From the beginning, Petty Officer Theresa Walker wasn’t satisfied doing “a woman’s job” in the U.S. Navy.
“In ’87, when a female came into the Navy, it was to a desk job,” said Walker, a six-year veteran. “I didn’t want a desk job. I wanted something new.”
So Walker became a damage controlman, prepared to fight fires, clean up oil spills and keep a damaged ship from flooding. Now, she and thousands of other Navy women are being trained for roles they’ve never held before: permanent assignments in combat units.
The first 500 women to serve aboard combat and combat-type ships reported to duty in the spring or are preparing to report, and the first handful of combat-trained women Navy aviators took their places in aviation squadrons in the spring.
Women have served on ships since 1978 and as Navy aviators since 1974, but not in combat positions. When Congress repealed the combat exclusion law for women in all services last year, it gave women a critical opportunity to advance.
Of the Navy’s 490,000 personnel, 54,000, or about 11.5 percent, are women. They are expected to make up roughly 10 percent of combat units.
The new opportunities follow an incident that outraged many women inside and outside the Navy: the Tailhook scandal, in which more than 150 men were accused of molesting and harassing 83 women at a 1991 convention of Navy aviators in Las Vegas. No courts-martial resulted from the charges, although dozens of men were reprimanded.
In part because of Tailhook and in part because men and women will be together on ships for longer periods than before-combat ships routinely deploy overseas for six months at a time-the Navy has developed programs to train men and women to work together. Many women say that men sailors have treated them as equals for years, but others say that derogatory comments, unwanted touching and other harassment have been common.
Now the challenge to men and women is to work collegially in high-stress combat units. The challenge to women is to show skeptics they can do the job.
“I feel like I’ve just joined the Navy,” said Chief Petty Officer Mindee Wolven, who was assigned to the USS Eisenhower nuclear aircraft carrier in April after 14 years in the Navy. “We’ve been supporting the Navy; now we’re in the Navy.”
Walker is accustomed to showing people she can handle her job. Few women work in ship damage control, she said, but most of her male colleagues have given her a chance to prove herself.
Some men and women say, however, that Tailhook-and the Navy’s resulting programs to address sexual harassment-have made many men and women serving together ill at ease.
Last fall and winter, Airman Malissia Chester was one of a handful of women temporarily stationed on the aircraft carrier USS America in the Mediterranean Sea and off the coast of Somalia.
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“With sexual harassment (concerns) in the Navy now, (men on ship) had to be careful,” said Chester, a former resident of McPherson, Kan. “We’d walk through passageways and they’d slam their bodies to the side, like we had some horrible disease.”
Some men are not only ill at ease but also are reluctant to accept women in combat roles, said Lt. Andrew Alford, an instructional pilot with the Fleet Logistics Support Squadron 40, which is based in Norfolk, Va., and flies mail and other cargo.
Some men and women expressed concern that choice assignments would go to women solely because of gender. Military downsizing intensifies that fear for men, Alford said.
“The guys think they’re getting the short end,” Alford said. “If everything was perfect, the decisions would be made by performance.”
Men who will be serving with women in combat units for the first time are required to take instruction on equal job opportunities, fraternization, responsible sexual behavior, privacy issues and more. A Navy video updated last year also addresses gender differences in handling conflict, communicating and other issues.
In January 1993, the Navy decided to require personnel to attend annually its expanded classes on preventing sexual harassment.
The Navy inspector general’s office can investigate formal complaints of harassment. Over the winter, the Navy began requiring that supervising officers record even informal harassment complaints that often were handled without written records previously.
In 1992, the Navy set up a toll-free telephone line on sexual harassment. Through April of this year, the line had received 1,400 calls, including some from other branches of the military. More than 50 percent were from men wanting to know the boundaries of behavior or how to make amends for stepping out of bounds.
For men, “the root of the problem-if there’s a problem-is fear of the unknown,” said Capt. Alan Mark Gemmill, commanding officer of the Eisenhower, the first aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Fleet to house women.
“Is it a big deal? No,” Gemmill said. “I thought it was a big deal when I went through it the first time because I’d spent 20 years in not only a male-dominated Navy, but (an exclusively) male working environment.”
Watching men and women work effectively side by side changed his view, he said.
Several women who reported to the Eisenhower in April, and to the Mt. Whitney in March, say men welcomed them and helped acquaint them with their new duties.
Integrating the sexes “makes things more normal,” said the Whitney’s commanding officer, Capt. M.P. Branch.
“We’re just now getting over that Tailhook scandal; you have to be re-educated,” said Master Chief Petty Officer William Farrow, the highest-ranking enlisted man on the USS Austin, which also was sailing the Atlantic in the spring. “We’re rough around the edges.”
