The Navy that gave us John Paul Jones and defeated Imperial Japan seems incapable of cleaning up its act when it comes to women. Four years alter Tailhook ‘91, the notorious bacchanal that eventually claimed the jobs of the Secretary of the Navy and the chief of naval operations, the Navy still can’t shake its reputation for misogyny. Since 1992, the Department of the Navy has logged more than 1,000 new harassment complaints and more than 3,500 charges of indecent assault, from groping to rape–nearly three times the national rate for the same period. The Navy acknowledges that sexual abuse is actually underreported. And last August, the Pentagon had to stiffen regulations because so many women said they were the victims of reprisals for filing complaints.
Sexual abuse is difficult to root out because it is now so embedded in the Navy’s day-to-day culture. Over the last 30 years, an attitude of contempt toward women has become routine not only below decks but also in the officers’ quarters. Sailors have always been known for their bawdiness, but officers, at least, were supposed to be gentlemen. Then came Vietnam. Billeted in southeast Asia and increasingly frustrated by a losing war, a whole generation of naval officers began carousing in the sleazy bars of Bangkok and the Philippines. The Vietnam vets–and the exploitative sexual attitudes they developed in Asia–arrived home in the ’70s just as women were beginning to move into the ranks. The result was a colossally unlucky convergence of declining manners and morals with the arrival of female sailors and officers. For the men, this has meant careers wrecked by lewd indiscretions. And the Navy’s women have been forced to learn how both to go along and to fight back-with very mixed success.
The story begins during the Vietnam War at the Cubi Point Officers Club, near the Navy’s vast station at Subic Bay in the Philippines. The pilots who flew through heavy enemy flak and then landed their planes on a tossing ship’s deck never admitted their fears. Instead, they took their feelings out on shore leave, routinely destroying the Cubi Point club during boozy brawls. Finally, the Navy built a cinderblock annex to the bar, with steel mesh over the light bulbs. Fliers dubbed it “the Tailhook Bar.” There the pilots performed a strange ritual, a way of mocking the death they faced every night when their returning planes had to catch an arresting cable on the deck of the carrier–or plunge into the sea. On the floor of the bar, the fliers built a small-scale catapult capable of “launching” a plane (an old fuel tank with a seat welded inside) through the bar doors and into a small pond outside. Unless the pilot managed to drop a small tailhook from his cockpit and catch a wire strung across the floor, he would be hurled into the drink.
It was a ride built for men only. But one persistent woman, a civilian American teacher, kept asking if she could try it, so they let her. When she missed the hook and sailed into the pond, the men of the Navy’s air arm urinated into the water. This became a custom.
Respect for women was pretty much non-existent at Subic Bay. The girls working bars in their pasties and G-strings were called “hostitutes” or “L.B.F.M.s” (Little Brown F —– Machines). The Navy tacitly sanctioned this trade. Commanding officers used a formula to decide when to order troops to stop having sex with local prostitutes: 30 days–the normal course of treatment for venereal disease-before they arrived home. In the mid-’70s, the brass prepared a film called “Sex and the Naval Aviator,” to explain to wives the intense pressure on pilots, to rationalize their need for a physical release after they had endured so much under fire. But the production was deemed too embarrassing and was never released.
The behavior at the Tailhook Bar was carried on at the annual “Tailhook” conventions, where in 1991 the abuse of 83 women forcefully underscored the spread of the post-Vietnam naval culture. Founded in a Mexican hotel in the ’50s, this debauch moved to Las Vegas and had become a three-day drinking and sex binge. T-shirts with slogans like “Hang ’em if you’ve got ’em” and “Women are Property” were worn by aviators who had flown their F-14s and A-6s (cost: approximately $3,000 an hour) to Vegas for the ‘91 party.
For years, the top brass looked the other way- or joined the fun. In the mid-’80s, when several base commanders cancelled happy hour at their officers’ clubs, Navy Secretary John Lehman sent a Flash Message, a communication for priority dispatches, to overturn the order. At one Tailhook convention, on the night of Oct. 2, 1986, Commander Pete Stoll, an aviator who had flown 450 combat missions in Vietnam, stood next to a couple of visiting Air Force pilots as they watched a naked woman standing over a man, wagging her rump. “Do you know who the Secretary of the Navy is?” the Navy man asked the Air Force pilots. They said no. Stoll pointed to the man beneath the girl. “Well, there’s our Secretary of the Navy, right there.” It was Lehman.
