In time, he supposed, they'd be real aviators and accepted as such by the hitherto all-male fraternity of naval fliers.
His real problem with women serving aboard ship was on a different level entirely.
Tombstone's destination was the Dirty Shirt Mess, so called because officers could show up there for a bite to eat at almost any time without having to change from working clothes to clean uniform, as was expected in Jefferson's more formal officers' wardroom. He'd missed the regular mess call because he'd been tracking the evening's CAP in worsening weather, first from CATCC, Jefferson's air traffic control center, and then from up in Pri-Fly.
Now that Conway and her girls were safely down, he realized that he was hungry and wanted something to eat.
Conway and her girls. Every sensitivity session on women in the military that Tombstone had sat through during the past several years had emphasized that you don't call an adult, professional woman a "girl." It was demeaning, sexist, insensitive.
Yeah, right. Like it was demeaning for Tombstone to talk about his "boys." Conway herself referred to her people as her "girls," though some of the female Naval Flight Officers bristled when a man called them that. The semantic distinction seemed less important to the enlisted personnel on both sides of the line, but the whole issue had the air wing's male complement so on edge they sometimes seemed positively tongue-tied. Morale was being affected, and since Tombstone, as CAG, was responsible for the fighting trim and efficiency of CVW20, that made it his problem.
The line to pay for his meal at the Dirty Shirt wardroom was a short one.
An enlisted man sitting at the door punched his meal ticket, and Tombstone went straight in. Fluorescent lighting gleamed from metal surfaces and white tables. A handful of NFOs, all male, sat in small groups amid the clatter of silverware and the low-voiced murmur of conversation. Tombstone picked up a tray and started through the chow line. Fried chicken was on the menu this evening, left over from the regular mess hours and kept hot for people coming in off duty.
Tombstone didn't resent the women. No, if he resented anyone, it was the politicians and bureaucrats back in Washington who continued to use the entire U.S. military as a test bed for their experiments in social reform.
The first experiment with women aboard ship had taken place as far back as 1972, when Admiral Zumwalt, then Chief of Naval Operations, had issued one of his famous "Z-grams." Among other innovations, Z-gram 116 had called for 424 men and fifty-three carefully screened Navy women volunteers to report aboard the hospital ship U.S.S. Sanctuary for a four-hundred-day test at sea.
Officially, the test was an enormous success. Unofficial leaks to the press, however, as well as the Navy's own classified reports, told a different story. Despite regulations, there'd been romantic relationships between members of the crew, and several pregnancies. PDAs, Navyese for "Public Displays of Affection," had been common, and there'd been a number of fights.
"The situation was becoming serious," read a memorandum from Sanctuary's commanding officer to the CNO, "and was definitely detrimental to the good order and discipline of the ship's company."
Perhaps the most obvious proof that the experiment had been less than totally successful could be found in the fact that the Sanctuary returned to port after only forty-two days at sea. She spent most of her next several years tied to a dock, before being unobtrusively decommissioned in 1975.
In 1978, after Watergate's Judge John S. Sirica ruled in Federal District Court that banning women at sea violated their 14th Amendment rights, the Navy tried integrating the sexes aboard ship again, assigning a mixed crew to the repair ship Vulcan. Even before she left port, several pregnant personnel had to be put ashore, and the media began referring to the U.S.S. Vulcan as "the Love Boat."
Eventually, Sirica's decision was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1981, a ruling that feminists decried as tragic and the ACLU called "a devastating loss for women's rights."
But the matter had not ended there. Women continued to be stationed on some auxiliary, noncombat vessels. In the early nineties, the destroyer tender Samuel Gompers had become the next Navy ship to be known as the Love Boat when three sailors, two men and a woman, videotaped themselves having sex. One of the men was caught passing the tape around to his buddies, precipitating court-martial proceedings and yet another Navy sex scandal.
But there was another side to the larger issue of women in combat than pregnancies and PDAs. During the Gulf War of 1991, women had served with distinction, including helicopter pilots operating at the front. The death of one female pilot in a helicopter crash, and the capture and sexual mistreatment of another, had been widely reported. Several women had died in one night when a barracks of the 14th Quartermaster Corps at Dahran had been hit by an incoming Iraqi SCUD missile.
Finally, the Clinton Administration, coming to office in 1993, ruled once and for all that there should be no barriers whatsoever to women serving aboard ship or in combat aircraft. The Air Force, first to admit women cadets to their academy as far back as 1976, had swiftly integrated women pilots into front-line aviation, but implementation of the new policy in the other services had been slow. The Navy's first female combat aviators had begun feeding into shore-based fighter squadrons by the mid-nineties, but it wasn't until now that a serious attempt had been made to fully integrate women into carrier-based units.
The official story was that Jefferson's squadrons had suffered severe combat losses in the Battles of the Fjords, and qualified women had been needed to bring the carrier's squadrons back to full strength. That played well on CNN, but Tombstone knew that there were still plenty of male NFOs available for duty. The situation was being used by the politicians back home who were eager for the support of women's groups such as NOW.
As he took his tray to a vacant table and sat down, he couldn't help wondering what tune the radical feminists would be singing if the Russian situation deteriorated far enough that a draft became necessary, a draft that would put women in front-line foxholes next to men.
He thought again of his conversation with Barnes up in Pri-Fly. If war erupted again between the resurrected Soviet empire and the West, there would be no way to contain it. Conway and her "girls" would be right in the thick of what promised to be a long, bloody, gruesome war.
"Hello, CAG. You look about as chipper as a man on the way to his own execution. Surely the chow's not that bad."
Tombstone looked up. "Hey, Batman. Secure a chair."
Lieutenant Commander Edward Everett Wayne, wiry, dark-haired, and irrepressible, was VF-95's Executive Officer. He was also one of Tombstone's most experienced flight officers. The two men had known each other for better than four years now.
"So why all the unrestrained hilarity?"
"What?"
"Actually," Batman said, stabbing a fork loaded with mashed potatoes at the empty space above Tombstone's head, "it's that little black cloud above you that worries me. I'm going to have to report that thing to the Met office, you know. They take a dim view of micro-thunderstorms going off loose aboard ship. Plays hell with their jobs. Makes 'em look bad."
Tombstone chuckled, the bleak spell of his thoughts broken. "Okay, Batman. You can rest easy. Right after chow, I'll trot up to Scott's office and get my cloud registered."
Lieutenant Scott was head of Jefferson's OA division, the Meteorological Office. An "oh" was one of Met's weather observations, taken once each hour when Jefferson was underway, and every thirty minutes during flight quarters.