Not the right stuff

National Review, July 20, 1992

AMONG seafaring men, a woman on board ship was traditionally considered bad luck, and since the Tailhook Association convention last fall in Las Vegas, it's dear that they can spell trouble ashore too. Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned after President Bush expressed his displeasure with the Navy's inquiry into the sexual abuse of 26 military and civilian women by naval aviators at the convention. The Senate is holding up 4,500 Navy promotions; a House Committee has cut 10,000 jobs from Navy headquarters; and Representative Pat Schroeder is demanding that the Department of Justice take over the investigation. President Bush and his fellow politicians appear convinced that the women's vote hinges on overreacting to the Tailhook incident.

This privately sponsored yearly gathering of active and retired Navy and Marine flyers is notorious for its bawdy revelry. For three nights the Navy's aerial glamor boys act like drunken sailors. Complaints by Navy Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, a helicopter pilot, launched the investigation into Tailhook, which has implicated some seventy officers. Her own boss, Rear Admiral Jack Snyder, has been relieved of his command for not responding appropriately to her complaints. When Lieutenant Coughlin reported being pawed by her fellow pilots as they propelled her down a hallway in the Las Vegas hotel, Snyder allegedly remarked, "That's what you get when you go on the third floor of a hotel with a bunch of drunken aviators." That would have been the reaction of most mothers a generation ago. Even in these progressive times, it is more to the point than Senator Sam Nunn's hints on television that four years' hard labor would be the appropriate punishment for the celebrating flyers.

Of course, military personnel guilty of sexual abuse should receive appropriate punishment--well short of four years' hard labor. But the Navy brass has strangely concluded that the appropriate remedy for Lieutenant Coughlin and her female colleagues is to allow them to fly combat aircraft. Both admirals and feminists seem unconcerned that this would expose American women to the far more serious sexual molestation suffered by the American female POWs in the Gulf at the hands of enemy soldiers.

Indeed, these attacks have been played down as vigorously as the Tailhook incident has been denounced. We suspect that this sorry affair will conclude with the President nominating the first female secretary of the Navy. Candidates already include two outspoken feminists, Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Manpower Barbara Pope, and recently defeated Democratic Representative Beverly Byron of Maryland, who chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel. By appointing either one of these proponents of women in combat, the President would be turning an unfortunate incident into a military disaster. What Tailhook is accelerating is the transformation of the armed forces into a vast experiment in feminist sexual theory. Not only would such an experiment obstruct the very purposes of a military organization; it would also wreak havoc on the people being experimented on, exposing young women to sexual harassment, young men to sexual entrapment. An odd sort of achievement for the macho flyers of Tailhook and for another famous former Navy flyer.