Navy women react to all this by resisting, adapting or desperately trying to do both at once. The Navy is equally confused about how to reform itself. Officially, it wants to promote women as fast as possible-sometimes too fast. Unofficially, many of the Navy’s men are undermining women as they struggle through the ranks. The experiences of three women-two aviators and a midshipman at Annapolis-illustrate how rocky this voyage has been.
The same night Lehman was enjoying himself at the ‘86 Tailhook convention, Lt. Roxanne Baxter, an attractive aviator, wandered into a third-floor “gauntlet,” a passageway lined with men who fondled females. As she made her way down the hall, she felt a hand reach up and grope her. She slammed the man against the wall. Baxter, a weightlifter, then grabbed the man’s testicles as hard as she could. With her face a few inches away from his, she demanded, “How do you like it?”
A few summers later, Baxter was the only woman aboard the carrier Constellation on a North Pacific cruise. She knew she would have to endure a ritual attended by. the carrier’s captain and the admiral in charge of the battle group. She gamely laughed through a skit called “The Butt Brothers,” which was performed by two officers who stuck their buttocks through a sheet as if they were talking heads. One was an “angel,” the other the “devil.” Beneath them sat a male aviator in a blond wig, who was supposed to be Baxter. The skit consisted largely of the “devil” urging Baxter to perform intercourse. As the men howled, Baxter herself took the stage in a flight suit that had been stuffed to mimic one of the male pilots whose call sign was “Flex.” Baxter aped about, grabbing her crotch and yelling, “Oh yeah! I need a package check!” “I got lewd just to give it back to them,” she later said. “In some ways I won a lot of respect. But I lost some respect with myself for doing it.”
Such hazing drove other women out very early in their careers. On the night of Dec. 8, 1989, Gwen Dreyer, a second-year student at the Naval Academy, was lying on her bed, exhausted. She was accustomed to raids from her male classmates, who would sneak into her room and leave pieces of meat on the floor. (They would also play tag with their penises in front of Dreyer and her roommates and mutter “You’re f —– ugly” as she passed in the hall.)
The daughter and granddaughter of Annapolis grads, Dreyer was determined to make it. But this evening would be too much. At about 8 p.m., two midshipmen- one of them responsible for handling personnel complaints on her floor-burst in. They hauled Dreyer into the men’s bathroom and chained her to the urinal. Then, along with eight others, they laughed and exposed themselves. Only two of her abusers were punished, mildly. But Dreyer was so humiliated that she left Annapolis at the end of the year. The academy’s commandant, Capt. Joseph Prueher, who then warned the Dreyer family not to push the case publicly, is the Pentagon’s nominee for the top admiral’s job in Asia: commander of U.S. forces in the region.
Lt. Kara Hultgreen stuck it out longer. Six feet tall, she was called “the Incredible Hulk.” Hultgreen was one of the first women chosen to fly an F-14–the supersonic carrier-based fighter–in a combat squadron. Under normal conditions, she would have washed out. Two “downs”–serious mistakes in training–are usually enough to disqualify a pilot. Hultgreen had four, but she still qualified, in part because the Navy felt tremendous pressure to promote women after Tailhook ‘91. When Hultgreen crashed and died attempting to land on a carrier in October 1994 on a clear, calm California day, the Navy publicly defended her, claiming she died because of engine failure. The brass tried to suppress a secret report blaming pilot error, which was leaked to the press.
Cleaning up after Tailhook ‘91 has been virtually impossible. Two “standdowns” were ordered, bringing the Navy to a halt while every unit discussed sexual harassment for a day. Yet no one was court-martialed because of Tailhook, in part because the aviators stonewalled. At Miramar, site of the Navy’s Top Gun school, fliers wear patches saying “Tailhook ‘91–I wasn’t there.” The Tailhook convention itself is now a tame affair. And the Tailhook Bar was closed down when the U.S. left Subic Bay. But the action has moved down the Pacific Basin, to the Pattaya Beach in Thailand, a strip joint-honky-tonk scene where almost every night, drunken American carrier pilots can be found relieving their fears. The Tailhook spirit lives on.
