, ha).24
The military not only assumed that soldiers would have sex,
it resigned itself to rampant sex within the ranks. Since the mil¬
itary could not control sex among its soldiers, it could only
approve the activity.
Physical conditions in the Army’s make-shift camps only
contributed to moral laxity. For the first time since integration,
the Army actually spared women some of the special treatment
they were accustomed to receiving. In Saudi Arabia, men and
women slept under the same tents and shared the same showers
and latrines, separated only by crude partitions. One soldier,
back from the war, told of striking up a conversation in the
latrine, before he realized that the soldier on the hole next to his
was a woman. Lieutenant General Charles C. Krulak, later com¬
mandant of the Marine Corps, had his own war storv to tell:
The restrooms were shared.... and the women waited for

the men to complete, men waited for the women to com¬
plete, and it was very refreshing to see that. Men relieved
themselves using what we called a piss tube.... I can remem¬
ber very vividly standing there using it myself Lieutenant
Colonel [Ruthanna] Poole and Major [Ginger] Jaecox walk¬
ing by and, as I was standing there, they whipped a very
smart salute at me and had great grins on their face. ^
At first, the women themselves struggled to maintain some

sense of physical modesty under such conditions, changing
clothes in their sleeping bags or only when the lights were out,
and starving themselves of water (which made them susceptible
to dehydration) to avoid the unpleasant experience of using the
latrine. But after months of inconvenience their sense of mod¬
esty gave way. No one expected modesty of them, or chastity for
that matter—least of all the military.
Sanitation was a special problem for women in the Gulf,

who suffered higher rates of urinary tract and yeast infections,
in part because of shortages of feminine supplies. As if beans
and bullets and gasoline were not enough to worry about, quar¬
termasters now had to make sure they stocked plenty of tam¬
pons and sanitary napkins. They were forever running out.
Some units in the Gulf resorted to giving women hormone
shots and bill-control pills to keep them from menstruating.
Tambrands Inc., the makers of Tampax tampons, offered to-
send a free box of tampons to every woman in the Gulf whose
friend or relative called their 800 number. One female sergeant
wrote to tell Tambrands, “I read somewhere that an Army
spokesperson assured your company that these items were rou¬
tinely issued to female soldiers. Don’t believe it. I’ve been in 10
years and its never happened.”27 Women preparing for deploy¬
ment were told to take a six-month supply.
A poll of Gulf War veterans conducted after the war by the
Roper Organization confirmed the opinion of commanders who
reported problems in the Persian Gulf. Overall, 98 percent of
Gulf War veterans rated the performance of men as excellent or
good, but only 61 percent rated the performance of women
similarly. The greatest disparities between ratings for men and
women were found in the Army and Marine Corps. In both, a
majority of veterans rated the performance of women
“fair/poor.” Only in the Navy and Air Force did a majority rate
the performance of women as “excellent/good”:
Poll of Gulf War Veterans

On the Performance of Women28
“fair/poor” “excellent/good”
Army 52% 48%

Marine Corps 56 44
Navy 37 63
Air Force 17 83
Fifty-six percent of those who deployed to the Gulf with

mixed gender units reported that women in their unit became
pregnant just prior to or while deployed in the Gulf. Of that
56 percent, 46 percent said that such pregnancies had “very
much” or “some” negative impact on unit readiness, and 59 per¬
cent said that it had “very much” or “some” negative impact on
unit morale. Sixty-four percent of those who deployed to the
Gulf with mixed gender units reported that there had been inci¬
dents of sexual activity between men and women in their unit.
Of that 64 percent, 36 percent said that sexual activity had “very
much” or “some” negative impact on unit readiness, and 55 per¬
cent said that it had “very much” or “some” negative impact on
unit morale.29 Clearly a large part of the U.S. military actually
on the ground in Saudi Arabia did not share the Pentagon s high
opinion of the performance of women, and whether the
Pentagon admitted it or not, the troops in the field had a big
morale problem because of sexual integration.
It seemed at first that the military’s difficulties and embar¬
rassments in the Gulf would certainly slow if not halt the trend
toward greater integration of women, and it might have, if the
war had lasted longer and cost more lives. As it happened, the
ground war in February was so swift and so successful that it
conquered not only the Iraqi defenses but all of America’s accu¬
mulated fears about going to war—the fear of getting involved
in distant foreign conflicts, the fear of escalating military
actions, the fear of lost and shattered lives, public discord, and
political recriminations—and the fear of sending women to war
and losing them in combat.
The three women killed by an Iraqi Scud attack on an air¬
base barracks were used by proponents of women in the mili¬
tary as proof that there is no “front” in modern warfare and
therefore the distinction between combat and noncombat made
no sense. The Washington Post said as much in a single head¬
line to a straight news story: “Scuds Put U.S. Women on Front
Line: Law Shields Females from Combat But Not from Iraqi
Missiles. At the same time, the absence of a public outcry over
the first female fatalities (totaling six, including accidental

deaths) allowed feminists to declare that the public was finally
“ready” for women in combat. “I think after this war, the body
bag issue can be put to rest,” said Carolyn Becraft of the
Womens Research and Education Institute.
The first American servicewoman to die in the Persian Gulf
did so somewhat ignominiously. She was Army Staff Sergeant
Tatiana Khaghani Dees of the 92nd Military Police Company
from Baumholder, Germany. While training her weapon on a
suspicious person, Sergeant Dees, a divorced mother of two
young children, backed off the end of a
pier and drowned under the weight of
Whether the Pentagon
her equipment.
admitted it or not, the
But, ultimately, we won, we won
easily, and nothing else mattered. troops in the field had a
Everybody was a hero. The two female big morale problem
soldiers captured by the Iraqis (a flight
because of sexual
surgeon and a truck driver) were appar¬
ently returned unharmed, laying to rest integration.
yet another fear that stood in the way of

combat for women. The question every reporter asked was
whether the women had been sexually molested by their cap-
tors. The Army said no. A year later it turned out the Army had
lied. The flight surgeon, Major Rhonda Cornum, confessed that
she had been “violated manually, vaginally, and rectally,” a fact
she treated later with manly indifference: “no big deal... a
known hazard when you go to war.”30 (The twenty-four U.S. ser¬
vicewomen who were violated by U.S. servicemen during the
war were not so accepting.) Cornum received five decorations
for her service, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, which
is rarely given to nonaviators. She had been a passenger aboard
an Army helicopter when it was shot down.3j
The postwar push for repeal of the combat exclusions did
not really begin until April, when Senator John McCain of
Arizona, during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, commented that the sterling performance of
women in the G^f justified taking a new look at the ban on

women in combat roles, particularly aviation roles. McCains
opinion carried weight because he was himself not only a vet¬
eran Navy pilot but also a former prisoner of war. Still, his com¬
ments were clearly self-serving. He had been badly tarnished bv
his involvement in the savings-and-loan scandals, and his praise
of military women brought him the first good press he had seen
in months. His sentiments were soon seconded by another
^Senate Republican eager to have good things said about him,
John Warner of Virginia.
McCains comments received a mixed response from the ser¬
vices. The Air Force, as usual, was out in front, ready to greet the
new age. The Navy was cautious, with Vice Admiral Jeremy M.
“Mike” Boorda, then chief of naval personnel, warning that if
the exclusion laws were repealed we would have to be willing
to undertake the commitment to make it a truly equal opportu¬
nity for both males and females.” The Army and Marine Corps
opposed any change, but by the end of April, Defense Secretary'
Dick Cheney was hinting that more opportunity for women was
in order. At its spring meeting, DACOWITS, which by then
consisted solely of Cheney appointees, voted oveAvhelminglv to
recommend repeal of the combat exclusions.32 When asked
about the recommendation, Cheney told the Associated Press,
"Whether we want to adopt a recommendation to the Congress
to change [the combat exclusions], I just can’t give you an
answer today.” The headline in the Washington Times read,
“Cheney would expand womens role.”33 Later, in June, Cheney
signaled his willingness to go whichever way the wind blows,
saying. We basically follow whatever direction we re given bv
Congress in this regard.”34 Any hope that the Pentagon would
take the time to learn from its experience in the Gulf was gone.
In the House, Representatives Pat Schroeder and Beverly
Byron, both Democrats, were already in the lead, making the
most of the opportunity created by McCain and Warner. In
early May, the House Armed Services Committee had
approved an amendment to the 1992 National Defense
Authorization Act to permit Navy and Air Force women to fly

combat missions in combat aircraft. There was little debate, and
the vote was forty-five to six.35 Publicly Cheney endorsed the
amendment on the grounds that it merely eliminated statutory
restrictions on the services without requiring changes in assign¬
ment policies, but his assistant secretary for personnel,
Christopher Jehn, had already informed Senator McCain by
letter that if the statutory restrictions were eliminated, the ser¬
vices “would be obligated to allow women to enter any career-
area for which they qualify.”36
Leading Democrats on the Senate Armed Services
Committee were clearly on the defensive. The committee’s
esteemed chairman, Sam Nunn of Georgia, and the chairman of
its subcommittee on personnel matters, John Glenn of Ohio, had
long opposed combat for women but had never been so politically
alone in doing so. No one was speaking publicly against repeal
except a lonely handful of old soldiers and conservative activists.
It seemed certain that if Nunn and Glenn did not act to repeal the
exclusions, the full Senate would act on its own without them.
In June, Glenn’s subcommittee on personnel held hearings
giving opponents of repeal a chance to speak. The service chiefs
all stated their personal opposition to repeal, although with con¬
siderably less vigor as well as candor than guest witnesses such
as retired General Robert H. Barrow, former commandant of
the Marine Corps, and Elaine Donnelly, formerly a member of
DACOWITS. The testimony of a panel of military men and
women was divided, with female officers favoring repeal and
enlisted women and military men generally opposing it. During
and after the hearings, Glenn presented himself as a cautious
skeptic, saying the Gulf War was far too limited an engagement
to serve as the basis for drawing any conclusions about the mil¬
itary use of women, good or bad. Others on the committee gave
the impression of being cautious and uncommitted, including
McCain and Warner, who had taken some heat in conservative
circles for their earlier remarks.
Behind the scenes, female military officers crisscrossed

Capitol Hill lobbying in uniform for repeal, a violation of regu¬
lations that was overlooked by the Pentagon. Despite the pres¬
sure, the Senates version of the 1992 Defense Authorization
Act was reported out of committee later that summer without
provisions for repealing the combat exclusions. As expected,
Senators Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and William Roth,
a Republican from Delaware, quickly introduced a repeal
amendment. As a counter move, both McCain and Warner
joined Nunn and Glenn in offering an amendment to establish
a presidential commission to study the issue. McCain himself
advised that approving the Kennedy-Roth amendment would
“rush ahead without proper study and a national consensus....
[By creating a commission,] we will be able to make the kind of
judgment which will give the American people what they want.
We will find the best way to both defend this nation’s national
security interests, and provide equality for women in all ranks
and military specialties.”37
Such timid double-talk came too late to stop the rush for
repeal that McCain had started months earlier. When the final
version of the authorization act became law on December 5,
1991, it included both amendments. Congress had passed the
buck. The laws barring Navy and Air Force women from com¬
bat aviation were repealed, but the difficult issue of deciding
just how women would be assigned was transferred from
Congress to the White House, which was stuck with the respon¬
sibility for establishing the commission. Defense Secretary
Cheney immediately announced that he would wait until the
commission had finished its work before making any changes in
service policy.
Chapter 11
THE WAR GAMES COMMISSION
To me, the very fact that this issue is being dis¬

cussed and this meeting is being held simply shows
that you really don’t take the military seriously.
For you, the military is not a question of life and
death.... So you can afford to make all kinds of
social experiments, which we cannot.... The very fact
that you have this debate may itself be construed as
proof that it’s not serious. It’s a game. It’s a joke.
—PROFESSOR MARTIN VAN CREVELD

ISRAELI MILITARY HISTORIAN
“PEOPLE ARE POLICY,” as anyone in Washington knows, the

point being that the formation and execution of political policy
is entirely dependent upon the people appointed to do the job.
Political appointees, even senior military officers, do not follow
orders like good soldiers: they do as much of what they want to
do, and as little of what they don’t want to do, as they can get
away with. Successful political executives will therefore make
sure to pick just the right people for the particular policy they
wish to see implemented.
In December 1$91 the only policy the Bush White House

wanted to see implemented was avoidance: they wanted to
avoid offending as many potential voting blocks as possible, in
preparation for Bushs bid for reelection in the coming year.
The White House especially wanted to avoid offending both
women voters, for fear of the gender gap, and conservative
activists, for fear of Patrick Buchanan, who had already begun
his 1992 presidential campaign.
The composition of the Presidential Commission on the
Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces reflected these
fears. Not announced until after Buchanans stunning perfor¬
mance in the New Hampshire primary in February 1992, the
commissioners included two known conservatives who had spo¬
ken out publicly against women in combat: Kate Walsh
O’Beirne, vice president of government relations at the
Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, an Army offi¬
cers wife, and a lawyer; and Elaine Donnelly, Republican
activist from Michigan, former member of DACOWITS, and
one of the most vocal critics of the military’s use of women.
A third commissioner, Professor Charles C. Moskos of
Northwestern University, had contributed to the public debate
over women in combat, but without taking sides. Chairman of
the Inter-University Seminar on the Military and Society and
the most noted military sociologist in the country, Moskos had
conducted some of the best research on the AVF and on the
issues of race and gender in the military. His work revealed the
sharp contrast between the attitudes and ambitions of female
officers and enlisted women—as, for example, the desire of
female officers for combat jobs and that of enlisted women to
avoid such jobs. Always careful to maintain his academic objec¬
tivity, he had never publicly opposed women in combat, but he
was clearly no pushover for procombat feminists.
Retired Army General Maxwell Thurman was another curi¬
ous pick. Ten years earlier, while deputy chief of staff for per¬
sonnel ol the Army, he had overseen the Army’s controversial
WITA (Women in the Army) study and successfully defended
THE WAR GAMES COMMISSION • 217
the study’s findings and recommendations before a hostile

DACOWITS in 1983 (see Chapter 6). Since then, he had
served as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Southern Command
during the invasion of Panama. He was much praised and well
respected in and out of the military, but there was no way of
knowing how recent events might have affected his thinking on
women in the military.
The biographies of four other members gave clear indica¬
tions of being likely to support women in combat. They were:
Meredith A. Neizer, a young former White House Fellow, 1978
graduate of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, and past
chairwoman of DACOWITS; Captain Mary M. “Mimi” Finch,
an Army hehcopter pilot and West Point graduate; retired Army
Major General Mary Elizabeth Clarke, known as “Mother
Mary” to troops at Fort McClellan, Alabama, where she was
once post commander and commandant of the Military Police
Corps; and Brigadier General Thomas V. Draude, the Marine
Corps’s director of public affairs, whose daughter Loree was
undergoing naval flight training at the time.
The rest of the commissioners had not been publicly asso¬
ciated with the issue. They included the commission chairman,
recently retired Air Force General Robert T. Herres, formerly
vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and first commander-
in-chief of the U.S. Space Command; retired Army Brigadier
General Samuel G. Cockerham, a combat veteran and attack
helicopter pilot; retired Army Colonel William Darryl
Henderson, Ph.D., a recognized authority on unit cohesion,
formerly commander of the U.S. Army Research Institute;
retired Admiral James R. Hogg, former U.S. representative to
NATO Military Committee and Seventh Fleet commander;
Newton N. Minow, a Chicago lawyer, World War II veteran,
and former Democratic political appointee; Marine Corps
Reserve Colonel Ronald D. Ray, a lawyer, Vietnam combat vet¬
eran, former deputy assistant secretary of Defense, and past co¬
chair of the Bush campaign in Kentucky, whose wife had been
appointed to DACOWITS the previous year; and Sarah F.
White, a master seiêant in the Air Force Reserve and the com¬
mission s only enlisted member.
The commission included voices from both sides of the
debate without appearing publicly to lean in one direction or
the other, although the commissioners themselves saw things
differently. The five most conservative commissioners—Sam
Cockerham, Elaine Donnelly, Kate O’Beirne, Ron Ray, and
Sarah White (the “Gang of Five,” as they came to call them¬
selves), were convinced that pro-combat commissioners held
the upper hand. All five had been picked by the White House
to counterbalance the obvious feminist tilt of the original slate
of nominees submitted by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.1 Of
the commissioners nominated by Cheney, only two might vote
against combat: Darryl Henderson and Charles Moskos.
Chairman Robert Herres was close to Democratic
Congressman Les Aspin of Wisconsin, then the powerful chair¬
man of the House Armed Services Committee. There was no
doubt among the commissioners that Herres felt it his personal
duty to steer the commission to appropriate, politically accept¬
able results. His only other interest was in making sure the com¬
mission s work was completed on time and with minimal bother.
He was impatient with debate and ruled the committee and its
staff with a heavy hand, moving the committee swiftly through
the motions of hearing testimony and gathering information,
without attempting a more conscientious examination of issues.
Officially, the commission was chartered by Congress to
assess the laws and policies restricting the assignment of
female service members” and make recommendations to the
president by November 15, 1992. Congress specifically
directed the commission to recommend, (1) whether existing
laws and policies restricting the assignment of women should
be retained, modified, or repealed, (2) what roles service-
women should have in combat, (3) what would be an appropri¬
ate transition process if women should be assigned to combat
positions, and (4) whether special conditions and different stan¬
dards should apply to servicewomen as opposed to servicemen.
Unofficially, for Robert Herres, the commission existed to

justify opening as many combat roles to women as politically
possible. Thus much of the work involved documenting the suc¬
cess of women in other military roles and certifying that their
overall performance equaled men’s.
Little attempt was made to argue that adding women to
combat units would actually improve unit effectiveness. The
recent draw-down in defense following the end of the Cold War
eliminated the once powerful argument that women were
needed to make the AVF work. The only appeal to military
readiness left was that opening combat roles to women would
expand the pool of qualified candidates, but this was weakened
by the ready availability of qualified men, and it was vulnerable
to arguments that women were not in fact qualified.
The only forceful argument was equal opportunity, “one of
our most sacred cultural values,” in Herres s words, a sine qua
non of American justice. Said Herres, “One can argue, and I
would argue, that an impact on military effectiveness or some
other important public purpose must be shown in order to con¬
tinue an exclusionary policy, as opposed to protecting such a
policy.”2 In other words, the burden of proof was on those who
argued against combat for women.
Still, Herres encouraged others to believe that military
effectiveness and equal opportunity were not competing values:
I believe that military effectiveness is a vital criterion, as well.

But 1 do not believe that all issues can be reduced to a simple
choice between military effectiveness and equal opportunity,
because they are not mutually exclusive concepts in all cases.
The extent to which they are mutually exclusive is a judgment
that each one of us must make for ourselves. I don’t think
anyone else can impose that assumption upon us, the assump¬
tion that they are mutually exclusive....3
Others on the commission were less optimistic about their

choices and clearer in their thinking. They did not assume the
equality of men |tad women, as far as the military was con¬

cerned, and insisted on ranking military necessity above equal
opportunity. As Moskos told Herres:
You raise a question, Mr. Chair, where the burden of proof

should lie. Other things being equal, you say, well, then let
equal opportunity triumph. Well, most of the evidence that
we’ve heard here—and there will be some debate about the
degree—is that mixed-gender units, particularly as it gets
closer to the combat area, have lower deployment rates,
higher attrition, less physical strength, more sexual activity,
higher costs, et cetera, et cetera. It would seem to me the
burden of proof would be on the side of saying equal oppor¬
tunity is of such significance that we’re going to override
some of these costs.4
Some of these costs came with dollar signs: $66,000 to

$500,000 to refit a combatant vessel to accommodate women,
$2 million to $4 million per aircraft carrier, and an average of
more than $138,000 for amphibious ships. The Air Force testi¬
fied to higher costs for feminine-specific equipment needed by
pilots, and the Army estimated that it cost 50 percent more to
recruit female candidates.5
Other costs were harder to put a price on—in particular the
fact that women were less likely to be available to deploy with
their units, a shortfall the units simply had to absorb without
recourse to “overmanning.” This was especially a problem in
the Gulf War. A 1992 Navy study found that some ship com¬
manders felt that pregnancy, single parenthood, and “dual mil¬
itary parenthood did indeed “constitute a readiness problem.”
On some matters, there was little doubt. The relative phys¬
ical abilities of men and women were well documented, and the
commission heard hours of testimony from the researchers
themselves on the results. Colonel Dennis Kowal, who had
been a part of the WITA study in the early 1980s, testified that
the Army was still assigning women to jobs well beyond their
physical ability, and that the cost of reassigning women to less

physically demanding jobs could be as much as $16,000 per
reassignment. The commissions report recommended gender-
neutral strength tests for each of the services. It also noted that
the Army had devised such tests a decade earlier, but they were
finally eliminated in 1990 “for political reasons.”
The testimony of Army Lieutenant Colonel William Gregor
put the disparities in the physical abilities of men and women in
sharper perspective. Gregor, a former _*
faculty member at West Point, had TT . „
J Unofficially, the commis
compared the performance of male and
female West Point cadets and Army sion ex*stetl t0 justify
ROTC cadets at summer camp. Using opening as many com-
the standard Army Physical Readiness bat roles t0 women as
Test, Gregor found that the upper fifth
r i.i , possible.
of women achieved scores on the test
equivalent to the bottom fifth of men,
but even with equivalent scores, the men and the women were
not physical equals:
The women who achieved this level of fitness are unusual.

They are confident, they are talented, hut they are limited in
their potential relative to men. The men, in contrast... have
the potential to do much better.... However, criticizing the
women who achieve a level of fitness such as this is only
going to discourage them, because... you cannot reasonably
expect more.6
The unbridgeable gap in potential physical ability of men and

women presented unique problems for physical training in inte¬
grated units.
Gregor testified that the Army Physical Fitness Test
(APFT) actually minimizes the gap between men and women
by measuring only general cardiovascular fitness and not
strength and job performance. The gap actually widens in tests
for specific jobs which require strength and performance:
APFT scores do not measure relative strength or perfor¬

mance [and are theore] the kindest to the woman,
because she works only against her own weight. If we were
to add a load, the gap between males and females would
widen. If we were to reinstate the 40-yard man-carry that
was part of the readiness test 20 years ago, we would find
far fewer women achieving passing scores using the male
tables.
Of course, abandoning the double standard would have drastic

consequences for women in commissioning programs: 80 per¬
cent would not qualify for an Army commission. Adopting a
male standard of fitness at West Point would mean 70 percent
of the women would fail at the end of their junior year, only
3 percent would be eligible for West Points Recondo Badge,
and not one would qualify for the Army Physical Fitness Badge.
Gregor also testified that a man is more likely to be able to
meet minimum standards later in his career, whereas a woman
has nowhere to go but down, and rapidly as she ages. According
to Gregor, a woman in her twenties has about the same aerobic
capacity as a fifty-year-old man. Women also begin losing bone
mass at an earlier age and are therefore more susceptible to
orthopedic injuries, which means that young women selected
for physically demanding branches of sendee will not survive to
finish their careers. (A case in point is Captain Linda Bray,
mentioned in Chapter 10.) Gregor concluded that adopting the
male standard of fitness for officers at midcareer would elimi¬
nate most women from the Army.
When Gregor had finished. Commissioner White won¬
dered indignantly “why the Department of the Army has not
provided the information that Dr. Gregor has just provided. I
would like to know why our staff has not even provided a por¬
tion of this very valuable information that he has provided....”
An area of special concern, in view of Congress’s repeal of
the statute barring women from combat aviation, was the ability
of women to fly high-performance aircraft. The most newswor-
thy testimony came from two daring young instructor pilots from
the Navy’s Top Gun air combat school, who boldly challenged
the Navy’s party line on integration. Delivering a statement
signed by twenty-one out of twenty-three Top Gun instructors
opposing women in combat aviation, Lieutenant John Clagett
told the commission “that it mainly is the lieutenants out there,
and the captains in the Marine Corps, that are screaming that,
‘No, we don’t want this to happen,’ and our big reason for it is
that we need to have those units act as units.”7
Clagett revealed that in some areas female students w^re
simply “not allowed to fail.” The word from the top was that the
Navy needed more female pilots, and everyone in the training
command knew what that meant. In 1990, when the Navy
decided to reduce its numbers at the end of the Cold War, Vice
Admiral Boorda, then chief of naval personnel, ordered an arbi¬
trary reduction of officers already in pilot training—excluding
women, because the Navy still didn’t have enough female
pilots. Even before 1990 instructor pilots were under pressure
to go easy on women. Clagett recalled his experience with a
female student at Beeville, Texas:
She didn’t perform her mission what I considered up to

standards. I chose at that time to try to give her an unsatis¬
factory for the flight and was told in private quarters that
that wasn’t what you did in this situation, that she not only
will pass the flight, hut it will he an average grading.”
Clagett challenged the commission to ask the Navy for statistics

on women attrited from flight training involuntarily, “the ones
that are told, ‘You are not good enough to fly this airplane or any
other airplane from this point on. Thank you. Your services are
no longer required.’... quite frankly, they were zero when I was
at Beeville. It was zero. And we attrited male candidates left
and right.” He added that “the point was that the male student
aviators knew that the standards weren’t the same, and that was
a major point.”
The Navy’s statistics on attrition in aviation training for fis¬

cal years 1990, 1991, and 1992 reveal an easily discernible pat¬
tern. Attrition of women was allowed only when there were
many women in training and instructors felt safe in saying that
not every woman performed up to standard.8 In time, the
Navy’s failure-proof flight training would have deadly conse¬
quences for one of the women it was supposed to benefit.
Air Force instructor pilots were under the same pressure to
make women succeed. As one Air Force captain told David
Hackworth, writing for Newsweek, “We are told to evaluate
women on a different scale than men. A woman who is ade¬
quate is rated as outstanding, or who is unacceptable is rated as
acceptable.... We lie to the public, we lie to the Air Force, and
most of all we lie to ourselves.”9
The Army had a slightly different problem when it came to
female flyers: it couldn’t get enough women to volunteer to fill
its ambitious aviation quotas. Colonel Gregor, head of the Army
ROTC department at the University of Michigan, told the com¬
mission, “I got a message last year that said I had to push avia¬
tion because we had an insufficient number of women
competing for aviation, and I couldn’t understand that, because
we have disappointed men every year.”10
Quotas for Army women were disappointing in other wavs
as well. In the winter 1991 issue of Military Law Review, an
Army lawyer, Captain Donovan Bigelow, blew the whistle
on the Army s use of quotas in officer promotions to ensure that
the percentage of women and minorities promoted matched
the percentage ot eligible women and minorities.
The Army didn’t call them quotas; it called them “goals.”
According to the Army’s affirmative action plan, “Goals are not
ceilings, nor are they base figures that are to be reached at the
expense of requisite qualifications and standards. In affirmative
action efforts, goals are not quotas.’ The Army’s goal for per¬
sonnel promotions read: “Selection rates for all categories [of
protected groups] should not be less than the overall selection
rate for the total population considered.” Of the thirty-four offi-
cer promotion boards convened in 1990, all but one met its
affirmative action goals.11
Bigelows step-by-step account of the promotion boards’
business left no doubt how they achieved such success. When a
board begins work, its first task is to reriew and evaluate the
records of all eligible officers and rank them from best to worst,
to produce what is called an Order of Merit List (OML). Next
the board must identify those officers “best qualified” for pro¬
motion. If the needs of the Army require it to promote fifty offi ¬
cers, the board will count down from the top of the list and
draw a line after the fiftieth officer. The process will end there
if the percentage of women and minorities above this “best
qualified line” equals or exceeds the percentage of women and
minorities on the OML, but this almost never happens, so the
board will begin moving officers above and below the line to
achieve the desired result.
Bigelows article began as a research paper for the Army’s
Judge Advocate General school in Charlottesville, Virginia,
which would examine the legality of the Army’s promotion sys¬
tem in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1989 decision in City
of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. In that decision, the court
struck down numerical quotas preferring minority contractors
doing business with the City of Richmond, Virginia, on the
grounds that such quotas were not a response to actual dis¬
crimination in the past awarding of contracts. According to the
court, unless past discrimination was proven, the use of quotas
was unconstitutional.
The Army cooperated fully with Bigelow’s research. At the
Total Army Personnel Command in Alexandria, Virginia, two
colonels and a sergeant major explained to Bigelow the entire
process, right through the practice of bumping qualified non¬
minority male candidates off the promotion list. In January
1992 Bigelow described for me the sergeant major’s response
when he asked what happened to the original OML, which
evaluates the records of all eligible officers and ranks them
from best to worst:
He kinda laughed, and the colonels kinda giggled, and he

said, "We destroyjt, sir. ” 1 said, “You destroy it?” He said,
"Oh yes sir! Could you imagine what would happen if that
got out?” I smiled and nodded [as if to say], ‘Yeah, boy. I’m
with you on that .one. ” In the back of my mind, I’m think¬
ing, ‘Yeah, I know, sergeant major, a whole lot better than
you do what would happen: There’d be lawsuits all over the
damn country. ”12
Bigelow concluded that the Army’s “goals” were really the

“rankest of rigid numerical quotas” and that the rigged promo¬
tion system was plainly illegal.
When Bigelow submitted his article for prepublication
review, the first response of the Army’s judge advocate general
was denial. But a few months later the acting judge advocate
general, Brigadier General Donald W. Hansen, sent a memo to
the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel saying that the
Supreme Court’s ruling in Croson meant that “race and gender
may be considered by Army selection boards only when there
has been a specific finding that individual officers have been the
victims of discrimination.” The memo, dated March 19, 1990,
recommended instructing boards that they could not move offi¬
cers on the list solely to meet affirmative action goals.13 But the
memo was “withdrawn in anticipation of litigation.” In other
words, the Army had decided to continue knowingly breaking
the law until challenged in court.
To this day the Army denies that it uses “quotas” but admits
using “goals.” When asked how many recent officer boards met
their affirmative action goals, the Army provided only a brief
statement saying, “Historically, the select rate for minority officers
has been comparable to the select rate for non-minority officers.”
This is not true. Not until May 1988 did the Army promotion
board selection rates become equal. Before then, boards were
given selection ranges as affirmative action goals. The Army
resorted to requiring equal selection rates because women and
minorities legularly fell at the bottom of the specified ranges.
In the spring of 1992 the Army’s duplicitous use of quotas

and double standards became a matter of public record when
the Bush administration finally brought the state of Virginia and
the Virginia Military Institute (VMI) to trial for refusing to admit
women. In making their case against VMI, lawyers for the U.S.
Justice Department called to the stand Colonel Patrick Toffler,
head of the U.S. Military Academy’s Office of Institutional
Research. Led by federal lawyers, Toffler bore witness to the
many achievements of female cadets and the overall success of
integration. He was less forthcoming on the subject of how the
integration of women had changed West Point. Remember, this
is a senior Army officer representing the United States Military
Academy testifying under oath in a federal court:
Q: Colonel Toffler, when West Point was required to

admit women, were any changes made in the operation of
the academy, in terms of adjustments or changes for women
cadets?
Toffler: The basic changes that were made involved
accommodations, latrine facilities, locker facilities. But in
terms of policies and programs and procedures, there were
no special changes that were made.14 [Emphasis added.]
“No special changes” was apparently too much for even the
Justice Department lawyer conducting the examination to
believe, so to save Toffler from perjury, the lawyer asked again
if there were any changes made to accommodate women that
were not “policy changes.” Toffler grudgingly admitted that “in
the admissions process” the academy had substituted the flex-
arm hang for the pull-up on a test of physical aptitude, and that
“on admission to the Academy” women received instruction in
self-defense while men were taught boxing and wrestling.
“There may have been some other minor changes,” he added,
“but those are the ones that come to mind.”
Under cross-examination by a lawyer for VMI, quite a few
more changes came to Toffler’s mind. Had not the academy
eliminated peer ratings, rifle runs, Recondo awards, and obsta¬

cles on its obstacle $)urse to make success easier for women?
Answer: Yes. Had not the academy substituted other require¬
ments for women in the name “equivalent training”? Answer:
Yes. Had not the aforesaid accommodations failed to reduce the
higher attrition rates for women? Answer: Yes. And had not
West Point failed in its efforts to convince male cadets that inte¬
gration was a success? Toffler resisted:
Q: There is turnover every year in the cadet corps, cor¬

rect, Colonel Toffler?
Toffler: Yes.
Q : And because of that turnover, it’s necessary to edu¬
cate the incoming cadets about these physiological differ¬
ences, and in your judgment the integration of women has
been a success?
Toffler: That’s right.
Q: It’s fair to say so far the cadets have not bought your
argument?
Toffler: No, that’s not fair to say.
Q: It’s not true that there are studies which show that
the male and female cadets at West Point believe that inte¬
gration has not been a success?
Toffler: The current information we have comes from
a survey that we do of first classmen just prior to gradua¬
tion, and that survey indicates that there are substantial
portions of the corps, both men and women, who do not
view the integration of women as having been fully
successful.
Q: So, that’s a yes answer?
Toffler: That’s my answer.15
Toffler went to even greater lengths to avoid admitting that

female cadets benefited from the use of quotas in branch
assignments:
Q: [I]t is a fact that women graduates of West Point do

receive preferential treatment in their assignments due to
the U.S. Army’s quota system. Right?
Toffler: They receive preferential treatment com¬
pared with whom?
Q: Compared with other cadets who are eligible, that
some units of the U. S. Army specifically ask for women even
if they are not as well qualified as other men. Isn’t that
right?
Toffler: I am absolutely unaware of any requests by
an Army unit for women that is in any way attached to
their relative qualifications. I’m just not aware of what you
are talking about.
Q: All right. Let me try to help you, colonel. We need to
look at Defendant’s Exhibit 152, volume 14. This is a memo¬
randum about cadet perceptions on quotas. Correct?
Q: And one of the things it talks about down at the bot¬
tom under 2-B is the issue of proportional representation?
Toffler: Correct.
Q: And it states in there that in an effort to achieve pro¬
portional representation, we may well place a lesser but
fully qualified cadet ahead of another fully qualified cadet.
Correct?
Toffler: That’s what it says.
Q: And this is a memorandum to the superintendent of
West Point. Correct?
Toffler: It’s by the current, by the then chief of staff,
Colonel Derring.
Q: Over on page two it gives some examples. Some
examples of some other impacts of the quota system, correct,
specifically under paragraph two about engineer branching.
Do you see that?
Toffler: Yes, but what quota system are you talking
about?
Q: Well, let’s look at the specific issue that he addresses.