Theresa Walker and 80 other women reported in March to the Whitney, a combat-type ship. Women were not previously assigned to it because, as the 2nd Fleet’s flagship, it is a prime target for attack.
The Whitney houses the staff of the 2nd Fleet commander, who oversees naval operations in the Atlantic between North America and Europe, and in the Pacific on the west coast of South America. The ship stretches 630 feet and can hold 1,470 crew members. The communications towers and antennas that rise from its deck distinguish it from other ships.
Like Walker, Capt. Lin Hutton is on her first stint on the Whitney, serving as the 2nd Fleet’s new air operations officer. Hutton manages all aircraft from all branches of the military that train with the 2nd Fleet.
When Walker enlisted in the Navy just out of high school, women were already serving on non-combat ships. When Hutton was commissioned in the Navy 20 years ago, women were restricted to land.
Hutton, whose father was in the Navy, had just finished college and was considering law school when she went to an officer’s club one night with her parents. “To be honest, I think my father was hoping I would find a suitable Navy aviator.”
Instead, she saw two women in dress blue uniforms at the bar. Their professional image stuck.
She didn’t want to marry a Navy aviator; she wanted to be one.
Hutton dived in. She became the seventh woman to earn her Navy aviator wings and the first woman aviator to be named commander of a Navy Atlantic Coast aviation squadron. She also has earned a master’s degree in international relations from Georgetown University.
In some ways, Hutton said, she regrets not having the opportunities available to women just coming into the Navy now. But she’s proud of what she has accomplished.
“I’d exchange places with them in a heartbeat to have those opportunities. But I know I’ve played a major role in building that road for them.”
Her manner telegraphs confidence and intensity: She looks everyone straight in the eye, leans forward when she’s engaged in conversation and doesn’t hesitate to approach fellow officers. She talks easily with the men on ship: about personnel training, about the vinaigrette dressing on the cucumber salad at that night’s dinner, about the thrill of landing a cargo plane on an aircraft carrier.
Her living quarters are spare-a desk, a bed that folds down over a Naugahyde sofa, a private bathroom. Her wedding photo and other mementos are scattered around the room. When she prepares her bed for the night, she adds a blue, hand-crocheted blanket and a small brown teddy bear.
She prefers not to talk about harassment in the Navy; she said she countered it by trying to remain professional.
“Tit for tat doesn’t work. I knew those roadblocks coming in, and I accepted that. I felt so grateful to be allowed to participate in this great activity. I didn’t expect the system to change for me.
“We have come so far when you look at how much society has changed in 20 years. It’s like you’ve got (a salesman with) that foot in the door, and then the salesman’s half in the door. Now we’re there. It’s up to women to show we deserve it.”
To a visitor aboard ship, it can be hard to understand why so many relish sea duty.
One night aboard the Whitney, for example, both hands on Walker’s Mickey Mouse watch hovered near 12 by the time she finished her evening damage-control shift. She untwisted her reddish-brown hair from a tight braid to prepare for sleep.
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Her previous 24 or so hours had gone like this: To bed at 3:30 a.m. after night duty, then up at 6:30. Next, a work shift from 7:30 to 3:30 p.m. A break, then one more four-hour watch that wrapped up at 11:45 p.m.
The ship is bustling even late at night. With work shifts around the clock, the women’s lounge and bathrooms are almost always in use. Cafeteria meals are served in the enlisted mess even in the middle of the night. It’s a gathering place for men and women who want to play cards or relax. There’s television for spare moments, a chapel for prayers, even two barbershops on board.
After dark, only red lights illuminate many of the decks so the ship can sail almost undetected on open waters. At night, only those whose work requires them to be outside can venture there. Sailors who are regularly assigned to a daytime work shift or a watch inside may go weeks or months without seeing the sun or the stars.
But sailors said they adapt. They adjust to the continual glare of fluorescent lights, to the constant roar of the engines, to the roll of the deck beneath them.
It can be harder to adapt to separation from family and friends.
Walker’s boyfriend is a sailor stationed on the Austin, which also cruised this spring in the Atlantic. When both are sailing, they go for months without seeing each other.
“That’s the hardest part,” Walker said. “There’s women on here that have children, and that would be really hard. They’re really strong women.”
Petty Officer Cynda Masterman-Ingalls is one of them. Ingalls left her husband and young daughter in Iceland to accept a post on the Whitney.
Days after returning from a spring vacation to see friends and relatives in Independence, she was still fighting sea-sickness and adjusting to the movement of the floor beneath her step, the whistles that accompany ship announcements and the pain of parting from family.
But Ingalls voices no regrets about her choice.
Sailing is “all I wanted to do,” she said. “A lot of women are saying, `I don’t want to go on a ship,’ and I say: `Join the Air Force.’ “