THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507060468
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY KERRY DEROCHI
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
TAILSPIN
Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook
JEAN ZIMMERMAN
Doubleday. pp. $24.95
THE OPENING SCENE is familiar. A crowded room at the Las Vegas Hilton. Jeering pilots. Scantily clad women jostling to be near the ``glory.''
In the middle of suite 303 crouches Gandhi, a Navy flier known more for his skill with a razor than his career in an E-2C Hawkeye. He tenderly caresses the calf of the woman next to him.
``He loved the whole procedure,'' writes author Jean Zimmerman in Tailspin: Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook, ``the bracing smell of Barbasol, the heat of the towels, the feel of the flesh afterward - firm, clean, slightly moist, but above all smooth, preternaturally smooth, like warm marble.''
Many will look at this book about ``Tailhook,'' the sex scandal that turned the world of naval aviation upside down, as yet one more in a long line of feminist salvos, another round of bad publicity meant to be endured and ultimately ignored.
But to lump Tailspin with the many biased media reports would be unfair. Zimmerman's writing style and exhaustive research have produced an account of Tailhook that stretches far beyond the third floor of the Las Vegas Hilton, where dozens of women claimed they were assaulted during the 1991 aviators convention.
Tailspin is less a story about groping pilots than a treatise about women's struggle for equality. Tailhook is less about criminal conduct than it is about prejudice and fear.
Zimmerman, a journalist, has carefully chronicled the progress of women warriors, tracing their role in combat from the battlefields of the Middle Ages to much later in briefing rooms on Capitol Hill.
Her story is eerily framed by the life of F-14 pilot Kara Hultgreen, who died last October while trying to land on an aircraft carrier.
Zimmerman suggests that the 1991 Tailhook was not the catalyst that brought about historic changes allowing women into combat. Instead, she views Tailhook as a reflection of the changes already taking place. Slowly, the macho world of aviation was becoming a thing of the past.
The men who lined the long, skinny corridor in September 1991 sensed it, knew it.
``Every man on the third floor that night, every guy standing around with a drink in his hand, wearing the off-duty uniform of the aviator - clipped hair, T-shirt, shorts and shoes without socks - had at least a dim awareness that the culture which had sustained his world for so long was undergoing a vast change,'' writes Zimmerman.
``Their response was so automatic as to seem practically inborn.''
They fought back because they had so much to lose.
In Tailspin, Zimmerman details the rise of naval aviation before Tailhook: The release of the Tom Cruise movie ``Top Gun.'' The adrenaline of the Persian Gulf War.
No one was more revered than the Navy pilots, Zimmerman suggests. They were the elite members of a rigid hierarchy, the Brahmins of the Navy's caste system.
All others were mere ``wannabes.'' They scrubbed the decks of the carriers, waiting for the ``angels, floating down from the skies.''
Zimmerman writes: ``If a guy drove a transport plane, maybe, or a helicopter, he took his place outside the sacred circle and sat there with his nose pressed up against the glass.''
Among those who most wanted entry into the inner sanctum were women, she says.
Zimmerman profiles career women aviators, fliers who broke through some barriers only to struggle against the combat ban. Women like Jackie Cochran, who headed the Women Airforce Service Pilots during World War II; Capt. Rosemary Mariner, who earlier this year was scheduled to be the first Navy woman to command a naval air station; and Hultgreen, the first woman qualified to fly the F-14 Tomcat on a carrier.
Zimmerman portrays Hultgreen as a hard-charging aviator who fought to lift the ban against combat flying. She wore her flight suit to conventions in Washington, just to make a point. She fought off an assailant at Tailhook and later scoffed when Defense Department investigators tried to call her a victim.
When the ban against flying was lifted in the spring of 1993, Hultgreen was assigned to F-14s. She died 18 months later on her final approach to the carrier Abraham Lincoln.
``In hindsight the crash rendered Kara Hultgreen's concerted efforts to fly front-line jets in tragic high relief . . . as if she had spent the last four years of her young life committing slow motion suicide by idealism, lobbying for her right to die,'' Zimmerman writes.
Just like men have done for years.
If there's a flaw in Tailspin, it's Zimmerman's inability to break beyond gender barriers. She lumps male aviators together as if they acted with a single sense of purpose and fails to take into account the hundreds who were shocked and disturbed by the allegations.
For many, the wounds of Tailhook are deep. Careers have been ruined - many of them unfairly. Reputations have been sullied, if not destroyed. Lifelong dreams have been rudely awakened.
Not all of the men attending Tailhook were guilty of a crime. Not all of the women present were victims.
As Zimmerman writes in her epilogue, ``Life does not offer up such simple equations.''
If it did, Tailhook would have been resolved long ago. MEMO: Staff writer Kerry DeRochi covered the Tailhook scandal. by CNB