I think that will oe clear. He indicates in the last sentence of
subparagraph two that, “Five of six women who went engi¬
neers stood lower in the class than any of their 107 male
counterparts. ” He says that probably contributes to the
cadet perception of bias. Does that help you with respect to
your statement you were unaioare of any quota system?
Toffler: No, because the Army sent to the Military
Academy a set of quotas for each branch that has a gender
difference, so there is a set of quotas, if you will, for engineers
that are for men and a set of quotas that are for women. And
those quotas have got to be met, and so when the women are
going for the engineer branch quotas, they are being com¬
pared with performance of women, and the men are going for
the men. It has nothing to do with the Military Academy and
it has nothing to do with any specific unit.
Q: But in the judgment of Colonel Derring, at least, or
Deering, excuse me, that may contribute to the perception of
cadets that there is some bias operating. Is that right?
Q: And the next paragraph about how female officers
receive preferential assignments ahead of others with higher
class standing. Correct?
Toffler: Again, this is a manifestation of the same
type of situation where the Army has a requ irement for a
certain number of officers, and there is recognition of gen¬
der in that requirement, and so those women did not receive
assignment p references ahead of some men at all. They were
not even competing for those positions against men.
Q: Well, I think you are answering yes to my question,
is that right?
Toffler: I’m not answering that there is a quota sys¬
tem that gives women preferential treatment, no. I’m not.16
There also appeared to be a “recognition of gender” in the

selection of cadets for leadership positions at West Point. Many
female cadets thought so, according to surveys, but Toffler

denied it. He even flatly denied that the Army imposes a quota
on the number of women admitted to the academy each year,
although this had already been admitted by the Justice
Department.
Embarrassments abounded for the services during the
commission s nine months of fact finding, enough to worry fem¬
inist observers who continued to warn of a secret male conspir¬
acy to deny them equality. “The Pentagon is apparently using
the commission as an excuse to delay action,” wrote a female
Army captain in the New York Times.17
At every public hearing, uniformed mil- .. War ig not an equal
itary women were in the audience, reg-
. . .1 . .. . opportunity endeavor.”
istermg their reactions to various
witnesses with groans, snickers, and —Max Thurman
sometimes conspicuous silence.
In early October 1992, preparing for the commission s final
deliberations. Commissioner Darryl Henderson attempted to
make sense of the mound of testimony by making a standard,
scholarly “content analysis.” He began by sorting the testimony
into two groups, personal opinion and anecdotal testimony on
one hand and factual testimony on the other. The former testi¬
mony, said Henderson, was of “limited usefulness.”
Of much greater worth was the factual testimony heard by
the commission, which could be expected to be valid, reliable,
and accurate. Henderson identified some 133 facts established
by the commission, only 2 of which supported the integration of
women on the basis of military effectiveness. As he explained to
his fellow commissioners:
The vast majority of facts presented were problematic for

the integration of women and, as a result, problematic for
readiness and combat effectiveness. It also should he noted
that no case was made through factual testimony for the
military necessity of integrating women into the combat
forces or combat positions.18
In other words, tlm weight of evidence was well on the side

against women in combat, and so too were the majority of com¬
missioners, at least at that time.
Before beginning their final review, the commissioners
were allowed ten minutes each to present their own views of
the issues at hand. In speaking for themselves, all three com¬
missioners who had not so far firmly committed themselves to
one side or the other gave clear indications of siding with the
five commissioners against the use of women in combat. But
when Henderson presented the results of his content analysis,
Moskos, to everyone’s surprise, became fearlessly combative.
He took issue with Herres on where the burden of proof should
lie, telling his colleagues that “women are not just little men. I
want to underscore that. Women are not just little men. You’re
talking about a social chemistry variable, as well as [an] individ¬
ual, physical strength attribute.”
At times Charlie Moskos sounded like Brian Mitchell, chal¬
lenging the advocates of women in combat to admit that they
would sacrifice military readiness for equal opportunity:
Now, we might say, on the other hand, “Listen, we’ve got a

very powerful military. What is ever in second place is so
far in second place, we can t see it. We have enough slack to
experiment. If we want to say that, let’s just say it outright,
that we do have slack, we can take a slight degradation in
effectiveness—or readiness, excuse me—a slight degradation
in readiness for equal opportunity grounds. Let’s not beat
around the bush.
Dismissing all arguments based on culture, philosophy, or reli¬

gion, Moskos insisted that only the military’s interests mattered:
Readiness, readiness, readiness. And that’s what the legislation
says, and let’s just pay attention to that only.”
Moskos questioned the trustworthiness of testimony from
commanders who said only good things about the integrated
units under them. He also questioned the gender-neutral phys-
ical standards, which he said were not popular with enlisted

women, “because they are realistic about those kinds of physi¬
cal standards.”
Max Thurman was also a surprise. In the preceding months,
he had kept his thoughts to himself and dutifully supported the
committee chairman as a fellow member of the “Four Star
Club,” with Admiral Hogg. When the time came to talk, how¬
ever, he had quite a lot to say, and much of it ran counter to
Herres s opinion. Thurman succinctly enumerated eight points,
he considered most important. Three of these points were neu¬
tral with regard to the issues; the other five supported argu¬
ments against a broader military role for women. Thurman told
his colleagues that “war is not an equal opportunity endeavor”
and that he saw no evidence that integration would do anything
but exacerbate problems of sexual harassment or fraternization.
Instead, he said, “Sexual activity, in my view, must not occur in
direct combat units, because it will be dysfunctional to the
accomplishment of the mission and the units effectiveness.”
Combat units should be spared the problem of nondeployabil¬
ity among women, and there was widespread opposition to
sending mothers to war.
Of the predictable opponents of combat, Sally White was
the briefest. Reminding the others of her experiences as an
enlisted woman, she called the advocates of combat among mil¬
itary women a disruptive minority with no real knowledge of the
object of their ambitions. Instead, she said, the commission
should listen to the retired flag and general officers, who over¬
whelmingly opposed combat for women.
The other four against combat each delivered informed and
impassioned appeals. Elaine Donnelly likened the many prob¬
lems with integration and the military’s equal opportunity ambi¬
tions to Jenga blocks pulled one by one from the original tower
and added to its top, until the players have pulled away one block
too many and the whole proud tower comes tumbling down.
Kate O’Beirne lamented the selfishness of many military
women who were lobbying for combat:
I talked to a nurqfeer of women Marines when we made a

trip to Camp Lejeune, and I said to one of them, “Do you
think women ought to serve in combat?” And she responded
by saying, “.Not if it’s not good for the Corps, ma’am. ” But,
hoy, 1 haven’t heard too many others express that opinion.
And I guess I’m at some level disillusioned to see people who
are putting their needs, their wants, their desires ahead of
that loyalty to the ethic, to the unit, to the group ethic....
O’Beime ended by pointing out that equal opportunity wasn’t

really the bone of contention, it was special treatment:
A
The consensus of opinion is for special treatment. The only

consensus is, it seems to me, that women ought to serve in
combat if they want to, but they shouldn’t be made to. And
the majority of women don’t feel they should have to meet
the same physical standards as men.... We’re not talking
equality, here. We are talking about special treatment.
Sam Cockerham spoke from his thirty-plus years of military

service in three wars and contrasted the vastly different per¬
spectives taken toward the issues: “the individual, be-all-vou-
can-be approach” and “the military necessity/combat readiness
point of view.’ Ron Ray called the commissioners to a higher
plane of thinking with reference to history and philosophy, to
the legal doctrine of military necessity, and the sacred princi¬
ples that define and inspire a nation and a civilization:
«
We are at the level of high politics, and we have to ask our¬

selves, ‘What are our beliefs? What are our assumptions?
What are these deeper societal processes that have been
going on in this country in the last thirty years? What are
our first principles? And by what standard shall we judge
the extremely important issues before us?”
The comments of those in favor of combat for women, with

the exception of General Herres, were short in length and lim-
ited in scope. Meredith Neizer said that her first concern was
military readiness and, after that, “having the highest utilization
of every individual that’s in the military.” Betty Clarke said
barely more, mostly about herself, as did Tom Draude, who said
he had once opposed women as Marine security guards and in
other positions, but had since repented.
Admiral Hogg took up the standard and followed the party
line at the Department of the Navy: Exempting mothers and
single parents from deployments was bad; exempting women,
from involuntary sea-duty was bad; and the performance of
Navy woman was “as good or better” than the performance of
men. The Navy should not be restricted in its authority to assign
women wherever it needs them. (The Navy has always guarded
its prerogatives jealously, and Hogg was a very loyal Navy man.)
It was left to General Herres, the commission’s chairman,
to make the definitive procombat case. He began by trying to
conciliate his opponents by asking the commissioners to agree
that they were against quotas, against dual standards, and for
gender-neutral tests of physical ability for all military jobs. He
then argued that military effectiveness and equal opportunity
were “not mutually exclusive.” When the two goals are in con¬
flict, Herres reasoned, the primacy of military effectiveness “is
an argument that one can use for persuasive purposes, but not
a criterion that should be imposed on one another,” which is,
apparently, an obscure way of saying that equal opportunity is
more important.
“And, finally, what will influence my decisions when the
time comes? First, the belief that an exclusion must be shown
to be necessary to be preserved,” he told his colleagues. Other
factors were physical strength, physical endurance, pregnancy,
and privacy, which he said “should not diverge drastically from
the norms that our society can accept.” He rejected the argu¬
ment that women should be excluded from combat units to pro¬
tect them from being killed, since they were already vulnerable
in noncombat units. He also rejected the argument that women
should not be trained to be killers:
We have long since crossed that threshold with the admis¬

sion of women to the ranks of Minuteman nuclear missile
combat crews. It is unrealistic to expect that we can turn the
clock back, or even should, on that issue.
In nine months, a lot of bad blood had circulated among

the more determined members of the commission. Elaine
Donnellys aggressive style infuriated Herres, who resented
challenges to his chairmanship and hated having to deal with
civilian women who to his mind did not belong on the commis¬
sion. For their part, Donnelly, O’Beirne, and White had little
use for Herres, whom they regarded as an unprincipled auto¬
crat. And so it went.
In political committee work, two questions are key: who will
run the show and who will write the report? Herres had ran the
show his own way from the start, much to the dismay of the
conservative commissioners, who would have wanted the com¬
mission to dig deeper into the problems and complaints about
the military’s actual experience with integration. Now they
feared that if Herres wrote the report, the evidence that sup¬
ported combat exclusions would be ignored.
To avert this, three commissioners—Cockerham, O’Beime,
and Ray—submitted a letter to Herres outlining their desires
for the report format and requesting that the commission dis¬
cuss the issue. Herres put them off again and again. Finally, on
the night before the last day of deliberations, the five conserva¬
tives agreed among themselves to force the issue.
The next morning, just after the meeting was called to
order, Ron Ray asked once more about the letter, only to be put
off by Herres once again. Sally White quickly moved to
reschedule discussion of the reports format to the first item of
business, before the Commission had voted on the issue of
combat. Minow and Finch opposed the motion. Kate O’Beirne,
speaking in favor of Whites motion, said, “I think its important,
before we complete the commission business, with respect to
voting on every single issue and option, that everybody, all com-
missioners, recognize that the final report will be a balanced,

even-handed product. And I think the sooner people are
assured of that fact, the better. There’s no assurance of that at
the moment.”
As soon as she had finished speaking, Minow called for a
vote on the motion. The vote was 8 to 7 in favor of ending dis¬
cussion of the motion and voting on it immediately. Herres was
reading the motion for the vote when O’Beime interrupted him
to offer a friendly amendment to limit discussion of the report
format to fifteen minutes. The amendment was accepted, the
vote was called, and the motion was defeated.
Without announcement, one by one, the five conspirators
got up and walked out. Herres and the others continued work¬
ing as if the commission had simply shrunk to only ten members.
And the pretense of basing decisions on military effectiveness
was discarded. In considering combat roles for women,
Commissioner Draude read from President Harry Trumans
executive order for racially integrating the military in 1948:
It is essential that there he maintained in the Armed

Services of the United States the highest standards of
democracy, with equality of treatment and opportunity for
all those who serve in our country’s defense.
Notice, said Draude, “He used the words ‘equality of treatment

and opportunity,’ not ‘military necessity.’”19
Neizer, Hogg, Minow, and Herres all seconded Draude’s
sentiments. Minow said he was “very moved” by Draude’s state¬
ment and offered to support it in writing for the commission’s
report. Herres put equal opportunity and military necessity on
the same vague level, saying that “both are one of our most
sacred cultural values” and both “could be protected” without
sacrificing one to the other. Henderson was not persuaded:
Everybody here almost said it, that military readiness is a

primary concern. Now, when you start prejudging what
might come up indater decisions, in later issues, early on

here, you’re just biasing the whole process here. I think we
should take this opportunity to reaffirm that military readi¬
ness is a primary concern.
To appease him, the others voted to say in its recommen¬

dation that “military readiness should be the driving concern,”
but “there are circumstances under which women might be
assigned .to combat positions.” The word driving, instead of pri¬
mary, was meant to strengthen the first sentence, while the
word might, instead of should, was meant to weaken the sec¬
ond. Henderson still voted against the recommendation, the
only commissioner present who did so. Moskos abstained.
About 1 pm, just before the commission was to take up the
issues of women in combat aviation and aboard combat vessels,
the Gang of Five rejoined the others with the understanding
that they would be allowed fifteen minutes to make their case
on the report format. The discussion was contentious, with
Commissioner Draude accusing the gang of blackmail for walk¬
ing out, prompting an objection from Commissioner Ray:
I respect General Draude enormously. I respect his

integrity. I respect his combat record. But I will not be
accused of blackmail in this room or anyplace else, nor will
I be called a quitter....
After my tour in Vietnam, I spent a year making the
casualty calls, okay ? I went to the families of the people who
were going to die. I’ve heard it said by people in this room
that America can stand a 20 percent degradation in readi¬
ness. In favor of fairness, I’ve heard that said. I disagree
with that. We re smaller. We ve got to be better. We re noina
to have to fight and win outnumbered. I’ve done that before,
and it is not easy.
Now listen: I take this as serious as a heart attack, and I
think the rest of you here do. I will not let the reality of war,
the demands and the physical demands of combat be other
than fairly represented to the president of the United States, to

the Congress, and, more importantly, to the American people.20
The commission voted in favor of a report format that would

provide room for “alternative views.”
After a short break, the commission took up the issue of
women in combat aviation. Three commissioners—Thurman,
Minow, and Clarke—chose not to speak on the issue. Moskos
argued both sides. Henderson and the Gang of Five all spoke
against integration of combat aviation, citing concerns for unit
cohesion, aggressiveness, physical ability, medical problems,
cultural factors, survivability as prisoners of war, and the con¬
sensus of the leadership of the services, retired flag officers, and
aviators on active duty. (Integration of combat aviation was
opposed by 71 percent of the retired flag officers and more than
80 percent of current aviators.)
Hogg, Finch, Neizer, and Herres spoke in favor of combat
aviation for women on the basis of their appraisals of the past
performance of women, the voluntary nature of aviation, public
opinion, and projected improvements to “the quality of the
talent pool.”
Darryl Henderson motioned that the commission recom¬
mend a test period for female combat pilots, but Charlie
Moskos questioned whether such testing could be done, free of
political pressure. Sally White motioned that the commission
recommend barring women from assignment aboard aircraft
engaged in combat missions. Elaine Donnelly seconded White s
motion. Eight commissioners voted in favor of White’s
motion—Thurman, Moskos, Henderson, and the Gang of Five.
The other seven voted against it.
The key factor for Thurman was the matter of women as
prisoners of war. Air Force Colonel John D. Graham, director
of the Joint Services SERE Agency, which trains pilots from all
services in survival, evasion, resistance, and escape (SERE),
had told commissioners that having women among men as pris¬
oners of war would make survival harder on the men:
Females will have a harmful effect on the males. This was

not held by the stiMents. In what was probably what they
thought was politically correct, neither males nor females
thought that females would have any impact on males in
captivity, but the instructors who observed the training,...
both male and female, noticed a marked difference in the
impact that the females had on men in this training.21
SERE representatives attributed the male response to female

abuse as a cultural need felt by men to protect women: “they
feel the need to do something, feel a need to stop it, or they feel
the need to protect.”22 One objective of SERE training was to
make men less sensitive to suffering of women. Nevertheless,
their lack of physical strength was expected to make them less
able to survive as downed pilots. In the words of Marine
Colonel John Ripley:
When that airplane, with its female pilot, returns to earth or

collides with earth or she must bail out of it, she is no longer
a female pilot; she is now a victim, and made so by the
incredible stupidity of those who would permit her to
encounter with the enemy. She is no longer protected by our
own standards of decency, or the Geneva Convention,
which feiv of our enemies have paid the least bit of attention
to. She is no longer protected by the well-wishers and the
hand-wringing and the pleas and the p rayers of the folks
here at home. She is a victim, and she ivill be treated
accordingly,23
The commission now took up the issue of women aboard combat

vessels. Fewer commissioners participated, but Admiral Hogg
spoke at great length. His former reservations about women
aboard ships was just his “macho-male baggage,” he said.
In summary, I can find no solid arguments or valid reasons

for excluding qualified women from serving in combatant
ships. Taken a step further, to include them would improve

all aspects of the ship’s performance, as has been the case
with our noncombatants.
The arguments against integration were based on privacy,

pregnancy, deployability, sexual harassment, fraternization, unit
morale, and detriment to the vessels’ damage-control and war¬
fighting capabilities, especially in jobs where physical strength
was important. Henderson accused the Navy of stonewalling
requests for factual information on the performance of worn On
aboard ship. He concluded his argument by saying that even
the current policy of putting women _
aboard ships is “going to cost lives, and
For many, the key factor
it probably will cost ships, given a real
emergency at sea.” Henderson attrib¬ in the argument is the
uted the Navy’s enthusiasm for putting matter of women as pris¬
women aboard warships to panic over
oners of war.
the Tailhook scandal. _
Meredith motioned that the com¬
mission recommend repealing the restrictions on women
aboard combatant vessels. Mimi Finch seconded the motion.
Just before it went to a vote. Chairman Herres weighed in. The
nation was expecting change, he said, and if the commission
failed to recommend a change in the status quo, all of its other
worthy recommendations would be ignored:
I submit that the words of caution that we have agreed

upon, with regard to ground combat, with regard to quotas,
and the potential for affirmative action, with regard to the
establishment of gender-neutral physical standards where
they are relevant to the occupations in which people will
serve, all of those cautions will probably be lost in the
smoke, because I submit to you that the great number—a
great number of people who will be looking at this report
and are likely to act on it—will not believe that we credibly
considered these issues.
If we had shown some flexibility that we realistically

looked at this problem carefully and recognized that this is
1992, change is upon us, that there were things learned in
the Gulf War, there are things that are different today, that
women have proved that they can make significant contri¬
butions to the effectiveness of our military forces—if we
demonstrate that we have recognized all of that, some of our
other cautions may be listened to.
If we go status quo on this issue, this will be the last
one, and I submit that what I think is very important, and
that is codification of a combat exclusion for land combat, is
never going to happen. Probably what will happen is our
report will be ignored. The testimony that we have heard,
the records that have been laid before us will be reviewed,
and I suggest to you that others are going to come to differ¬
ent conclusions.
Robert Herres delivered this speech staring straight at Max

Thurman, who had surprised him by voting against having
women in combat aircraft.
As Herres spoke, Elaine Donnelly waited impatiently to
offer a rebuttal, but Darryl Henderson dissuaded her. “Let it
go,” he whispered. “We have the votes.”
But when the vote was finally taken, they didn’t. Thurman
voted in favor of the recommendation. Henderson hung in
there with the Gang of Five voting against. Moskos, to every¬
one’s surprise, abstained.
The commission voted on a very mixed bag of seventeen
recommendations included in its final report: against quotas,
for gender-specific physical training standards, for gender-
neutral physical job standards, for gender-normed precommis¬
sioning standards, against women in ground combat, against
women in combat aviation, for women on combat ships, against
women in special operations, and detailed recommendations on
how to deal with pregnancy, motherhood, single parents, and
deployment. The “Alternative Views: The Case Against Women
in Combat, for which the Gang of Five had fought so coura¬

geously, was also included in the commission’s report. Written
by Elaine Donnelly and signed by Cockerham, Donnelly,
O Beime, Ray, and White, it expanded on the issues of combat
aviation and combat ships, basing everything on combat effec¬
tiveness, while noting that the drive for change was motivated
not by a concern for the good of the military but by the demand
for equal rights.
“The Case Against Women in Combat” was followed by a
lengthy dissent on the recommendation against women in com¬
bat aviation, signed by all seven commissioners who voted
against that recommendation. Three commissioners (Clarke,
Finch, and Neizer) dissented from the commissions recom¬
mendation against ground combat for women, arguing that
women were already serving in ground combat and had thor¬
oughly proved themselves in the Persian Gulf. Six commission¬
ers dissented from the recommendation to retain the Defense
Departments “risk rule,” which they called an “unrealistic,
inappropriate, and subjective” means to restrict women from
serving where they were needed. Seven commissioners dis¬
sented on the recommendation against women aboard sub¬
marines and amphibious vessels, on the grounds that the
secretary of the Navy should be given flexibility in such matters.
The report also included personal statements from twelve
commissioners, some of them pages long. Most of the state¬
ments stuck to the issues addressed by the commission, but the
statements of Clarke, Finch, and Neizer complained bitterly
about the influence of the conservative commissioners. Finch
wrote that “the work of this commission has been an insult to all
servicewomen.” The three commissioners who did not submit
personal statements were Herres, O’Beirne, and the strenu¬
ously nonpartisan Charles Moskos.
It all came to naught. The final votes on women in combat
were taken on Election Day 1992. By the end of the day, with
Bill Clinton as the projected winner of the presidential election,
it was clear that the commission’s work was superfluous—a new
political order had arrived. The commission delivered its report

to the White House Sn November 15, 1992. The White House
forwarded the report to Congress without comment. Two
months later, the raging issue was not women in combat—
which was a done deal—but homosexuals in the military.
Still, the Gang of Five had accomplished many things. They
had uncovered much evidence against gender integration of the
military, evidence which might never have seen the light of day
had there been no commission and no Gang of Five. The Gang
of Five had spoiled the party, and sometimes, in politics, spoil¬
ing the party is all you can do—and just what is needed.
Chapter 12
THE MOTHER OF ALL HOOKS
Tailhook should hare been a three- or maybe a

five-day story. Those who were to blame for
outrageous conduct should have been disciplined,
,
and those who were not to blame should have been
,
vigorously defended along with the culture and the
mores of the naval service. Instead we are now at
four years and counting, and its casualty list reads
like a Who’s Who of naval aviation.
—FORMER NAVY SECRETARY JAMES WEBB
BEFORE TAILHOOK, there was Gwen Dreyer, a first-year mid¬

shipman who was “chained to a urinal” at the United States
Naval Academy in December 1989. The incident came on the
eve of the Army-Navy game, at the end of a long day of snow¬
ball fights and high-spirited high jinks, in which Ms. Dreyer had
willingly taken part. She was not actually chained but hand¬
cuffed to the urinal in her dormitory at the academy, in retalia¬
tion for her part of the snowball fights. Eyewitnesses reported
that she had laughed during the ordeal, and photographs
showed her smiling. Her torture lasted fifteen minutes. Dreyer
tearfully told her parents. Her father Gregory, a Naval Reserve
captain and Navy exilian employee, was incensed and com¬

plained in person to academy officials. The academy investi¬
gated and punished two midshipmen with demerits and the loss
of a months leave, and six others with written reprimands.
Weeks before the incident, Dreyer told her faculty advisor
she was considering quitting the academy. Both her father and
her grandfather had graduated from Annapolis, and academy
officials believed that she had been pressured by her father to
go there. When she finally did quit the following May, her
father blamed the academy. He had not been satisfied with the
academy’s response to the chaining incident and had continued
to badger the academy for months for sterner measures. When
his daughter quit, he went to a small local paper, the Annapolis
Capital, whose banner headline later read, “Tormented female
mid resigns,” with the subhead, “Women handcuffed to toilet,
taunted.” That got the attention of the Baltimore Sun and the
Washington Post, and before long, NOW was picketing outside
the academy’s gates, and the school was facing no fewer than six
Navy and congressional investigations focusing not only on the
Dreyer incident but on the general climate between the sexes
in the Brigade of Midshipmen.
No one was alleging that Dreyer had been sexually
molested, and nothing indicated that Dreyer had been victim¬
ized because she was a woman. Not all of her tormenters were
male, and several female midshipmen were vocal in their sup¬
port for the academy, telling the protesters from NOW that
“you don’t know what the norm is... you are doing a lot of dam¬
age. Dreyer’s humiliation was “not a matter of gender, it’s part
of the life here.” That same weekend, according to one female
mid, Dreyer herself had helped to “strip, tar and feather” a
male West Point cadet.
But this hardly mattered to the journalists who smelled a
good story or to the politicians looking for attention. For them,
the incident had cosmic meaning. The mythic Dreyer was a
hard-working, conscientious, capable woman beaten down by
mean and jealous men. “The trouble with Annapolis goes
THE MOTHER OF ALL HOOKS • 247
deep, wrote syndicated columnist Mary McGrory, “—insecure

men, feeling threatened by bright women excused from com¬
bat; a service-wide identity crisis caused by the fact that its ships
have become little more than targets for Exocet missiles.”1
Investigators found no evidence of a “service-wide identity
crisis,” to say nothing of Exocet missiles, but what they did find
confirmed a feminists worst fears. Fourteen years after the first
women arrived at Annapolis, half the male midshipmen
believed that women had no business being there. Eighty per¬
cent of males and 86 percent of females believed that women
were not accepted as equals in the brigade. A “significant
majority” of male and female mids said upperclassmen dating
female plebes was a problem, although investigators noted that
dating “both helped and hindered” the acceptance of women.
Gossip on who was seeing whom was broadcast by the acad¬
emy’s radio station as “Tales from the Dark Side,” and a mid¬
shipmen magazine featured photos of attractive female mids as
“Company Cuties.” Through dirty jokes, derogatory language,
and lewd e-mail, male mids let female mids know they were not
welcomed. Former Navy secretary and best-selling novelist
James Webb had become a cult hero among male midshipmen,
who kept copies of his article “Women Can’t Fight” in constant
circulation at the academy, ten years after it appeared in the
Washingtonian magazine.
A study group at the academy identified the causes of the
“lack of assimilation” of women as a “misperception” of the
academy’s mission, “ignorance about the integral role of women
in the Navy,” and “perceived preferential treatment” of women.
The “combat officer ideal pervades midshipmen’s definition of
[a] good leader,” said the group’s report. They would be more
accepting of women if they understood that the academy’s mis¬
sion was to train not combat leaders but career naval officers.
Midshipmen needed to be enlightened about the many things
women do in the Navy. They actually believed that equal treat¬
ment should mean identical treatment.” Their complaints about
unequal treatment—in admission standards, academic boards,
leadership positions, and physical requirements—were only

“perceptions.” (Midsnipmen merely perceived that male plebes
had their heads shaved while female plebes didn’t.) The study
also blamed opposition to women at the academy on not
enough female role models, not enough female mids, not
enough jobs open to women upon graduation, and fraterniza¬
tion between upperclass males and female plebes.2
Politically, Vajfaire Dreyer culminated in October 1990
with a press conference in the U.S. Capitol Building held by the
academy’s Board of Visitors to present the findings of its own
investigation. The board was chaired by Arthur B. Culvahouse,
Jr., but board member Barbara Mikulski, Democratic senator
for Maryland, dominated the press conference. “What we
found is that in order to achieve a fair and just society, a fair and
just Navy, it is essential that the academy lead the fleet, not fol¬
low the fleet, in crushing racism and sexism,” said Mikulski.
“Sexism is wrong, and the U.S. Naval Academy cannot tolerate
it. Attitudes must change.” She was seconded by another board
member, Maryland Republican Congresswoman Helen
Bentley. The board’s three male members hardly said a word,
but the Naval Academy’s superintendent, Rear Admiral Virgil
L. Hill, Jr., did his best to appear fully understanding of the
problem and eager to address it.
Mikulski’s office distributed a statement castigating the
academy for regarding Dreyer’s handcuffing as an innocent
prank and for tolerating openly sexist behavior among midship¬
men and faculty members. But in a closed-door meeting with
Hill and Hill’s superior, Vice Admiral Jeremy M. Boorda, just
before the press conference, Mikulski was sufficiently mollified
by the Navy’s penitence and plan for reform that her initial
written statement was withdrawn in favor of a more moderate
statement.
During the press conference, Mikulski accepted the acad¬
emy’s assurance that changes were under way, as per Rear
Admiral Hill’s plan. The plan included the creation of a stand¬
ing committee of female mids and faculty members to monitor
the status of assimilation, six hours of sensitivity training for all

midshipmen, zero tolerance for any expression by students or
faculty inconsistent with official Navy policy, severe punish¬
ment for sexual harassment and discrimination, dismissal of
midshipmen and faculty members who “question” the presence
of women at the academy, and a strict hands-off policy that
made touching a plebe grounds for dismissal. “Straightening
someone’s hat or tie or flicking dust off a uniform, that will not
be done anymore,” explained the academy’s commandant ear¬
lier that summer. The plan did not include eliminating uneqtial
treatment. To this day, the academy _
shaves the heads of its men but not its
Eighty percent of males
women.'3
No one knew in 1990 that the and 86 percent of females
shakedown of the Naval Academy was believed that women were

but a trial run for the legendary scan¬ not accepted as equals in
dals that were to come. All of the con¬
the brigade.
ditions that made the Tailhook disaster
possible were already in place: wild
young men whose idea of equality was treating women as
roughly as they treated each other; selfish, sensitive young
women who could dish it out but not take it; self-righteous jour¬
nalists who saw good copy in a “battle of the sexes”; feminist
ideologues in need of another cause celebre; shameless
politicians eager for attention; and gutless Navy leaders who
were unable or unwilling to defend their men, their service, or
themselves.
At the Tailhook Symposium of 1991 two currents crossed
path: the trend of increasingly licentious American sexuality and
the countertrend of increasingly intolerant American feminism.
Naval aviators had long been known as a wild bunch, but in
recent years the annual meetings of the Tailhook Association had
grown wilder than usual. A letter sent before the symposium by
the president of the Tailhook Association, Navy Captain
Frederick “Wigs” Ludwig, to all squadrons expected to attend
admitted to problems in the past and asked attendees to be on
the look-out for underage participants, to try to curtail “late night

gang mentality,”’ ana to ensure that each squadrons “duty offi¬
cer” remain sober. The letter ended with a final brief warning:
REMEMBER... THERE ARE TO BE NO “QUICK HIT”

DRINKS served. LEWD AND LASCIVIOUS behavior is
unacceptable. The behavior in your suite reflects on both
your squadron and your commanding officer.
Even so, the letter was surprisingly tame, in view of the sympo-
siums reputation. It did warn that an “accident” involving
underage participants could cause the association, the Navy,
and the hotel to be sued, “and Tailhook would come to an end,”
but it threatened no individual punishment. It even advised
attendees to use “discretion” when sneaking prohibited sup¬
plies into the hotel: “Please cover your supplies by putting them
in parachute bags or boxes. DO NOT BORROW LAUNDRY
BASKETS FROM THE HILTON. THEIR SENSE OF
HUMOR DOES NOT GO THAT FAR!!!”
The annual Tailhook symposiums were not without profes¬
sional value. They regularly offered briefings from senior Navy
officials on aviation safety, advances in aviation technology, air
operations, personnel issues, and other professional topics. Of
special interest at the 1991 symposium were briefings on com¬
bat operations, munitions effectiveness, and intelligence during
the Persian Gulf War, which some of the attendees had seen
first hand and others would learn about through the sympo¬
sium. The capstone of the symposium s professional agenda was
a flag officer panel bringing together half a dozen or more
admirals to field questions from the audience. It was a rare
opportunity—unique among the branches of service—for offi¬
cers of any rank to question the most senior men in their pro¬
fession, from the three-star head of “OP-05”4 on down. Other
official events included golf and tennis tournaments, a five-
kilometer lun run, and two formal dinners, one to present
awards to distinguished aviators.5
Nevertheless, the annual symposium had begun as a party

and thrived as a party year after year. The first was held in
Tijuana in 1956 as a reunion for aviators from the fleet. The
symposiums were moved to Las Vegas in 1963, with the profes¬
sional events added over the years, receiving official Navy sup¬
port in the form of time off from regular duties, military
transportation to and from the event, participation by Navy offi¬
cials, and administrative support. An estimated five thousand
people, mostly Navy and Marine aviators, attended the 1991
symposium, billed as the “Mother of all Hooks,” but fewer than
2,000 were registered attendees, and, according to Navy inves¬
tigators, even fewer were present at the best attended official
event, the flag officer panel. Obviously, quite a few attendees
were there for other reasons.
For years, the social side of the symposium was supported
by the “hospitality suites” sponsored originally by Defense
Department contractors, who laid out free food and drink for
the attendees in rented hotel rooms concentrated on a single
floor. In the late 1970s new rules governing relations between
Defense Department employees and contractors meant that
contractors could no longer sponsor the hospitality suites. That
responsibility was taken over by individual squadrons, which
funded their suites with money collected from squadron offi¬
cers and from the sale of Tailhook souvenirs at previous sympo¬
siums. Before long, competition developed among participating
squadrons to see who could throw the wildest party. After the
1985 symposium one Tailhook board member, Rear Admiral
James Service, expressed concern for symposium misconduct
that already included public drunkenness, damage to hotel
property, and “lurid sexual acts on naval aviators.” He proposed
limiting the number of hospitality suites, black-listing ill-
behaved squadrons, issuing warnings to squadron commanders,
and even banning all suites for one year. Instead, the board
decided to advise squadron commanders of ground rules and
past problems and to require them to post duty officers to keep
behavior in each suite under control.
Little changed, though, in the years following. By 1991 the

annual gatherings ha& descended to degrees of excess and
depravity far beyond the normal limits of even the rowdiest
civilian professional or business convention, perhaps on par
with the worst collegiate affairs. Competition among the
twenty-two hospitality suites at the thirty-fifth annual Tailhook
in September 1991 produced some innovative obscenities. In
the “Rhino room,” a recently deactivated Marine reconnais¬
sance unit (the Rhino Squadron, VMFP-3), an eight-foot-long
mural of a white rhino was rigged to dispense an alcoholic
concoction through a dildo in the place of the rhinos phallus.
The beverage, called “rhino spunk,” consisted of rum, Kahlua,
milk or cream, and ice. Women were encouraged to “please
the rhino,” and some made a show of simulated oral sex. For
the favor of exposing their breasts, women received squadron
T-shirts.
Outside the pool-side suite sponsored by VAW-110 (a
carrier-based early warning squadron), a large banner adver¬
tised “FREE LEG SHAVES!” to female guests. Inside two avi¬
ators at a time shaved the legs of willing guests using hot towels
and baby oil, and licking each customers calves to ensure “qual¬
ity control.” Easily visible from the pool through the glass door
of the suite, the shaves lasted between thirty and forty-five min¬
utes and included a foot-and-leg massage. Some women wore
only panties or bikini bottoms during the procedure, while a
few exposed the edges of their pubic region for a “bikini shave.”
Some exposed their breasts during the operation. One woman
who disrobed completely for a bikini shave was a stripper who
did it for money. Investigators estimated that about fifty women
allowed their legs to be shaved during the symposium, includ¬
ing at least three female officers, one while in uniform.
The suite hosted by Fighter Squadron 124 from the Naval
Air Station in Miramar, California, boasted a disk jockey, porno¬
graphic movies, and two strippers performing sadomasochistic
and lesbian acts, with occasional physical contact between per¬
formers and the audience. In this suite, several witnesses saw a
female officer serve “belly shots” of tequila to three male offi¬

cers, who drank from her navel. The same female officer later
allowed two male officers to shave her legs in the suite hosted
by VAW-110. She told investigators that some women serving
belly shots (also known as “navel shots”) wore short skirts with
no underwear and exposed themselves during the act. Some
men also served belly shots to both civilian women and female
officers.
There were several reports of men and women exposing
themselves in the pool area and sometimes from the windows
of rooms above the area. One woman was injured when hit by
glass from a window pushed out by someone mooning the
crowd below. The pool itself was the sight of “chicken fights,” in
which women mounted on men’s shoulders tried to rip the
bathing-suit top off other women. In the hospitality suites,
strippers were paid to perform fellatio, and at least one couple
copulated in the presence of others. There were also reports of
couples engaging in oral sex and sexual intercourse in the pool
area and near the tennis courts.
The various obnoxious behaviors exhibited by the partiers
also included pinching, groping, streaking, “sharking” (biting
women on the buttocks), “zapping” (slapping stickers of
squadron logos on people, especially women), and “ball¬
walking” (exposing one’s testicles in public). None of these
offenses originated with or was limited to Tailhook. Sharking
had been known among Marine aviators since the dark days of
Vietnam. Ball-walking began more recently as a sophomoric
show of virility and defiance.
Zapping originated among Navy and Marine aviators as a
territorial marking of aircraft from other squadrons visiting
their base. At the symposiums, it was practiced mostly on
women. Buttocks were a favorite target, but a few women
caught in the third-floor gauntlet were zapped on their breasts
and groin as well. Some women tried to collect as many zappers
as possible. One woman walked into the VA-128 suite, lifted
her shirt to reveal five or six zappers covering her bare breasts,
and asked the aviators to rearrange them. Another woman wel¬

comed two men to zaphher crotch. Aviators often requested per¬
mission to zap, and most of the recipients told investigators they
were not offended and that zapping was mostly done with per¬
mission and among friends.
The infamous gauntlet was a relatively recent development
in the history of Tailhook, arising in response to the changing
nature of the gathering. For most of its history, the Tailhook
symposium had been a stag affair. Informal rules prohibited avi¬
ators from bringing their wives or girlfriends. The few women
present were usually prostitutes or “groupies” who knew the
rules and went along. Only in the 1980s, after the squadrons
had taken over the hospitality suites, did many more women
begin attending the symposiums, not just wives and girlfriends
but also female officers and many more single women attracted
to naval aviators. These women did not always know the rules
and so received a rough reception from the drunken aviators,
who viewed them as outsiders and therefore free game.
The gauntlet evolved from a few men overflowing into the
hall from the hospitality suites, to a coarse communal display of
attention for arriving women. At first, the women were received
with cheers, catcalls, and comments on their relative attractive¬
ness. Then came the pinching, patting, and slapping, which
later degenerated into grabbing, groping, and sharking. The
later the hour, the worse the treatment. One civilian woman
employed by the Navy told investigators of a conversation she
had with another young woman whom she had met on a com¬
mercial flight to Las Vegas to attend Tailhook 1991. In describ¬
ing the gauntlet, the young woman said that at about three
o’clock in the morning, things get “real rough” and wild on the
floor. Far from being put off by such behavior, the young
woman said that it was the reason she was on her way to the
convention.6
Much of the activity in the third-floor hall was spontaneous
and unpredictable, sometimes crowded and rowdy, sometimes
not. At times, though, the crowds functioned in an organized
fashion. To lure women into the hall, the men would mill
around casually, paying no apparent attention. At the first sign
of an attractive woman, a self-appointed “master of cere¬
monies” would yell out “Clear deck!”—the signal for the men to
line the hall in preparation for her passing. Once in the gaunt¬
let men would close around her, slowing her progress but keep¬
ing her moving while plastering her with zappers or grabbing at
her groin, breasts, and buttocks. Others would begin rhythmi¬
cally pounding the walls while chanting, “Gauntlet! Gauntlet!”
Unattractive women were greeted with “Wave off!” and “Abort!
Abort!” or other carrier jargon, and were allowed to pass unmo¬
lested. Similar signals were given to announce the approach of
senior officers and security personnel. Afterwards, the com¬
mand was “Mill about!”—to return the assembly to its original,
unthreatening appearance.
Many witnesses, male and female, told investigators that
they viewed the gauntlet as just part of the party, and that most
women seemed to enjoy or at least accept the attention and the
contact, responding with smiles, giggles, playful retaliation
against the men, and repeat passes. The attitude among many
aviators was, “This is our party: if you come here, you play by
our rules.” Women who objected were told they should not be
there. Women who resisted were often treated worse, although
some managed to fend off men with well-placed punches or
kicks. Two women reportedly showed up on the floor armed
with electronic devices to ward off attackers.
Security guards and some officers warned quite a few
women not to enter the third-floor hallway, but many did any¬
way and some regretted it later. Reluctant women were occa¬
sionally hoisted upon the shoulders of the “master of
ceremonies” and carried down the hall against their will. One
young college freshman, who was too drunk to resist, was
passed hands-over-head all the way down the hall, having her
slacks and her underwear removed along the way. At the end of
the gauntlet, she was deposited on the floor, naked from the
waist down, and left in the care of two security guards.7
For all the groping and grabbing, there were indications

that the event was less threatening than some victims believed.
One woman reported that after the “master of ceremonies” car¬
ried her down the hall against her will, he set her down gently
and asked, “Are you. okay?” Only when assured she was not
injured did he rejoin the crowd. Two women told investigators
that after being pushed and shoved through the groping gaunt¬
let, one of the women noticed that she had lost her pager. A
Navy lieutenant at the end of the gauntlet yelled to the men in
the hall that the woman had lost her pager, and immediately,
said one of the women later, “the whole crowd stopped and
began to look for the pager.” The pager was found and politely
returned to its owner.8
Throughout the weekend, members of the Tailhook staff
and some senior officers made individual attempts to rein in
misbehaving junior officers. The president of the Tailhook
Association, Captain Ludwig, chased five streakers into a bath¬
room and pounded on the door until they opened up, then
chewed them out and sent them away in towels. A Navy com¬
mander chastised a junior officer for exposing himself in the
pool. On occasion, officers broke up attacks on women in the
hallway. There was, however, no concerted effort to bring the
party under tighter control, although many of the activities
described above were witnessed by several senior officers.
At the end of the three-day debauch, the third floor reeked
of beer, vomit, and urine. Attendees had consumed (one way or
another) more than $33,000 in alcoholic beverages (mostly
beer) and caused $23,000 in damage to the Las Vegas Hilton
($18,000 to replace the third floors carpet). In his epistolary
debriefing to squadron commanders, Captain Ludwig declared
the gathering
...the biggest and most successful Tailhook we have ever

had. We said it would be the ‘Mother of all Hooks,’ and it
was.... The professional symposium proceeded flawlessly
and it appeared the information exchange was excellent. The
flag panel was a resounding success with an estimated 2,500

in attendance. The questions were frank, on the mark, and
often quite animated. Our banquet and luncheon also
boasted of incredible attendance and were enjoyed by all.
Our very senior naval leadership, including the Secretary
and the CNO, were thoroughly impressed and immensely
enjoyed their times at Tailhook ’91. Additionally, all of our
naval aviation leaders and many industry leaders had noth¬
ing but praise for the event. We can be proud of a tremen¬
dous Tailhook ’91 and a great deal of thanks goes to all the
young JOs in the various committees
that made Hook fly.
For the most part,
But he also admitted that the 1991 Tailhook, even at its

gathering was the Mother of all Hooks worst, was a consensual
in one other respect, which Ludwig
, , , 1, 7< f . i. „ encounter.
could only call unprotessionalism,
stemming from a “blatant and total dis¬
regard of individual rights and public/private property.” Ludwig
mentioned the damaged carpet, the broken window, and five
reports he had heard of women abused by the gauntlet, includ¬
ing the young girl who was passed overhead without her pants.
Such things had put a “serious blemish on what was otherwise
a successful symposium” and a “black eye to the Tailhook
Association and all Naval Aviation.” They had also strained
Tailhooks welcome at the Hilton, leaving Ludwig to do the
“damage control” while attempting to lock in Tailhook ’92. He
ended with a warning: “If future Tailhooks are to take place,
attitudes and behavior must change.” The challenge was “to fig¬
ure out a way to have a great time responsibly or we will jeop¬
ardize the very future of Tailhook altogether.”
How could it have happened? How could it have happened
year after year? How could highly paid, greatly trusted, college-
educated professionals, dedicated, dutiful, upright, and obedi¬
ent in the service of their country devolve into a wild, wanton
rabble with deliberate regularity?
Probing for answers, investigators saw evidence of a variety

