She could have ignored it. She could have reported it. Neither course would have been satisfactory, not if she didn't want more of the same and worse. Instead, she'd stopped, turned sharply, and picked out the kid who'd spoken, selecting him by the gleam in his eye and the expressions on the faces of the others. His name tag, she remembered, had read "SHAZINSKY," and he'd been big, a muscular guy who towered over the others in the group like a football player at a meeting of the school math club.
"Well gee, Shazinsky," she'd said sweetly. "I wouldn't know from personal experience, 'cause I'm not equipped for it, y'know? But I heard the other night you gave the best head in Lehman Hall!"
She'd puckered a pretend kiss in his direction, and Shazinsky's face had flushed scarlet as his companions dissolved into hooting gales of laughter.
She'd had no more wise-ass crap out of Shazinsky during her whole time at Annapolis. In fact, she'd not had much trouble out of anyone after that.
Word had gotten around that she could play the guys' game on their terms, and win.
That was the way to handle verbal harassment ― to give better than she got. She'd slapped Slider down a couple of times already, but so far he'd just kept coming back for more.
What to do about him? She could report him to CAG. In fact, going by the regs she probably should. But what good would it do? The man would get a lecture, maybe a slap-on-the-wrist reprimand, and the next time the squadron was gathered in the VF-95 ready room she would still be sitting next to him.
Worse, the next time they were up, he might be on her wing. The jerk just thought he was being funny; that, or it was the only way he could think of to catch her attention. Report him, and things could get nasty, maybe nasty enough to lead to him getting court-martialed or grounded. Hell, she didn't want to wreck the guy's career, even if he was a pig.
Besides, proving sexual harassment in a situation like this was hard, verging on the impossible. After all, what had he actually said or done?
Asked if there was anything he could do to warm her up, in a tone that only suggested something sexual? Agreed with her when she'd thoughtlessly given him a classic straight man's line? Called her "baby," or grinned as he told her to "make a hole," which had been a part of every sailor's lexicon for generations. It meant, "Get out of the way," or, "Let me through." Only on the lips of someone like Slider, and when directed at a woman, did it take on a different, salacious meaning.
What she disliked the most was Arrenberger's twisting of her call sign.
She was Brewer, damn it, not "Brew" or "Brewski."
Among the popular myths of the history of American arms, the story of Lucy Brewer was one of the most enduring. She'd been a prostitute who, during the 1800s, had published a widely read series of pamphlets describing how she'd passed herself off as a male Marine serving aboard the U.S.S.
Constitution during the War of 1812. Lucy's claims had long since been disproved by Marine Corp historians. Her accounts of battle were too precise, drawn nearly word-for-word in some cases from the captain's published after-action reports or from newspaper accounts at the time.
In any case, Lucy's claims that she'd escaped detection for three years in cramped quarters occupied by 450 men, where the toilets were a couple of open-air perches at the ship's beakhead, and where the regulations of the day required all Marines to strip, bathe, and dress in the presence of a commanding officer responsible for checking frequently on their physical condition, were patently ridiculous. There were cases of women serving aboard ship during that era, usually prostitutes or wives smuggled aboard without the officers' knowledge. "Jeannette," the wife of a seaman aboard a French warship who was plucked from the sea after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, was a well-known example. The story of Lucy Brewer, however, was almost certainly a complete fabrication, one given new life only recently by books with feminist agendas and titles like Jeanne Holm's Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution.
That hadn't stopped Conway from adopting "Brewer" as her call sign.
She'd read Holm's book while she was in flight training at Pensacola, and that had led her to research Lucy's history, as well as accounts of other American women in combat, from Molly Pitcher serving a cannon at Monmouth to the now-nameless Confederate girl who, dressed like a man, had died by her husband's side during Pickett's Charge. If Lucy Brewer's story hadn't really happened the way she said it had, it still could have, even should have, for it reflected the attitudes of other Americans who felt that women ought to have the same right to defend their homes and loved ones as men.
Not many of the men Conway had served with knew the origin of the call sign. Most, typically, assumed it had something to do with beer, which explained why a few like Arrenberger twisted it into "Brew" or "Brewski."
Usually, she didn't mind, not really, not when she'd long ago learned that fighting every possible slight, put-down, or innuendo did nothing but wear her own nerves to a frazzle.
Conway was fond of claiming that she was not a militant feminist, but a military feminist; she referred to herself and others as "girls," just as she sometimes called the men she served with "boys" or "the guys," and she'd laughed as hard as any man the first time she'd heard the story of the sailor, the Marine, and the admiral's daughter. Thirty-one years old, with eleven of those years in the Navy, she was in every sense a professional, intensely proud of who and what she was, and of her success in what for so long had been an exclusively male-dominated bastion. All her life, since long before the notion of women serving in combat units had been seriously addressed, she'd wanted to be a Navy aviator. Her older brother had been a Tomcat driver in VF-41, the Black Aces, stationed aboard the Nimitz during the late eighties, while her father had flown Navy F-4B Phantoms off the Forrestal in Vietnam.
The day she'd first stepped onto the flight deck of the U.S.S. Thomas Jefferson had been a dream come true.
Now, just two weeks later, she was wondering if the dream hadn't already begun to take on the shades of nightmare.
Her defenses, she told herself with a sigh, were way, way down. As she turned a corner and entered a companionway, quick-stepping down a ship's ladder to the 0–2 deck, she thought that the worst of it was the environment, the tight, gray-bounded shipboard atmosphere that was part of life at sea and stretched on unchanging for day after day after day. Privacy next to zero; regulations governing everything from when she could take a shower to how she took that shower to where she could use a toilet; the inevitable presence of a few bastards like Arrenberger, who insisted on turning each exchange of pleasantries into a hormone-charged sexual encounter of some kind; the language, God, the language…
It wasn't that she minded the profanity; if she did, she'd definitely made one hell of a bad career choice. Shit, she'd stopped being shocked by mere words sometime during her first week at Annapolis. No, for Conway, the worst aspect of the language used by Navy men came from the accidental verbal harassments, the expression on some guy's face when he slipped and said something he thought he shouldn't have said in her presence. Things like, "He's got real balls," or, "It just went tits-up," or, "Make a hole."
She'd only been aboard the Jefferson for two weeks and it was starting to get to her. Hell, if she was this stressed out already, what would it be like in a month? In three? In seven? This was a war patrol, and no one knew when they'd be setting course for Norfolk again. Smart money said the cruise would last at least six months… and eight or nine was far more likely.
"Girl," she murmured to herself, "it is just barely possible that you have made one hell of a big mistake."
Turning right at the next cross passageway, Conway reached the block of compartments that had been set aside for women officers aboard. A female electrician's mate third class, a stocky, plain-faced girl wearing the bright silver police badge of Jefferson's MAA force pinned to her uniform blouse, stood guard. "Evening, ma'am."