of contributing factoincluding a lack of leadership, a tradi¬
tion of excess, and an expected immaturity from junior officers.
Some believed that unlike young platoon leaders in the Army
and Marine Corps, young aviators were responsible for no one
but themselves and their machine, and therefore their profes¬
sional maturity was delayed. Even after ten years of service,
they were still “the kids” to their superiors.
The stress of their jobs was another supposed factor. The
“kids” were engaged in one of the most dangerous professions
in modern times, regularly risking their lives in their routine
duties. Flying was the easy part; what set them apart from even
other aviators were the launches and landings on a busy carrier
flight deck. Six naval aviators were killed in the Gulf War, and
in the year of peace after the symposium, thirty officers were
killed in military aviation accidents. Such stress had presumably
produced a fatalistic hedonism—“Eat, drink, and be merry, for
tomorrow we shall die.” The convention was merely the
appointed time to indulge.
Investigators also looked to the popular culture for possible
explanations. The movies An Officer and a Gentlemen and Top
Gun were thought to have contributed to the glamor and
bravado of naval aviators, although these movies almost cer¬
tainly had more effect on the women who flocked to Tailhook
than on the aviators themselves, who considered the latter an
exceedingly silly flick—“Top Bunk,” they called it. Influences
from popular American culture were more probably movies like
Animal House, Caddyshack, and the movie and television series
M*A“S*ff, which encouraged an attitude of insouciant irrever¬
ence toward uptight, oppressive, hypocritical, old-fashioned
norms of social propriety. A generation of American males had
grown up without positive exemplars of dignified Christian gen¬
tlemen, an image that was more often insulted than honored by
the quite un-Christian American media. No one seriously
expected them to be “officers and gentlemen” anymore. The
word gentleman had lost all meaning; the concept no longer
existed. The same could be said for the word lady and the ideal
it represented. Neither ideal was invoked by the modern moral¬
ists who condemned the aviators for their behavior. Instead, the
event was judged by newer, feminist standards, which came
down hard on the men but went easy on the women.
By these new standards, Tailhook was judged a general
assault on women, a violent backlash against their presence in
the military, a wild “harassacre” as one wit put it. The idea that
the abuse of women, especially female officers, was motivated
by antifeminist animosity dominated the thinking of a few
female officers. The vast majority of male officers denied it, but
there was some evidence to support the notion. When the sub¬
ject of women in combat aviation was raised by a female officer
before the flag panel, a male voice yelled out, “We don’t want
women!” The senior admiral present, Vice Admiral Richard
Dunleavy, made a joke of pretending to duck under the table
before giving an equivocating response that was not well
received by either sex. A drunken argument over the issue
between male and female junior officers that evening led to
verbal and physical abuse. Several officers on the third floor
sported T-shirts with “HE-MAN WOMAN-HATERS’ CLUB”
on one side and “WOMEN ARE PROPERTY” on the other.
Still, the evidence is insufficient to establish sexism as a primary
or even a secondary cause of events, for it does nothing to
explain the general behavior of both men and women at the
symposium, unless one interprets all sexual misbehavior as evi¬
dence of sexist misogyny.
For the most part, Tailhook, even at its worst, was a con¬
sensual encounter. Investigators identified 470 women who
attended the symposium and interviewed 398. Less than one-
quarter (83) were classed as “victims” for having experienced
nonconsensual physical contact, mostly grabbing or fondling of
the buttocks. Ten of those women, including five Navy officers,
told investigators that they did not consider themselves victims.
Some requested that they not be identified as such in the inves¬
tigators’ report. At least three women who did feel like victims
blamed themselves for their experience, saying they “should

have known better.” TWo alleged victims refused to cooperate
with investigators. Ten women, mostly civilians, said they had
experienced similar treatment at Tailhook symposiums in the
past, but were not discouraged from coming back. Six men said
they were assaulted by women pinching their buttocks, grab¬
bing their crotches for a “package check,” or pulling their shorts
down in public. Only a handful of the female victims left the
party after being assaulted; the great majority just changed
places, moving from the hallway to the pool patio or from one
suite to another. Only two women felt so violated that they
called the police. '
The investigators never attempted to explain the behavior
of any women, although most of the women present had no
professional reason for being there. Some single civilian women
flew in from as far away as Massachusetts and Florida, just to
join the party. Many more drove to Las Vegas from California
and Arizona. Since Tailhook was an annual event in Las Vegas,
most of the local women present knew exactly what to expect.
The two who called the police were among the few women who
just happened to be in Las Vegas that weekend and had no prior
knowledge of Tailhook.
Ironically, it was Ludwigs second letter alerting squadron
skippers to the “unprofessionalism” exhibited at the symposium
that proved the Navy’s undoing. The letters specific mention of
the gauntlet, the woman passed hand over head without her
pants, the broken window, and $23,000 in damage was the
smoking gun needed by Gregoiy Vistica, a reporter for the San
Diego Union-Tribune. Vistica had been tipped off to the story
by an unnamed source, a Navy captain, and had already identi¬
fied a few of the victims, including the civilian women who
called the police and an admirals aide, Lieutenant Paula
Coughlin, but it was Ludwigs letter, provided to Vistica by
another Navy source, that made the story.9
The Union-Tribune ran the story on Tuesday, October 29,
1991. That very afternoon, Senator John McCain denounced
the Navy on the floor of the Senate, demanding a “full and

immediate convening of a high-ranking panel of civilian and
military members” to investigate the “despicable behavior
taking place as far as sexual harassment is concerned at this
convention.”10
McCains denunciation was a resounding vote of no confi¬
dence in the Navy and its leadership, already badly beaten by a
string of scandals: the Dreyer affair, a cheating scandal at the
Naval Academy, the drowning death of a rescue swimmer, the
persecution of a decorated enlisted man who blew the whistle
on the inappropriate cannibalization of downed aircraft, and,
most significant, the Navy’s disastrous investigation into the
explosion aboard the battleship Iowa. The Navy’s political lead¬
ers were running scared, while its admirals were touchy and
defensive.
The Navy’s most senior leaders were caught flat-footed by
McCain. With the exception of Vice Admiral Dunleavy, chief of
aviation, they had not known of Ludwig’s letter until Vistica
called the office of the secretary for comment late in the after¬
noon the day before. Neither had they heard any complaints of
impropriety. Several key leaders had, however, attended the
symposium and were afraid of being implicated. They included
the secretary of the Navy, H. Lawrence Garrett III, and the
chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso.
Hours after McCain s attack, Garrett’s office hastily drafted
a letter to Captain Ludwig expressing the secretary’s “absolute
outrage” at the reported abuses at the convention and termi¬
nating all Navy support for the Tailhook Association, one of
McCain’s demands. Written with obvious exculpatory intent,
the letter cited Navy-wide messages against sexual harassment
sent by both Garrett and Kelso months earlier and mentioned
the professional value of the symposium as justification for
Garrett’s and Kelso’s presence.
That same day, Garrett announced two investigations of the
symposium, one by the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) focus¬
ing on criminal allegations and another by the Navy’s inspector
general focusing on th^gathering’s noncriminal aspects. Garrett

also announced the formation of a panel of senior executives
who would monitor the investigations and the developing polit¬
ical situation. The panel was headed by Undersecretary of the
Navy Dan Howard and included Rear Admiral George Davis,
inspector general; Rear Admiral Ted Gordon, judge advocate
general; Rear Admiral Duvall “Mac” Williams, NIS chief; Rear
Admiral William Flanagan, congressional liaison; Commander
Peter Fagan, Garrett’s personal counsel; and, most auspiciously,
Rarbara Spyridon Pope, assistant secretary of the Navy for man¬
power and personnel.
The first head to roll was that of Rear Admiral John W.
Snyder, commanding officer of Patuxent River Naval Air Station
in Maryland, whose aide was Lieutenant Paula Coughlin.
Snyder’s crime was not responding quickly enough to Coughlin’s
allegations of assault. He was first briefed by Coughlin on the
incident on September 19, but his letter notifying Admiral
Dunleavy did not arrive until almost two weeks later.11 Per
Snyder’s instructions, Coughlin wrote her own letter to
Dunleavy and sent a copy to her friend in the office of Vice
Admiral Boorda, chief of naval personnel. Less than a week after
Tailhook went public, Boorda used the delay of Snyder’s letter as
proof that Snyder did not take the allegations seriously enough
and recommended that Snyder’s name be removed from the
rear admiral promotion list, an action that would have demoted
him to captain.12 He also reassigned Coughlin to his own staff.
On November 4 the Navy announced that Admiral Kelso had
relieved Snyder of his command.
The aviation community met both investigations with a
stone wall. Many officers refused to cooperate. Some denied
that they had attended Tailhook, while others who admitted
attending denied the existence of the gauntlet and refused to
finger fellow officers. They did, however, report seeing Garrett,
Kelso, and other senior officers on the third floor, although
Garrett and Kelso insisted they had seen nothing improper.
Nevertheless, some retired aviators began to complain that the
THK MOTHKH Of A 1,1, HOOKS • 263
top brass bar] known all along about the abuses at Tail hook and
that it had unfairly sacrificed Snyder.
After six months investigators had identified twenty-six vic¬
tims but only two likely suspects. One was an Australian
exchange officer, easily identified by his accent, as the man
responsible for several “shark attacks.’ The other was a Marine
captain named Gregory j. Bonam, who was suspected of
assaulting Paula Coughlin. Unfortunately for the Navy leader¬
ship. the Australian could not be prosecuted, and the easy
against Bonam appeared weak He fit the general physical
description of a man Coughlin accused of putting both hands
down her shirt from behind and squeezing her breasts, and he
had failed an NTS polygraph, but Coughlin had failed to pick
him out of a photographic line-up, and a photograph taken the
night in question showed Bonam in a green “Raging Rhino”
shirt, not the burnt-orange shirt that Coughlin remembered.
Bonam also showed no signs of having been bitten on the fore¬
arm, although Coughlin told investigators she thought she drew
blood.
With no one to hang, the Navy leadership was in a pickle.
Barbara Pope was the most upset. Pope had a reputation as an
intellectual lightweight, whose only claim to an office on the
E-ring of the Pentagon was her gender. Her resume hardly pre¬
pared her for her position. Like many in the Cheney Pentagon,
including Cheney himself, she had never served in uniform.
Before her nomination as Navy manpower secretary, she had
been depute assistant secretary of defense for family policy, a job
of little significance. Before that she was an aide to Senator Barry
Goldwater. ' Pope lacked the political savvy of other female
political appointees at the Pentagon like Marybel Batjer, then an
advisor to Garrett who arrived during the early Reagan years as
a protege of Frank Carlucci and survived through the patronage
of General Colin Powell, the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
The pair was a study in contrast: Batjer dressed to kill in short
skirts and high heels, and Pope in maternity clothes and dowdy
business dresses. She was nine months pregnant at her confir-
mation hearing and Ojjive birth shortly after taking office.) They
had one thing in common: they were both ardent feminists.
Pope saw Tailhook as the crime of the century. Frustrated
that commissioned officers would not cooperate with the inves¬
tigations, she wanted to come down hard on squadron com¬
manders. She recommended grounding them, docking their
flight pay, and relieving them of their commands as punishment
for the alleged misbehavior of their men. She wanted the Navy
to elevate the investigations to the level of a court of inquiry or
blue ribbon panel, bringing in outsiders to really make a show
of it. If nothing else, someone should apologize to the victims,
preferably the secretary himself.14
The admirals involved in the investigations were aghast.
They could not suspend constitutional rights to coerce testi¬
mony, and they were concerned that undue command influence
would prejudice the process. They were also concerned with
protecting the Navy leadership and the aviation officer corps
from a hysterical witch-hunt run by people like Pope. They also
doubted that the available evidence could stand up in court. In
the words of Rear Admiral Williams, the NIS chief, the NIS
investigation didn’t stand “a fart’s chance in a whirlwind” of pro¬
ducing convictions.15 Embarrassing as the results were, when
the investigation reports were released to the press and public
on April 30, 1992, Navy leaders could do little more than
express their indignation at the lack of cooperation.
The lurid details of the reports only stoked the fires of out¬
rage and retribution. Publicly, Congresswomen Barbara Boxer
and Patricia Schroeder called for congressional hearings, and
Senators Sam Nunn and John Warner announced that they
would hold up the promotions of some 5,000 officers until those
who were involved in Tailhook were identified and removed
from the promotion lists. Tailhook had become a threat to the
republic. Who could expect the Navy to accomplish its mission
if it didn’t treat women with utmost respect?
Privately, Barbara Pope threatened to resign and even dic¬
tated terms to Secretary Garrett, including punishment for
squadron commanders. She could afford to be bold. George

Bushs reelection campaign was doing badly. The last thing he
needed was the resignation of a female political appointee
charging the administration with winking at Navy misconduct.
After Pope’s threat, Cheney ordered Garrett to have the
squadron commanders interrogated by the Navy’s civilian gen¬
eral counsel, which the Navy’s staff judge advocate opposed as
a politicization of the judicial process. But Garrett went along
with the order, and, to placate Pope, established a standing
committee on women headed by her.
Larry Garrett was an aviator himself, a former enlisted man
and naval flight officer, who retired
with twenty years in the Navy. He was
Now nothing separated
also a lawyer, and like most lawyers, he
believed in handling things through a the views of the Pentagon
set process. One simply filed the right from those of the most
papers and spoke when it was time. It
feminist congresswoman.
was the only way he knew, and it suited
his personality. He functioned best
among friends, and it was friends like former Navy Secretary
James Webb who were responsible for his career in the
Pentagon. Webb picked Garrett as his undersecretary and con¬
sidered him “a good number-two man.” Garrett kept his post
after Webb left in 1987. When the secretary’s office fell vacant
again in 1989, Garrett was urged on Dick Cheney by Richard
Armitage. Armitage could not have been more wrong in rec¬
ommending Garrett as secretary of the Navy. The Navy needed
someone who respected its headstrong admirals without being
intimidated by them. Garrett was not that man.
By the summer of 1992 the press had learned that fifty-five
pages were missing from the NIS report, including a statement
by a Marine captain placing Garrett in the Rhino Room on the
last night of the convention. Garrett had always denied visiting
any suites and seeing anything inappropriate, but the missing
pages cast doubt on his story and raised the question of a cover-
up. Garrett was forced to request the Defense Departments
inspector general, lêrek Vander Schaaf, to investigate the

missing pages.
On June 24, 1992, Paula Coughlin went public for the first
time. She had been talking to Vistica at the San Diego Union-
Tribune for months^ without allowing him to use her name.
Vistica says she had once told him that if she went public she
would do so in the Union-Tribune, but when the time came she
chose the Washington Post, for obvious reasons.16 The Post gave
her a front-page feature with a photo, in which she looked
pained but composed as she reflected on her ordeal. The story,
by John Lancaster, was one of those pitiful victim profiles for
which the Post is fatuous. (One is reminded of P.J. O’Rourke s
joke about newspaper headlines at the end of the world: The
Post’s will read, “End of the World: Women and Minorities to
Suffer Most.”) Under the headline “A Gantlet of Terror,
Frustration,” the story began:
When Navy Lt. Paula Coughlin first spotted them—a

youthful, clean-cut bunch of guys lounging in a third-floor
hallway of the Las Vegas Hilton—it never crossed her mind
that she should he afraid. After all, she recalls thinking, they
were Navy and Marine pilots. Pilots just like her.
But Coughlin, a helicopter pilot and admiral’s aide, was
quickly enveloped by terror. Grabbed from behind and pro¬
pelled down the hallway to jeers of “admiral’s aide, admi¬
ral’s aide,” Coughlin was repeatedly pawed and molested.
One man grabbed her breasts, another tried to remove her
panties....
“It was the most frightened I’ve ever been in my life,”
Coughlin said. “I thought, 7 have no control over these
guys. I’m going to be gang-raped. ”’17
The story, in fact, was rather shy on details. Barely three hun¬
dred words described the incident in an article 1,450 words
long. She said her reason for coming forward was frustration
with the Navy’s inability to punish her attackers, and she
accused her former boss, Jack Snyder, of shrugging off the

ordeal, telling her, “That’s what you get when you go on the
third floor of a hotel with a bunch of drunk aviators.”
The rest of the story was self-defense. “People would come
up and ask me, “What were you doing in that hallway anyway?
What’s the big deal?”’ says Coughlin. ‘Tve heard, ‘Didn’t any¬
body warn her?’ Warn me of what? That you’ll go down that
hallway and be assaulted by your fellow aviators?... I had no
idea what was going to happen.... I’m not exactly the girl next
door, but I’m the person in the office next door.” She insisted
she wasn’t carrying out a vendetta against every man in the
Navy, saying instead, “It’s an education process.... I’m not a
hero. I’m a victim who’s speaking out.”
Coughlin had reason to appear defensive. Many details of
her experience did not reflect favorably upon her. Lancaster
wrote that Coughlin “attended a banquet, then went back to
her room to change” before returning to meet some friends at
the Hilton. He did not note the time that Coughlin returned to
the Hilton to begin her night of partying—about midnight,
when every drunken party is at its peak. According to Lancaster,
Coughlin changed into “casual, civilian clothes”—actually a
denim miniskirt, a strapless bra, a shirt described variously by
others as a “tube top” and a “tank top with thin shoulder straps,”
and “little black cowboy boots.” (At the banquet, she had worn
a “snazzy red silk dress” from Neiman Marcus.)18 Lancaster
depicted Coughlin walking unsuspectingly into a “youthful,
clean-cut bunch of guys lounging” leisurely in the hallway, but
Coughlin told investigators that when she got off the elevator it
was already “loud and rowdy.” Lancaster said Coughlin
assumed that they were “pilots just like her.” She apparently did
not tell him that she had had an alcohol-fired argument about
women in combat the night before with her fellow pilots.
Lancaster did not mention allegations that Coughlin herself was
intoxicated the night of her alleged assault. He did not tell us
that Coughlin did not leave the party after her ordeal. He said
that two of her attackers had been “positively identified,” which
was not true. No mention was made of Coughlins difficulty in

identifying her attackers. That information had been hidden in
the investigation reports fifty-five missing pages, which also
revealed contradictions in Coughlin s account of her assault.
Nothing in Lancasters story made sense of Coughlin’s com¬
ment that she is “not exactly the girl next door.” Lancaster did
quote her saying that she “worked [her] ass off’ to prove herself
in the Navy, but he didn’t quote her saying repeatedly to her
attackers, “What the fuck do you think you are doing?”
Coughlin had a reputation in the Navy as quite a modem
woman. According to her boyfriend, she had once shown up for
a Navy “dining-in” ‘carrying a large rubber dildo and wearing a
black tuxedo jacket, short black miniskirt, black fishnet stock¬
ings, and high heels.19 She had also attended the infamous 1985
Tailhook, the one that prompted Admiral Services complaint to
the Tailhook board. Yet Coughlin insisted she had never seen or
heard of the gauntlet until September 1991.
By June 1992 Coughlin was most definitely on the defensive.
The aviators under investigation had long known who she was,
and they had begun to talk, alleging that Coughlin had willingly
participated in the ribald revelries in both 1985 and 1992. Most
damaging was the allegation made by Navy Lieutenant Rolando
Gandhi Diaz, a Puerto Rican E-2C Hawkeye pilot who spent
his time at Tailhook ’91 in the VAW-110 suite giving free leg-
shaves, asking only that his customers sign Iris banner. Diaz
claimed he had shaved Coughlins legs twice: once on Friday
night while she was wearing her dress-white uniform jacket, and
once again on Saturday night, when she was in civilian clothes. As
thanks, claimed Diaz, Coughlin had written on his banner the
blasphemous words: ‘Tou make me see God. The Paulster.”20
Diaz’s allegations had not yet been made publicly, but
Coughlin was aware that she could not get away with the total
innocent act and thus the admission that she was, well, not the
girl next door.
Her words were intended for her fellow aviators and offi¬
cers. The general public had no idea what she was saying. They
\
%
had only read Lancasters June 24 article in the Post or seen

Coughlin’s interview with Peter Jennings on ABC News that
same night. The effect on the press and the public was entirely
one-sided. The twenty-six victims now had a face and a name
and a sympathetic audience. /-
Coughlin’s going public was the coup de grace for Larry
Garrett. He had been taking on water since the Navy’s failure to
come up with culprits, and he had been sinking fast since his
sighting in the Rhino Room, which torpedoed his integrity.
With Barbara Pope apparently blackmailing the Bush adminis¬
tration in an election year, and Dick Cheney always ready to
blow with the wind, it was just a matter of time. Two days after
Coughlin’s apotheosis, Garrett was forced to resign. In his res¬
ignation letter to President Bush, he insisted again that he “nei¬
ther saw nor engaged in any offensive conduct” at the
symposium. Nevertheless, he accepted responsibility for the
“leadership failure” that made Tailhook possible.
The conventional wisdom in Washington was that if Garrett
had taken responsibility for Tailhook in the beginning, “Tailhook
would never have become the Navy’s worst disaster since Pearl
Harbor.”21 This facile lie ignored the political realities that kept
fueling the controversy. Nearly two years after Garrett’s depar¬
ture, Tailhook was still bringing down the Navy’s high and
mighty. Nothing that powerful would have been stopped so eas¬
ily. However blameworthy Garrett might have been, he was not
responsible for the witch-hunt that followed it.
For a few short days after Garrett’s resignation, his under¬
secretary, Dan Howard, a Cheney man- cracked the whip as act¬
ing secretary to bring the Navy to heel. In the Pentagon’s
auditorium, he lectured some 300 senior officers on their
“stone age attitudes,” explicitly denying that Tailhook was just
a problem with the integration of men and women.” He
ordered the entire Navy to “stand down” for one day to consider
the problem of sexual harassment, and he proposed to the sec¬
retary of defense that sexual harassment be made a crime under
the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But all his enthusiasm
was not enough. Qn July 7 President Bush announced his

choice of Sean O’Keefe, the Defense Departments comptrol¬
ler, to be the next Navy secretary.
O’Keefe was a very unmilitary man. He was tall and hand¬
some, with a big mustache that hid his lips, and a youthful,
cocksure demeanor that showed little deference to his seniors.
He was just thirty-eight and had never served in uniform,
although his father had been a Navy civilian submarine engi¬
neer. O’Keefe was an accountant, first for the Naval Sea
Systems Command, then for the Senate Appropriations
Committee’s subcommittee on defense, where he later became
staff director. Cheney brought him to the Pentagon. He was just
the kind of man that Cheney liked, suave and bright, politically
astute, and utterly ruthless when it came to cutting the Defense
budget and rooting out untimely attitudes and traditions.
Shortly after taking office, O’Keefe pulled the nominations
for promotion of two admirals, Joseph Prueher and Jerry Tuttle.
Prueher had offended Gwen Dreyer and her family when he
was commandant of the Naval Academy two years earlier, and
Tuttle had allowed an organizational newsletter to be published
with a dumb joke comparing women to beer (“beer never has a
headache”). O’Keefe also fired Vice Admiral Richard Dunleavy,
chief of naval aviation, forcing him to retire as a rear admiral, on
account of not having enough time-in-grade as a three-star, and
without the usual fanfare for someone in his position: no flight-
deck retirement ceremony, no fly-over by Navy jets, no brass
band, no medals for long service, no printed program lauding
his achievements, no bouquet of flowers for his wife.
In September, when the Defense Department’s inspector
general, Derek Vander Schaaf, submitted his first report on the
handling of the investigation by senior Navy officials, O’Keefe
announced the resignations of two more admirals, NIS chief
“Mac” Williams and Navy Judge Advocate General Ted
Gordon, and the reassignment of a third, George Davis, the
Navy’s inspector general. Gordon had been scheduled to retire
November 1 anyway, but O’Keefe threw his name in for added
effect. Williams, like Dunleavy, would be forced to retire early

and therefore at a lower grade. Vander Schaaf had faulted him
for shielding senior officers from investigation and for making
insensitive comments that indicated bad faith on his part.22
Both men were unrepentant and submitted lengthy rebuttals to
Vander Schaaf’s findings. Williams complained of being pun¬
ished without due process.
Vander Schaaf had also recommended action against Dan
Howard, Cheneys man in the Navy Department, but O’Keefe ,
defended Howard. “These professionals failed him,” O’Keefe said.
“They did not give him the support and _
advice that he needed.”
There were quite a few
In announcing the resignations of
Williams and Gordon, O’Keefe told the 9°0C* men cau9ht UP in the
world: whirlwind of Tailhook.
I need to emphasize a very important message: We get it.

We know that the larger issue is a cultural problem which
has allowed demeaning behavior and attitudes toward
women to exist within the Navy Department.... Sexual
harassment will not be tolerated, and those who don’t get
that message will be driven from our ranks.
It was an answer to Pat Schroeder’s public complaint that Navy

leaders “just don’t get it.” Now they did. Now nothing separated
the views of the Republicans running the Pentagon from those
of the most feminist member of the House of Representatives.
Now it was Pat Schroeders Navy, and the joke making the
rounds among naval aviators was that Schroeder had gone to
Europe for a sex change and came back as Dick Cheney.
In the next six months, the Defense Department inspector
general set about investigating the Tailhook convention itself,
sending a team of forty investigators out across the country to
interrogate over 2,900 persons, 900 more than the Navy had
interrogated. This time, undue command influence wasnt a
concern. The high command wanted prosecutions, and the
inspector general âs out to get them. For their adolescent

behavior, aviators found themselves hounded like vicious crim¬
inals. Officers reported being threatened with punishment or
dismissal or with having their names leaked to the media if they
did not cooperate: One Marine officer claimed that he was
threatened with an IRS audit and subsequently endured one.
Some were offered immunity in exchange for incriminating tes¬
timony. Others were ordered to take polygraphs. Agents asked
suspects probing questions about their sex lives such as whether
they masturbated. They even attempted to intimidate officers’
wives at home to get information and in one case went under¬
cover to obtain evidence.
In one case, a Defense Department agent tricked a civilian
nurse in Las Vegas into signing a statement alleging that Navy
Lieutenant Cole V. Cowden had sexually assaulted her by press¬
ing his face against her chest, even though the woman repeatedly
said that she did not consider Cowden s actions an assault or her¬
self a victim. The woman later signed an affidavit to that effect,
which Cowdens attorney used at his court-martial. In cross-
examining the agent, the attorney took each statement in turn:
Q: That first statement by Ms. M., who wrote that?

Agent: I did, sir.
Q: Did she tell you that she didn’t consider that an
assault?
Agent: Yes, sir.
Q: Did she tell you that she didn’t appreciate the gov¬
ernment telling her whether or not she’s been assaulted?
Agent: That I don’t remember, sir.
Q: You explained it to her that it ivas an assault
whether or not she considered it to be an assault. Correct?
Agent: That’s correct, sir.
* *
Q Have you read her subsequent statement that she

provided?
Agent: Yes, sir.
Q: It’s a lot different than her first statement.

Agent: Yes, sir.
Q: So, the statement that you wrote out constituted an
assault even though the woman clearly told you that she had
not been assaulted? r
A
Agent: Yes, sir.

Q: Now, looking at the second statement, it’s pretty
clear that she hasn’t been assaulted. Correct?
AGENT: In her view, yes, sir.
Q: Whose view is important here, the view of the victim
or the view of you?
Agent: Well, I would answer that question, sir, by say¬
ing that—
Q: No, the question was whose view is important. If
you’re talking about an assault, a woman has been
assaulted, whose view is important?
Agent: In this instance, the government.23
By such methods, the inspector generals henchmen identi¬

fied 140 suspects who were referred to their services for disci¬
plinary action for assault, indecent exposure, conduct
unbecoming an officer, dereliction of duty, lying under oath,
and impeding an investigation. One hundred nineteen were
Navy officers and twenty-one were Marines. Half of these offi¬
cers were never prosecuted because of a lack of evidence. Most
of the rest accepted nonjudicial punishment, called a captains
or admirals mast in the sea services. A handful were exonerated
but most received fines and the loss of leave time. Five Navy
officers and one Marine refused nonjudicial punishment, opt¬
ing instead for courts-martial.
No women were prosecuted, although the inspector gen¬
eral heard testimony that female officers participated in leg¬
shaving, belly shots, indecent exposure, and other unbecoming
conduct. “The agenda of the Pentagon inspector general did
not include looking at the misconduct of women, a senior naval
officer told Greg Vistica of the San Diego Union-Tribune. “It
was a conscious decision to punish male aviators for miscon¬

duct. That was the direction, and investigators were not going
to get sidetracked by the misconduct of women.”24
One female Navy lawyer who spent much of one evening
topless was allowed to resign, however, and a female ensign was
disciplined for making false accusations. During the investiga¬
tion, the ensign had accused Lieutenant Cowden and several
unnamed others of attempted rape. She admitted later that she
had lied to keep her fiance from finding out about her own mis¬
behavior, which included having her legs shaved, serving belly
shots, cavorting in public in a lace teddy, and consensual sex.
Paula Coughlin was never charged with unbecoming con¬
duct, and neither was Rolando Diaz, who claimed to have
shaved her legs. Instead, the Navy charged Diaz with failure to
obey a direct order allegedly issued by his commanding officer
forbidding leg-shaving above the midthigh. But Diaz’s lawyer
threatened to make an issue of The Paulster’s signature on his
banner, and the Navy backed off and dropped the charge.
Coughlin also escaped prosecution for publicly aiding
Senator John McCains bid for reelection in 1992, an obvious
violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits military personnel
from participation in political activities. At the height of the
Tailhook hysteria, McCains opponent began making much of
the senators attendance at earlier Tailhooks. To protect himself,
McCain requested and received a letter of endorsement from
Coughlin. The Navy’s congressional liaison office even acted as
intermediary. When the matter was brought before Sean
O’Keefe as secretary of the Navy, he declined to take action.25
Coughlin later left the Navy and became the subject of a
flattering television movie by ABC entitled “She Stood Alone:
The Tailhook Scandal. In 1995 she won a $6.7-million verdict
against Hilton Hotels lor failing to provide adequate security
during her late-night visit to the third floor.
The case against Cole Cowden was dismissed when a Navy
judge determined that the prosecutor had “become too person¬
ally involved” and “exceeded the permissible bounds of his offi¬
cial role as legal adviser” to Vice Admiral J. Paul Reason,
commander of Naval Surface Forces Atlantic, who was assigned

authority over all Navy Tailhook cases. The case against
Cowden had always been weak, and Reason’s previous legal
advisor had, in fact, recommended dropping all charges.
The Marine Corps’s prosecution of Captain Gregory Bonam
collapsed during pretrial hearings, which convinced the Corps’s
counsel that the case was unwinnable. Several witnesses contra¬
dicted Coughlin’s identification of Bonam as the man who had
sexually assaulted her in the gauntlet, so Lieutenant General
Charles C. Krulak ordered all charges dropped. Coughlin, still
receiving kid-glove treatment from the Navy Department, was
flown from Norfolk to Quantico, Virginia, to hear the decision
from Krulak in person, before Bonam himself had been told.
Afterwards she told reporters, “My impression was [Krulak] took
it all seriously. But the outcome of the meeting was, he felt bet¬
ter and I didn’t. Nobody’s prosecuted. Everybody walked.”26
The lawyers of three officers—Commander Thomas R.
Miller, Lieutenant Commander Gregory E. Tritt, and
Lieutenant Dave Samples—joined forces to file a motion for
dismissal on the grounds that the Navy leadership, from Admiral
Kelso on down, had exerted undue command influence that
could only prejudice the cases. On February 8, 1994, a Navy
judge, Captain William T. Vest, Jr., finally handed down his deci¬
sion granting the defendants’ motion for dismissal. After review¬
ing more than 1,000 pages of statements and testimony, Vest
found that Admiral Kelso was present on the third floor patio on
both Friday and Saturday nights, witnessed misconduct, did
nothing to stop it, repeatedly lied under oath, and “manipulated
the initial investigative process” to protect himself and others.
Kelso had no choice now but to retire early. Before he did
so, female legislators, led by Senator Barbara Boxer of
California, mounted a campaign to force him to retire without
two of his four stars. The Senate by a narrow vote allowed him
to keep them all.
More than a dozen admirals were reprimanded or censured
for their involvement in Tailhook. Some were relieved of their
duties or prematurely retired, while others were denied further
promotion. Nearly tîree hundred naval aviators suffered seri¬

ous blows to their careers. Among them was the hapless
Captain Ludwig, the Tailhook Associations president. Once a
rising star in naval aviation, Ludwig received much of the blame
for the Tailhook affair. The Navy leadership tried to hold him
accountable as the man in charge of the symposium, while
junior officers blamed him for spilling the beans with his
incriminating letter. While on cruise in the South Pacific on the
carrier Kitty Hawk, Ludwig suffered a nervous breakdown and
was confined to the psychiatric ward of a hospital in Singapore.
His career was finished.
Another victiifi was Commander Robert E. Stumpf, a
fighter pilot of star quality. Stumpf had commanded the Navy’s
demonstration squadron, the Blue Angels, and was a veteran of
air action off Libya and in the Persian Gulf, where in twenty-
two missions he won the Distinguished Flying Cross. He
attended Tailhook ’91 to receive the prestigious Estocin Award
as commanding officer of the best F/A-18 squadron in the fleet.
After accepting the award, Stumpf was invited that night to
attend an impromptu party in a room on the 28th floor of the
Hilton. While he was there, two strippers showed up to enter¬
tain the guests. One tried to draw Stumpf into her act, but he
waved her off. He left before they finished their act, and before
a stripper performed fellatio on a naval aviator from a dif¬
ferent squadron. Stumpf was later exonerated of any wrongdo¬
ing by a Navy board of inquiry, but when he came up for
promotion to captain, the Senate Armed Services Committee
asked the Navy to remove his name from the list. A new proce¬
dure instituted by the committee placed all officers who had
attended Tailhook under special scmtiny when up for promo¬
tion. Although the Navy first tried to change the committee’s
mind, Stumpf was never promoted, and he retired as a com¬
mander in 1996.
Not all of the victims of Tailhook attended the gathering.
Some fell victim to the hysteria that followed. In the summer of
1992 the fighter jocks at Miramar Naval Air Station assembled
for their annual Tomcat Follies,” another customary occasion

for ribald behavior. There were no reports of assault, but there
was some obscene humor at Pat Schroeders expense in several
of the skits. Schroeder was not the only enemy the aviators had
in Washington, and not the only government official lampooned
by the skits, but she was the one they most hated. One skit used
a contraption to spell out the words “Hickory, dickory, dock, Pat
Schroeder can suck my cock.” Another skit produced the words
“Pat, don’t be a —” whereupon a picture of Dick Cheney
appeared. Still another unfurled a banner that declared: “Pat
Schroeder Sucks!”
The skits reportedly received standing ovations from the
aviators present, but the Navy leadership was not amused.
Taking no chances, Kelso himself informed Schroeder of the
insults and offered the Navy’s apologies. Schroeder pretended
to laugh it off, and then had her staff call Vistica at the Union-
Tribune with the story. Shortly thereafter, the commander-in-
chief of the Pacific Fleet, Admiral Robert Kelly, sacked five
squadron commanders at Miramar. Although two were later
reinstated, the other three wrote scathing letters to senior offi¬
cers denouncing the hypocrisy of the top brass. They had been
fired for not stopping the offending skits, but Kelly himself and
many other admirals had not (yet) been fired for not stopping
the abuses at Tailhook.
Months later, Admiral Kelly was reported to have told a
dirty joke at a staff meeting attended by three female officers,
but was spared punishment by Admiral Kelso. One admiral who
was not spared in the summer of 1992 was Vice Admiral Jack
Fetterman, who was relieved of his post as chief of naval train¬
ing and education for allegedly obstructing the investigation of
a chief petty officer on his personal staff, who was accused mak¬
ing homosexual advances to other sailors. The charge had noth¬
ing to do with Tailhook, but the Navy brass was in an
unforgiving mood and few of his peers sympathized with his cir¬
cumstances. He had been an outspoken proponent of women in
naval aviation, and his punishment allowed feminists once again
to blame the Navy,^this time for carrying things too far. “He’s
one of the good guys,” moaned a female aviator to the press.
There were quite a few good men caught up in the whirl¬
wind of Tailhook, men who were expert in performing their mil¬
itary missions, men on whom the Navy had spent hundreds of
millions of dollars to train, men with decades of experience,
who had been tested in combat, and who had offered their lives
in the service of their country. Not all were opposed to women
in the Navy, and some of the men who suffered had “a good
track record concerning women.” But that’s what happens when
the governing principle is fear—fear of being burned for not
burning others. Only accusers survive. Everyone else is a
suspect.
Before the Pentagon’s inspector general had completed its
investigation, both statutory restrictions on women in combat
had been repealed. Dissent from Pentagon policy was not
regarded as a difference of political opinion, but as the unwel¬
come persistence of pernicious “attitudes” assumed to inspire
criminal behavior:
At the root of sexual harassment is a series of cultural

beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions about women. Unless we
can change stereotypical thinking, sexual harassment train¬
ing programs will likely prove ineffective.
The memo from which these words are taken, issued in July
1992 by the House Armed Services Committee, likens tradi¬
tional beliefs about men and women to racial bias and drug
abuse and recommends that the military apply a similar correc¬
tive to eradicate the evil.
Tailhook was a political purge. In the end, to the Navy’s
enemies, it mattered less that those responsible for outrageous
conduct were disciplined than that the traditional culture of the
military services, and indeed the traditional culture of the
American people, had been condemned and outlawed.
Chapter 13
ASSORTED VICTIMS
It was a “freak tragedy with no larger lessons
—OFFICIAL COAST GUARD COMMENT

ON THE SUICIDE OF CAPTAIN EDWARD BLANCHARD
ON FEBRUARY 10, 1993, the Washington Post ran a long arti¬

cle (over 1,300 words) on a pillow fight at the United States
Naval Academy. Two female midshipmen were ambushed in
their room at night by four male midshipmen, who blinded
them with flashlights and then assaulted them with pillows. One
woman received a black eye; the other was bruised. The men
received demerits and were restricted to the academy grounds
for one month. Why weren’t they dismissed, the Post wanted to
know? “Unless you can prove some sort of malice, dismissal is
not the way to handle young people,” said a spokesman. The
attack was a familiar prank at the academy, known as a “Mack
truck.” The injuries were “incidental and not intentional.”1
The Post wrote that the incident “reflects the sexism that
has persisted at the male-dominated institution since women
were admitted 17 years ago.” The attack was intended to send
a message” to one of the victims, who was widely disliked for
complaining of discrimination and harassment. An unidentified
male mid was quoted as saying the woman was like a lot of
women here who say, "We can do whatever we want because
were females, we’^ privileged.... She wasn’t all that popular.

Most people would put this in the category of DSAF—Did
Society A Favor.” Her roommate was apparently an innocent
bystander who didn’t deserve the pillowing. As one mid said,
“She’s a good Christian girl.”
Two weeks earlier, a male midshipman had been accused of
indecent assault for slipping into bed with a sleeping female
classmate and trying to caress her. The previous month, two
civilian professors had complained that they were unfairly
denied tenure, and three months before that a former academy
professor, in an article in The New Republic, had denounced
the “obscene and* misogynistic songs” and other “anti-female
practices” she had encountered during her eight years at the
school. Such things, wrote the Post, “suggest that the hostility
women encountered when they were first admitted remains a
problem today, despite a series of formal investigations, changes
and sensitivity classes at the 147-year-old institution.”
It was a tired old song that the Post knew by heart. But the
rest of the media had more trouble than the Post taking a pillow
fight so seriously. Most certainly the timing wasn’t right. With
the inauguration of Bill Clinton, the issue of women in the mil¬
itary was assumed to be settled. The new social revolution to be
pushed on the military was the administration’s desire to sanc¬
tion homosexuality.
THE NEXT STEP

The campaign to repeal the military’s longstanding ban on homo¬
sexuals in service actually began nearly two years earlier. When
the media declared tire participation of women in the Gulf War a
smashing success, gay activists began calling for an end to the
militarys ban on homosexuals, arguing that if mixing men and
women in the military didn’t reduce readiness, how could mixing
gays and straights? They had a point. The military had pretended
for many years that sex was a trivial matter, nothing that a little
leadership couldn t keep in line. Sexual harassment, fraterniza¬
tion, hostility within the ranks, and the resulting effects on
ASSORTED VICTIMS • 281
morale were all problems the military claimed it could handle,

but only when they were caused by women. When gays caused
the same problems, they were booted out.
In August 1991, at a hearing of the House budget commit¬
tee, Congressman Barney Frank, a proudJiomosexual who had
been reprimanded by the House in 1990 for allowing his male
companion, Steve Gobie, to run a prostitution ring out of
Franks home, asked Defense Secretary Dick Cheney why the
military still denied security clearances to avowed homosexual
civilians. Cheney answered that he had “inherited a policy that
has been in the department now for many years” and that the
idea that homosexuals posed a security risk was “a bit of an old
chestnut.”2 Cheneys defense of the ban on homosexuals in the
military was so weak that Frank later commented, “I must say
that if the normally articulate Secretary of Defense defended
America as forcefully as he defended this policy, we would have
lost nine States to Cuba sometime around 1988.”3
Cheneys comments unleashed a torrent of editorials in
newspapers across the country calling for an end to both the
denial of security clearances to gay civilians and the ban on gays
in the military. The New York Times, Washington Post, Los
Angeles Times, Seattle Times, Detroit Free Press, USA Today,
and many others joined the chorus. Even the privately pub¬
lished Army Times and Air Force Times chimed in in favor of
repeal, lending the movement a special air of respectability,
based upon the erroneous assumption that the service papers
understood the military even if the rest of the media didn’t. In
fact, the three papers, Army Times, Navy Times, and Air Force
Times, are largely written and edited by nonveterans who share
the leftist leanings of their journalistic colleagues elsewhere.4
It was no accident that the drive for gays in the military fol¬
lowed so closely the successful drive for women in combat, or
that feminist champions like Pat Schroeder and Barbara Boxer
lined up in support of gays. The advocates of both movements
shared the same values and used the same arguments. Both
began with a demand for equality; both insisted that the ability
to “do the job” waj* all that mattered and that everything else
was irrelevant; and both were determined to use the military to
revolutionize American society.
The media portrayed the issue as a simple matter of letting
good gay service members stay in service, but gay activists
wanted much more. A coalition of pro-gay groups, including the
ACLU, the American Psychological Association, and the
National Lawyers Guild called for a Defense advisory commit¬
tee on homosexuals and bisexuals modeled on DACOWITS;
mandatory annual reports to Congress from the secretary of
defense on the progress of integration; and reeducation pro¬
grams at all levels for all service members, specifically chap¬
lains, with “didactic and experiential opportunities addressing
prejudice, stigma, and discrimination,” similar to those actually
inflicted upon personnel assigned to Washington, D.C., under
the Clinton administration.5
Bill Clinton had promised as early as March 1992 that if
elected he would repeal the military’s ban on homosexuals in
service. By that time, senior military officers were beginning to
speak up in defense of the ban. In February General Colin
Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House
budget committee that homosexual behavior was “inconsistent
with maintaining good order and discipline.” In May he sent a
letter defending the ban to Pat Schroeder, who had written to
him arguing that sexual orientation was no more relevant to mil¬
itary service than race. Powell wrote, “Skin color is a benign,
nonbehavioral characteristic. Sexual orientation is perhaps the
most profound of human behavioral characteristics. Comparison
of the two is a convenient but invalid argument....”6 Here was
Powell arguing that sexual orientation—which, of course,
includes the attraction of men and women to each other—is
“the most profound of human behavioral characteristics,” while
presiding over a military that denied that it had any bearing on
military readiness outside the combat arms.
Despite Clintons promise, the issue of gays in the military
was a sleeper throughout the presidential campaign. The Bush
campaign never mentioned it, afraid as always of “divisive”

social issues. Then, too, the Bush folks were hardly in a position
to make Clinton s promise an issue since a key female advisor in
the White House had actively sought homosexual support for
Bush, and Bush’s secretary of defense, Dyck Cheney, had him¬
self lit the fire for repeal of the ban. Cheney also had brought
two homosexuals with him to the Pentagon to fill positions of
considerable importance. One was responsible for screening
candidates for other positions. The other was the Pentagons
chief spokesman, Pete Williams, the assistant secretary of
defense for public affairs, who was “outed” in 1991 by The
Advocate, a national gay and lesbian magazine. Williams never
denied the charge, and Cheney, when asked if he would fire
Williams even if he were gay, answered, “Absolutely not.”
The issue plagued Clinton’s first few months in office and
ended in a partial defeat. Feminists had repeatedly succeeded
in forcing the military to accept changes it didn’t like, but they
had done so gradually. Keeping Clinton’s promise on homosex¬
uals fully was going too far, too fast. The revolutionaries had
over-reached themselves. In the end, the White House and the
Pentagon settled on a compromise policy dubbed “don’t ask,
don’t tell,” whereby no inquiries would be made concerning a
service member’s sexual orientation but the services retained
the right to dismiss members if their homosexuality became a
problem.
Even this was too much for Marine Major Charles B.
Johnson, an eighteen-year veteran who resigned in protest
immediately after the policy was announced. Johnson was an
exceptional officer. As a young captain in 1983, he became a
national hero of sorts when he single-handedly stopped a col¬
umn of Israeli tanks rolling into Lebanon by climbing onto the
lead tank and putting his .45 in the tank commander’s face.
Later in his career, he earned a doctorate in education and pol¬
icy analysis under the guidance of Charles Moskos and served
as deputy director of research for the Presidential Commission
on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces. A devout
Roman Catholic, Johnson regarded the new policy on homo¬

sexuals as an affront to fundamental morality. By resigning, he
gave up a retirement that was just two years away, but he kept
his conscience clear, which is more than many admirals and
generals can claim.
TAILHOOK’S AFTERMATH
Another devout Christian who fell victim to the feminist revolu¬
tion in the military was Navy Lieutenant Commander Kenneth
Carkhuff—Naval Academy graduate, helicopter pilot, husband,
and father of five. His fitness reports described him as a “com¬
munity superstar” with “unlimited potential... destined for com¬
mand and beyond.” But in August 1994, just before his squadron
was to be mobilized for combat duty in Haiti, Carkhuff told his
commanding officer that he believed that exposing women to
combat was morally wrong on religious grounds. One week later,
his commanding officer informed him that if he did not submit
his resignation within twenty-four hours, he would be forced out
as soon as possible. Carkhuff submitted his resignation the next
day with the understanding that he would be allowed six months
to leave the Navy. When he later withdrew his resignation upon
the advice of counsel, his commanding officer moved to have
him separated “for cause,” charging him with “substandard per¬
formance” and “failure to demonstrate accceptable qualities of
leadership required of an officer.” A special fitness report, writ¬
ten to justify his ouster, stated, “Carkhuffs stated beliefs are
NOT COMPATIBLE WITH FURTHER MILITARY SER¬
VICE.”7 (Emphasis in the original.)
Service members do not have all the civil rights of civilians.
In fact, they have only the rights the military wants them to
have, in accordance with the doctrine of “military necessity.”
Military necessity was invoked by the services to defend the ban
on homosexuals, but while the Navy was still preparing its case
against Carkhuff, military boards of inquiry voted to allow two
admitted homosexuals—Navy Lieutenant Zoe Dunning and Air
Force Airman 1st Class Prentice Watkins—to remain in service.
At Carkhuff’s board of inquiry in May 1995, the Navy

focused on Carkhuff’s membership in Promise Keepers, a loose
affiliation of evangelical Christian men who promise to uphold
their responsibilities to God, church, family, and community.
The seven promises to which Promise Keepers commit them¬
selves are all rather innocuous, but many in the movement
believe that men have a special responsibility to provide lead¬
ership in church, at home, and in society. Some Promise
Keepers even teach the biblical doctrine that “the man is the,
head of the woman” (1 Cor. 11:3, Eph. 5:23) and that wives,
being subject to them, are obliged to
obey their husbands (Eph. 5:22-24, Col.
3:18, Titus 2:5, 1 Peter 3:1-7). Such With 8111 Clinton’s ina“S“-
beliefs were portrayed by Navy prose- ration, the issue of women
cutors as equivalent to the racist “atti- jn the military was
tudes” of white service members before , , ,
assumed to be settled.
the military s racial integration in 1948.
Carkhuff’s executive officer testified
that he had tried to identify other Promise Keepers in the
squadron, concerned about the influence of their subversive
views. Carkhuff himself never refused an order or failed to do
his duty, but his commanding officer testified that he had lost
confidence that Carkhuff would serve as sworn. The board
voted 3 to 0 to cashier Carkhuff.
Carkhuff’s cause was taken up by Robert Maginnis at the
Family Research Council, a subsidiary of James Dobson’s Focus
on the Family, and by Elaine Donnelly, who publicized his
plight through the newsletters of her Center for Military
Readiness, a small nonprofit corporation supported largely by
retired flag officers alarmed by the repeal of the combat exclu¬
sions and the Clinton administration’s efforts to force the mili¬
tary to accept homosexuals. Well connected in Washington and
in the services, Donnelly nevertheless often stood alone against
her feminist foes in the White House, Congress, the Pentagon,
and the mainstream media. For the conservative media, the
Center for Military Readiness became the chief source of infor-
mation and argument against the feminist party line put forth
by the Pentagon. Donnelly’s appearance with Carkhuff on a
Christian radio show hosted by Dobson provoked a national
outpouring of support for Carkhuff from outraged Christians.
In response, Navy Secretary John Dalton decided to allow
Carkhuff to remain in service. But he was removed from flying
duties, and it remains to be seen whether he will be promoted
to commander. If not, he may leave the Navy anyway.
Lieutenant Larry Meyer was not so fortunate. As a heli¬
copter instructor pilot, Meyer made insensitive comments to a
student of his, Lieutenant Rebecca Hansen, who had him dis¬
ciplined and discharged. According to Gregory Vistica, who
wrote Fall from Glory, an expose of Tailhook and other Navy
follies, Meyer had criticized Hansens appearance, suggesting
that she dye her hair and wear blue contact lenses. When
Hansen complained that her friction control knob was stuck,
Meyer replied, “Isn’t that just like a woman to complain about
friction?” and he ended one flight with the words, “Come on,
wench.” Hansen was not one to take such things lightly. Even
Vistica admits she was a “problem student,” prone to argue with
her instructors and resist correction. She also lacked the situa¬
tional awareness required of good pilots and was washed out of
a later stage of aviation training.8
Nevertheless, Hansen demanded an investigation to deter¬
mine whether her earlier complaints about Meyer had been one
of the reasons she was dropped from the program. Not satisfied
with the Navy’s negative response, she complained to Minnesota
Senator David Durenberger, who asked the Navy for an explana¬
tion. Congressional inquiries prompted by complaints from con¬
stituents are not uncommon in the military and are never taken
lightly. In this case, the Navy investigated and concluded that
Hansen had been dropped for just cause. The report of the inves¬
tigation was even approved by the vice chief of naval operations.
Admiral Stanley Arthur, before it was delivered to Senator
Durenberger. Still the senator was not satisfied. In retaliation, he
placed a hold on Arthur’s nomination to become commander-in-
chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific, the most prestigious opera¬
tional command an admiral could hold.
The matter then fell to Admiral Boorda, Bill Clintons pick to
succeed Admiral Kelso as chief of naval operations. Scrupulously
correct when it came to social politics, Boorda was appointed to
keep the Navy on a politically correct course. Not a typical mem¬
ber of the Navy brass, Boorda, just five-foot-five, the son of
Jewish Ukrainian immigrants, readily confessed that he joined
the Navy to escape his father and a troubled upbringing.
Arthur, by contrast, was a much admired “operator”—not a
politician like Boorda—a decorated combat veteran with a no-
nonsense reputation. Although an aviator, he was untainted by
Tailhook. If Arthur said Hansen wasn’t qualified to fly, everyone
in the Navy believed just that.
Boorda s task was to convince Durenberger that Arthur was
right. Durenberger was claiming publicly that he just wanted
answers, but Arthur had learned through personal meetings
and correspondence that nothing would satisfy him. In a letter
to the Wall Street Journal, Durenberger accused the Navy of
stonewalling, but the Navy thought Durenberger was grand¬
standing, posing as the great defender of women for the folks
back home.
Never one to cross the power-brokers on Capitol Hill,
Boorda withdrew Arthurs nomination, which effectively ended
Arthur’s career. To add insult to injury, Boorda reversed the
decision to discharge Hansen and traveled to the Great Lakes
naval training depot to meet with her personally. Hansen pre¬
sented Boorda with an impossible list of demands, including
that the Navy send her to law school and assign her to work on
women’s issues. Boorda instead offered her a job on his staff,
just as he had done for Paula Coughlin. Hansen declined and
left the Navy.
The Navy’s admirals, both active and retired, were scandal¬
ized. Former Navy Secretary James Webb put their contempt
in writing in the New York Times. Boordas abandonment of
Arthur “raises serious questions about Admiral Boorda s fitness
to be Chief of Na\£ti Operations,” wrote Webb, who also faulted

Boorda for unfairly firing Rear Admiral Jack Snyder, Paul
Coughlin’s boss. In Webb’s words, Boordas actions were “seri¬
ously deficient” in that he had shown “disloyalty to deserving
subordinates” and “faulty judgment.”
In a very short time, Boorda realized he was all alone. He
later confessed to regretting his abandonment of Arthur, but
the admirals never forgave him.
\
THE DEATH OF KARA HULTGREEN

In the spring of J993, in the midst of the furor over homosexu¬
als in the military, the nation hardly noticed when President
Clintons new secretary of defense, Les Aspin, formerly chair¬
man of the House Armed Services Committee, submitted leg¬
islation to repeal the statute barring women from assignment
aboard combat vessels. The legislation passed quickly through
Congress and was signed by the president. The Navy then spent
$1.3 million to reconfigure the berthing spaces aboard the car¬
rier Dwight D. Eisenhower to accommodate 500 women in its
5,000-man crew. A year later, when the Ike returned from a six-
month Mediterranean cruise, the Navy reported that at least
thirty-nine women (probably more) left the Ike before or dur¬
ing the cruise because of pregnancy. The Navy, of course,
insisted that the departures had no negative effect on readiness,
prompting an editorial in the Washington Times to ask, “If
removing these sailors from active duty does not hurt readiness,
what were they doing on board in the first place?”
Another immediate act by Aspin was to order the services
to begin training women for combat aviation. The Navy, still
under the gun for Tailhook, raised no objection to either
change. The chief of naval operations, Admiral Kelso, even
directed that women be given priority in the aviation training
pipeline, moving them ahead of male officers already waiting
for coveted training slots.
Among the first female officers to volunteer for combat avi¬
ation was Navy Lieutenant Kara Hultgreen, a twenty-eight-
year-old Texan already qualified to fly the EA-6B Prowler, the

electronic warfare version of the A-6 Intruder bomber. Nearly
six feet tall, with long brown hair and an air of invincibility,
Hultgreen was at once deliberately sexual and daringly tough.
At the infamous 1991 Tailhook symposium, Hultgreen had
shown up in a short black blazer, black leather miniskirt, and
high heels, leading some to mistake her for a prostitute.9 She
was standing talking to two male aviators in one of the hospital¬
ity suites when the drunken Australian exchange officer tried to
put his hand up her skirt. Hultgreen grabbed him by the collar,
shoved him up against the wall, and told him she was a naval
aviator and did not wish to be touched. The Australian wan¬
dered off, but then returned moments later and sank his teeth
into her buttocks. More annoyed than offended, Hultgreen
responded with a swift jab of her elbow that knocked the
Australian to the floor. “Do that again and you’re dead,” she
scowled. The Australian crawled out of the room.
Hultgreen’s lifelong ambition was to be an astronaut, and
the surest way to become one, she figured, was to become a
Navy fighter pilot. She was selected to fly the F-14 Tomcat, a
twin-engine supersonic fighter with a reputation as the most
difficult aircraft then in the Navy inventory. She herself had
described flying the F-14 as like “dancing with an elephant.”
But if any woman could do the dance, surely it was Hultgreen,
or so the Navy assumed. She was the “Incredible Hulk” to her
female colleagues, the great female barrier-breaker, “an air¬
borne white female equivalent of Jackie Robinson whom fate
had appointed to shoulder others’ hopes and fears as she
climbed into the cockpit.”10
In April 1994, before Hultgreen had finished training, the
journal Proceedings, published by the quasi-official U.S. Naval
Institute, ran an article entitled “Who’s to Blame When Women
Don’t Measure Up?” raising serious doubts about the Navy’s
treatment of female aviators. The articles author was Lieutenant
Ellen Hamblet, a Navy reservist and former airborne intelli¬
gence officer, who was concerned that the Navy was not holding
female pilots to standard. Hamblet claimed that women were

“being allowed to carrier qualify, although they didn’t meet the
required standards.” She told of “a woman near the bottom of
her class being allowed to continue at the training command...
because the commanding officer needed to keep a female
instructor. ” One female pilot who blew a tire and ran off the run¬
way was “praised by top leadership for keeping her wits about
her but the general consensus among junior officers was that if
a male pilot had done the same thing, he would have been
severely disciplined.” According to Hamblet, stories of mishaps
involving male aviators often ended with the words “so he lost
his wings,” but similar stories involving women often ended with
“and can you believe she is still flying?”
Hultgreen herself seems to have been concerned about
standards. “Guys like you have to make sure there’s only one
standard,” she told Rear Admiral Robert Hickey, for the bene¬
fit of the press. “If people let me slide through on a lower stan¬
dard, it’s my life on the line. I could get killed.”
On the afternoon of October 25, 1994, Kara Hultgreen was
attempting to land her F-14A on the deck of the carrier
Abraham Lincoln, fifty miles off of San Diego. The weather was
clear and calm, but for some reason Hultgreen swung wide on
her approach, taking her too far to the right of the centerline on
the flight deck below. In her attempt to correct her misjudg-
ment, the plane yawed too far to the left. The landing safety
officer on the Abe ordered her to “wave off.” “Wave off! Wave
off!” he yelled when she didn’t respond. “Power! Raise your
gear!” He flashed the warning lights on deck. Low on air speed
and losing lift, the plane banked steeply, about to roll over.
‘Eject! Eject!” yelled the LSO. Hultgreen’s radar intercept offi¬
cer, Lieutenant Matthew Klemish, riding in the back seat, initi¬
ated the ejection procedure, which sent him out over the water,
just high enough for his chute to deploy before he hit the sur¬
face with only minor injuries. Hultgreen’s ejection followed
automatically half a second later, but by that time the plane was
upside down. Ejecting rocketed her straight into the water,
knocking her unconscious if not breaking her neck. A Navy sal¬

vage team found her three weeks later, still strapped in her
ejection seat, in four thousand feet of water, ninety yards from
the wreckage of her aircraft.
The day after the crash there was already speculation that
Hultgreen had caused her own death. Two Tomcat pilots
phoned into a radio talk show in San Diego to say that pilot
error was responsible for nearly all carrier landing accidents,
and that Hultgreen had a poor record as an F-14 pilot. She was
“an accident waiting to happen, every one of her squadron
mates knew it, but they could not speak up for fear of reprisal,”
according to an anonymous fax received by the San Diego sta¬
tion. Others told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Hultgreen
had had trouble before with carrier landings and had failed in
her first attempt at “car-quals,” or “carrier qualification,” in
April 1994.
The Navy was just as swift to defend Hultgreen. Two days
after the crash. Captain Mark Grissom, commander of the
Pacific Fleets fighter forces, told the San Diego Union-Tribune
that Hultgreen had indeed failed to qualify on her first attempt,
but that this was not unusual in the F-14. “It’s a difficult air¬
plane to fly aboard the carrier and it happens quite often that
somebody does not qualify” said Grissom. “On the second
attempt, she did extremely well. She had excellent grades and
VF-213 was very happy to receive her on board, and she per¬
formed extremely well in VF-213 subsequently in carrier oper¬
ations aboard Abraham Lincoln.”
The Navy routinely declines comment on the cause of avi¬
ation accidents until a formal Mishap Investigation Report
(MIR) can be completed, but in Hultgreen’s case Navy officials
directly responsible for Hultgreen’s performance were quick to
suggest that engine failure might have caused the crash. As
early as November 19, three months before the MIR was com¬
pleted, Grissom was speculating publicly on the engine failure
suspicion. A few weeks later, Vice Admiral Robert J. Rocky
Spane, commanding officer of the Pacific Fleets naval air
forces, confirmed th^ suspicion, telling reporters that a video¬

tape of the attempted landing showed a trail of exhaust coming
from the starboard engine only.
To quiet persistent rumors about Hultgreen s poor perfor¬
mance, Hultgreens* mother released her training records,
which the Navy had given her. The records stated that
Hultgreen was fully qualified to fly the F-14 and an “average to
above average” pilot. According to the records, Hultgreen
scored 3.22 in day landings on the carrier, with a boarding rate
(successfully catching the arresting wire) of 89 percent, putting
her first in her class of seven. Her night grade on the carrier was
2.82, with a 71 percent boarding rate, putting her sixth in the
class of seven. Her overall score was a 3.10, just above the mean
score of 2.99 for all pilots attempting to qualify, ranking her
third in her class of seven, all of whom qualified. According to
Grissom, the records “establish that this girl was not given spe¬
cial favors.... She did not qualify with marginal grades. She was
in there swinging with the best of them.”11
What Grissom did not point out was that this was
Hultgreen s second attempt at qualifying, and her scores were
below average for pilots attempting to qualify for the second
time. Nor did he mention Hultgreens difficulties in training,
which were not included in the records her mother released to
the press. Those difficulties fueled rumors of Hultgreen s poor
performance, but it was months before they came to light in a
credible form.
Male pilots who are lost at sea in depths are routinely aban¬
doned, along with their planes, but the Navy spent $100,000 to
recover Hultgreen s body and plane. And she was given a hero’s
funeral at Arlington National Cemetary.12
The Navy obviously had a special interest in Hultgreen. It
had once blamed a sailor for a fatal naval disaster, in the turret
explosion aboard the battleship Iowa, and it was not about to
repeat its political mistake by blaming Hultgreen for her own
death. Only by exonerating Hultgreen could the Navy avoid yet
another congressional inquisition led by Pat Schroeder and
Barbara Boxer, and the likes of John McCain and David

Durenberger.
No one was surprised when the Navy announced the results
of its investigation on February 28, 1995, at a press conference
at North Island Naval Air Station in ^Coronado, California,
across the bay from San Diego. “Engine failure” was responsi¬
ble for the Hultgreen crash. A “mid-compression bypass valve”
had caused her port engine to stall, resulting in a loss of both
power and control.
“The Navy’s report and officials’ comments clearly blame
the engine failure for the fatal crash,”
wrote Pat Flynn, a reporter represent¬
Advocates of gays and
ing the San Diego Union-Tribune at the
women in the armed
press conference. The reporters were
not shown the actual MIR, but they forces were determined to
were given a much shorter “JAG man¬ use the military to revolu¬
ual” report, with three letters of
tionize American society.
endorsement from Navy admirals, each
one spinning the report toward the
“engine failure” conclusion. At the press conference, Rear
Admiral Jay B. Yakeley III defended Hultgreen’s record as a
pilot, saying, “I knew her. She was qualified and a darn good
pilot.... For those who say otherwise anonymously, I find that
cowardly.” While admitting that Hultgreen might have survived
if she had acted differently, he insisted that only more experi¬
enced pilots would have responded correctly. Asked by Lloyd
Billingsley of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture
whether Hultgreen had any “downs” in her training record,
indicating serious errors in performance, Yakeley appeared
startled and then answered that “she had one down in her
record, as many other pilots have.” A down is an error so bad
that it risks the “safety of flight.”
The next day, headlines across the nation announced that
Hultgreen was not to blame. She, too, was a victim, of engine
failure. Worried feminists sighed with relief and then crowed
their satisfaction. “So it was the engine after all. Not the pilot,
wrote columnist Ellen Goodman. “Lt. Kara Hultgreen did not

die on the altar of ‘p$titical correctness’ or ‘preferential treat¬
ment’ or ‘reverse discrimination.’ She died because the F-14
Tomcat stalled as it approached the aircraft carrier.”13 When
conservative columnist Linda Chavez, writing for USA Today,
doubted “that any honest investigation into Hultgreen’s tragic
death is even possible,” Senator Barbara Boxer was incensed
and demanded publicly that Chavez “withdraw the scurrilous
and irresponsible charges made about women in the military.”
‘Reporters who looked beyond the letters by admirals to the
JAG report itself found ample evidence to justify Chavez’s
doubts. In one passage, Hultgreen’s squadron commander,
Michael Galpin, even admitted that pilot error, and not
mechanical failure, might have caused the crash: “Whether the
engine stall was brought on by an overly aggressive pilot using
rudder to remedy a dynamic overshoot, or a failed or closed
MCB [mid-compression bypass] valve and/or unknown addi¬
tional causal factors will never be definitively determined.” The
rest of the report was filled with veiled references to
Hultgreen’s errors. Notice what is not said in the following
excerpts:
A delay in recognition of the extremis condition, either due

to preoccupation with correcting the overshooting start, or
the timing of the stall warn ing system.... Subsequent pilot
technique permitted Angle of Attack to increase to a poi nt
where rudder effectiveness began to be reduced to nil and
departure from controlled flight was imminent.... the win¬
dow of opportunity for a successful recovery was missed.
Finally, inexperience prevented the crew from recognizing
the point at which recovery was impossible and ejection the
only alternative.14
The missing word in each sentence above is the pilots name.

Hultgreen was late in recognizing the extremis condition.
Hultgreen was preoccupied with correcting the overshooting
start. Hultgreens technique permitted the planes angle-of-

attack to increase to a point where the rudder became ineffec¬
tive. Hult green missed the window of opportunity for a
successful recovery. And finally, Hultgreen’s inexperience pre¬
vented her from recognizing the point ,at which recovery was
impossible and ejection the only alternative.
Before long, other details leaked out that cast doubt on the
Navy’s public version. The independent newspaper Navy Times
reported that two messages sent by the Abraham Lincoln imme¬
diately after the accident were strongly critical of Hultgreen, but
both were later withdrawn. When the Navy later claimed that
simulator tests had shown that few pilots could recover from the
same situation, unidentified sources accused the Navy of rigging
the tests by instructing male pilots “flying” the simulation not to
follow mandatory procedures to avert a crash. In time, however,
the MIR itself was leaked to the press, falling first into the hands
of Gregory Vistica, then at Newsweek:
This Mishap Investigation Report spelled out in clear and

direct language Hultgreen’s many mistakes that led to her
death. The bluntness of the findings was in direct contrast to
the shortened version of the JAG report handed out to
reporters by the Navy at the press conference. Some officers
in the chain of command at Spane’s headquarters in San
Diego had warned Washington of this and said if it leaked
the Navy would appear to be covering up.15
Newsweek reported that the MIR pulled no punches in blam¬

ing Hultgreen, explicitly stating that the failed bypass valve
could not explain the stalled engine. Instead, the stall was
caused by Hultgreen’s erratic handling of the aircraft, which
deprived the port engine of air. The controversial simulator test
merely assumed Hultgreen’s erratic handling and thus tested
only pilot response to the resulting emergency.
The Navy did all it could to discredit the MIR. The Navy’s
chief of information, Rear Admiral Kendell Pease, sent out a
memorandum advising reporters to “please allow Navy public

affairs an opportunity to help avoid the errors of fact evident in
some recent news reports.” Admiral Boorda and Rear Admiral
J.S. Mobley commander of the Naval Safety Center, both
protested that the MIRs release was a high crime that threat¬
ened Navy safety. “Unauthorized disclosures really damage the
system,” said Boorda, while Mobley fumed that he was “angry,”
“disappointed,” and “concerned.”16 As Vistica notes, the cam¬
paign succeeded in discouraging several major news organiza¬
tions from even reporting the MIRs findings.
But Robert Caldwell, an editor at the San Diego Union-
Tribune, was not discouraged, and he reported that the MIR
“documented enough pilot error to make an irrefutable case
that it was a major contributor and perhaps the primary cause
of Hultgreens fatal crash.”17 Caldwell questioned the integrity
of the Navy’s leadership, namely Vice Admiral Spane, prompt¬
ing a lengthy written reponse from Spane himself. In writing to
address “perceived discrepancies” between the MIR and the
shorter JAG report, Spane dismissed the MIR as little more
than hearsay: “The JAG discusses facts and bases opinions on
these facts. Just as in a court of law, hearsay, innuendo and con¬
jecture are not allowed.” The MIR, on the other hand, consists
of “[fjacts, opinion (whether or not substantiated by fact),
guesses, possible causes, ideas, etc.” Furthermore:
The JAG defines what we know and the logical conclusions

and opinions based on those facts.... The MIR, on the other
hand, contains facts, conjecture, as yet unproven theories
and opinions, some of which are not rigidly based on fact.
This is appropriate for an MIR but should not be used
as the definitive cause of the accident nor to malign the
pilot.18
All of this came as quite a shock to naval aviators, who knew

that in every other accident, the MIR was the last word. Spane s
article was answered by another article in the San Diego Union-
Tribune, written by Gerry Atkinson, a retired Navy captain and

computer science professor. Atkinson wrote:
Spane states that the JAG report is more reliable than

the MIR. Again, not so! The JAG investigation is based on a
legal model, adversarial in nature. Consider the O.J.
Simpson trial. The legal model does not have a goal of ascer¬
taining the truth, only winning a judge and/or jury over to
one view, not in actually revealing the truth [for the pur-
f*
pose of setting] policy to avoid recurrence of the accident,

the purpose of the MIR.
An officer of Spane’s rank knoivs the differences
between the JAG report and the MIR. The MIR is the only
complete and ruthlessly, scrupulously truthful account of an
aircraft accident. Period.
As for the MIR’s unauthorized release:
Unauthorized release of the privileged MIR to the public

had to have been undertaken purposely by active duty per¬
sonnel who were trying to send the American people a sig¬
nal: "What you were reading in the national press is not the
truth, and something is terribly awry at the highest levels of
naval leadership. ”19
Besides wishing to avoid feminist ire and again blaming the

victim, Admiral Spane and the rest of the Navy leadership were
desperate to deny that they themselves had contributed to Kara
Hultgreeris death by not allowing her to fail. Around the debate
over pilot error versus mechanical failure swirled endless
rumors and suspicions that Hultgreen would never have made
it if she had been a man.
Many military men believed the rumors; they had seen it
themselves. Boorda’s abandonment of Stanley Arthur for
merely concurring with the decision to fail Rebecca Hansen
had sent a powerful message to the fleet: Women were trouble,
and failing them oreven criticizing them could quickly end

careers. Vistica tells of a female helicopter pilot who was
allowed to keep her wings after Rocky Spane overruled a safety
panels recommendation that she lose them. This woman had
been assigned as an instructor pilot at North Island, but when
she arrived she failed a routine check ride. Vistica writes:
A performance review followed and found that the woman

had panicked on numerous occasions while airborne with
passengers aboard. One time, her copilot had to land the
aircraft because the woman had become incapacitated. On
the ground, medics had to revive her with oxygen and take
her away on a stretcher.20
Instead of taking away her wings, Spane reassigned her to an

air-traffic-control unit, which meant that she could later be
reassigned to flight duties.
Gullible journalists of a standard feminist outlook had
bought the Navy’s story on Kara Hultgreen’s carrier landing
scores, and as long as her training records stayed with her
mother, the truth remained a secret. As early as December
1994, however, a second copy of Hultgreen’s training records
had been delivered by a confidential source to Elaine Donnelly
of the Center for Military Readiness. On January 16, 1995, after
consulting with several retired aviators on the records,
Donnelly sent a nine-page letter to Senator Strom Thurmond,
the new chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee,
detailing specific events, low scores, and major errors alleged by
the documents. Thurmond then requested the Navy to answer
Donnellys allegations.
In February and March, Donnelly met once with Admiral
Boorda and three times with Admiral Arthur, who was then still
vice chief of naval operations. At her third meeting with Arthur,
Donnelly and an aide from Senator Spence Abraham’s office
were shown a report by Rear Admiral Lyle G. Bien, which
Arthur and Rear Admiral Kendell Pease, chief of information,
insisted disproved Donnelly’s principal allegation that

Hultgreen and another female pilot, identified as “Pilot B,”
received preferential treatment in scoring and evaluation.
The Bien report had been completed two months earlier
and was based largely on interviews with the Navy officers
responsible for training the two women, including Captain Tom
Sobieck, commanding officer of the Replacement Air Group,
the last stop before a pilot joins an operational squadron.
Sobieck had been burned for his involvement in Tailhook and
was reportedly under pressure to prove his bona fides by guar¬
anteeing the success of the first women entering combat avia¬
tion.21 Worried by Donnelly’s allegations, Sobieck twice phoned
Donnelly to try to convince her that everything he had done for
Hultgreen and Pilot B had been perfectly reasonable, but to no
avail. The Bien report nevertheless accepted the word of offi¬
cers like Sobieck that all was in order.
Donnelly and the aide were not allowed to take a copy of
the Bien report with them, but what they read on the first page
confirmed that the allegations in her letter to Senator
Thurmond were “largely accurate.” Three major allegations
were substantiated:
■ Kara Hultgreen was retained in the F-14 program and

graduated to the fleet despite low scores and four major
“downs” on her record, two of which were similar to mis¬
takes made in her fatal landing attempt.
■ Pilot B earned even lower scores and an astonishing
seven downs, the last of which was later reclassified as
just a “warm-up” so that she could be sent to the fleet.
■ The Navy had taken no action since Hultgreen s death or
since Donnelly made her allegations to change the way
the training commands treated women or the status of
Pilot B.
A month after the Bien report had been delivered to

Admiral Spane, Rear Admiral Yakeley lied to all Americans
when he said at the February 28 press conference that
Hultgreen had only one down on her record. With the Navy
unwilling to set the Record straight, Donnelly decided she had
no choice but to publish the records in her possession.
She did so in April 1995, issuing a document with twenty-
three pages of text Rnd over one hundred pages of photocopies
from the actual training records. The records showed that in
March 1994 an instructor observed Hultgreen “making power
corrections that were erratic and unpredictable,” just the
behavior she exhibited on that fateful day in October. As for
Pilot B, in her first attempt at car-quals, she received the worst
night score in the history of the training squadron. During tac¬
tics training, her instructor noted that she “seemed to have lost
her grasp of basic tactical concepts: positioning, mutual sup¬
port, visual responsibilities, weapons employment, engaged
communications and maneuvering.”
Neither Hultgreen nor Pilot B ever went before a Field
Naval Aviator Evaluation Board, despite four downs for
Hultgreen and seven for Pilot B. After one down, a pilot usually
goes before an evaluation board, which will decide whether the
pilot may continue with training or be dropped. Two downs are
usually enough to wash a pilot out, especially in F-14 training.
The Navy refused to comment on Pilot B’s records, but con¬
tinued to insist that Hultgreen was a “fully qualified naval avia¬
tor.” Experienced “airedales” knew better. Kara Hultgreen
might have been a fully qualified EA-6B aviator, but she never
really mastered the F-14.
The San Diego Union-Tribune’s Robert Caldwell asked five
former naval aviators, three with experience flying the demand¬
ing F-14, to review Hultgreens training records. One pilot told
him, “Neither of these two women should have been in the
cockpit. I feel strongly about that.” Another aviator told him,
“It’s crystal clear to me that they moved Hultgreen out to the
ship too quickly. She wasn’t ready and they overlooked a num¬
ber of shortcomings. She clearly got special treatment.”22
II Hultgreens records were bad, Pilot B’s were even worse.
One aviator told Caldwell that Pilot B had “the worst flight
records I’ve ever seen, the worst [training] scores in the

Replacement Air Group (RAG) I’ve ever seen.... Yes, some
pilots are late bloomers, OK. But this was just bad, unaccept¬
ably bad." Another said he was “astonished" at the number of
downs Pilot B received without being dropped from F-14 train¬
ing or at least being called before a formal review board.
Two months after the publication of her training records,
Pilot B’s name was revealed to the public, not by Donnelly but
by Navy Times, which reported that a Field Naval Aviator
Evaluation Board had recommended that she be relieved of
flight duties for poor performance. The
woman’s name was Lieutenant Carey
Navy leaders were des¬
Dunai Lohrenz. She has since sued
perate to deny that they
Donnelly’s Center for Military
Readiness, the Washington Times, the themselves had contrib¬
San Diego Union-Tribune, and assorted uted to Kara Hultgreen’s
“John Does 1-100,” charging them with
death by not allowing her
publishing “false and defamatory” alle¬
gations of double standards in Navy to fail.
training that cost Lohrenz her wings

and her career. Lohrenz received a sympathetic profile, a la
Dreyer, a la Coughlin, in an NBC Dateline segment, which por¬
trayed her as the “victim” of “gossip” and sex discrimination,
totally ignoring the Center for Military Readiness report.
Donnelly never revealed Lohrenz’s name, and she had
nothing to do with Lohrenz losing her wings; she may even have
saved her life. Yet she is now being sued, proving that when it
comes to careers, feminists are once again pro-choice as
opposed to pro-life.
Lohrenz’s lead attorney is Susan Barnes, founder of
WANDAS, or “Women Active in Our Nation’s Defense, their
Advocates and Supporters,” a feminist group that needs help in
the names department. Barnes’s objective is nothing less than
the criminalization of open opposition to feminist ideology in
the civilian world, as it already is in the military. In the parlance
of revolutionary legal theory, Lohrenz s filing is a SLAPP suit.
SLAPP stands for “^rategic litigation against public participa¬

tion.” The objective of SLAPP suits is not to win in court (they
rarely do) but to silence political opposition by draining the
opposition of funds.
Lohrenz recently returned to flight status, but only for
shore-based aircraft' An investigating panel composed by the
Navy inspector general concluded that she was properly
removed from flight status for failure to obey the directions of
landing safety officers. Her commanding officer had also
faulted her for a lack of motor skills and poor motivation, but
the inspector general’s panel faulted him for not being more
understanding of tKe stress she was under.
The inspector general’s panel rejected claims that Lohrenz
had received preferential treatment in training, despite testi¬
mony to the contrary from the instructors responsible for her
training. One instructor told the panel, “the instructors at
VF-124 wanted to see the females succeed, and I believe we
went to some extraordinary lengths to have them do so.”
Another said, “I honestly believe that if Lt. Lohrenz was a male,
that she may not have made it through the tactics syllabus.”
As for the Bien report, it disappeared for two years imme¬
diately after Donnelly formally requested a copy under the
Freedom of Information Act, which makes it a federal crime for
executive agencies like the Navy to withhold documents from
the public. For a while during those two years, the Navy even
insisted that no such document ever existed. Then, lo and
behold, it appeared again in January 1997, and Donnelly finally
received her copy. A critique of the Bien report documenting
the accuracy of Donnelly’s claims was published by the Center
for Military Readiness in March.
THE BIGGER THEY ARE...

In October 1995 Everett L. Greene, rear admiral (select),
became the highest ranking Navy officer since World War II to
face a court-martial. Greene stood accused of sexually harass¬
ing two female officers who had worked under him two years
earlier. By 1995 quite a few admirals had fallen under the ax

for having committed or condoned one of the many new
crimes of gender. Most had gone quietly, knowing they could
never expect a favorable hearing anywhere—not in the Navy,
not in Congress, and certainly not in thy- press. A few groused
publicly about their punishment, but none demanded their day
in court. Greene did. Greene was black, and his accusers were
white, and when he was alleged to have committed his heinous
deeds, he was heading the Navy’s office on equal opportunity.
Greene was an academy graduate and Navy SEAL who was
being pushed along the career ladder by Admiral Boorda in the
interest of diversity. He was accused of showing unrequited
romantic interest in both women, writing them letters, cards,
and poems of a deeply personal nature. One said, “What you
offered to do with me was very special, very precious. I wanted
you just as much, if not more, than you wanted me.” Although
he never touched them, his attentions made the women
uncomfortable enough to complain. Their complaints were ini¬
tially handled informally, to the apparent satisfaction of all. But
with Greene scheduled for promotion to admiral and already
serving in a prominent position as the Navy’s Special Operation
Command, the Navy was afraid that the leniency it had shown
him would come back to haunt them. All it would have taken
was for one of the women to take her story to the press. Admiral
Stanley Arthur, vice chief of naval operations, wanted Greene to
stand for admiral’s mast, a nonjudicial proceeding that would
allow the Navy to say later that Greene had been held account¬
able, even if he received only light punishment.
But Greene maintained that he was innocent and that his
attentions to the women were just his way of giving encourage¬
ment and showing gratitude. He also believed that he was being
lynched by white admirals in retribution for his equal opportu¬
nity work. He opted for a court-martial, which, unfortunately
for the Navy, forced the whole issue before the public. It was a
no-win situation for the senior sea service. The Navy was caught
between competing interests—the desire to improve its record
on minorities by p^jmoting more blacks to flag rank, its need to

protect itself from charges of favoritism for admirals, and its
internal pressure to be tough on sex discrimination and harass¬
ment by aggressive prosecution. Whatever it did, it was vulner¬
able to another bout of abuse. Greene was acquitted in the
court-martial but lost his promotion. The press did not rally to
his flag of race as he had hoped.
Coast Guard Captain Ernest Blanchards case was more
clear-cut. At a Coast Guard banquet on January 10, 1995,
Blanchard, the Coast Guard’s chief of public affairs, made jokes
that some women found objectionable. This had happened
once before, and the Coast Guard took no action. The second
time, it initiated criminal proceedings. Blanchard was a thirty-
year veteran who had joined the Coast Guard at the age of six¬
teen. He was married and the father of two teenagers, but the
Coast Guard was his family. When word got around that he had
committed an unpardonable sin, friends and colleagues began
avoiding him. Blanchard became despondent. On March 10 he
offered to retire immediately if the Coast Guard agreed to drop
its investigation, but the Coast Guard turned him down. Four
days later, Blanchard killed himself with a shot to the head,
leaving no suicide note. Coast Guard spinmasters called his sui¬
cide a “freak tragedy with no larger lessons,” but a Navy psy¬
chological review concluded:
[H]is style seemed consistent with someone whose duty it

was to shoulder the burden and assume responsibility, even
as that style clouded his ability to keep his situation in per¬
spective. The emotional pain and shame that Captain
Blanchard felt he had brought upon himself and the Coast
Guard led him to choose suicide as a solution.2*
After Mike Boorda abandoned Admiral Stanley Arthur to

the political wolves, who demanded his hide for not reinstating
a washed-out female helicopter pilot, Boorda also found him¬
self shunned by friends and colleagues. On April 25, 1996,
Boordas severest critic, James Webb, expressed his outrage at

the Navy’s lack of leadership, in an address at the Naval
Academy. Lamenting the loss of moral courage, Webb asked:
When the acting secretary of the Nay*}, who had never

spent a day in uniform, called a press conference and
announced that the antics of one group of aviators at
Tailhook were an indication that the Navy as a whole had a
cultural problem—cultural, as in ethos, as in the overall
body of traits that constitute an institution’s history and tra¬
ditions—how could the chief of naval operations stand next
to him and fail to defend the way of life he had spent a
career helping to shape?
When Paula Coughlin’s commanding officer, who had
previously received dual honors as the Navy’s outstanding
fighter squadron, was relieved of his command based on a
letter she wrote, without being given so much as five min¬
utes to explain his own actions in her case to the admiral
who summarily dismissed him, who dared to risk his career
by taking Jack Snyder’s side?
When one of the finest candidates for commander in
chief of the Pacific in recent times, a man who flew more
than 500 combat missions in Vietnam and then, in the Gulf
War, commanded the largest naval armada since World War
II, was ordered into early retirement by the chief of naval
operations because one senator asked on behalf of a con¬
stituent why Stan Arthur as vice chief of naval operations
had simply approved a report upholding a decision to wash
out a female officer from flight school, who expressed out¬
rage? Who fought this? Who condemned it?
When a whole generation of officers is asked to accept
the flawed wisdom of a permanent stigma and the destruc¬
tion of the careers of some of the finest aviators in the Navy
based on hearsay, unsubstantiated allegations, in some cases
after a full repudiation of anonymous charges that resemble
the worst elements of McCarthyism, what admiral has had
the courage to risk his own career hy putting his stars on

the table, and dej§nding the integrity of the process and of
his people?24
As soon as he had finished, former acting Navy secretary Dan

Howard, taking Webbs words as a personal attack, stormed up
to the podium to denounce the speech as “fiction.” When
Howard tried to grab the microphone away from Webb, Webb
told him, “You want a rebuttal? Write an article. That’s what I
dd. Were you invited to this podium?”
Three days later, the Washington Post printed the text of
Webbs speech, slightly edited for length, and a few days after
that, an anonymous letter appeared in Navy Times declaring
that Boorda had lost the respect of the entire officer corps and
that his fellow admirals even privately referred to him as “Little
Mikey Boorda.”
None of this, even all together, would have been enough to
drive Mike Boorda to “punch out,” as the airedales say. It would
take a much deeper blow to his personal integrity, something
that went to the very core of who he was as a man.
It is difficult for military men to explain to those who have
never served the appalling significance of the charge of wearing
unauthorized decorations. Decorations are not merely lines on
one’s resume, and wearing unauthorized decorations is not
merely “resume enhancement.” People lie on their resumes to
deceive others. They wear unauthorized decorations to deceive
themselves. When a man pretends to be something he’s not, he
does so out of deep dissatisfaction with the man he actually is.
When a military man is discovered to have worn decorations he
did not earn, it tells other military men not so much that he is
dishonest, but that he is crazy, or deeply disturbed to say the
least.
For years, Admiral Boorda wore decorations he did not
deserve, two tiny “V devices” (V for valor) indicating combat
service. Boorda had never served in combat. He had served on
a destroyer in the South China Sea during the Vietnam War, but
his ship did not see action. Boorda never received orders autho¬
rizing him to wear the devices, nor did his service record ever
indicate that he deserved them. No one else pinned them on his
uniform; he did that himself, but only after he made rear admi¬
ral, many years after he supposedly earned them.
Boorda was twice informed privately before 1996 that he was
not authorized to wear the V devices, once in 1987 and once
again after Boorda had assumed the top post in the Navy, chief of
naval operations. After the second time, he took them off, but by
then thousands of photographs had been taken of the admiral
wearing the unauthorized decorations. Eventually a member of
the press noticed, a reporter for the tiny National Security News
Service, who requested a copy of Boordas service record under
the Freedom of Information Act and then compared the records
with the photographs. The tip was then passed to David
Hackworth, a retired Army colonel writing on military matters
for Newsweek. Hackworth requested an interview with Boorda.
On the day of the interview, Boorda discussed it with
Kendell Pease, chief of information. Pease told reporters later
that Boorda asked, “What should we do?” He then immediately
answered his own question: “We will tell them the truth.” Even
this was a lie, for Boorda would not tell the truth. He had
planned to have lunch in his office, but changed his mind and
drove himself home to his quarters at the Washington Navy
Yard. In his study, he wrote two notes, one to his wife and one
to “my sailors,” then he went into the garden and shot himself
through the heart.
The pols plastered over the death with more lies about how
he was a “sailors sailor,” much loved in the fleet, and about how
he had given his life to atone for the Navy’s many sins. The truth
was far more personal and not at all heroic. The approval of oth¬
ers and the glory of rank and office were everything to Mike
Boorda. Without the worlds approval, he had no reason to live,
and he could not bear to see his glories taken away in shame.
V
*
Chapter 14
SCHOOLS FOR SCANDAL
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.1
s'
—WILLIAM CONGREVE
EVENTS FOLLOW FAST, with one scandal after another.

In November 1996 the Army held a press conference to
announce that it was charging five soldiers assigned to the
Ordnance School at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland,
with various sex crimes including rape, adultery, sexual assault,
fraternization, and sexual harassment. Shortly thereafter the
Army shifted into high gear to show that it had learned from the
Navy’s experience not to take such things lightly. Soldiers world¬
wide were ordered to undergo another round of sexual harass¬
ment training, and victims were encouraged to call the Army’s
new twenty-four-hour harassment hotline, which in its first
twelve weeks logged nearly 7,000 calls and 1,074 allegations of
sexual abuse. Before long, multiple prosecutions sprang up at
Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri; Fort Jackson, South Carolina;
Fort Bliss, Texas; Fort Sam Houston, Texas; and Darmstadt,
Germany. The old threat to “drop a dime” on someone had
taken on a whole new danger.
In the nation’s capital, a tribunal of twelve congresswomen
interrogated four Army generals on their failure to eradicate
sexism and sexual harassment. “There are procedures that the
Army has in plaoSfe, but while that looks good on paper, some¬
thing has gone wrong. What are the causes of that? Is there a
climate that allows this to happen?” wondered Congresswoman
Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut. The women were pleased,
though, with the Army’s vigorous response, which Pat
Schroeder said “has been very thorough.”
But just to make sure the Army stayed on the tribunal’s
good side. Army Secretary Togo D. West, Jr., announced the
n formation of a Senior Review Panel on Sexual Harassment,
headed by retired Major General Richard S. Siegfried and
including noted, feminists such as Sara Lister, a veteran not of
the Army but of the Carter administration, now assistant secre¬
tary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs; retired
Brigadier General Pat Foote, who returned to active duty to
serve as an assistant to West; Major General Claudia Kennedy,
assistant chief of staff for intelligence; Professor Mady Segal of
the University of Maryland; Holly K. Hemphill, DACOWITS
chairwoman; and Professor Madeline Morris of Duke
University.
Also on the list was the Army’s senior enlisted man.
Sergeant Major of the Army Gene C. McKinney. When his
appointment was announced, a female sergeant major, Brenda
L. Hoster, came forward to accuse him publicly of assaulting
her by making a pass at her in a hotel room in Hawaii in 1996.
There were no witnesses, and there was no evidence, but under
pressure from female members of Congress, the Army relieved
McKinney of his duties pending an investigation.
In Aberdeen it was a young recruit named Jessica Bleckley
who sparked the investigation with her complaint of sexual
assault. Bleckley, by her own admission, acquiesced to having
sex not once but twice with a male drill sergeant, Staff Sergeant
Nathaniel Beech, because she “thought she had to,” according
to the New York Times. The Times quoted the young woman
saying, “When he got through [the second time], he was like:
Get out. Don t get in my face.’” The Times viewed Bleckley as
an innocent young soldier ( solidly built... with a firm jaw”) vie-
SCHOOLS FOR SCANDAL • 311
timized by a predatory superior and the Army’s sexist culture.

Diane Sawyer of ABC saw her in the same light. A military jury,
more experienced with young recruits, proved less gullible and
voted for Sergeant Beech’s acquittal. Bleckley, it turned out,
had a history of difficulty with the truth. "
Military justice is swift. In a matter of weeks, the Army had
produced convictions, but also more acquittals—of a staff
sergeant at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, acquitted of all
charges of sexual misconduct; of another staff sergeant at Fort''
McClellan, Alabama, acquitted of all similar charges; and of a
West Point cadet acquitted of raping another West Point cadet
after a drunken beach party. In the latter case, Army investiga¬
tors recommended against a court-martial (both male and
female witnesses supported the defense), but the Army chose
to try the cadet for rape rather than appear insufficiently sensi¬
tive to women. The Aberdeen investigation also produced one
more suicide—Private Alan M. May, an Army reservist who was
accused of raping a female reservist in his unit. May hanged
himself in the bathroom of his quarters on January 7, 1997.
Many of the accused soldiers avoided court-martial by
pleading guilty to lesser charges like fraternization and sexual
misconduct, involving consensual sex. For all the talk about
rape, there was very little evidence of it. Five women lined up
and publicly accused Army investigators of trying to blackmail
them into making false accusations of rape, and threatening to
charge them with fraternization and sexual misconduct if
they did not cooperate. As in the Tailhook investigation, the
government exaggerated the grievances of the supposed victims
themselves.
Rape charges against Staff Sergeant Vemell Robinson, Jr.,
were dropped when it turned out his victim went to quite a lot
of trouble to be raped, keeping assignations off post by wearing
a beeper.
In the end, the charge of rape stuck against only one soldier,
drill sergeant Delmar Simpson, who was convicted of eighteen
counts of rape involving six young female soldiers in his charge
at Aberdeen. Onj^ two of the six women actually accused

Sergeant Simpson of using physical force. The other four
claimed that Simpson simply ordered them to do things and
they did as they were told. “One even testified that Simpson
could not have known she did not want to have sex with him,”
wrote Hanna Rosin for The New Republic. “Many of the women
who testified described themselves as being in a sort of hyp¬
notic state, frozen by fear and incapable of resisting. Their pas¬
sivity often lasted for months, through several rapes.”2
The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not require
physical force to define rape; it is sufficient that the perpetrator
applied “constructive force,” i.e., abusing ones status and
authority to obtain consent. Rosin faulted the Army for embrac¬
ing a “definition of rape cribbed from radical feminist theory:
rape is what happens when a man has sexual intercourse with a
woman who is in a subordinate position to him.” But the defini¬
tion of rape applied in Simpson s case was not all that different
from the civilian definition of statutory rape, in which the con¬
sent of the victim is all but assumed. The major difference is that
statutory rape in the civilian world carries a much lighter penalty
than forcible rape. Simpson faced the possibility of life in prison
for each of his eighteen counts.
One “victim,” whom witnesses called a “compulsive liar,”
had sex with Simpson five times in one month. Another testified
that she gave Simpson sex in return for his help in having
charges dropped against her for a minor infraction. She also tes¬
tified to giving him nothing but encouragement both times they
had sex:
Question: It’s fair to say that Staff Sergeant Simpson

could have gotten the perception from you that you wanted
to have sex with him?
Answer: Yes, sir
Question: Isn’t it in fact true that you didn’t want him

to know you didn’t want to have sex?
Answer: Yes.
None of Simpson’s victims complained of being raped until

questioned by Army investigators. Several had sex with him on
more than one occasion, and at least one woman testified that
she not only had sex “willingly” but that investigators pressured
her into accusing Simpson of rape. Even $6, he was convicted of
raping her.
Minutes after the verdicts were announced, Drill Sergeant
Mariana Shorter, a colleague and friend of Simpson, told CBS
News, “I was a private once [and] there’s no way you could rape
me eight times and me not telling anybody.... These are not
innocent young ladies. These women _
are very forceful and very, very aggres¬
Five women publicly
sive. They’re not children, young inno¬
accused Army investiga¬
cent children that they portrayed
themselves to be.”3 tors of trying to blackmail
To Sergeant Shorter as well as to them into making false
Sergeant Major McKinney, the in¬
accusations of rape.
vestigations and prosecutions appeared
to be racially motivated. Shorter,
McKinney, Simpson, Beech, and most of the accused were
black, whereas almost all of the victims were white. As in the
case of Navy Captain Everett Greene, the white women ulti¬
mately won.
THE KELLY FLINN AFFAIR

No sooner was Simpson’s punishment announced than the
media were off to an even more sensational story: the first
female bomber pilot in the history of the U.S. Air Force was
being drummed out of the service for adultery.
As the Air Force’s first female bomber pilot, First
Lieutenant Kelly Flinn was treated like an aviation princess.
Senior civilian and military officials from around the country
showed up in Minot, North Dakota, to visit her. The media
were enamored. Flinn was always in the spotlight. As a joke,
Flinn s fellow crew members donned name tags that identified
themselves merely as members of her crew: Kelly’s Navigator,
Kellys Crew Chie£ Kellys Bombardier, etc. Flinn was a gradu¬

ate of the Air Force Academy. She was tops in her class in flight
training. She was blond and beautiful. She was a feminist dream
girl. She was also The Victim.
The way her story played in the media and in Washington is
a textbook example of feminist victimology, the clearest demon¬
stration yet of how feminists identify The Victim in any circum¬
stance. Only two things count: The Victim must serve the cause
of feminism, and The Victim must fit the image of the high¬
flying woman brought down by low-lying men. Kelly Flinn served
the cause, and Kelly Flinn fit the image. Gayla Zigo did neither.
Gayla Zigo was a lowly airman who moonlighted behind the
front desk of the local Holiday Inn. The few times she was pic¬
tured by the press, she was wearing a shapeless Air Force-issue
skirt and a plain blue uniform blouse, in contrast to Flinns
dashing Nomex flight suit and leather flight jacket.
Some details of the case are in dispute, such as just how
Flinn met Gayla s civilian husband Marc Zigo and whether
Flinn knew that Marc Zigo was still married. Flinn swore that
Marc Zigo had told her he was legally separated. But witnesses
swore that Flinn was introduced to the Zigos as husband and
wife, that both Zigos had joined her for a barbecue at her quar¬
ters, and that she had visited the Zigos in their home.
Otherwise, the facts involved in the five charges leveled
against Flinn by the Air Force are not in doubt. (1) Flinn was
charged with adultery for her acknowledged affair with Marc
Zigo. Maximum penalty: one year in prison. (2) She was
charged with making a false official statement, in that she
denied to another officer that anything “intimate or sexual has
ever occurred” between herself and Zigo. Maximum penalty:
five years in prison. (3) She was charged with disobeying a
direct order, continuing to live with Marc after being ordered
to stay at least one hundred feet away from him by her
commanding officer. Maximum penalty: six months in prison.
(4) She was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer,
bringing disgrace upon the Air Force by committing adultery.
Maximum penalty: one year in prison. (5) She was charged

with fraternization, because she had also had sexual relations
with an unmarried enlisted man a few months before shack-
ing up with Zigo. Maximum penalty: two years in prison. For all
five counts, she could have gone to prispn for nine and a half
years.
Somehow this adulterous, dishonest female officer became
a cause celebre for journalists and politicians. According to
Tucker Carlson, who writes for The Weekly Standard, the man
responsible was Todd Ensign, editor of a leftist journal aimed at
the military called Citizen Soldier. Over the years, Ensign has
pushed a variety of subversive issues on the military like union¬
ization and gay rights. “I’m on the left,” he told Carlson. “I
believe that a lot of these militaristic policies come from the
domination of the military of our foreign policy.”4 Citizen
Soldier has never had much impact on the military itself, but
mainstream journalists who don’t know any better, and who are
often sympathetic to Ensign’s leftist views, have tended to pay
it more attention, and so Ensign’s portrayal of Kelly Flinn as a
victim of sex bias in military prosecutions for adultery ended up
in USA Today. There wasn’t any evidence to support the alle¬
gation of sex bias, but Ensign had said it was so, and that’s all
the media needed.
There followed sympathetic profiles of Flinn in the “Style”
section of the Washington Post and on the front page of the
New York Times, and not one but two interviews with a sympa¬
thetic Morley Safer for CBS’s 60 Minutes, one of which was
humorously described by Carlson. After reading from Air Force
evaluations describing her as an “aggressive” and incredibly
sharp professional warrior,” Safer asked how she was holding up
under the circumstances:
‘You’re a tough woman, yes?” he asked. The aggressive

professional warrior looked down, lower lip quivering.
‘Yes,” she replied, her voice barely audible. Then she started
to cry.
According to Carlson, Flinn showed even less control in private,

throwing tantrums Jnd becoming “hysterical,” in the words of
his source. Carlson concluded:
The fact that someone as psychologically fragile as Kelly

Flinn had been put in command of a B-52 bomber with a
nuclear payload was powerful evidence of the Air Force’s
determined, even reckless, effort to install women in posi¬
tions of leadership.
Flinn cried often in her interviews, playing two roles at

once for the media: gung-ho Air Force team-player and help¬
less heartbroken young girl. She claimed she had been sexually
assaulted at the Air Force Academy but hadn’t reported it. She
claimed she had been unfairly suspected of lesbianism because
she would not date officers in her squadron for professional
reasons. She claimed she had been deeply hurt by the special
name tags and that she disliked all the attention. She claimed
she had been offended by the questions investigators asked
about her sex life. She claimed she had been manipulated
by Marc Zigo, “a real con artist,” in her words. She claimed
she had been abused by Zigo while they were living together.
She claimed she had wanted to leave him, “but I didn’t know
how.”
Flinn also showed little or no remorse for her own actions.
“It’s not like I committed treason or murder or robbery or this
heinous crime,” she told Tamara Jones of the Washington Post.
“I fell in love with the wrong man.” (The Post gave her the usual
star treatment: a full-page story with a large flattering photo on
page 1 of its “Style” section and two more photos inside.)
The explanation Flinn gave for her actions changed over
time. When Safer asked her why she lied and disobeyed orders,
Flinn answered that she was young and confused and con¬
cerned for her career. Later, on Good Morning America, she
said she had just found out she might have cancer and was con¬
fused and wasn’t thinking about the investigation. Carlson was
told by another reporter that the cancer scare had come weeks
after she had lied and disobeyed orders. (Another Air Force
officer had already used the same excuse to explain her own
adultery, saying she was “lonely, vulnerable.”5) Much of Flinn’s
defense rested on her claim that MarmZigo had lied to her
about being separated from Gayla. But when both were ques¬
tioned separately by investigators, Marc Zigo did not support
Flinn s story.
Such details did not affect the way the story was reported.
The “story” that impressed the media, after all, was that the mil¬
itary was targeting women for prosecution for the archaic crime
of adultery. The Air Force responded defensively, with General
Ronald R. Fogelman, Air Force chief of staff, telling the Senate
Armed Services Committee, “this is not an issue of adultery.
This is an issue about an officer entrusted to fly unclear
weapons who lied. Thats what this is about.”
Nobody stood up for Gayla Zigo or argued that dashing
young officers shouldn’t be allowed to swoop down and carry
off the spouses of enlisted personnel. Many press reports,
including an early front-page Washington Post story, did not
even mention that Marc Zigo was married to an enlisted
woman. He was a “married civilian,” not a military dependent.
Even after Gayla entered the story, she did not receive much
sympathy. To feminists, Gayla was the enemy. Ellen Goodman
wrote, “That battered and betrayed ex-wife managed to turn
her rage on the other victim of Marc’s attentions. I leave her
and her self-deception to Ann Landers.”
Politicians like Senators Slade Gorton and Trent Lott were
indignant on Kelly Flinn’s behalf but seemed not to notice
Gayla Zigo. One could expect feminist pols like Republican
Nancy Johnson and Democrat Carolyn Maloney to weigh in on
Flinn’s side. But Gorton, a former Air Force lawyer, actually
wrote to Air Force Secretary Sheila Widnall to demand that the
charges against Flinn be dismissed. Lotts support for Flinn
came off the cuff, and it showed. After admitting that he did not
know much about the case, Lott declared on camera.
I think it’s unfair. I don’t understand why she is being sin¬

gled out and punished the way she is. I think at the mini¬
mum she ought to get an honorable discharge. And I’ve got
a lot of other questions about why the Air Force hasn’t
stepped up to this issue and dealt with it better. I’ll tell you,
the Pentagon is not in touch with reality on this so-called
question of fraternization. I mean, get real. You’re still deal¬
ing with human beings. And the way she has been treated
really disturbs me greatly.... My wife has a good question:
Where’s the guy that was involved in this dealP I don’t
understand all this. And I think it’s very unfair.6
The New York Times praised Lott for his “sound civilian
advice,” but it is hard to see how the Air Force could have acted
on it without ceasing to make dishonesty, disobedience, and
conduct unbecoming an officer no longer punishable under
military law. Lott, of course, had never been in the military; he
had spent the Vietnam War as a cheerleader for Ole Miss. It
appeared his major interest in the case was pandering to
women voters. Columnist George Will called Lott a “media-
driven nonleader” who was “sounding like a Valley Girl doing an
impression of former Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder.” The
Weekly Standard’s William Kristol wrote that he sounded
“Clintonian.”
Opinion polls, however, showed that most Americans saw
Flinn just the way Lott did. Flinns commanding officer still
wanted to see her court-martialed and convicted, but Secretary
Widnall was under pressure to let her resign instead. The trou¬
ble was that Flinn, encouraged by the sympathy she had
received, refused to resign with anything less than an honorable
discharge, which the Air Force s uniformed leadership opposed.
An honorable discharge would have allowed her to keep her vet¬
erans benefits and remain in the Air Force Reserve, and the Air
Force wasn’t about to trust Flinn to fly again.
Events turned against Flinn when Gayla Zigo wrote to
Secretary Widnall to urge against an honorable discharge. In
her letter, Airman Zigo complained that “less than a week after
we arrived to the base, Lt. Flinn was in bed with my husband
having sex. Flinn visited their house several times, “always in
her flight suit flaunting the fact that she was an academy grad¬
uate and the first female bomber pilot.. v/ IIow could I compete
with her?”
Widnall refused Flinn s request for an honorable discharge,
and just before going on trial, Kelly Flinn gave in to the pleas of
her family that she accept a general discharge instead. Even the
Washington Post conceded defeat in an editorial admitting that
Flinn had manipulated the press and _
that “Lt. Flinn wasn’t singled out for
Somehow Kelly Flinn—this
her gender.”
For Flinn it was over, but for the adulterous, dishonest
military the ordeal was still alive, as female officer—became a

later cases demonstrated. A lesser- cause celebre for journal¬
known case occurred in the summer of
ists and politicians.
1997 involving one of Flinn’s former Air
Force Academy classmates, Lieutenant
Crista Davis. Davis filed racial and sexual discrimination
charges against the service, although she herself had had an
affair—and a child—with a married superior officer and had
boasted about this in sexually explicit letters to the officers wife.
At one point, Davis faced fifty-five years in prison on charges
including willful dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming an
officer, absence without leave, willfully disobeying a superior
officer, and making false official statements. The case was even¬
tually heard in a nonjudicial administrative hearing rather than
a court-martial. Davis was reprimanded and fined $2,000 after
she was found guily of conduct unbecoming an officer for the
affair and for writing the sexually explicit letters.
The military’s moral standards were now being openly
questioned. They were too high, according to the know-it-all
nonveterans in the media and in Congress. Congressman
Barney Frank submitted a bill to move consensual sexual
behavior beyond the military’s regulatory reach, another ploy to
win approval of homosexuality. At the same time, the services

were more obligated%ian ever to prosecute men for the slight¬
est sexual infraction. In the spring of 1997 the Army relieved
two general officers of their duties for having affairs with civil¬
ian women, and days after Kelly Flinn capitulated. Air Force
General Joseph Ralston was forced to withdraw his name from
nomination as the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on
account of an affair he had with a civilian woman ten years after
having been separated from his wife.
Normally such affairs would never have been noticed, but
the twenty-four-hour sexual harassment hotline made anony¬
mous accusations easy and effective. And normally such infi¬
delities would never have been prosecuted unless they were
believed to disrupt official duties. But the military had lost all
ability to discriminate, to tell the difference between adultery
with the spouse of a helpless airman and adultery with a
divorced civilian secretary. Once again, fear had made a rea¬
sonable response impossible.
THE BOYS OF SYRACUSE

If the Flinn case turned out relatively well, with Flinns mis¬
deeds ending her career, another case involving the New York
Air National Guard produced opposite results without attract¬
ing the interest of Mr. Safer or USA Today or the rest of the
journalistic herd. No case better illustrates the power of one
woman to work the political system to her own advantage than
the case of Major Jacquelyn S. Parker. Parker literally destroyed
a fighter squadron with her accusations of a “hostile environ¬
ment” and “disparate treatment,” escaping any blame for her
own alleged transgressions and shortcomings.
The trouble began when Defense Secretary Les Aspin
finally gave the go-ahead for the training of female fighter
pilots. Eager to be the first to admit women, the New York
National Guard went “barnstorming” for female candidates.
The 174th Fighter Wing in Syracuse, New York, came up with
five candidates and hired one, Sue Hart Lilly, through the nor-
mal screening process. State Guard headquarters sent them

another, Jackie Parker, who had been slated originally for a
fighter squadron in Niagara that was subsequently selected for
conversion to tankers. Parker was a C-141 pilot who boasted of
having once been an Air Force test pilot and a NASA flight con¬
troller, and of having finished college at an early age with a
degree in computer science. While on active duty, she had
caught the attention of General Michael Hall, the adjutant gen¬
eral of New York, whose support secured her slot in the F-16
program.
Both Parker and Lilly passed the initial training phase at
Wichita, Kansas, learning to fly the F-16C Falcon, a multipur¬
pose, supersonic, single-engine, single-seat fighter. In the next
phase, conducted by the 174th Fighter Wing, they would learn
to fly tactically in order to qualify as combat fighter pilots. The
wing commander, Colonel David Hamlin, had actively encour¬
aged the search for female candidates and had expressed to oth¬
ers his ambition that the 174th could write the manual on how
to integrate women. At the same time, Hamlin was aware that
State Guard headquarters was especially interested in the
womens progress, Parkers in particular. In one of the many
irregularities of the case, Parker was neither assigned nor offi¬
cially attached to the 174th. Instead, Parker filled a headquar¬
ters billet, although the 174th was expected to train her.
The combat qualification program required pilots to com¬
plete eight “rides,” successfully demonstrating their ability to
perform the various combat missions the squadron might be
called upon to execute. It was not unusual for new members to
require many more rides to master the missions. New members
were often coming off active duty, converting from another type
of tactical aircraft to the F-16 while at the same time learning
their new civilian jobs as airline pilots.
Parker had no civilian job and would have been available for
training full-time, except that she spent a considerable amount
of time in Washington, D.C., being celebrated as one of the fiist
female fighter pilots. In the year she was with the 174th, Parker
was honored by First Lady Hillary Clinton at the White House

and by the commanJmg general of the Air Combat Command.
Such events took priority over her training and would have
extended the time needed to qualify even if her performance
had been outstandir\g—but it wasn’t. After ten months of train¬
ing, Parker had stilhnot qualified despite as many as fifty-two
rides. She repeated one mission nine times before receiving a
passing score. On one practice bombing mission, she missed
the target five out of six times, even after having it marked by
heY wingman. One of her misses landed two kilometers away, in
the wrong valley, far enough off target to pose a danger to
friendly forces in the area.
Her several instructor pilots all held civilian jobs and rarely
saw each other, but before long their concern for her perfor¬
mance prompted them to compare notes. The trends were
obvious. A small woman, just five-foot-three or -four, she had a
tendency to black out when pulling G’s. Her instructors advised
her to work out at the gym to develop the upper-body strength
necessary to maintain consciousness. One recommended that
she undergo remedial centrifuge training, which she had
already done and could not repeat. Parker also never mastered
the “switchology” of the aircraft. She took too long to find the
right switch for what she needed to do. Most distressingly, she
lacked sufficient “situational awareness,” a critical faculty for
fighter pilots. She often lost track of her flight lead. She was
easily overwhelmed with the demands of flying the aircraft,
tracking targets, and executing maneuvers in a changing envi¬
ronment. It was a deficiency that nearly proved fatal in training
and ultimately ended her attempt to qualify for combat.
The fateful last ride came in June 1995, the day before the
174th was scheduled to deploy to Turkey for Operation Provide
Comfort, a mission in support of relief efforts for Kurdish
refugees in northern Iraq. This was not long after a U.S. Air
Force fighter had shot down a U.S. Army helicopter in north¬
ern Iraq, having mistaken it lor an Iraqi helicopter violating the
Allied no-fly zone. To prevent such mistakes in the future, the
pilots of the 174th were required to qualify for the low-altitude

intercept mission. If Parker could do so, she would deploy with
the wing as the first female fighter pilot to see combat service.
The New York Air National Guard intended to disregard one
requirement of the Air Force tasking jbr the mission, which
specified that only operational combat pilots deploy. Parker was
not in an operational billet, but the Guard was not about to
deny her, on a technicality, the honor of being the first female
pilot to see combat.
Parker’s attempt at qualifying was graded by Major Jeffrey
“X” Ecker, the wing’s weapons-and-tactics officer, a “Top Gun”
in Navy terms, specially trained to train other pilots in tactical
maneuvers. The test mission involved two F-16s intercepting
two A-10 “Warthogs” flying a known route at an altitude of just
500 feet. On her first attempt, Ecker led the way, with Parker
following as his wingman. Upon spotting the A-lOs, Ecker
descended from 3,000 to 500 feet and engaged the Warthogs.
Parker, however, made no calls to indicate that she had made
radar contact or spotted the Warthogs, made no descent, and
did not fire a shot.7
For her second attempt, Ecker suggested a different tactic.
This time, they would separate, fly parallel, and then converge
on the Warthogs from different directions, in a maneuver called
a “split” or “bracket.” All Parker had to do was watch for Ecker
to turn and descend, but once again she failed to follow, mak¬
ing no calls, no turn, no descent, no attempt to engage.
On her third ride, Ecker put Parker out in front flying the
same simple intercept course as her first ride, but this time
Parker flew right by the Warthogs without seeing them, so they
shot her.
Ecker and Parker had to refuel before trying again. On her
fourth ride, Ecker tried to make the mission even easier. The
plan was to fly a bracket again, but instead of engaging the
enemy on the first pass, they would take advantage of their
superior speed to dash past the A-10s for a positive identifica¬
tion before turning back to engage. Once again, Paiker made
no calls to indicate that she had spotted the Warthogs. Ecker

zoomed past them ^d then turned back and descended to give
chase. After engaging the lead Warthog, he saw Parker
approaching straight ahead, still at 3,000 feet. When she at last
spotted a turning A-10 much closer to the ground, she banked
sharply, nearly flipping completely over, and started to dive in
on her target, a maneuver called an “oblique slice.” It might
have worked at a higher altitude, but from 3,000 feet it would
have killed her. “Knock it off!” Ecker yelled into the radio. The
command was used to stop pilots from executing unsafe maneu¬
vers. In response, Parker immediately rolled out of her deadly
dive, and Ecker called off the exercise.
Back on the ground, Ecker sent Parker to the debriefing
room to relax. Then he went to consult with two superiors. He
knew that if he flunked her, she would not go to Turkey and
would miss her famous first. It had not bothered him before or
during the exercise, but he wondered how the Guard would
handle her failure. “You have to call it like you see it,” one offi¬
cer told him. The other concurred. Should he fail her after four
attempts and a life-threatening mistake? “Absolutely” was the
answer.
As one of her principal instructors, Ecker had flown with
Parker many times before. He knew that she was often defen¬
sive in critiques, making excuses for her faults and arguing
against criticism. She sometimes told instructors her in-flight
video recorder of radar and cockpit displays didn’t work, to
avoid having to replay her mistakes. She had always seemed to
Ecker to be more interested in “playing the part” of the tough
fighter pilot than in actually becoming one. She didn’t study;
she didn’t work out; she didn’t even seem all that eager to fly.
This time, however, he found her drained and white, clearly
shaken, with the familiar “Casper-the-Ghost look” of a pilot who
has just escaped death. She did not question his critique, which
he couched in careful, technical terms that faulted a “dangerous
set-up” that almost “put her aircraft in a position that no one
could have converted.” On a scale of 0 to 4, he gave her an unsat-
isfactory 1, but the grade didn’t seem to phase her. She seemed
too frightened at that time to care. “I think she knew then she
was in over her head, said Ecker. That same day, she quit.
Days after quitting, Parker blamed her failure on a “hostile
environment in the wing that had resulted in “disparate treat¬
ment in the form of biased evaluation of her performance. Her
complaint prompted a board of inquiry headed by Brigadier
General Johnny Hobbs, a lawyer who was deputy commander
of the New York Air National Guard.
The basis of Parkers complaint was Colonel Hamlin s han¬
dling of rumors about Parkers relation- _
ship with Lieutenant Colonel Robert A.
Jacquelyn Parker’s defi¬
“Snake” Rose, commander of the wings
operations group and one of Parkers ciencies nearly proved
instructors. Parker and Rose, a married fatal in training and ulti¬
man, were known to have spent time
mately disqualified her for
together socially, sailing, rock-climbing,
combat.
dining, and drinking. Both insisted that
their relationship was strictly platonic, a
“mentor-student” relationship that supported her training.
Other officers in the wing saw evidence of more, as Rose and
Parker seemed entirely too tight. Rose was suspected of inflat¬
ing her scores. Five of her nine 3 s she owed to Rose. (She never
received a top score of 4 and never received a 3 on a first try.)
In December 1994 some of the pilots got together and gave
Rose a mock award for the “most disgusting guardsman” of the
year. It was their way of putting him on notice.
Hamlin also warned Rose about the appearance of impro¬
priety and advised Rose to stay away from Parker. Hamlin was
later quoted as saying, “I asked Rose to kindly put his relation¬
ship on a professional basis. In my mind, that wasn’t taking away
a mentorship. It was telling him not to go sailing and drinking
wine.” Finally in May 1995, after three previous warnings,
Hamlin relieved Rose of his duties. According to Parker,
Hamlin’s actions encouraged the hostility of the other pilots in
the wing, making them unfairly critical of her performance.
For their part, the pilots of the 174th at first assumed that
Parkers long docm^nted history of poor performance would
disprove any charge of bias, but before long it became apparent
that the investigation was headed in other directions. Parker’s
three principal instructors, including Ecker, were never even
interviewed by investigators. Other pilots were instead ques¬
tioned on what they had heard about her performance.
Interviews with Sue Hart-Lilly and the squadrons only black
pilot were brief and superficial, as neither provided evidence to
support Parker’s accusations.
Colonel Rose was the second person to be interviewed,
immediately after Parker. When he was questioned about his
relationship with Parker, he twice asked for legal counsel, but
the investigating officer, a JAG lieutenant colonel named John
Clark, misled him into thinking he was not entitled to counsel.
The questioning went as follows:
Rose [for the second time]: I’d like a lawyer present

before 1 answer that, because it borders on things outside
the unit that I consider personal and not work-associated. If
I have that right. If I don’t, I’ll answer it truthfully, if I
don’t have that right for legal counsel.
LTC Clark: I’m not treating you as a suspect. I haven’t
read you your Miranda rights.
Rose: Okay.
LTC Clark: So I’m going to ask you the question
again, and you are required to answer it.
Rose: Okays
The investigating officer knew that any competent legal coun¬

sel would have shut Rose up tight, possibly preventing Rose
from incriminating others. At the same time, since the investi¬
gator had no intention of prosecuting Rose, he was not con¬
cerned with securing testimony that could be later used against
Rose in court. By such tricks, the investigator obtained the tes¬
timony that served his purpose, later leading the witness
through the following questions:
Question: And that association [between Rose and

Parker] was a professional association and a friendship, was
it not?
Answer: Yes. Uh-huh.
Question: It was never more than that, was it?
Answer: No. It wasn’t.9
The same tactics were used in the Tailhook investigation to

pump accusations out of alleged victims who might otherwise
have needed to protect themselves from self-incrimination. The
rest of the interview focused not on Roses relationship with
Parker but on the alleged abuse that Rose and Parker had suf¬
fered as a result of what others thought of their relationship.
Parker, of course, had earlier denied anything inappropriate
in her relationship with Rose:
He did come into my room afeiv times.... but it was never

overnight. Nothing like that.... Basically what I’m saying is
if I have lunch with someone, it’s not unusual for me to hear
about it later that I have been suspected of having some sort
of romantic relationship ivith someone.... I made sure to tell
Col. Hamlin and Col. [Thomas] Webster that they must
know nothing happened. And they didn’t care, really. That
wasn’t the point. The point was they had told Snake not to
do it; and he had hung out with me; and that the percep¬
tions were that we were having an affair, and that was
really what was important, were the perceptions, not what
really happened. I expressed that I think their perceptions
should be changed, that there was a lot more underlying
this than my relationship with Snake and that they were
succeeding in ostracizing me.10
On August 30, 1995, before the results of the investigation

had been announced, Brigadier General John H. Fenimore V,
adjutant general of New York, informed Colonel Hamlin by let¬
ter that he was removing Hamlin’s name from the promotion
32 S • WOMEN IN THE MILITARY
list, and delaying his promotion to brigadier gen end on account

of the interim report of the investigation, which Hamlin had not
seen. Three weeks later. Fenimore went all the wav by relieMng
Hamlin of his command and requesting his resignation. Hours
later, the results of the investigation were announced in a
nationally telerised press conference. Investigators had con¬
cluded that Parker had indeed suffered disparate treatment in
a hostile environment. They found Hamlin responsible as wing
commander, faulting him for not squelching rumors against
^Parker and Rose and for unfairly interfering with their mentor-
student relationship.
Hamlin's second in command. Colonel Thomas Webster,
was also relieved and reassigned to another unit, and two other
officers were to receive .Article 15s. a form of nonjudicial pun¬
ishment. Captain Anthonv Zaccaro was accused of sexually
harassing Parker, while Major Theodore Limpert was faulted
for having a lawyer friend call Rose on the telephone posing as
a reporter to inquire about their relationship. Both were
removed from flight status, t,Zaccaro later filed a 52 million law¬
suit against Parker, accusing her of sexually harassing him.
The next dav. Rose himself was quietlv asked to retire. In
the preceding weeks. Colonel Brent J. Richardson, the State
Guard's director of operations, had told General Fenimore that
Rose had confided to him privately that he had indeed carried
on a “sustained and intimate personal relationship " with
Parker.11 This allegation was not included in the 500 copies of
the investigation report distributed to the press, as investigators
continued to base their conclusions on the assumption that both
Rose and Parker were telling the truth in their sworn state¬
ments. It was. however, deemed sufficiently credible to hasten
Roses retirement. At the end of his tour. Richardson himself
was not selected for continued senice and was forced to retire.
The pilots of the 174th w ere incensed at the treatment of
their commanding officer and fellow pilots and at the public
humiliation of their unit mid the \iciousness of the system's
V
response. Still believers in the system, they decided to do what

they could to set things right.
On November 4 Major Ecker and another instructor met
with Fenimore s personal legal advisor and another lawyer who
had been involved in the investigation. Perhaps not being pilots
and without having interviewed Parkers principal instructors,
they just didn t understand how bad Parker was in the cockpit.
Afterward, Ecker came to believe that they had known all along
and that his naive attempt to explain things had only identified
him as a non-team-player.
On November 14 another experienced pilot, Lieutenant
Colonel John M. Whiteside, took the matter to the Air Force
Office of Special Investigations (OSI) and to the office of the
secretary of the Air Force. That same day, his new wing
commander threatened him with a psychiatric evaluation. One
week later the OSI investigation was called off on orders from
the Air Force office that oversees the air national guards.
Two weeks later the 174th was grounded for “safety con¬
cerns” and “good order and discipline,” and four weeks after that,
when the grounding was lifted, eight pilots, including Ecker and
Whitehead, were notified that they were being removed from
flight status and reassigned to nonexistent maintenance jobs with
the stated excuse of “career broadening.” All eight had com¬
plained to the Air Force, members of Congress, state legislators,
Governor George Patakis office, or the press. Notifications were
made by certified letter. Padlocks were cut off of the pilots’ lock¬
ers to force them to clear out as soon as possible. Whiteside was
barred from the base for being out of uniform (he was accused of
wearing a nonstandard name-tag). Others were ordered to sub¬
mit to testing for drugs. Rumors were circulated that the boys of
Syracuse were a bad lot—crazy, dishonest, and, of course, sexist.
Then on January 16, 1996, Robert Rose signed an affidavit
admitting to an intimate sexual relationship with Parker. Tom
by guilt at what was happening to his unit, Rose confessed three
days before he retired:
I did have a strong, emotionally supportive personal

relationship aruLpn a number of occasions it did include
engaging in touching [and] kissing, which was conduct that
would be considered unprofessional. We never had and I
never intended to have sexual intercourse, but I did on one
occasion spend the night in the same bed with Parker.
There were also"other times when I visited Parker at her
apartment.
Col. Hamlin appropriately advised me on several occas-
sions to end my unprofessional relationship with Parker. 1
had also conveyed the nature of my relationship with Parker
to both Col. Hamlin and Col. Richardson. I offered to con¬
vey the information directly to Bfrigadier] Gfeneral]
Fenimore.12
Rose’s confession directly contradicted Parkers sworn state¬

ment and invalidated the main findings of the State Guard
investigation. As a result, Governor Pataki on February 1
ordered a second investigation of the first investigation, to be
conducted by the state inspector general, Roslan Mauskopf.
Then in June 1996 the Air Force inspector general opened a
whistle-blower investigation to examine allegations of retalia¬
tion against those pilots who complained.
“Justice delayed is justice denied.” At this writing, the New
York State inspector general has yet to complete its investiga¬
tion of the Parker affair, although it has been twenty months
since the investigation was ordered. The whistle-blower investi¬
gation was also still pending. The politics of the issue are too
dangerous for anyone in the New York State government or the
Department of the Air Force to move swiftly and courageously.
Who, after all, would want to risk his career standing up for a
handful of successful, upstanding white males?
Whatever the results of the two investigations, the 174th
will never be the same. There is talk now of disbanding the unit
and closing the base. A highly effective combat unit has already
been destroyed. Millions of tax dollars invested in the training
of combat-experienced pilots has been lost. The faith of pilots

throughout the Air Guards in the organizations they serve has
been shaken. Once again, the integrity of senior military offi¬
cers has been impugned.
Maybe we were old and naive, but we actually thought we
could maintain standards,” says one former 174th pilot. Once
again the principal victims were not narrow-minded traditional¬
ists opposed viscerally and ideologically to the advancement of
women, but forward-thinking, fair-minded men willing to give
a competent woman a chance.
They just didn’t understand how things work in the real
world, how powerful sex is, how craven some men are, and how
spiteful and manipulative some women can be.
*
NV
Chapter 15
EXPOSING THE LIES
It will avail us little if the members of our

defeated force are all equal. History will treat us
for what we were: a social curiosity that failed.
—PROFESSOR RICHARD A. GABRIEL

ST. ANSELM'S COLLEGE
IN THE WAKE OF THE ABERDEEN SCANDAL, The New

Republic, a venerable magazine of neoliberal opinion, pub¬
lished a cover story by Stephanie Gutmann entitled “Sex and
the Soldier.” Under a previous editor who was an avowed
homosexual, The New Republic had endorsed not only women
in combat but gays in the military. With Gutmann s cover story,
the magazine executed a surprising about face.
“Sex and the Soldier” took a wry look at the various prob¬
lems afflicting the integrated military—the lack of physical
strength among women, the double standards, the softening of
co-ed training, the persistent problems with fraternization and
harassment, the pregnancy and nondeployability, the resent¬
ment and hostility of men, the contradictions inherent in offi¬
cial policy, and the ideological silliness and dishonesty of senior
leaders. The outlook, overall, was not good:
In a military that is dedicated to the full integration oj women,

and to paperii^ over the implications of that integration as
best it can, sex and sexual difference will continue to be a dis¬
ruptive force. And regulating sex will become an ever more
important military sideline, one whose full costs in money,
labor and morale we will not really know until the forces are
called on to do what they are assembled to do: fight.1
Gutmann stopped just short of calling for a return to an all-male

military. She wrote not one word of praise for women in the
military, made no specious distinction between combat and
noncombat, and conceded no military role for women even in
the most limited sense.
No doubt because she was a woman writing in The New
Republic, Gutmann inspired a bout of soul-searching among
the self-appointed guardians of the nation s conscience. After a
few weeks filled with more revelations, acquittals, and convic¬
tions, Richard Cohen of the Washington Post finally spoke up.
“Whatever comes out of the Aberdeen mess ought not be pre¬
ordained by an ideological commitment to the status quo,” he
wrote. Comparing his own experience in the Army with the new
reality described by Gutmann, Cohen concluded, “In some
ways, the military has become the most politically correct insti¬
tution in the country. The question is whether that has affected
its fighting ability.” He wrote:
[The military is] not the place where an ideology, unproved

no matter how worthy, should be imposed so that the rest of
society will follow.... [It is possible] the [Aberdeen] scandal
is a warning to both the brass and the civilian leadership
that they are attempting the impossible—a fight not against
a few bad men but against a more formidable foe: human
nature.2 .
Cohen was having second thoughts about feminist assur¬

ances of success in the military, and he was not alone. Even
EXPOSING THE LIES • 335
members of Congress began speaking up with uncharacteristic

forthrightness. At the outbreak of the Aberdeen scandal,
Congressman Robert Livingston of Louisiana said on Good
Morning America-.
There were 70 pregnancies in the last yerfr in Bosnia; some

500 women a year get pregnant on ships. And then you
have all these incidents of rapes, which no one can defend.
The point is that we’ve gone to a unisex environment. We
expect young men and women to live together in the mili¬
tary without any distinction between the sexes. And we’ve
lost all common sensed
On the floor of the Senate, Democratic Senator Robert Byrd of

West Virginia declared, “I think the scandals which we are see¬
ing... must be taken as a danger sign that sexual integration
complicates an Army’s fighting capabilities.” In the House,
Congressman Roscoe Bartlett of Maryland proposed a bill that
would have forced the services to resegregate basic training,
ostensibly to protect young, impressionable female recruits
from predatory drill sergeants. The bill would not have pro¬
tected the women at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, which is not
a basic training post, neither would it have made an appreciable
difference in the overall problem, but it would at least have
been a step in the right direction, which Congress had been
unwilling even to consider in the previous years.
Before long, doubting the success of integration was no
longer forbidden. In April 1997 Anna Simons, a female assistant
professor of anthropology at UCLA, defended the exclusion of
women from combat units in the New York Times on the
grounds that women would inhibit “male bonding” and unit
cohesiveness.4 Later, in June, The New Republic ran another
article decrying the injustice of the Aberdeen trials, this time by
Hanna Rosin. That sameinonth, Edward Luttwak, senior fel¬
low of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told
the New York Times Magazine:
So long as men and women are in the Army together, lines

of poiver will get entangled with sexual lines. The attempt to
prevent this is ndiculous. It’s a fantasy, not to mention a
grotesque puritanical hypocrisy. The Army can’t do some¬
thing that eluded the Franciscans. It can’t run a mixed
monasteryA
And Jonathan Steinberg, an American historian at Cambridge

University, lamented the imreasonableness of the American
demand for a type of social justice not shared by the rest of the
Vorld. He told the Times, “We’re utopian perfectionists. If
we’re going to have gender equality, we’re damn well going to
have it all the way.”
Some feminists seemed to realize the hopelessness of their
cause, the frustrating elusiveness of success at actually integrat¬
ing men and women on an equal footing anywhere without con¬
tinuing conflict. “The more men and women blend, the more
we clash. The more we talk to each other, the less we under¬
stand each other,” despaired the Washington Post’s Maureen
Dowd. Linda Bird Francke, author of the recently published
book Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the Military, sadly
admits the irreconciliable differences between feminism and
the male military culture, and declines even to suggest how to
combine the two. “The resistance to women will not go away
because it can’t,” she writes. “Instead of drawing the genders
together, the dynamics of work in the military culture often
force them apart.”6
By and large, though, feminists stuck with their familiar ali¬
bis. Senator Olympia Snowe, a Maine Republican, called
Cohen’s column “uninformed and inaccurate,” then ventured
the outdated argument that women are “absolutely essential to
meeting the force requirements under the current voluntary
service system.” At the high point of Kelly Flinns popularity, the
Washington Post spoke up in defense of sexual licentiousness,
condemning the military for its “unrealistic” demands that ser¬
vice members eschew fraternization and adultery. (The military
♦
has no regulation against fornication.) “This dilemma isn’t really

about women in the military, though it’s often presented that
way,” the Post protested. “It’s about drafting the rules so that
expectations are relevant to the essential functioning and well¬
being of the organization....” It was another outdated argument:
that the right rules, the right policies, the right words on paper
would bring the whole of human nature under control.
Less abashed feminists continued to blame everything on
the masculine nature of the military itself. Of the Aberdeen
scandal, NOW’s Karen Johnson, a retired Air Force officer, told
the Baltimore Sun, “They cannot get a _
handle on this problem because of a
The ideology of “equal
military culture that is macho, that uses
women as sexual objects.” opportunity” trumps our
About the same time as the military needs and our

Gutmann article, The Weekly Standard, national security.
a neoconservative version of The New _
Republic, published a cover story by
James Webb entitled “The War on the Military Culture,” which
received rave reviews in conservative circles, usually timid on
issues involving women. Webb’s thesis was that the military was
being destroyed by its ideological enemies, who were “actively
interested in undoing the military’s historic culture,” not princi¬
pally to provide more opportunity for women, but to annihilate
a power structure that oppresses civilian society. The drive for
equal opportunity for both women and homosexuals was merely
a means to an end, a way to subvert the military from within.
The principal butt of Webb’s logic was Madeline Morris,
professor of law at Duke University, appointed to the Army’s
Senior Review Panel on Sexual Harassment by Army Secretary'
Togo D. West, Jr. Morris had served as a “special consultant” to
West since publishing a 130-page treatise in the Duke Law
Journal entitled “By Force of Arms: Rape, War, and Military
Culture,” in February 1996. In this work, Morris focused on the
“rape differential.” Its seems that crime rates are lower in the
military for everything except rape. This suggested to Morris
that something in the “masculinist military construct” enhanced

the “rape propensity” of male service members. She wrote,
“The socialization^ the hypermasculine male may script him
to overvalue a definition of masculinity as tough and unfeeling,
violent and exploitative of women.” According to Morris, the
services had reason to fear that a “critical mass of potential
rapists” could cause periodic outbreaks of violence against
women. She concluded, “there is much to be gained and little
to be lost by changing this aspect of military culture from a mas-
culinist vision of unalloyed aggressivity to an ungendered
yision....”
When Morris’s ideas became known. Secretary West
attempted to dissociate himself from her, but there was nothing
unusual about Morris’s thesis, nothing that the Army and the
other services had not already succumbed to many years ago.
Feminists have long blamed the services for “the encourage¬
ment of a ‘macho’ male image” which supposedly contributes to
the problem of sexual harassment,7 and they have always
insisted that masculinity is an accidental characteristic of mili¬
tary service, not essential to the military’s mission. As early as
1979, a West Point study group on the integration of women
was arguing:
There is nothing inherent in what the Army does that must

be done in a masculine way; therefore, women must be
offered the opportunity to be feminine and nothing should
be done to deny women opportunities to be feminine.8
The actual experience of women in the military has proved

otherwise—those who are most masculine are most successful
leading men, and those who retain their femininity receive the
least respect. “People just don’t give you commands [of units]
when you’re pregnant,” complained a female West Point grad¬
uate. “They want you in the staff someplace.”9
Feminists, nevertheless, have always insisted that the attri¬
butes of a leader are neither masculine nor feminine, that
virtues traditionally considered masculine or feminine can be

found in both sexes, and that the military should look for an
androgynous or “ungendered” model of leadership not based
upon the ubiquitous male model. Some feminists, indeed, hold
androgyny to be the ideal for both sexes. They seek to make the
words masculine and feminine meaningless, except in reference
to genitalia. Most feminists, however, being women, continue to
favor traditionally feminine characteristics.
Attempts by the services to reconcile a masculine military
and a feminist philosophy have produced strange results. Service
women here and there have become somewhat more masculine,
but in general the military has been thoroughly feminized. The
modem military has trivialized combat as incidental to military
service and relegated readiness to secondary status behind the
more pressing concern for equal opportunity. The dictum “every
Marine, a rifleman” is no longer tme. The Army’s Basic Combat
Training is now just Basic Training, with many of the more rig¬
orous drills gone and self-esteem more important than physical
fitness. The Army, after all, is a “caring” organization:
We want soldiers, of all ranks, feeling they belong to a “fam¬

ily”. ... Building the “family” requires a professional sensi¬
tivity toward and caring for one another.... We want these
professional, caring relationships because they are necessary
to build the vertical bonds which tie leader to led.10
In 1986 the Army published a definition of the “warrior

spirit” that said nothing about combativeness, aggressiveness,
an eagerness to fight, a willingness to die, or the courage to kill.
Instead, even under Reagan, soldiers were told that military val¬
ues mirrored “the ethic of our people which denies any
assertive national power doctrine and projects a love and mercy
to all.”11 The military existed to protect the “supremacy of the
individual” and therefore needed leaders “who embrace a value
system that places the individual soldier and citizen at the cen¬
ter of society.”12
Such nonsense preceded Morris by more than a decade.

During that time, the revolutionaries intent upon destroying
the military have^poken more and more boldly. Their leading
critics meanwhile have marshalled arguments only against the
lost cause of women in combat, conceding the good of having
women everywhere else in the military. Never mind that every
single argument, against women in combat roles can also be
made against women in so-called noncombat roles. Never mind
that the distinction between combat and noncombat is entirely
arbitrary, that it existed only to provide a place for women, and
''that it served only to expand their participation continually.
Never mind the fundamental absurdity of a “noncombat mili¬
tary” that requires discipline, efficiency, and optimum effec¬
tiveness only of its withered combat arm.
No one, it seems, is courageous enough to approach the
issue of women in the military as one would any other issue,
analyzing it with cold rationality in the simple terms of costs
versus benefits. The problem, of course, with weighing the
pluses and minuses of using women in the military is that there
are too many minuses. A partial list would include higher rates
of attrition, greater need for medical care, higher rates of non¬
availability, lower rates of deployability, lesser physical ability,
aggravated problems of single-parenthood, dual-service mar¬
riages, fraternization, sexual harassment, sexual promiscuity,
and homosexuality, all of which adversely affect unit cohesion,
morale, and the fighting spirit of the armed forces.
Against these many disadvantages, women offer the mili¬
tary one single advantage: they are better behaved. They lose
less time for disciplinary reasons and are less prone to drug and
alcohol abuse. And even this is not true for the Air Force, where
men are as well behaved as women.
From a strict cost-benefit standpoint, the military use of
women makes sense for only a handful of jobs, largely in the
medical professions, where the military’s need for doctors,
nurses, and medical specialists well outweighs any difficulty of
using women. For all other military jobs, the only reason to use
women is not a military reason. It is a political reason driven by

an ideology that is hostile to the military, according to which the
advancement of women, under the euphemism of “equal
opportunity,” trumps the needs of the military and the cause of
national defense.
With all the accumulated evidence of the past quarter of a
century, the nation s top military leaders have no excuse for pre¬
tending that the presence of women in the military has been for
the good of the armed forces. Initially they went along with this
ruse for fear that without women the all-volunteer armed forces
would not be able to meet its requirements. It is debatable
whether this was ever true. The All- _
Volunteer Force was never allowed to
Women are no longer
work without women. At the start, its
architects resorted to greater use of needed in the military,
women without considering the possibil¬ and their presence is

ity that an all-male military, with its dis¬ destroying the military’s
tinctly masculine appeal, might attract
body and soul.
more young men than a more feminine
force.
Now, however, with a military that is a full 30 percent
smaller than it was ten years ago (down from 2.1 million
members in 1988 to 1.5 million members at the end of 1996),
no one can seriously argue that the military must recruit
women to make up for the lack of men. During the drastic
downsizing of the post-Cold War age, the military was forced to
go easy on women and expand their percentage in the ranks
(from 10.3 to 13.5), while simultaneously discharging many
good men, many of them involuntarily and some just prior to
retirement.
The simple facts are that women are no longer needed in
the military and their expanding presence is destroying the mil¬
itary’s body and soul. Without doubt the worst effect of integra¬
tion on the armed forces is “the general retreat of honor and
integrity” prophesied in Weak Link, my first book on this sub¬
ject. The widely known but unaccepted truth is that most of
what our senior civilian and military leaders tell us about

women in the military is a lie.
It is a lie thdiSmilitary women are meeting the same stan¬
dards as men. The truth is that women enjoy preference and
protection in a variety of forms. Nowhere are women required
to meet the same physical standards as men, and nowhere are
women subjected to the military’s sternest trials of mind and
body that many men face. Promotions and assignments are gov¬
erned by quotas, theoretically illegal but nevertheless univer¬
sally used and never admitted. Pregnancy remains the only
v “temporary disability” that gives a service member the option of
breaking a service contract without penalty. It is also the only
disability for wljich service members cannot be punished for
deliberately inflicting upon themselves. Applying the same
standards to men and women has repeatedly proved to be
impossible, for it conflicts with the overriding political and ide¬
ological interest in advancing women over men.
It is a lie that the presence of women has had only a posi¬
tive effect on military readiness. The truth is that the overall
effect of integration has been a general softening of military ser¬
vice. Conditions and performance requirements that aggravate
attrition among women and expose their limited abilities have
been systematically eliminated. The “LaBarge Touch,” with its
myopic focus on getting recruits through training instead of
preparing them for wartime service, has cheated the field and
fleet of the highly trained and capable manpower needed to
fight and win. The modem military’s emphasis on self-esteem
and “positive motivation,” inspired by the need to protect
women from the harshness of military life, has led the military
to an excessive reliance upon leadership and a potentially fatal
neglect of discipline.
It is a lie that the victimization of women is a product of a
patriarchal culture that distinguishes male from female and
orders them appropriately. The truth is that women are most
victimized where they are most liberated. It is the modem
world that sets the sexes at odds, that teaches boys to muscle
girls on the court and on the field, that forces men to see
women only as competitors and opponents. In the patriarchal
world of old, the strong were obliged to serve the weak. Men
and women strove to be gentlemen and ladies. Men were
taught to protect women, to bear a woman’s burdens, and to
watch their language in her presence. Chivalry honored women
with care and safety if not with freedom" at least not the free¬
dom to be men. Today, women are free to live as coarsely and
as brutally as men, while men are “desensitized” to the suffer¬
ing of women in training. Yet, somehow, when women discern
the slightest offense, the old ways are always to blame.
These are the lies that our military today lives by. These are
the lies that our officers force upon their subordinates with
Soviet slavishness. From the top down, the example to follow is
one of cowardly, self-protective deceit.
Duty in the American military means doing as one is told.
Obedience to civilian control is the supreme law. Defying that
control, even publicly protesting it, is unthinkable. The
American military has no tradition of honorable dissent, of
standing upon principle against official policy. Its officers do not
fall on their swords for anything. The lessons they learn early in
their careers are “get with the program,” be a “team player,” “go
along to get along,” “cooperate and graduate.” They follow
orders even if it means acting contrary to conscience, even if it
means saying things in public that they do not personally
believe, even if it means punishing the innocent and rewarding
the undeserving.
The feminization of the American military is no longer a
story of reluctant admirals and generals forced to do things
against their better judgment by unsympathetic politicians.
After more than two decades of political correctness, the mili¬
tary men and women who have survived to become today’s
admirals and generals are themselves either true believers in
the military’s unmaking or unprincipled opportunists who
enthusiastically persecute the men under them to protect and
advance their own careers, who will not put their stars on the
table to see justice done and the defense of the nation assured.
Sworn to defend the Constitution, they in fact defend nothing
but the status qi$», the powers that be, the corrupt regime of
which they are a part. They believe in nothing else. They know
no other god. They serve only themselves and their careers.
The single greatest lesson of the late twentieth century is
that lies so contrary to nature cannot live forever. Half of the
world once lived under communism until, finally, that lie lost its
power. Without terror to njaintain it, it became a joke, and then
it died.
In the second thoughts and open doubts lately expressed in
odd comers, we may be seeing the lie of integration turning
into a joke. Let us hope the joke spreads before the American
military is reduced to a cowardly and corrupt institution, a high-
tech danger to free peoples at home and abroad.
Appendix
TESTIMONY OF BRIAN MITCHELL
Before the Presidential Commission on the Assignment
of Women in the Armed Forces
MAY 4, 1992
I’D LIKE TO THANK the Commission and its staff for inviting
me here today. I certainly hope I can assist the Commission in
making sense of the issue.
There are just two ways to see this issue, and two sides to
take in the debate. One side believes that men and women are
fundamentally different and will always remain so; the other
side believes that men and women are pretty much the same
and that their differences are either insignificant or eradicable.
One side wants society to remain much as we have always
known it; the other wants revolutionary change, with an utterly
androgynous society as a result.
The one side generally argues against expanding the role of
women in the military on the basis of military effectiveness; the
other side argues for expanding the role of women in the mili¬
tary in the interest of equal opportunity.
Those are our choices, but before choosing sides, lets get
one thing straight: The latter choice is not really for equal
opportunity, but merely for opportunities for some women. It’s
not equal opportunity when the services are forced to pay more
346 • APPENDIX
to employ women—more for medical care, for higher attrition

rates, and for lower rates of availability. It’s not equal opportu¬
nity when stand^ds are “gender-normed” to get women into
jobs for which they are otherwise unqualified. Its not equal
opportunity when quotas are used in promotions and assign¬
ments to advance and protect women against men.
If you have any doubt about the use of illegal quotas by the
military, I recommend to you two articles, one of which
appeared last January in% Army Times, the other of which
appeared last year in Military Law Review. As a result of these
v two articles, a lawyer here in town-—a former head of the Army
Judge Advocate Generals very own litigation division—is now
preparing a class-action lawsuit charging the Army with dis¬
crimination against literally tens of thousands of servicemen
because of their race and gender.
No, the policy that we have today in the military is not equal
opportunity, but deliberately unequal opportunity. That’s what
the revolutionaries demand and that’s what the military is giv¬
ing them.
It will surprise no one that I reject this injustice and the
arguments used to advance it. I reject the notion that the dif¬
ferences between men and women are insignificant. The evi¬
dence is plain and plentiful that they are not. I also reject the
notion that there exists some overriding moral imperative that
requires us to provide a place for women in the military, regard¬
less of the differences. No God that I know requires it. Even
our Constitution, which some (for their own purposes) would
make a god, requires no such thing.
We don’t owe anyone a military career. Everyone serves as
he is needed, to be dismissed when he is needed no longer.
That is what it means to serve. To obligate the military to
employ certain people is to make the military the servant of its
members, a complete reversal of the natural relationship
between the service and the serviceman.
I also reject the canard that ties full citizenship to military
service. Citizenship has never depended upon military service.
TESTIMONY OF BRIAN MITCHELL • 347
Our military today includes many members who are not citi¬
zens, and the vast majority of our voting public are not veterans.
Our nonveterans include the present secretary of defense and
several major presidential candidates.
We do have a moral imperative to obey in this business, but
it is to provide for the best defense of the nation. Military effec¬
tiveness, with few exceptions, should therefore be our only con¬
cern. The question we must ask ourselves repeatedly is: Does a
policy enhance or degrade the ability of the military to fulfill its
purpose?
In answering diis question, I recommend that we avoid all
debate on the issue of combat versus noncombat. It is a great
waste of words. The distinction between combat and noncom¬
bat is purely descriptive and never definitive. The only reason it
is made at all is to say where women may serve or where they
may not serve. The line between the two is always drawn arbi¬
trarily. Even the Army’s elaborate combat probability coding is
nothing more than a pseudo-scientific disguise for arbitrariness.
The services are, in toto, combat organizations. They exist to
do combat. Anything that degrades their efficiency or readiness,
degrades their ability to do combat. Support units that operate
less efficiently hinder the operation of the units they support.
Resources expended to accommodate women in support units
are resources that could have been used to enlarge combat capa¬
bility. Our approach to the military use of women must therefore
be comprehensive. We must consider all things, every inconve¬
nient item that bears upon the military’s overall effectiveness.
Very often the revolutionaries will attempt to limit the
debate to the ability to do the job, ignoring every other consid¬
eration. If a woman can “do the job,” they argue, the military
should then spare no expense to allow her to do it. Notice, how¬
ever, that this is an appeal to ideology—to the notion that we
owe qualified women a place in the military. There is no mili¬
tary reason why our debate should be so limited.
Often the same people will point to similarities between men
and women and invite us to marvel at how much alike the sexes
348 • APPENDIX
are, and at how much women can accomplish when given the
chance. This is nothing but a ploy to divert our attention from the
very real differences between the sexes. And the differences are
all that matter. The similarities are of no account. When we
weigh the relative merits of using men and women in the military,
the similarities are neutral. They tell us nothing we need to know,
except that we must look elsewhere for the differences.
To avoid such distractions, I suggest re-phrasing our ques¬
tion in terms of substitution: if we substitute a woman for a
man, will the military be helped or hindered?
The present draw-down in forces has made answering this
question much easier by eliminating completely the argument
that women are Deeded, despite their disadvantages, “to make
the All-Volunteer Force work.” Today we can get all the men we
need. The question of whether to employ women instead of
men is therefore reduced to a simple matter of advantages ver¬
sus disadvantages.
The disadvantages of substituting women for men are
many. I will name just a few, without argument:
■ higher rates of attrition

■ greater need for medical care
■ higher rates of nonavailability
■ lower rates of deployability
■ lesser physical ability
I would add to this list a number of problems that are aggra¬

vated if not caused by substituting women for men:
■ single-parenthood
■ in-service marriages
■ fraternization
■ sexual harassment
■ sexual promiscuity
■ homosexuality
TESTIMONY OF BRIAN MITCHELL • 349
A few disadvantages are harder to observe and measure, but

should not be discounted. They include the deleterious effects of
the presence of women on unit cohesion, the fighting spirit, and
loyalty and respect that servicemen feel toward their service.
Don’t be misled by the services’ claims to have solved this
or that problem. Most of their solutions merely involve shifting
the burden of the problem from one account to another. The
military “solves” the problem of the greater need for medical
care among women by hiring more gynecologists and obstetri¬
cians. It “solves” the problem of separating mothers from their
children during wartime by granting servicewomen deferments
from war. The bottom line of such solutions is inevitably
increased costs and decreased readiness.
Even drastic solutions, such as discharging women who
become mothers or single parents, are really no solution at all,
because they would greatly aggravate attrition rates, thereby
reducing the military’s return on its recruitment and training
investment. As attrition goes up, the justification for recruiting
women goes down. The only way to truly solve these problems
is to not recruit women.
What of the advantages of using women? There is only one:
women are better behaved than men. They miss less time for
disciplinary reasons and are less prone to drug and alcohol
abuse. This is much less of an advantage today than it once was.
As the Defense Department will tell you, proudly, drug and
alcohol abuse and disciplinary problems aren’t nearly as bad
today as they were in the late 1970s. They should be even less
of a problem in the 1990s, as the shrinking military becomes
more choosy about whom it recruits. At present, I hardly think
this one advantage outweighs the many disadvantages.
I’ll say again that the ability of many women to perform
many military jobs just as well as men is not an advantage. It is
not a reason to replace a man with a woman. It becomes an
advantage only when the woman can perform the job much bet¬
ter than the man. It becomes a reason to replace the man only
350 • APPENDIX
if the womans performance is so much better that it outweighs

all of the disadvantages of employing women.
Following mj|dine of reasoning, one would have to con¬
clude that the service in which it makes the least sense to
employ women is, surprisingly, the Air Force. Why? Because
Air Force enlisted men are much better behaved than enlisted
men in the other services, so that women present only disad¬
vantages to the Air Force, no advantages. At least two Air Force
studies have documented these disadvantages, and one of those
went so far as to conclude that increasing the number of women
Nin the Air Force necessitates significantly increasing the Air
Forces end strength and personnel budget.
Is there a place at all for women in the military? There is,
in fact, even if ones only concern is the good of the military.
Women are desperately needed as military doctors and nurses,
for the very reason that the military cannot get enough doctors
and nurses, male or female, as it is. There maybe other jobs for
which the need justifies the cost. Those jobs ought to be open
to women.
For all other jobs, however, we must admit that there are
simply no compelling military reasons to fill them with women
instead of men. “This is a hard saying. Who can bear it?” And
yet simple logic forces us to that conclusion. Any other answer,
any attempt to “balance” the interests of military effectiveness
and opportunities for women, is a compromise and a sure sac¬
rifice of national security to an unworthy end.
Of course, many will say that only a compromise is politi¬
cally possible. In response, I would say that if the American
people want a qompromise, then they should be fully informed
of the seriousness of the sacrifice. So far, they have been fed a
line about how the inclusion of large numbers of women in the
military doesn’t degrade readiness in the least. If this commis¬
sion does nothing else, it should set the record straight and give
the American people an honest choice.
NOTES
NOTES ON THE INTRODUCTION

1. Rowan Scarborough, “Top Army woman: Marines ‘extremist,”’
Washington Times, November 13, 1997.
2. Sandra L. Beckwith, “Teaching Women to Soldier: The
LaBarge Touch,” Army, March 1982, 44.
3. Paul Richter, “Boot Camp Kicks Its Harsh Image,” Los Angeles
Times, October 26, 1997.
4. Jackie Spinner, “The New Drill Sergeant,” Washington Post,
August 14, 1997.
5. An analysis of the historical use of women by the militaries of
countries other than the United States is beyond the scope of this
book. For more on Israel, see Chapter 9.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 1
1. U.S. Marine Corps, History and Museums Division, “The
Legend of Lucy Brewer,” 1957. This report lists a number of objec¬
tions to Lucy’s claim, the only basis for which is a series of pamphlets
Lucy wrote and published after the war. Among the report’s objec¬
tions: the similarity between some of Lucy’s accounts of the
Constitution’s naval engagements and contemporary newspaper
reports; the unlikelihood that Lucy, as an inexperienced marksman,
would have been assigned as a sharpshooter in “the fighting tops,” as
she claimed she was; her accounts’ overabundance of technical detail,
of which a Marine at his pqst in the topsails would have had no knowl¬
edge; and the fact that Marine Corps regulations at the time required
all Marine recruits to strip, bathe, and don a Marine uniform in the
352 • NOTES
presence of their commander, who would have been derelict in his

duties not to ascertain the physical condition of the men in his charge.
Among those who have perpetuated the myth of “the first girl Marine”
are Martin Binkin and Shirley Bach in Women and the Military
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1977), 5, and Jeanne Holm
in Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution (Novato, Calif.:
Presidio Press, 1982), 3.
2. WAC strength peaked at 99,000 in April 1945. The WAVES,
SPARS, and Women Marines peaked in September 1945 with 83,000.
The remainder of the 266,000 were Army and Navy nurses.
3. Robert R. Palmer el ah, The Procurement and Training of
Ground Combat Troops (Washington, D.C.: Historical Division,
v Department of the Army, 1948), 41. Between August and November
1943, the Army alone discharged 55,000 men as ineligible for overseas
assignment because of such things as missing teeth, hernia, perforated
eardrums, and excessive nervousness.
4. Palmer, 212.
5. U.S. Navy, Bureau of Naval Personnel, “History of the
Womens Reserve,” an unpublished draft manuscript produced in
1946, 153. Navy units, particularly medical units, reported that men
bore up much better under the strain of being overworked, while
women suffered inordinate rates of stress-related breakdown working
the same hours as the men.
6. Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women’s Army Corps (Washington,
D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army,
1954), 711-712. Treadwell, herself a WAC veteran, produced this thor¬
ough history of both the successes and failures of the WAC nine years
after the war’s end. The Navy’s unpublished history of the WAVES was
written within the first year after V-J day and is entirely too self-
congratulatory to give an adequate appraisal of the WAVES s record.
7. Treadwell, 460.
8. Quoted by Holm, 159.
10. Officers- of all services hold pay grades numbered 1 to 10 in
increasing seniority. Each grade has a corresponding rank, though
ranks vary depending upon the service. An 0-3 in the Army is a cap¬
tain, but a captain in the Navy is an 0-6. An 0-6 in the Army, Air
Force, and Marines is a colonel. Admirals and generals are 0-7s, 8s,
9s, or 10s and are often called flag officers.
11. Flag officers are still sometimes asked to take reductions in
rank to accept certain positions. When General Andrew J. Goodpaster
took over as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West
NOTES • 353
Point, he accepted a reduction to lieutenant general, the highest rank

authorized for the superintendency. Prior to 1967 the womens com¬
ponents were, in a sense, miniature armies. The system for managing
womens promotions and assignments therefore resembled the way
promotions and assignments are managed by smaller foreign armies,
in which an officer must resign, retire, or die before another can move
UP- ^
12. Holm, 199.
13. Margaret Eastman, “DACOWITS: A Nice Little Group That
Doesn’t Do Very Much,” Army Times, Family Supplement, March 15,
1972, 11.
14. Thomas D. Morris, assistant secretary of defense for man¬
power. Statement before the House Armed Services Committee on a
proposal to remove restrictions on female officer promotions.
15. The same House report admitted: “It is recognized that a
male officer in arriving at the point where he may be considered for
general and flag rank passes through a crucible to which the woman
officer is not subjected—such as combat, long tours at sea, and other
dangers and isolations.”
16. Holm, 197.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 2
1. National Advisory Commission on Selective Service, In
Pursuit of Equity: Who Serves When Not All Serve? (Washington,
D.C.: GPO, 1967).
2. Richard M. Nixon, “The All-Volunteer Armed Force,” address
given over the CBS Radio Network on Thursday, October 17, 1968.
3. Presidents Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force, The
Report of the President’s Commission on an All-Volunteer Armed Force
(New York: The MacMillan Company, 1970).
4. U.S. Comptroller General, Additional Cost of the All-
Volunteer Force (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1978), ii.
5. Congress and the Nation (Washington, D.C.: Congressional
Quarterly, Inc., 1973), III, 510. In arguing against exemptions from
combat, Bayh minimized the likelihood of just what he was arguing
for, a common tactic among radical reformers. He said, “There is an
extremely small likelihood that any [women] will really reach combat
service.”
6. Among them were Senators Howard Baker of Tennessee and
Robert Dole of Kansas. The defeat of the military service exemptions
made the ERA unacceptable to more Americans.
354 • NOTES
7. Report 92-51 of the Special Subcommittee on the Utilization

of Manpower in the Military.
8. Central ^1-Volunteer Task Force, Utilization of Military
Women (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1972).
9. Martin Binkin and John D. Johnston, All-Volunteer Armed
Forces: Progress, Problems, and Prospects (Washington, D.C.: GPO,
1973), 3.
10. Martin Binkin and Shirley Bach, Women and the Military
(Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1977).
11. Frontiero v. Richardson, 36 L.Ed. 2d 583 (U.S. Supreme Ct.
1973). Noting that the Equal Rights Amendment, then before the
states, would have accomplished the same effect as Brennan s charac-
v terization of sex as “inherently suspect,” Powell argued that “the Court
has assumed a decisional responsibility at the very time when state
legislatures, functioning within the traditional democratic process, are
debating the proposed Amendment.” Brennan’s opinion therefore did
not show the proper “respect for duly prescribed legislative
processes.”
Rehnquist agreed with the District Court’s ruling that the military'
would have required all members to prove dependency of a spouse, as
it required all members to prove dependency of other adults, if that
were administratively feasible. Because it was not, the military was
simply trying to curb the excess of benefits on the basis of probability.
It was highly probable that the wives of servicemen were in fact
dependent upon their husbands for primary support, but it was
unlikely that the husbands of servicewomen were primarily supported
by their waves. Probability, not sex, therefore, was the determining
factor. See Frontiero v. Laird, 341 Federal Supplement 201 (U.S.
Dist. Ct. 1972).
12. “Sex Equality: Impact of a Key Decision,” U.S. News It World
Report, May 28, 1973, 69.
13. Schlesinger v. Rallard, 42 L.Ed. 2d 610.
14. Heberts first claim to fame was as city editor of the New
Orleans Times-Picayune when the paper broke the Huey Long scan¬
dals in 1939.
15. Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services,
“Recommendations made at the 1974 Spring Meeting,” April 25,
1974, 2.
16. Albert P. Clark, “Women at the Service Academies and
Combat Leadership,” Strategic Review, Fall 1977, 67.
NOTES • 355
17. Hearings before the House Armed Services Committee, 94th

Congress, “Eliminate Discrimination Based on Sex for Admission to the
Five Federal Service Academics” (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1974), 165.
18. Ibid, 137.
19. Ibid, 256.
20. Ibid, 265.
21. Judith Hicks Stiehm, Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated.
Change at the U.S. Air Force Academy (Berkeley, Calif.: University of
California Press, 1981), 38.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 3
1. The rumor that “Bring Me Men” was later removed is not true.
2. Office of Institutional Research, “Women in the Classes
1980-1990: The First Decade” (Colorado Springs, Colo.: U.S. Air
Force Academy, September 1986). The Air Force Academy Class of
1986 was the only other class where male attrition exceeded female
attrition, 35.9 percent to 32.1 percent. It was also the only other acad¬
emy class where the female rate was below 40 percent. The only
classes with male rates above 40 percent were 1980 and 1982, with
44.4 and 42.3 percent, respectively.
3. Judith Hicks Stiehm, Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated
4. At the time, only 5 percent of Air Force officers were women,
but expecting a higher rate of attrition among female cadets and an
increased requirement for women officers in the future, the Air Force
decided that 11 percent of the Class of 1980 would be female.
5. Lois B. DeFleur, Dickie Harris, and Christine Mattley,
“Career, Marriage and Family Orientations of Future Air Force
Officers,” 20. DeFleur and William Marshak, “Changing Attitudes
Toward Womens Roles and Women in the Military at the U.S. Air
Force Academy,” 13.
6. Lois B. DeFleur, Frank Woods, Dick Harris, David Gillman,
and William Marshak, Four Years of Sex Integration at the United
States Air Force Academy: Problems and Issues (Colorado Springs,
Colo.: U.S. Air Force Academy, August 1985), 168.
7. One might extend this analysis to the entire experience at the
academy BCT would be the rite of separation, four years of education
and training would serve as the rite of transition, and the rite of incorpo¬
ration would be the commissioning of new Air Force second lieutenants.
8. Lois B. DeFleur, David Gillman, and William Marshak, “The
Development of Military Professionalism Among Male and Female
356 • NOTES
Air Force Academy Cadets,” 168. Upon entry, cadets were given phys¬
ical aptitude tests. Males averaged eleven pull-ups. Females averaged
24.1 seconds of tlm “flexed arm hang.”
9. Lois B. DeFleur, David Gillman, and William Marshak, “Sex
Integration of the U.S. Air Force Academy: Changing Roles for
Women,” Armed Forces and Society, August 1978, 615.
10. David Gillman and William Marshak, “The Integration of
Women into a Male Initiation Rite: A Case Study of the USAF
Academy,” 16.
11. Ibid, 15.
12. Ibid, 18, 23.
13. Four Years of Sex Integration at the United States Air Force
n Academy: Problems and Issues, 168.
14. Stiehm, 264.
15. Four Years of Sex Integration at the United States Air Force
Academy: Problems and Issues, 167.
16. This particular cadet finished her academic exams for the year
but did not participate in “Hell Week,” a final week of harassment
before doolies became third-classmen. Hell Week was traditionally
the week before final exams, but for the Class of 1980 it was the week
after exams, a variation intended to ensure that the stress of Hell
Week did not interfere with the women’s performance on final exams.
17. Stiehm, 83.
18. Quoted by Stiehm, 257-259. In a 1988 interview, Allen said
integration “went very well” and cited as proof the praise the Air
Force Academy received from Congress, the press, and the Carter
administration. He insisted that male and female cadets were held to
the same standards, which were merely “applied differently.”
19. Lois B. DeFleur and William Marshak, “Changing Attitudes
Towards Womens Roles and Women in the Military at the U.S. Air
Force Academy,” 13.
20. “Air Force Academy Has Inevitable First—Pregnant Cadet
Quits,” Denver Post, March 11, 1977, 3.
21. “So Far, So Good: A Report Card on Coeducational Military
Academies,” U.S. News 6- World Report, July 11, 1977, 30.
22. “Female Cadets: a rough start,” Science News, September 15,
1979, 182.
23. With an actual male attrition rate of 44 percent, the Class of
1980 graduated 798 men and 97 women, for a total of 895. If the male
attrition rate had been 35 percent, the average rate of previous
classes, the Class of 1980 would have graduated 933 men alone. If the
NOTES • 357
number of women had stayed the same, the graduating strength

would have been 1,030.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 4
1. “So Far, So Good: A Report Card on Coeducational Military
Academies,” U.S. News 6- World Report, July 11,1977, 26. West Point
officials had been warned by female drill sergeants at Fort Knox,
Kentucky, and Fort McClellan, Alabama, that female recruits often
took advantage of male drill sergeants, who tended to treat them less
roughly than they treated the men.
2. Kathleen P. Durning, Women at the Naval Academy: The First
Year of Integration (San Diego, Calif.: Navy Personnel Research and
Development Center, 1978), 20.
3. Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership, Project
Athena: Report on the Admission of Women to the U.S. Military
Academy (West Point, N.Y.: U.S. Military Academy, June 1, 1979)
Vols. I-IV.
4. Helen Rogan, Mixed Company: Women in the Modem Army
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981), 199.
5. Lieutenant General Sidney B. Berry, “Women Cadets at West
Point,” Address to the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the
Services, Washington, D.C., November 16, 1976.
6. Project Athena, Vol. IV, 48.
7. Rear Admiral William P. Lawrence, letter published in The
Washingtonian, January 1980.
8. James H. Webb, Jr., “Women Can’t Fight,” The
Washingtonian, November 1979.
9. James Feron, “West Point ’78 Closing Book on Cheating ’76,”
the New York Times, June 5, 1978, D9. The General Order of Merit
was not so sinister as it was made out to be. The last man to graduate
in each class was honored as the “goat” at West Point, the “anchor¬
man” at the Annapolis, and “Tail End Charlie” at the Air Force
Academy. Tradition held that the last man received a dollar from each
of his classmates. Famous goats include George A. Custer, George E.
Pickett of “Pickett’s charge,” and one superintendent of the academy.
10. See John P. Lovell’s “Modernization and Growth of the
Service Academies: Some Organizational Consequences, in The
Changing World of the American Military, Franklin D. Margiotta, ed.
(Boulder, Colo.: Westview,JL978). Lovell says that prior to World War
II, the academies were essentially “military seminaries, run faithfully
as they had been since founding, with knowledge of the fourth-class
358 • NOTES
system passed from class to class. The growth of the military bureau¬
cracy in America forced the academies to codify their policies, taking
control of the clas^system out of the cadets’ hands and putting it into
the hands of the academy administrators.
11. Rogan, 188. Rogan says that Berry almost resigned rather
than accept the mission of integrating West Point. In an interview,
Berry said he might have mentioned resigning in an off-hand remark
but he never seriously considered it.
12. James A. Salter, “Its Not the Old Point,” Life, May 1980, 76.
Salter is a 1945 graduate of West Point.
13. Feron, ‘West Point *78 Closing Book on Cheating ’76.”
14. James Feron, “West Point Concedes Some Hazing Tactics
N Have Been ‘Sexist,’” New York Times, November 10, 1979, 25.
15. In the first case, the academy dropped the charges and allowed
the cadet to graduate with his class to avoid a court ruling that might
have had far-reaching effects on the cadet honor system. In the second
case, Alexander had first requested that Goodpaster simply review the
case before taking action. Gopdpaster did so and concurred with the
honor committee’s recommendation for dismissal. Alexander then
overruled Goodpaster’s determination on the basis of an unstated “col¬
lateral issue.” The cadet was reinstated with a lesser punishment.
16. Committee on the Integration of Women into the Cadet
Wing, “Recommendations: Report on the Integration of Women into
the Cadet Wing,” U.S. Air Force Academy, July 1984, 13-15. Oddly,
after months of interviews and surveys, the committee produced no
written findings, only thirty pages of recommendations.
Wing, 12-18, 27.
18. Salter, 76.
19. General Douglas A. MacArthur, “Duty, Honor, Country,”
Address to the Corps of Cadets of the United States Military Academy
on May 12, 1962.
20. Lawrence, 18.
21. Project Athena, Vol. Ill, 12.
22. Feron, “West Point ’78 Closing Book on Cheating ’76.”
Wing, 1.
24. Lois B. DeFleur, Frank Woods, Dick Harris, David Gillman,
and William Marshak, Four Years of Sex Integration at the United
States Air Force Academy: Problems & Issues (Colorado Springs,
Colo.: U.S. Air Force Academy, August 1985).
NOTES • 359

Wing, 23. The committee also recommended making miniature acad¬
emy class rings unavailable to anyone but female cadets. For decades,
miniatures have been given as engagement rings to fiancees and as
special gifts to mothers. The committee deemed this a devaluation of
identical rings worn by female graduates, but the academy rejected
the recommendation.
26. Jerome Adams, Project Proteus (West Point, N.Y.: U.S.
Military Academy, 1984), Vol. II, 3-19 and 3-20.
27. Esther B. Fein, “The Choice: Women Officers Decide to Stay
In or Leave,” Neiv York Times Magazine, May 5, 1985, 45.
28. Adams, 3-38.
29. C.H. “Max” Freedman, “Navy Valedictorian and Feminism
Stole Male Cadet’s Award,” New York Tribune, June 1, 1984, 2B.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 5
1. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Manpower,
Reserve Affairs, and Logistics, Use of Women in the Military
(Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, May 1977). Binkin and
Bach estimated saving as much as $6 billion annually.
(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1977).
Reserve Affairs, and Logistics, Background Review: Women in the
Military (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1981), 144.
4. Memorandum from the Commanding Officer, USS
Sanctuary, to the Chief of Naval Operations, “Evaluation of Women
Aboard the USS Sanctuary,” November 19, 1973, 13.
5. Final Report: Evaluation of Women in the Army (Ft. Ben.
Harrison, Ind.: Department of the Army, 1978), 1-18.
6. George Gilder, “The Case Against Women in Combat,” The
New York Times Magazine, January 28, 1979.
7. Quoted by Seth Cropsey in “The Military Manpower Crisis:
Women in Combat,” The Public Interest, Fall 1980, 66.
8. Hearings before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the
House Armed Services Committee, November 13-16, 1979 and
February 11, 1980, 232.
9. Hearings, 238.
10. The Coalition Against Drafting Women included, among oth¬
ers: Sen. Jesse Helms, Rep. Marjorie Holt, Rep. Richard Ichord,
Marine Corps Gen. Lewis W. Walt, Army Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham,
Army Maj. Gen. Henry Mohr, Army Maj. Gen. John K. Singlaub,
360 • NOTES
Rabbi Herman N. Neuberger, Dr. Bob Billings, Dr. Gregg Dixon, Dr.
Bill Pennell, the Rev. Jerry Falwell, and representatives of the
National Council Catholic Women, the American Security Council,
the Conservative Caucus, Young Americans for Freedom, Family
America, and the Moral Majority. All of the military men were retired.
11. Senators Sam Nunn, Jake Garn, Roger Jepsen, and John
Warner had led the fight against inclusion. Among those who voted to
register women were Senators John Glenn, Howard Metzenbaum,
William Proxmire, and Bill Bradley. Senators Edward Kennedy,
George McGovern, Frank Church, and Joseph Biden, though reliable
supporters of feminist causes, did not vote.
12. Rostkerv. Goldberg, 69 LEd 2d 478.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 6
Reserve Affairs, & Logistics, Background Review: Women in the
Military (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, October 1981),
7. See page 81 for data.
2. Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Women in
the Amry Policy Review (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Army,
November 12, 1982), 4-9.
3. Final Report: Evaluation of Women in the Army (Ft. Ben.
Harrison, Ind.: Department of the Army, 1978), 1-18.
4. Before either the MEPSCAT or the categorization of an MOS
could be trusted to predict accurately a recruits ability to perform in
an MOS, the entire system required “validation.” To ensure accuracy,
the system would be validated by both the Army Research Institute
and a commercial research contractor with extensive experience in
the study of physical performance but no previous involvement in the
WITA project. The validation process was expected to take more than
a year. It had just started when the WITA review group released its
final report in the fall of 1982.
5. Margaret Eastman, “DACOWITS: a nice little group that
doesn’t do very much,” Army Times, Family Supplement, March 15,
1972, 11.
6. DACOWITS, Recommendations Made at the 1974 Spring
Meeting, April 21-25, 1974, 2.
7. DACOWITS, Recommendations Made at the 1975 Spring
Meeting, April 6-10, 1975, 2.
NOTES • 361
8. DACOWITS, Recommendations, Requests for Information,

Commendations Made at the 1976 Fall Meeting, November 14-18,
1976, 1.
9. DACOWITS, Recommendations etc., 1976 Fall Meeting, 2.
10. Women Can Do Anything Men Can Do,” Air Force Times,
November 29, 1976, 2.
11. “DACOWITS: ‘Actions’ Hurt Women’s Morale,” Air Force
Times, November 30, 1981, 16.
12. M.C. Devilbiss, ‘“Women in the Army Policy Review’—A
Military Sociologist’s Analysis,” Minerva, Fall 1983, 95. Believers in
WITA have nothing to fear from this “analysis.”
13. Mary Evelyn Blagg Huey, Letter to Caspar W. Weinberger,,
June 6, 1983.
14. Caspar W. Weinberger, Letter to Mary Evelyn Blagg Huey,
July 27, 1983.
15. Caspar W. Weinberger, Memorandum for the Secretaries of
the Military Departments, Subject: Women in the Military, July 19,
1983.
16. David C. Myers, Deborah L. Gebhardt, Carolyn E. Crump,
and Edwin A. Fleishman, Validation of the Military Entrance Physical
Strength Capacity Test (Bethesda, Md.: Advanced Research
Resources Organization, 1984). The report concluded that the
MEPSCAT was “a valid predictor of performance on physically
demanding tasks,” viii.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 7
1. Minutes to DACOWITS’s Spring 1984 Meeting, 6.
2. Lawrence J. Korb, Statement to DACOWITS’s Spring 1984
Meeting.
3. “Korb Says Women in Military ‘Are Here to Stay,”’ Army
Times, May 14, 1984, 31.
4. Quoted by Senator William Proxmire in the Congressional
Record, March 21, 1986.
5. Lawrence J. Korb, Statement to DACOWITS’s Spring 1984
Meeting.
6. Caspar Weinberger, Statement to DACOWITS’s Fall 1986
Meeting.
7. U.S. Air Force Special Studies Team, An Analysis of the
Effects of Varying Male and Female Force Levels (Washington, D.C.:
Department of the Air Force, August 9, 1985).
8. Sharon B. Young, “Need Told for Navy to Define Women’s
Sea Duty Clearly,” Navy Times, January 13, 1986.
362 • NOTES
9. Tom Burgess, “DACOWITS Seeks Closer Look at Women’s

Role,” Air Force Times, May 6, 1985, 30.
10. Sharon B.Woung, “Navy Secretary Sees Chance of Women
Having Greater Combat Support Roles,” Army Times, November 10,
1986, 45.
11. Sharon B. Young, “Navy Fights Opening More Sea Billets to
Women,” Navy Times, March 23, 1987, 4.
12. Jacquelyn' K. Davis, Letter to General Anthony Lukeman,
August 26, 1987, subject: DACOWITS s 1987 WESTPAC Visit.
13. Mel Jones, “Grays Tough Stand on His Responsibility Clarified,”
Navy Tones, May 9, 1988, 4.
14. Ibid.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 8
1. See U.S. Army Research Institute for Environmental
Medicine, Incidence of Risk Factors for Injury and Illness among
Male and Female Army Basic Trainees, 1988.
2. Department of Physical Education, Project Summertime
(West Point, N.Y.: U.S. Military Academy, 1976), 25-30. Differences
between men and women were even greater before training, as the
physical performance of men actually declined during the eight weeks
of training in which little emphasis was placed on strength and power.
(Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1977), 80.
4. Paul O. Davis, “Physical demands of ships’ tasks are a factual
matter,” Navy Times, July 2, 1990. See D.W. Robertson and T.T.
Trent, Documentation of Muscularly Demanding Job Tasks and
Validation of an Occupational Strength Test Battery (STB); Report
No. 86-1, Naval Personnel Research and Development Center, San
Diego, Calif., 1985.
5. Colonel R.W. Lind, Office of Assistant Secretary of Defense
for Force Management & Personnel, Letter to Penny Pullen, State
Representative, Illinois State Assembly, December 6, 1985.
6. Jay Blucher, “Mass Appeal,” Army Times, July 6, 1987, 68.
7. Blucher, 68.
8. See memo from Colonel Ronald A. Redman, U.S. Air Force,
to Dr. Mayer, subject: “The Health of Women in the Services,”
May 14, 1985; Anne Hoiberg, “Sex and Occupational Differences in
Hospitalization Rates Among Navy Enlisted Personnel,” Journal of
Occupational Medicine, October 1980, 686; and Anne Hoiberg,
“Health Care Needs of Women in the Navy,” Military Medicine,
February 1979, 109.
NOTES • 363
9. D.S. Nice and S.M. Hilton, Sex Differences in Health Care

Requirements Aboard U.S. Navy Skips, report No. 90-2, Naval Health
Research Center, San Diego, Calif., 1990.
10. See ‘Sex Differentials of Time Lost Due to Hospitalization,
Male and Female Active Duty Army Personnel: Worldwide, CY
1976-1981,’ Supplement to Health of the Army, December 1983,
60-61; and Hoiberg, “Sex and Occupational Differences in
Hospitalization Rates Among Navy Enlisted Personnel,” 689.
11. Redman.
12. Quoted by Joyce Price, “Supply of Brains Pain Killer Tied to
Pre-menstrual Blues,” Washington Times, June 29, 1987, A3.
13. Redman. ✓'
14. Ronald A. Redman, “The Feasibility of a Cohort Study on the
Health Needs of Women in the Services,” Health Studies Task Force,
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Health Affairs), May 15,
1985, 6-7.
15. Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, Military Women
in the Department of Defense (Washington, D.C.: Department of
Defense, July 1987), 63.
16. Marjorie H. Royle, Factors Affecting Attrition Among Marine
Corps Women (San Diego, Calif.: Naval Personnel Research and
Development Center, 1985), vii.
17. Jeanne Holm, Women in the Military: An Unfinished
Revolution (Novato, Calif.: Presidio Press, 1982), 293.
18. Letter from the Chief of Promotion, Separation, and
Transition Division, Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Department
of the Army, to Department of the Air Force, April 23, 1970, quoted
by Holm, 294.
20. “Female GIs in the Field: Report from Honduras” (Evanston,
Ill.: Northwestern University, 1985), 17.
21. Charlie Schill, “Navy’s Unwed Pregnancy Rate 37%,” Navy
Times, November 28, 1988, 2. The figure of 12.5 percent was taken
from the report of the Presidential Commission on the Assignment of
Women in the Armed Forces, C-115, and applied to 1996 year-end
female strength (197,118).
22. Office of the Assistant Secretaiy of Defense, Background
Review: Women in the Military (Washington, D.C.: Department of
Defense, 1981), 7.
23. Background Review: Women in the Military, 81.
364 • NOTES
24. Lt. Col. Steven M. Hinds, “Single Parents and the Marine
Corps,” Marine Corps Gazette, January 1989, 64.
25. Messago^from Commander, U.S. Army Intelligence and
Security Command, to subordinate units, subject: “Married Army
Couples,” November 20, 1986.
26. Minutes, DACOWITS Spring Meeting, 1984, C-7.
27. Royle, vii.
28. Letter from the Adjutant General, U.S. Army, to all com¬
mands, subject: “Fraternization and Regulatory Policy Regarding
Relationships Between Members of Different Ranks,” November 21,
1986.
29. Letter from the Adjutant General.
(New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1981), 154.
31. Rogan, J55.
32. Ibid, 156.
33. Quoted by Grant Willis, “More Women Than Men Discharged
as Homosexuals,” Navy Times, February 29, 1988, 3.
34. Moskos, 11.
35. Jacquelyn K. Davis, DACOWITS chairwoman, Memo to
General Anthony Lukeman, USMC, subject: “1987 WESTPAC Visit
of the DACOWITS,” August 26, 1987.
36. Grant Willis, “‘Witch-Hunt’ for Lesbians Never Intended,”
Army Times, March 28, 1988.
37. Willis, “More Women Than Men Discharged as
Homosexuals.”
38. Quoted by Larry Carney, “Ono Hails Quality of Army’s
Newest,” Army Times, June 15, 1987, 8.
39. Martin Binkin and Mark J. Eitelberg, “Women and Minorities
in the All-Volunteer Force,” in The All-Volunteer Force After a
Decade: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. William Bowman, et al.
(Washington, D.C.: Pergamon-Brassey’s, 1986), 96-97. There was no
difference on one test segment, word power. The Defense
Department has recently added emphasis to the mathematic seg¬
ments of the test battery and deemphasized the importance of certain
clerical segments.
40. Moskos, 5.
41. Background Review: Women in the Military, 149.
42. Niel L. Golightly, “No Right to Fight,” U.S. Naval Institute
Proceedings, December 1987, 48.
43. Hoiberg, “Sex and Occupational Differences in Hospital¬
ization Rates Among Navy Enlisted Personnel,” 689.
NOTES • 365
44. John Money and Anke A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy
and Girl: The Differentiation and Dimorphism of Gender Identity
from Conception to Maturity (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1972).
45. Scott Pengelly and James C. Benfield, “Handicapping the
Battle of the Sexes,” Washington Post, September 11, 1988, C3.
46. Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex
Differences (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974),
242-243.
47. George Gilder, Men and Marriage (Gretna, Louis.: Pelican
Books Publishing Co., 1986), 33.
48. Allen Carrier, “Defense EO Chief Decries End of Army Coed
Basic,” Army Times, July 12, 1982, 28.
49. Moskos, 10.
50. Quoted by Theodore C. Mataxis, “How Realistic Are Female
Test Scores?” Army Times, March 21, 1977, 15.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 9
1. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (New York: Basic
Books, 1987), 231.
2. Panel discussion, in Registration and the Draft, Martin
Anderson, ed. (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1982), 42.
Michael Levin reported this inconsistency in Feminism and Freedom
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1987).
3. Allen Carrier, “Defense EO Chief Decries End of Army Coed
Basic,” Army Times, July 12, 1982, 28.
4. Charles C. Moskos, “Female GIs in the Field: Report from
Honduras,” unpublished report, 1985, 17.
5. Michael L. Rustad, Women in Khaki (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1982), 219.
(New York: G.P. Putnam s Sons, 1981), 186.
7. William J. Gregor, “Women, Combat, and the Draft: Placing
Details in Context,” in Defense Manpower Planning: Issues for the
1980s, eds. William J. Taylor, et al. (New York: Pergamon Press, 1981),
39.
8. Mary Jo Salter, “Annie, Don’t Get Your Gun,’ The Atlantic
Monthly, June 1980, 83.
9. Kathleen Guest-Smith and Ellen Wilkinson, “Why Women in
the Military,” Statement presented to the Defense Advisory
Committee on Women in the Services, November 14, 1976, 3.
366 • NOTES
10. Salter, 84.

11. Hearings before the Military Personnel Subcommittee of the
House Armed S^vices Committee, Subject: Women in the Military,
November 13-16,'1979, and February 11, 1980, 55-56.
12. Minerva: Quarterly Report on Women and the Military,
Spring 1985, 95.
13. Lesley Hazelton, Israeli Women: The Reality Behind the Myth
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1977).
14. Ibid, 20. '
15. Ibid, 139.
16. Lionel Tiger and Joseph Shepler, Women in the Kibbutz (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 189.
17. Tiger, 204.
18. Hazelton, 139.
19. Judith H. Stiehm, “Women and the Combat Exception,”
Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College, June 1980, 5/.
20. Judith H. Stiehm, Bring Me Men and Women: Mandated
21. M.C. Devilbiss, “Gender Integration and Unit Deployment: A
Study of G.I. Jo,” Armed Forces and Society, Summer 1985, 525.
22. James Webb, “Women Can’t Fight,” The Washingtonian,
November 1979, 144.
23. Brig. General Andrew J. Gatsis, Testimony before the Military
Personnel Subcommittee of the House Armed Sendees Committee,
November 13-16, 1980, 279.
24. “Women’s Work,” Parade Magazine, January 5, 1986, 17.
25. Minerva, Fall 1987, 33.
26. Lois B. DeFleur with Frank Woods, Dick Harris, David
Gillman, and William Marshak, Four Years of Sex Integration at the
United States Air Force Academy: Problems and Issues (Colorado
Springs, Colo.: U.S. Air Force Academy, August 1985).
27. Stiehm, “Women and the Combat Exception,” 57.
28. Rogan; 164.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 10
1. “Woman Leads G.I.’s in Panama Combat,” New York Times,
January 4, 1990.
2. Unpublished memorandum signed by Major James J. Woods,
S-3 (Operations Officer) 5th Battalion, 87th Infantry, Subj: Just Cause
NOTES • 367
Lessons Learned (Initial). The memorandum and its draft are in my

possession.
3. “Army clears female soldiers,” Washington Times, January 24,
1990. Molly Moore, “Army: Female Drivers Did Not Disobey
Orders,” Washington Post, January 23, 1990.
4. “Soldier Boys, Soldier Girls,” The New Republic, February 19,
1990.
5. Based upon interviews with officers of the 5/87th Infantry. As
it happened, the executive officer of the 5/87th was a personal friend
of mine, having been my company commander in the 82nd Airborne
Division. See also my article “Women in Arms: What Happened in
Panama,” Chronicles, May 1990.
6. Grant Willis and Julie Bird, ‘Women-in-combat-units gets
cool reception,” Navy Times, April 2, 1990.
7. Ibid.
8. Sally Quinn, “Mothers at War: What Are We Doing to Our
Kids?” Washington Post, February 10, 1991.
9. Transcript of Committee Meeting, Presidential Commission
on the Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, June 9, 1992.
10. Testimony before the Subcommittee on Military Personnel
and Compensation, Committee on Armed Services, House of
Representatives, February 19, 1991.
11. Genevieve Henderson, “Women endure desert life,”
Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, October 30, 1990. Before this
article, several puff pieces about women in the Gulf had already
appeared in the major media. After this article, the story changed and
the focus of press reports followed the Gazette Telegraph.
12. Jane Gross, “Standoff in the Gulf: Needs of Family and
Country Clash in Persian Gulf Mission, New York Times, Decem¬
ber 9, 1990.
13. Henderson, op tit.
14. Gross.
15. Henderson, op tit.
16. Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta, “When Soldiers Have
Babies,” Washington Post, March 8, 1991.
17. Report to the President, 57-58, and C-121. Women were less
likely to have deployed with their units by a factor of 3.3 for the Army,
3.7 for the Navy, 3,5 for the Jdr Force, and 3.9 for the Marine Corps.
18. Anderson, op tit.
19. Report to tkie President, C-48, C-121.
368 • NOTES
20. Ibid, C-50. See U.S. GAO, Nondeploy able Personnel in the
Persian Gulf, GAO/NSIAD-92-208, August 31, 1992.
21. Hendersô, op cit.
22. Testimony of Sergeant Lori L. Mertz, USAR, before the
Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed
Forces, July 15, 1992.
23. Testimony of Sergeant Mary E. Rader, USA, before the
Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the Armed
Forces, July 15, 1992.
24. Judy Gerstel, “The military tells troops a thing or two about
sex and the returning soldier,” Detroit Free Press, May 20, 1991.
25. Testimony before the Presidential Commission on the
Assignment of Women in the Armed Forces, June 25, 1992.
26. A pamphlet recently published by the Army warns comman¬
ders of this danger.
27. Quoted by a brochure entitled “Feminine Protection for
Deployed Female Military Personnel” by International Forecasts and
Analysis, Alexandria, Va.
28. Report to the President, C-51-C-52.
29. Ibid, C-52 and D-4.
30. Washington Post, August 8, 1992. Her macho comments
prompted Wesley Pruden, editor of the Washington Times, to write,
“Lucky for her she was sent to Iraq and not to a Tailhook party.”
(“How Flapping Lips Sink Navy Ships,” Washington Times, June 29,
1992).
31. She also received the Prisoner of War Medal, the National
Defense Service Medal, the Bronze Star, and the Purple Heart (her
arms were broken in the crash). Her commanding officer had recom¬
mended her for the Air Medal with V device (V for valor), but with tire
approval of the army chief of staff, the Air Medal was upgraded to the
Distinguished Flying Cross.
32. The recommendation would have passed without debate had
it not been for Eunice Ray, a newly appointed member from
Kentucky. As a concession to Ray, each member was allowed three
minutes to speak. Only Ray and two other new members voted against
the recommendation.
33. Washington Times, April 26, 1991.
34. “Republican Leaders Missing in Action,” Human Events,
June 29, 1991.
35. Republicans who opposed the amendment were Bob Stump
(Ariz.), Duncan Hunter (Calif.), Robert Doman (Calif.), Jim McCrery
NOTES • 369
(Calif.), and Joel Hefley (Colo.). The lone Democrat in opposition

was, oddly, Ron Dellums (Calif.).
36. Letter of Christopher Jehn, assistant secretary of defense for
force management and personnel, to Senator John McCain, May 7,
1991.
37. Report to the President, president of the Presidential
Commission on the Assignment of Women , in the Armed Forces,
November 15, 1992, iii.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 11
1. Cheneys original slate included Heather Wilson, a former Air
Force captain and National Security Council staff member who had
lobbied Congress to repeal the ban on woman in combat aviation.
2. Transcript of Commission Meeting, November 22, 1992, 288.
3. Ibid, 287.
4. Ibid, 320.
5. Presidential Commission on the Assignment of Women in the
Armed Forces, Report to the President, November 15, 1992, C-98.
6. Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel William Gregor, September
9, 1992.
7. Testimony of Lieutenant John Clagett, USN, August 6, 1992.
8. Detailed pilot attrition statistics were somehow omitted from
the Commission’s bound report, but a half-page statistical table was
later inserted unbound at page C-138.
9. David Hackworth, “War and the Second Sex,” Newsweek,
August 5, 1991, 26.
10. Testimony of Lieutenant Colonel William Gregor, USA,
September 12, 1992.
11. Capt. Donovan R. Rigelow, “Equal Rut Separate: Can the
Army’s Affirmative Action Program Withstand Judicial Scrutiny After
Croson?” Military Law Review, Winter 1991.
12. Interview with the author, January 1992. See Rrian Mitchell,
“Army, Bush keep quotas, disregard law,” Army Times, January 27,
1992.
13. Memorandum for deputy chief of staff for personnel, from
Brigadier General Donald W. Hansen, acting judge advocate general,
March 19, 1990, in the possession of the author.
14. Transcript of proceedings before the Honorable Jackson L.
Kiser, Roanoke, Va., on April 8, 1991, in the United States District
Court for the Western District of Virginia, Roanoke Division, Civil
Action No. 90-0126-R, United States of America v. Commonwealth of
370 • NOTES
Virginia et al., page 489. This author served as a consultant to the

attorneys for VM1.
15. Ibid. 527-j^S. The defense entered into evidence a memo
Toffler himself hack written in 1990 stating that more than halt of
female first-classmen mid nearly half of male first-classmen felt that
integration had not been successful.
16. Ibid. 537-540.
17. Captain Jamie Ann Conway, "Let Women Fly in Combat."
New York Times. June 25. 1992.
18. Transcript of Commission Meeting. November 22. 1992. 316.
19. The commissioners could never agree on w hether to use the
phrase "military effectiveness." “military readiness.” or the legal term
^“military necessitv.”
20. Transcript of Commission Meeting. November 3. 1992. 266.
21. Transcript of Commission Meeting. June S. 1992.
22. Major John Bruce Jessen. USAF, transcript of Commission
Meeting. June 8. 1992.
23. Transcript of Commission Meeting. June 26. 1992.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 12
1. Mary McGrorv, "Closing Ranks Around Alibis. Washington
Post, May 29. 1990.
2. The Assimilation of Women in the Brigade of Midshipmen,
United States Naval Academy. April 1991.
3. At the press conference, Mikulsld herself defended this
unfairness bv saying
O
that head-shaving
O
is text humiliating
c'
for women
but not at all humiliating for men.
4. The Office of the Assistant Chief of Naval Operations for .Air
Warfare, wiio in 1991 was Vice Admiral Richard M. Dunleaw.
5. The Tailhook Association also published an excellent maga¬
zine, The Hook, featuring dramatic accounts of aviation endeavors in
wartime and in peacetime.
6. Report of Investigation: Tailhook 91—Pa it 2. Inspector
General, U.S. Department of Defense. Februarv 1993. VI-3.
7. Ibid. VI-11. Others passed down the hall in this manner
included a young male Air Force officer who foolishly showed up
wearing his Air Force flight jacket.
8. Ibid, VI-13 and F-26.
9. Gregory L. Vistica, Fall from Glory: The Men Who Sank the
U.S. Navy (New York: Simon 6c Schuster, 1995, revised 1996).
10. Congressional Record, October 29, 1992.
NOTES • 371
11- According to Vistica, Coughlin told investigators on

November 1 that she had complained to Snyder much earlier, but that
he had not pursued the matter. Snyder denied hearing about the
assault before September 19, and Coughlins first two statements to
investigators made no complaint against Snyder. Vistica says that
Coughlin later admitted to him, I guess I didn’t tell [Snyder] enough
to make him realize what really happened to, me,” but she also later
denied this admission. See Vistica, pages 339-341 with notes on page
454.
12. The Navy “frocks” officers selected for promotion, allowing
them to assume their new rank before the promotion becomes legally
effective. Snyder had been selected for promotion to rear admiral and
frocked months earlier.
13. Like many aged gents, Goldwater had a soft spot for the ladies
and was ever eager in his later years to live down his earlier associa¬
tion with “right-wing conservatives.”
14. Vistica, -345.
15. Vistica, 344.
16. Vistica, 456. Vistica explains in a footnote that he found out
about her interviews with the Post and with ABC News beforehand,
and called to give her a chance to tell him about the interviews, but
that she never mentioned them and made excuses for why she didn’t
grant him an interview' for attribution. He writes, “We could have eas-
ily identified her by name before the Post or ABC did, but we didn’t.
1 had promised not to identify her until she said okay. She rnay have
lied to me, but I was not about to break my word as a journalist.”
IT. John Lancaster, “A Gantlet of Terror, Frustration: Navy Pilot
Recounts Tailhook Incident,” Washington Post, June 24, 1992. For
some reason, the Post preferred the alternate spelling to the more
common gauntlet.
13. David Horowitz and Michael Kitchen, “Tailhook Witch-
Hunt,” Heterodoxy, October 1993, 11.
19. Vistica, Fall from Glory, 356. Military dinings-in are formal
dinners without spouses conducted according to a comic protocol.
20. David Horowitz and Michael Kitchen, “Tailhook Witch-
Hunt,” Heterodoxy, October 1993, 11. Curiously, Vistica quotes the
words “You make me see God” in relation to Diaz’s leg-shaving, but
does not sav where the words corne from and what their significance
is.
21. Vistica, Fall from .Glory, 355. Among those who blamed
Garrett for everything, Vistica names Barbara Pope and Richard
Arrnitage, each of whom played a part in the Navys disaster.
372 • NOTES
22. He had reportedly joked that any woman who used the F
word as often as Paula Coughlin did would welcome the attention she
received. He was ^§o accused by one woman of referring to female
Navy pilots as “go-go dancers, topless dancers, or hookers,” but this
was disputed by other witnesses.
23. Horowitz, op cit.
24. Gregory Vistica, “Is Tailhook punishing only males? Female
misbehavior ignored, say lawyers,” San Diego Union-Tribune,
August 27, 1993.
25. O’Keefes leniency was nothing new. Female officers had long
been allowed to campaign freely in uniform for repeal of the combat
exclusions, both in media and on Capitol Hill, while male officers did
vnot assume the same freedom to defend even current law and policy
publicly.
26. Barton jpellman, “Key Case in Tailhook Is Dropped;
Identification of Pilot Ruled to Be Inadequate in Harassment
Incident,” Washington Post, October 22, 1993.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 13
1. Fern Shen, “4 Midshipmen Disciplined in Pillow Attack;
Academy Orders Loss of Leave in Incident That Left 2 Female
Classmates Bruised,” Washington Post, February 10, 1993.
2. “Frank blasts anti-gay military,” Washington Tunes, August 1,
1991.
3. Congressional Record, September 11, 1991.
4. All seven publications were produced in the same large news¬
room by the Times Journal Company, which reverted to its original
name, Army Times Publishing Company, before being sold to
Gannett in June 1997.
5. Memorandum entitled “Recommendations for Accepting
Homosexuals and Bisexuals into the U.S. Armed Forces,” Gay,
Lesbian, and Bisexual Military Freedom Project, February 1993.
6. Jim Wolffe, “Powell stands by gay ban,” Army Tunes, May 25,
1992, 5.
7. V.I.P Notes, Center for Military Readiness, May and June 1995.
8. Gregory Vistica, Fall from Glory (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1995, revised 1996), 388-389.
9. Vistica, 327.
10. K.L. Billingsley, “Dancing with the Elephant,” Heterodoxy,
March/April 1995.
NOTES • 373
11. Pat Flynn, “Pilot qualified, files show,” San Diego Union-
Tribune, November 20, 1994.
12. Dori Meinert, “Naval aviator comes to rest at Arlington,” San
Diego Union-Tribune, November 22, 1994.
13. Ellen Goodman, “So it wasn’t pilot error after all—Kara
Hultgreen’s death tells us prejudice still exists,” San Diego Union-
Tribune, March 3, 1995. r
14. Quoted by Billingsley.
15. Vistica, 396.
16. Ibid, 396.
17. Robert J. Caldwell, “Hultgreen Case: Were the simulator tests
rigged?” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 1995.
18. Robert J. Spane, “Anatomy of a plane crash—Evaluating,
explaining the results of two different Navy investigations,” San Diego
Union-Tribune, April 13, 1995.
19. Gerald L. Atkinson, “Navy breaches integrity at the very high¬
est levels,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 7, 1995.
20. Vistica, 393.
21. Billingsley.
22. Robert J. Caldwell, “Navy files cast doubt on gender neutral
training,” San Diego Union-Tribune, May 14, 1995.
23. Time, May 13, 1996.
24. Quoted from “The Navy Adrift,” Washington Post, April 28,
1996.
NOTES ON CHAPTER 14
The Morning Bride,
1. As commonly quoted from which reads:
“Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned,/Nor hell a fury like a
woman scorned.”
2. “Sleeping with the Enemy,” The New Republic, June 23,1997.
3. Elaine Sciolino, “Sergeant Convicted of 18 Counts of Raping
Female Subordinates,” New York Times, April 30, 1997.
4. Tucker Carlson, “The Making of a Feminist Hero,” The
Weekly Standard, June 9, 1997.
5. “Military on the Offensive Against Illicit Love Affairs,”
Washington Post, April 28, 1997.
6. Quoted by The Weekly Standard, June 9, 1997.
7. This account is based on the authors interview with Ecker,
June 28, 1997.
8. Testimony of Lt. Colonel Robert Rose, July 24, 1995.
9. Ibid.
374 • NOTES
10. Testimony of Major Jacquelyn S. Parker, July 24, 1995.

11. Letter of Colonel Brent J. Richardson to Ms. Roslynn R.
Mauskoph [sic], ^ffice of Inspector General, New York State,
January 29, 1997, copy in the possession of the author.
12. Robert A. Rose, affidavit sworn before Joanne Vandyke,
January 16, 1996, copy in the possession of the author.
foOTES ON CHAPTER 15
1. The New Republic, February 24, 1997.
2. Richard Cohen, “Duty, Gender, Country,” Washington Post,
April 24, 1997.
3. Good Morning America, November 18, 1996.
x 4. Simons’s novel contribution to the subject involved the impor¬
tance of talking about sex to the Army’s Special Forces soldiers she
had studied. Talking about anything else, other than work, tended to
create uncomfortable distinctions that divided soldiers from each
other. She writes, “Only discussions about sex allowed the men to
define themselves separately, while not challenging the group’s unity.”
See “In War, Let Men Be Men,” New York Times, April 23, 1997.
5. Quoted by Richard Rayner, “The Warrior Besieged,” New
York Times Magazine, June 22, 1997.
6. Linda Bird Francke, Ground Zero: The Gender Wars in the
Military (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 260.
7. Jacquelyn K. Davis, Memo to General Anthony Lukeman,
August 26,1987, subject: “1987 WESTPAC visit of the DACOWITS,” 2.
Project
8. Department of Behavioral Sciences and Leadership,
Athena: Report on the Admission of Women to the U.S. Military
Academy (West Point, N.Y.: U.S. Military Academy, June 1, 1979),
Vol. Ill, 191.
9. Science Research Laboratory, Early Career Preparation,
Experiences, and Commitment of Female and Male West Point Grad¬
uates (West Point, N.Y.: U.S. Military Academy, undated), 1-52.
10. Letter from the adjutant general of the Army, subject:
“Fraternization and Regulatory Policy Regarding Relationships
Between Members of Different Ranks,” November 21, 1986.
11. John O. Marsh, Jr., secretary of the Army, “Soldierly Values:
Vital Ingredients for a Ready Force,” Army, October 1986, 15.
12. John O. Marsh, Jr., secretary of the Army, “On Values,”
Soldiers, November 1986, 2.
Index
S'
A surrogate upperclassmen, 46;

Aberdeen Proving Grounds, women’s level of interest in
Maryland, 309-313 the military, 72-73.
Academies: arguments for See also Air Force Academy;
sexual integration, 30-31; Merchant Marine Academy;
attrition rates, 56, 69; Naval Academy; West Point
fraternization, 65-67; ACLU. See American Civil
hazing, 64; Liberties Union
injury rate for women, 58; Administrative and clerical work,
intellectual discipline, 75-76; 11

job satisfaction after Adultery, 313-320
graduation, 74; Advanced Research Resources
legislation to admit women, 32; Organization, 122
liberalization of curriculum, The Advocate, 283
61-62; Air Force, 281
pregnancies, 67; Air Force: aviation ti'aining, 224;
sexism classes, 70; behavior of enlisted men, 350;

376 • INDEX
Flinn incident, 313-320; Antiwar activists, 18
percentage of women in AOC, 47
1981, 86; ^ APFT, 221-222
percentage of women in 1988, Armed forces: attrition rates,
127-128; 151-152;
recruitment quotas, 128. background review, 102-104;
See also Air Force Academy; division between female
Armed Forces officers and enlisted
Air Force Academy: attrition women, 178-180;
rate for women, 73; •% fraternization between the
Basic Cadet Training, 39—44; ranks, 65-67, 160-162;
inequities of integration, 48-53; homosexuality policy, 162-166;
nomination of women, 28; medical differences for men
positive motivation, 36-37, 45; and women, 147-151;
surrogate upperclassmen, percentage of women, 24, 100;
37-38, 46-47; physical limitations of women,
watchdog committee, 72. v 140-147;
See also Academies psychological differences of
Air Officer Commanding, 47 men and women, 166-176;
Air traffic controllers, 118-119 quality of female recruits, 25,
Air Training Officers, 37, 46-47 103;
Airborne Warning and Control quality of male recruits, 103,
System aircraft, 127 167.
Alcohol abuse, 349 See also All-Volunteer
Alexander, Clifford, 65, 81, 101 Armed Force; specific

All-male group behavior, 174 branch of armed forces
All-Volunteer Armed Force, 17, Armed Services Vocational
20-26, 33, 82,178, 341, 348 Aptitude Battery, 167
Allen, Lt. Gen. James R., 50 Armitage, Richard, 265
Allon, Yigal, 185-186 Armor, Dr. David J., 135
Amazons, 184-185 Army: Aberdeen Proving
American Civil Liberties Union, Grounds, Maryland, 309-313;
26, 92, 95, 97, 282 fraternization policy, 161-162;
American Psychological injury rate for women, 141;
Association, 282 percentage of women in 1988,
Androgyny, 339 127;
Annapolis. See Naval Academy pregnancy choices for
Anthony, Susan Brownell, 181 women, 105;
Anthropometric standards, 146 quality of male recruits, 167;

INDEX • 377
Recruiting Command, 110; Beech, Staff Sgt. Nathaniel,

recruitment quotas, 92; 310-311
Women in the Army Policy Belsky, Dr. Jay, 200
Review Group, 101, Bentley, Helen, 248
104-105,107-111,117-122. Berry, Lt. Gen. Sidney B., 62
See also Armed forces; Berryman, Sue, 192
Combat exclusion policies Bien, Adrrv Lyle G., 298-299, 302
Army Air Corps, 6 Bigelow, Capt. Donovan,
Army and Navy Nurse Corps, 2 224-226
Army Physical Readiness Test, Billingsley, Lloyd, 293
221-222 Binldn, Martin, 81-84
Army Times, 126, 281 Blanchard, Capt. Ernest, 304
Arthur, Adm. Stanley, 286-287, Bleckley, Jessica, 310-311
298, 303, 304 Bonam, Capt. Gregory J., 263, 275
Artillery study, 85 Boorda, Vice Adm. Jeremy M.
Aspin, Les, 218, 288, 320 “Mike”: as chief of naval
Assertiveness training, 67 operations, 212, 248, 262,
AS VAR, 167 287-288, 296, 298;
ATCs, 118-119 wearing of unauthorized
Atkinson, Gerry, 297 decorations, 304-307
The Atlantic Monthly, 183 Boxer, Rep. Barbara, 202, 275,
ATOs, 37, 46-47 281, 294
AVF. See All-Volunteer Armed Bray, Capt. Linda, 195-196
Force Aviators. See Combat Brazelton, Dr. T. Berry, 200-201

aviation; Tailhook Association Brennan, Justice William J.,
AWACS, 127 26-27, 97

Brewer, Lucy, 2
B Brewer, Margaret, 15
Bach, Shirley, 81-84 Brookings Institution, 81, 82
Bailey, Brig. Gen. Mildred C., 153 Brown, Harold, 81, 86, 92, 101
Ballard, Robert C., 27 Buchanan, Patrick, 216
Barnes, Susan, 301 Buddy plan, 92
Barrow, Gen. Robert H., 213 Bulldog training, 76
Bartlett, Roscoe, 335 Burke Marshall report, 18-19
Basic Cadet Training, 39-MB Bush administration, 215-216,
Batjer, Marybel, 135 227, 269-270, 282-283
Bayh, Sen. Birch, 22 Byrd, Sen. Robert, 335
BCT, 39-43 Byron, Rep. Beverly, 202, 212
Becraft, Carolyn, 117, 192

378 • INDEX
c Cheney, Dick, 212-213, 265,

Caldwell, Robert, 296, 299 281, 283
Callaway, Howard H., 29 Child-care, 156-159, 202-203
Carkhuff, Lt. Commander Citizen Soldier, 315
Kenneth, 284-286 City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson
Carlson, Tucker, 315-316 Co., 225
Carlson, Vice Adm. Dudley L., Civil Rights Act, 13, 19, 33, 181
130 Civil Rights Division, 19
Carlucci, Frank C., 102, 133-135 Clagett, Lt. John, 223
Carlucci, Marcia, 135 n Clark, Lt. Col. John, 326
Carpenter, Kathleen, 80, 93, 117 Clark, Lt. Gen. Albert P, 29
Carter administration: Clark, William D., 118
commitment to feminist Clarke, Betty, 235
movement, 79-80; Clarke, Maj. Gen. Mary
DACOWITs' and, 114-115; Elizabeth, 217
inaugural parade, 49; Clements, William P, 28
support for use of women in Clerical work, 11
combat, 84—97; Clinton administration, 243,
unpopularity among 282-283
American military, 99-100 Clothing and equipment issues,
CBS News, 197 145-146
Celli, Pamela Doviak, 131-132 Coalition Against Drafting
Center for Military Readiness, Women, 95
285, 301-302 Coast Guard, 304
Center for Strategic and Cochran, Jacqueline, 7, 29-30
International Studies, 335 Cockerham, Brig. Gen. Samuel
Center for the Study of Popular G„ 217-218, 234, 236
Culture, 293 Cohen, Richard, 334
Center for Women Policy Cohen, Sen. William S., 137
Studies, 28, 30, 112-113 Collins, Lt. Gen. Arthur S., Jr., 101
Central All-Volunteer Task Colt .45 pistols, 146-147
Force, 22, 23 Combat: definition of, 90,120-121;
CETA, 79 distinguishing from noncombat
Charm, effect on men, 175-176 roles, 347;
Chavez, Linda, 294 division between female
Chayes, Antonia Handler, 80, 93, officers and enlisted
178,184 women, 180;
Cheating scandal, 63 probability of direct combat,
Chen, 186-188 107, 122, 127
INDEX • 379
Combat aviation, 213, 222-223, 11-15, 111-125, 132, 134

239, 243, 288-302, 320-331 Defense Authorization Act of
Combat exclusion policies, 1979, 88
89-94, 105-106, 113, Defense Authorization Act of
125-126, 136-138, 183, 211, 1985, 128
214 Defense Authorization Act of
Combat Logistics Force, 130 1989, 129
Combat ships, 240-241, 243 Defense Authorization Act of
Combatant, definition of, 133 1992, 214
Common Sense Training, 101 DeFleur, Dr. Lois B., 38, 44, 47,
Comprehensive Employment 193
and Training Act, 79 Denton, Adm. Jeremiah A., Jr., 94
Conscientious objectors, 18 Denver Post, 51
Copeland, Peter, 196 Department of Defense:
Comum, Maj. Rhonda, 211 bonuses for recruits, 25;
Coughlin, Lt. Paula, 260, feminist infiltration, 80-81;
262-263, 266-269, 274-275 Health Studies Task Force,
Cowden, Lt. Cole V., 272, 274 150-151;
Crawford v. Cushman, 153 proposed legislation to
Creveld, Martin Van, 186 remove ceiling on
Culvahouse, Arthur B., Jr., 248 promotions for women,
13-14;
D study of women in the
DACOWITS. See Defense services, 102-104;
Advisory Committee on Task Force on Equity for
Women in the Services Women, 125
Dalton, John, 286 Department of Labor, 109
Damage-control tasks, 143-144 Dependent care certificate, 157
Date rape, 67 Diaz, Lt. Rolando “Gandhi,”
Davis, Adm. George, 262, 270 268, 274
Davis, Dr. Paul, 144 Dickinson, William L., 137
Davis, Jacquelyn, 132, 135 Direct Combat Probability
Davis, Lt. Crista, 319 Coding, 107, 122, 127
DCPC. See Direct Combat Disciplinary problems, 149-150,
Probability Coding 349
Dees, Staff Sgt. Tatiana Dobson, James, 285-286
Khaghani, 211 The Dodo, 50
Defense Advisory Committee on Donnelly, Elaine; and combat
Women in the Services, 8-9, exclusion laws, 124, 213,
380 • INDEX
216-217, 233; and homosexuals Electronic countermeasures

in the military, 285-286; and aircraft, 127-128
Kara Hultgree^s death, Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 177-178
298-302 Embassy security guards, 134
Doolie year, 45-49 Enduro run, 59-60
Dowd, Maureen, 336 Enlisted women, 178-180
Draft: Coalition Against Drafting Ensign, Todd, 315
Women, 95;. Equal Employment
Johnsons reform proposals, 19; Amendment, 33
men-only registration law, 96; Equal Employment Opportunity
Nixon s policies, 19; Act, 33
opposition to, 18; Equal Employment Opportunity
Selective Service Act of 1948,17 Commission, 131
Draude, Brig. Gen. Thomas V., Equal opportunity, 345-346
217, 235, 237-238 Equal Pay Act, 13, 32-33, 181
Dreyer, Gwen, 245-248, 270 Equal Rights Amendment, 22, 80
Drug abuse, 349 . Equal rights movement, 23
du Pont, Pierre “Pete,” 28, 30 Equipment issues, 145-146
Dual-service couples, 159-160 Equity feminists, 180
Dual standards, 59 Equivalent training, 59-60
Dunleavy, Vice Adm. Richard, ERA, 22, 80
259, 262, 270 Ervin, Sen. Sam, 23
Dunning, Lt. Zoe, 284 Etzioni, Amitai, 201
Durenberger, Sen. David, Evaluation of Women in the
286-287 Army, 91, 108
Dwight D. Eisenhower, 288 Eversole, Paige, 197
EWITA, 91, 108. See Evaluation
E of Women in the Army
Eagle Forum, 94—97 Executive Order No. 10240, 152
EC-130 electronic
countermeasures aircraft, F
127-128 ' Fagan, Commander Peter, 262
Ecker, Maj. Jeffrey “X,” Fall from Glory, 286
323-325, 329 Family Research Council, 285
Education Amendment of 1972, Female Artillery Study, 85
33 Female officers, 178-180
Edwards, Don, 28, 30 Femininity, 338
EEOC, 131 Feminist movement: campaign
Ehrhardt, Anke A., 171 for admittance of women
INDEX • 381
to service academies, 32; GAO, 20, 108

Carter administration and, Garrett, H. Lawrence, III,
79-80; 261-262, 264-265, 269
impact of, 177-194; Gates, Thomas S., Jr., 19
infiltration of Pentagon, 80-81; Gates Commission, 20-21
rejection of biologically Gatsis, Brig. Gen. Andrew J., 94
based sex differences, Gauntletf'254-256
171-172. Gender feminists, 180
See also Center for Women General Accounting Office, 20,
Policy Studies; National 108
Organization for Women Gennep, Arnold Van, 39-40
Fenimore, Brig. Gen. John H., Gilder, George, 93, 174
V, 327-328 Gillman, David C., 39, 43-44
Fetterman, Vice Adm. Jack, 277 Ginsburg, Justice Ruth, 26
Finch, Capt. Mary M. “Mimi,” Ginzberg, Dr. Eli, 9
217 Glenn, John, 213-214
Fire-fighting and rescue duties, Gobie, Steve, 281
143-144 Golightly, Lt. Niel L., 169
Fitzwater, Marlin, 195 Goodman, Ellen, 294, 317
Flanagan, Adm. William, 262 Goodpaster, Lt. Gen. Andrew
Flinn, Lt. Kelly, 313-320 Jackson, 61-63
Flynn, Pat, 293 Gordon, Adm. Ted, 262, 270-271
Fogelman, Gen. Ronald R., 317 Gorton, Sen. Slade, 317
Foote, Brig. Gen. Pat, 310 Grade limitations, 11-12
Ford, Gerald, 32 Graham, Col. John D., 239
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, 164 Gray, Gen. Al, 133-134
Fort McClellan, Alabama, 164 Greene, Adm. Everett L.,
Francke, Linda Bird, 336 302-304
Frank, Barney, 281, 319 Greenspan, Alan, 20
Fraternization, 65-67, 160-162, Gregor, Lt. Col. William J., 181,
318 221-222, 224
Friedan, Betty, 183 Grissom, Capt. Mark, 291-292
Friedman, Milton, 20 Ground Zero: The Gender Wars
Frontiero, Lt. Sharron, 26 in the Military, 336
Frontiero v. Richardson, 26 Group behavior, 174
Gulf War, 199-214
G Gutmann, Stephanie, 333-334
Galpin, Michael, 294
Gang of Five, 218, 238, 243-244
382 • INDEX
H House Armed Services

Hackworth, David, 307 Committee, 14, 23, 28, 31,
Hall, Gen. Michae^321 95, 184
Hamblet, Lt. Ellen,'289-290 Howard, Dan, 262, 269, 271, 306
Hamlin, Col. David, 321, 325, The Howitzer, 71
327-328 Huey, Mary Evelyn Blagg, 120
Hansen, Brig. Gen. Donald W., Hultgreen, Lt. Kara, 288-300
226 Hunter, Brenda, 201
Hansen, Lt. Rebecca, 286-287 Hunter, Richard W., 81-82
Hatch Act, 274
Hathaway, Sen. William D., 31 I
n Hays, Anna Mae, 15 IDF. See Israeli Defense Force
Hazelton, Lesley, 185-188 In-service couples, 159
Hazing, 64 ^ Injury rates, 58, 141, 148
Health Studies Task Force, Intellectual discipline, 75-76
150-151 Interdepartmental Task Force
Hebert, F. Edward, 28, 31 on Women, 80
Hemphill, Holly K., 310 International Fire Service
Henderson, Col. William Darryl, Association, 143—144
217, 231-232 International Women’s Year, 33
Herres, Gen. Robert T., Involuntary separation, 10
217-219, 235-237, 241-242 Israel, 185-188
Hill, Adm. Virgil L., Jr., 248 Israeli Defense Force, 186
History classes, 72-73 Israeli Women: The Reality
Hobbs, Brig. Gen. Johnny, 325 Behind the Myth, 185
Hobby, Col. Oveta Culp, 6-7
Hogg, Adm. James R., 217, 235, J
240 Jacklin, Carol, 172
Hoisington, Brig. Gen. Elizabeth P, JAG Report, 293-297
15, 94, 152-153, 194 Javits, Sen. Jacob, 27
Holderied, Kristine, 71 Jehn, Christopher, 202, 213
Holloway, Adm. James L., 89 Job satisfaction, 74
Holm, Maj. Gen. Jeanne, 10, 15, Johnson, Karen, 337
115,118 Johnson, Lyndon B., 13, 15, 18-19
Homosexuality, 162-166, Johnson, Maj. Charles B., 283-284
280-284 v Joint-domicile assignments, 75,
Hormonal differences, 171-172 159-160
Hospitalization rates, 147-148 Joint Services SERE Agency,
Hoster, Sgt. Maj. Brenda L., 310 239-240
INDEX • 383
K Ludwig, Capt. Frederick ‘Wigs,”

Kassebaum, Sen. Nancy, 95 249, 256-257, 260, 276
Kelly, Adm. Robert, 277 Luttwak, Edward, 335
Kelso, Adm. Frank, 261, 275,
277, 288 M
Kennedy, Maj. Gen. Claudia, 310 M16 rifles, 147
Kennedy, Sen. Edward, 214 MacArthur, Gen. Douglas, 7, 8
Kinzer, Dr. Nora Scott, 184 Maccoby, Eleanor, 172
Kleinbaum, Abby Welt an, 184 Maginnis, Robert, 285
Klemish, Lt. Matthew, 290 Male bonding, 175
Korb, Dr. Lawrence J., 104, 124 Manpower shortage, 4, 6
Korea, 77-78 Marcinla, Lt. Ed, 145
Korean War, 8, 191 Marine Corps: Bulldog training,
Kowal, Col. Dennis, 220 76;
Krulak, Lt. Gen. Charles C., percentage of women in
208, 275 1980, 89;
percentage of women in 1987,
L 133;
LaBarge Touch, 342 women as embassy security
Lackland Air Force Base, 36 guards, 134.
Laird, Melvin, 24 See also Armed forces
Lancaster, John, 266, 268-269 Maritime Administration, 30
Lawrence, Adm. William P., 61, 69 Marriage, effect on military
Lehman, John F., Jr., 129-130 career, 74, 159-160
Lesbianism, 162-166 Marshall, Burke, 18-19
Lewin, Nathan, 96 Marshall, Gen. George C., 4
Liberalization of curriculum, MAX WAC test, 84-85
61-62 May, Alan M., 311
Life, 62 McCain, Sen. John, 211-214,
Life satisfaction, 74 260-261, 274
Lilly, Sue Hart, 320-321 McClendon, Sarah, 112,
Limpert, Maj. Theodore, 328 117-118
Lister, Sara, 80, 310 McDonald, Jack H., 27
Livingston, Robert, 335 McGrory, Mary, 247
Lohrenz, Lt. Carey Dunai, McKee, Fran, 15
299-302 McKinney, Sgt. Maj. Gene C., 310
Lord, Sharon, 178 Medical differences, 147-151
Los Angeles Times, 195-196 Medical professions, 2, 11, 340,
Lott, Sen. Trent, 317-318 350
384 • INDEX
Men and Marriage, 174 Money, John, 171

Men-only registration law, 96 Moore, Lori, 203
MEPSCAT, 109-1 127 Morris, Madeline, 310, 337-338
Merchant Marine Academy, 30. Morris, Thomas D., 14
See also Academies MOS. See Military Occupation
Mertz, Sgt. Lori, 206 Specialties
Meyer, Gen. Edward C. “Shy,” Moskos, Charles C., 156, 165,
101, 107, 121 v 168, 176, 179-180, 190, 216,
Meyer, Lt. Larry, 286 220, 232
Mikulski, Barbara, 248 Moss, Howard A., 171
Military. See Armed forces Motherhood. See Parenthood;
^Military Enlistment Physical Pregnancy
Strength Capacity Test,
109-110, 127 N
Military Law Review, 224 Nahal, 187
Military Occupation Specialties, National Advisory Commission
91, 105, 108-109, 127 on Selective Service, 18
Military Orphan Prevention Act, National Association for the
202 Advancement of Colored
Military Project, 192 People, 20
Military science, 72 National Defense Authorization
Military Women’s Corridor, 124 Act, 213
Miller, Commander Thomas R., National Institutes of Health, 171
275 National Lawyer’s Guild, 282
Miller, Dean, 71 National Manpower Council, 9
Minow, Newton N., 217 National Military Family
Minuteman missile crews, Association, 130
127-128 National Organization for
MIR. See Mishap Investigation Women, 28, 95-97, 113
Report National Security News Service,
Miramar Naval Air Station, 277 307
Mishap Investigation Report, National Vietnam War Memorial,
291, 293, 295-296 15-16
Mitchell, Brian, testimony of, National Womens Equality Day,
345-350 33
Mixed Company, 59, 163 National Women’s Political
Mobile Logistics Support Force Caucus, 135
(MLSF), 129-130 NATO standard rifle caliber, 147
Mobley, Adm. J.S., 296 Naval Academy: attrition rate for
INDEX • 385
women, 56, 73; North Korea, 77-78

Dreyer handcuffing incident, NOW. See National Organization
245-248; for Women
first year of integration, 55-58; Nunn, Sam, 213-214
liberalization of academic Nursing, 2, 11
curriculum, 61;
nomination of women, °
27-28; O’Beime, Kate Walsh, 216-217,
opposition to admission of 233-234, 236
women, 71, 247-248; Occupational Classification
peer ratings, 63; System, 109
pillow fight incident, 279-280. Office of Institutional Research,
See also Academies; Navy; 227
Tailhook Association Office of Special Investigations,
Naval Air Station Adak, 143-144 329
Naval Health and Physical O’Keefe, Sean, 270-271
Readiness Program, 145 OML, 61, 225
Naval Investigative Service, 261, O’Neill, Thomas “Tip,” 92
265 Ono, Lt. Gen. Allen K., 198
Naval Reserve, 3 Operation Desert Shield, 199
Navy: aviation training, 223-224; Operation Just Cause, 195
injury rate for women, 148; Operation Provide Comfort, 322
obstacles to increasing number Order of Merit, 61, 225
of women, 87-88; OSI, 329
percentages of women in Owens v. Brown, 88
1986, 129.
See also Armed forces; P
Combat aviation Pacifism, 183-184, 189
Navy Times, 281 Panama, 195-198
Neizer, Meredith A., 217, 235 Parameters, 193
The New Republic, 333-334 Parenthood: effect on military
New York Air National Guard, career, 74-75;
320-331 impact of mothers in combat,
New York Times, 195 199-204.
NIS, 261, 265 See also Child-care;
Nixon, Richard M., 19, 22 Pregnancy; Single
Noble, Jeanne, 20 parenthood
Nonavailability rates, 149-150 Parker, Maj. Jacquelyn S., 320-331
Noncombat roles, 106, 340, 347 PDA, 87
386 • INDEX
Pease, Adm. Kendell, 295-296, 10; nondeployability and,

298, 307 204—205; as temporary
Peer ratings, 63 ^ disability, 101,153-155.
Pentagon: feminist infiltration, See also Parenthood
80-81; Premenstrual syndrome, 149
Military Womens Corridor, Presidential Commission on the
124; Assignment of Women in the
relationship with DACOWITS, Armed Forces, 200-201,
124-125 216-224, 231-244, 345-350
Persian Gulf War, 199-214 N Presidents Commission on an
Physical strength: Army Physical All-Volunteer Armed Force, 19
v Readiness Test, 221-222; Price, Melvin, 31
damage-control tasks and, Probability of direct combat,
143- 144; 107, 122, 127
requirements for MOS, Proceedings, 289
108-109; Promise Keepers, 285
technology and, 140-141; Promotion policies, 11-15,
upper-body strength, 141, 139-140, 224—226, 229-230
144- 145; Proxmire, Sen. William, 137
X-Factor indicator, 142 Prueher, Adm. Joseph, 270
Pilot B, 299-302 Psychological differences, 166-176
Pitcher, Molly, 1 The Psychology of Sex
Plebes, 56-58, 62-65, 68-69 Differences, 172
PMS, 149 Public displays of affection, 87
Policy Review Group. Public Law 90-130, 15, 111
See Women in the Army Public Law 94-106, 32
Policy Review Group Public Law 625-80, 8
Pope, Barbara Spyridon, 262-265
Positive motivation, 36-37, 45, a
342 Quinn, Sally, 199-201
Powell, Gen. Colin, 282 Quotas: illegal use of, 346;
Pregnancy: aboard combat for officer promotions,
vessels, 288; 224-226, 229-230;
at academies, 67; recruitment quotas, 92, 128.
attrition and, 151-152; See also Promotion policies
choices for Army women, 105;
impact on military readiness, R
210; Racial discrimination, 319
involuntary separation and, Rader, Sgt. Mary, 206
INDEX • 387
Ralston, Gen. Joseph, 320 ROTC. See Reserve Officers

Rangel, Charles B., 30 Training Corps
Rangers, 99-100 Roth, Sen. William, 214
Rank limitations, 11-12 Rustad, Michael, 180
Rape, 311-313, 337-338
Ray, Col. Ronald D., 217-218, S
234, 236 Safer, Morley, 315
RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft, Salter, James, 62, 68
127 Salter, Mary Jo, 183
RE-FORGER operations, 84 Samples, Lt. Dave, 275
Reagan administration, 99, San Diego Union-Tribune, 260,
115-116, 123-125, 129, 133 266, 277, 296-297
Reason, Vice Adm. J. Paul, Sanctuary, 87-88
274-275 Schamer, Sgt. Twila, 204
Reconnaissance aircraft, 127 Scheffelin, Margaret M., 118
Recruiting Command, 110 Schlafly, Phyllis, 33, 80, 94-95, 97
Recruitment quotas, 128 Schlesinger v. Ballard, 27
REF MAX 77 test, 84-85 Schroeder, Rep. Patricia, 30,
Rehnquist, Justice William H., 117, 212; and combat
26, 97 exclusion policies,198, 202;
Reserve Officers Training Corps, support of homosexuals in the
29 military, 281-282;
The Responsive Community, 201 unpopularity among
Revisionists, 1-2 American military, 271, 277
Richardson, Col. Brent J., 328 Science News, 52
Ringgold, Timothy, 63 Scientific Program of Aerobic
Ripley, Col. John, 240 and Resistance Training
The Rites of Passage, 39 Exercise in the Navy, 145
Robinson, Staff Sgt. Vemell, Jr., Sea duty, 89
311 The Second Stage, 183
Roe v. Wade, 153 Security guards, 134
Rogan, Helen, 59, 163, 180, 194 Security specialists, 86-87
Rogers, Edith Nourse, 4 Segal, Mady, 310
Roosevelt, Eleanor, 4 Selective Service Act of 1948, 17
Rose, Lt. Col. Robert A. “Snake,” Senate Armed Services
325-330 Committee, 25, 213
Rosenberg, Anna, 8-9 Senior Review Panel on Sexual
Rosin, Hanna, 312, 335 Harassment, 310, 337
Rostker v. Goldberg, 96, 137-138 SERE, 239-240
388 • INDEX
Service, Adm. James, 251 SPARTEN, 145

Sexual discrimination, 26-27, Special Subcommittee on the
131,319 ^ Utilization of Manpower in
Sexual harassment, 179, 269, the Military, 23
271, 302-304, 309-313, Spurlock, Delbert L., Jr.,
320, 337. 121-122, 135
See also Tailhook Association Star rank, 12
Sexual promiscuity, 67, 206-208, Starry, Gen. Donn A., 100
210. Statutory rape, 312
See also Fraternization Steinberg, Jonathan, 336
Shepler, Joseph, 187-188 Stewart, Justice Potter, 27
'Shorter, Drill Sgt. Mariana, 313 Stiehm, Judith, 31, 38, 189, 193
Sick-call rates, 148 STOP ERA movement, 33
Siegfried, Maj. Gen. Richard S., Strategic litigation against public
310 participation, 301-302
Siemer, Deanne, 80, 92 Stratton, Samuel, 31
Simons, Anna, 335 ' Strength. See Physical strength
Simpson, Delmar, 311-313 Stumpf, Commander Robert E.,
Singlaub, Maj. Gen. John K., 276
77-78, 100 Surrogate upperclassmen, 46
Single parenthood, 102-103, Survival, evasion, resistance, and
157-158, 202 escape, 239-240
Sirica, Judge John J., 88 Szervo, Patricia A., 80
60 Minutes, 315
SLAPP suit, 301-302 T
Smeal, Eleanor, 97 Tailhook Association, 249-278
Smith, Agnes O’Brien, 13 Tambrands Inc., 209
SMLM, 173 Task Force on Equity for
Snavely-Dixon, Mary M., 80 Women, 125
Snowe, Sen. Olympia, 336 Task Force on Women in the
Snyder, Adm. John W., 262, 267 Military, 135-136
Sobieck, Capt. Tom, 299 Thurman, Lt. Gen. Maxwell R.,
Soldier specific issues, 104—105 110, 118, 126, 216, 233
South Korea, 77 Thurmond, Sen. Strom, 298
Soviet Military Liaison Mission, Tiger, Lionel, 187-188
173 Title IX of the Education
Spane, Vice Adm. Robert J. Amendment, 33
“Rocky,” 291-292, 296-298 Title VII of the Civil Rights Act,
SPARS, 5 33
INDEX • 389
Toffler, Col. Patrick, 227-231 286, 295, 298

Tomcat Follies, 277 VMI, 227
Top Gun air combat school, 223 Volner, Jill Wine, 80, 92
Torralva, Maria Elena, 117 Volunteer force. See All-
Tritt, Lt. Commander Gregory Volunteer Armed Force
E„ 275 Voth, Dr. Harold M., 94
Trost, Adm. Carlisle A.H., 131
True volunteers, 20-21, 24 W
Truman, Harry S., 152, 237 WAAC. See Women’s Army
Tuttle, Adm. Jerry, 270 Auxiliary Corps
WAC. See Women’s Army Corps
U Waivers to stay in service, 153
UCMJ. See Uniform Code of Waldie, Jerome, 28
Military Justice Walters, Harry N., 117, 121
Ungendered model of WANDAS, 301
leadership, 339 The War Against the Amazons,
Uniform Code of Military 184
Justice, 154, 161, 312 Warner, Sen. John, 212, 214
United States Code, Section Washington Post, 266, 279
8549, Title 10, 86 WASPs. See Women’s Air
United States Code, Section Service Pilots
6015, Title 10, 87 Watkins, Adm. James D., 131
U.S. Army Fitness School, 144 Watkins, Prentice, 284
U.S. Military Academy, 227. WAVES. See Women Accepted
See West Point for Voluntary Emergency
U. S. News It World Report, 27, Service
52, 96 Weak Link, 341
Use of Women in the Military, 81 WEAL, 117, 192
USS Norton Sound, 164 Webb, James H., Jr., 61, 190-191,
247, 337;
V criticism of Boorda, 287-288,
Vallance, Hollie, 199 305-306;
Vander Schaaf, Derek, 266, as secretary of the Navy,
270-271 76,131-133, 265
Vest, Capt. William T., Jr., 275 Webster, Col. Thomas, 328
Veterans of Foreign Wars, 113 Weddington, Sarah, 80
Vietnam War, 10, 15, 18, 190-191 Weinberger, Caspar W., 101, 117,
Virginia Military Institute, 227 120-121, 124-126, 132, 135
Vistica, Gregory, 260, 266, 277, Wertheim, Mitzi M., 80

390 • INDEX
West, Togo D., Jr., 310, 337-338 Defense, their Advocates and
West Point: attrition rate for Supporters, 301
women, 56, 73*^ Women and the Military, 82
cheating scandal, 63; Women and War, 177
equivalent training doctrine, Women in the Army, 79
59-60; Women in the Army Policy
first year of integration, 56-57; Review Group, 101, 104—105,
fraternization, 65-66; 107-111, 117-122,126-127
hazing, 64; Women in the Kibbutz, 187
homosexuality issues, 164—165; Women’s Air Service Pilots, 5, 6
impact of quota system, Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps,
N 229-230; 4-5
injury rate for women, 58; Women’s Army Corps, 5, 6-7,
liberalization of academic 10, 91
curriculum, 61-62; Women’s Equity Action League,
opposition to sexual 117, 192
integration, 29, 55-56; » Women’s Lobby, 30
physical abilities of men and World War I, 3
women, 141-142; World War II, 3-4
policy changes necessary for Wright, Maj. James, 144
admission of women,
227-228. X
See also Academies X-Factor strength indicator, 142
Westmoreland, Gen. William C., 94
White, Justice Byron, 97 Y
White, Sally, 233 Yakeley, Adm. Jay B., Ill, 293,
White, Sarah F., 217-218 299
Whiteside, Lt. Col. John M., 329 Yeomanettes, 3
Wickham, Gen. John A., Jr., 121 Your Guide to More Than 400
Widnall, Sheila, 317-319 Top Women in the
Williams, Adm. Duvall “Mac,” Federal Government, 80
262, 270-271
Williams, Pete, 283 Z
Wilson, Dean H., 39, 43-44 Z-gram 116, 87
WITA. See Women in the Army Zaccaro, Capt. Anthony, 328
Policy Review Group Zapping, 253-254
Women Accepted for Voluntary Zigo, Gayla, 314, 317-318
Emergency Service, 5, 6, 10 Zigo, Marc, 314-319
Women Active in Our Nations’ Zumwalt, Adm. Elmo R., 87
*
*
s'
*
V
(CONTINUED FROM FRONT FLAP)
★ Air Force Lieutenant Kelly Flinn—how adul¬

tery and insubordination became media chic
★ The Aberdeen sex scandals and the farce of

new, sensitive drill instructors
★ How lowering standards for female aviators

caused the fatal crash of Navy Lieutenant Kara
Hultgreen
★ How the 174th Fighter Wing of the New York

National Guard was disbanded to cover up the
failure of a showcase female pilot
★ Sending pregnant soldiers to fight in the Gulf

War
★ How the enrollment of women has shattered

the morale, traditions, and standards of West
Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy
★ Tailhook and its aftermath—how the real vic¬

tims are still suffering from a political purge
Applying common sense, the history of men

under arms, and a quarter-century’s worth of
research on women in the military, Brian Mitchell
reveals how “equal opportunity” has been allowed
to trump military readiness and national security.
Women in the Military is an illuminating—and
frightening—look at our nation’s armed services.
BRIAN MITCHELL served seven years as a deco¬

rated infantry officer and intelligence agent. He
has worked as a reporter for the Navy Times, is the
author of the highly acclaimed book Weak Link:
The Feminization of the American Military, and
was an expert witness before the Presidential
Commission on the Assignment of Women in the
Armed Forces. He has appeared on “Nightline,”
“Face the Nation,” “Today,” and “Larry King
Live.” Mitchell now lives in Houston with his wife
and three children.
jacket design by Marja Walker
^KECNERY
PUBLISHING, INC.
Since 1947 • An Eagle Publishing Company
Washington, DC
Distributed to the trade by National Book Network

Lanham, Maryland
“THE AMERICAN MILITARY is under a feminist assault, and Brian
Mitchell deserves a med|tfor sounding this call to arms. His alarming
expose of the feminizatioTr' of the armed forces marshalls the facts that
explode the woman-as-warrior myth.”
-KATE O'BEIRNE, National Review
“AS A SOLDIER and writer on military subjects since World War II, I
find Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster to be the sharpest and
most objective focus yet to be published on the enigma of a sexually inte¬
grated All-Volunteer Service. Aptly citing such authoritative sources as
Clausewitz and Napoleon Bonaparte, Brian Mitchell provides ample evi¬
dence to support this book’s premise, implicit in its title.”
—ROBIN MOORE, bestselling author of The Green Berets and The French Connection
“WOMEN IN THE MILITARY: Flirting with Disaster is a major coun¬

teroffensive in the battle for America’s military—which may not be in a
position to fight many more battles if the feminists have their way.”
—MONA CHAREN, syndicated columnist
I n Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster, Army veteran Brian

Mitchell shatters stock Pentagon assurances to reveal that women have
had a profoundly negative effect on U.S. fighting capabilities. A few of
the grim facts:
★ When the going gets tough, the tough get... “stress passes”? Welcome to
today’s coed boot camps otraBV-zm
★ Guts and glory—or tea uth about female troop perfor-
mance during the Gulf Ws
★ The unyielding physica der women unfit to serve even

in support roles
★ The two countries that t, 1

0C10 ..mlitary and quickly abandoned it
★ The hard data on soaring attrition rates, skyrocketing medical costs, lower
rates of deployment, mushrooming levels of single parenthood, and more...
CURRENT AFFAIRS
ISBN 0-fiSSBb-37b-B

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Flirting with Disaster

8^0 LONGER UtfVNtU tiY

Flirting with Disaster

Regnery Publishing, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mitchell, Brian (Brian P.), 1958-

Published in the United States by

Distributed to the trade by

Printed on acid-free paper.

Former Major, United States Marine Corps:

For rising generations it will become a real

INTRODUCTION The G.I. Jane Deception xi

CHAPTER 1 Myths in the Making 1

APPENDIX Testimony of Brian Mitchell 345

THE G.I. JANE DECEPTION

The greatest change that has come about

—GENERAL JOHN A. VESSEY

ON OCTOBER 26, 1997, Sara Lister, assistant secretary of the

But the next day Lister was apologizing to General Krulak

itary today have all been implemented by military leaders pro¬

includes just 25,000 women (0.7 percent), who perform largely

they a financial bargain. A presidential commission on women

vide military careers for women if their effect is to hinder com¬

MYTHS IN THE MAKING

War hath no fury like a noncombatant.

THE FIRST AMERICAN WOMAN to serve in combat was Molly

The same was true of the first nonnursing servicewomen

men. As it turned out, neither the manpower shortage nor the

acronym WAVES: Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency

kind of women who would join the -

Just as the women’s components were overcoming the pub¬

male officers; there was little else Hobby could do to boost

forces decided to keep many women in service to speed the

licity campaign to call American women to arms, shelling out

cent to 80 percent of first-term female enlistees in the late

I am aware that conditions are bad and it must be difficult

The director of the WAVES echoed the same sentiment,

direction. Military jobs open to women shrank. In 1965,

components had reached “a maturity which calls for re¬

promotions were removed, the promotion of a few unqualified

From the time the DOD [Department of Defense] proposal

whomever they knew, gaining support for the legislation.

Two former DACOWITS members testified before the

[T]here cannot be complete equality between men and

Within the framework of this understanding, the

DACOWITS’s seven-year campaign to improve the lot of

ored by the embellished National Vietnam War Memorial,

THE ALL-VOLUNTEER SURPRISE

The conscription calls out a share of every class —

no matter whether your son or my son—all must

—THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON

THE EQUALIZATION OF PROMOTION POLICIES for male and

conscription per se and were quite willing to allow younger men

the Civil Rights Division under President John F. Kennedy and

but little became of the proposals in women drawn into the

noted economists Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan; two

population of enlistment-age men would increase in the 1970s

address to Congress, President Nixon used the report to justify

she be treated differently from a man?”5 Senator Sam Ervin of