War Story 6

There I was….

It was a dark night.  Not dark like in the U.S. where there is the glow of city lights on the horizon. This was black dark, no moon, high cloud cover, no city lights…anywhere, dark. We had a short night mission. I can’t remember what exactly. I was flying with the unit standardization pilot, the highest level of instructor pilot my company had. He was a CW4 and, like the typical aviator, believed he was better…than anyone. 

Let me pause the story for a moment, so you can get the full effect of this guy. I shared a large office with him. I was the company safety pilot. He was the standardization pilot. In our office sat all the other instructor pilots and crew training NCOs. Our office was also the pilot hangout. The line pilots passed their time doing flight planning, shooting the breeze, playing ‘stump the chump’, and whatever else pilots do when they aren’t on the flight line.

Days before we were headed off to war, I had a lot of last-minute paperwork and packing to do. The rest of the pilots basically had nothing to do. They were hanging around our office, deep in discussion.  The lingering question was “who will bring the porn with us to war?” This is not a conversation for me, but, of course, as the only female present, they thought I should be involved. The pressure was on me, the safety officer, to be in charge of the porn. I flippantly commented, that “they should take a long look at their wives, before we go” and left the room to get some paperwork signed by the commander. If I had learned anything throughout the years of working in a male-dominated field, it was that conversations like these were best had when I wasn’t present.

Later, task finished, I returned to my office to find that they were still deep in discussion on the porn topic. I simply said something to the effect that I wasn’t interested in being a part of any of it. The standardization pilot responded with a statement that would end my future in the organization. He said, “It’s better that we take porn, then rape the women in our unit.”

Let’s just let that sink in for a moment. Was it a threat, a joke? Does it even matter? By this time, my commander was gone for the day. I took a moment and went to my XO. I told him, very clearly, that I am not making a formal complaint, but there is a serious issue that the leadership needs to be aware of. A company where men feel free to make jokes or threats to a woman is a company with problems. I explained the scenario. The solution I offered was to hold a commander’s meeting with the whole unit where the commander would re-train on the sexual harassment policy and let them know that jokes or threats damaged morale and would need to stop.

A few days went by and no meeting, no training, no word on it. I approached my commander, again iterating that I was not making a formal complaint but attempting to gently indicate that he needed to be sure his unit understood the need for mutual respect. 

He took my advice and decided to teach somebody a lesson. It was me that would be in receipt of that lesson. My commander asked the standardization pilot to come to his officer where he delivered formal letter of reprimand for sexual harassment. Of course, my standardization pilot wasn’t happy. He told every pilot in the unit to stay away from me, and they did. He built an unshakable reputation for me as a whistleblower. 

We went to war with no pilots speaking to me. I flew combat missions and grieved as my fellow pilots died in action, all the while, no one was speaking to me other than what was absolutely necessary to complete a mission. I had no peers to talk to while living in the desert of Iraq. I was the butt of every joke. I ate my MREs alone. I walked miles to the dining facility alone while they drove past me in a Humvee. When one of our aircraft went down and three crew members died, I grieved alone. I wasn’t allowed to become a pilot-in-command because the standardization pilot controlled the process.

Not everyone sided with the standardization pilot. Those that didn’t side with him remained neutral.  They didn’t talk to me either. They just didn’t participate in the gossip and ridicule. They were better, sort of.

Later, a new major took command of my unit. He told me that no letter of reprimand had ever been filed. My old commander had written the letter, made the standardization pilot sign it, and then shredded it.

Back to my story… we were flying with night vision goggles in the pitch black. Night vision goggles, especially older models, rely on tiny amounts of illumination from the moon, stars, far away city lights, anything. Without this illumination, we lost sight of the ground by the time we were 15 feet off the ground. It was a terrible feeling. We couldn’t see the power lines or towers even though we knew they were there. The flight was terrible. 

We knew by the map and the GPS that we were headed toward power lines. The standardization pilot was on the controls, and he initiated a climb. The radar altimeter showed that we would probably cross over the lines without hitting them, but he wasn’t taking any chances. He pulled in so much power that he drooped the rotor. Rookie mistake. Drooping the rotor means that he put too much stress on the engine and the rotor responded by slowing down. The rotor noise bogged down, and the master warning beeped and lit up the dashboard. I announced the master warning reset and moved through the emergency procedures alongside him. He reduced the power and recovered, but it never should have happened, not with the most senior pilot in the unit. If it had happened to me, he probably would have grounded me until I could be retrained. I was angry. It was a stupid mistake.  But I said nothing. He knew what he did.

We finished the flight, landed, shutdown, and walked back to operations. I walked and talked with the medic and crew chief. This was normal since the pilots didn’t typically talk with me. The medic comments, “Hey, that was a great flight!” I thought he was being sarcastic, at first, until it dawned on me that the crew members in the back don’t hear the master warnings. They had no idea that our standardization pilot drooped the rotor and put us all in danger. I didn’t correct him. 

From the rape joke/ threat, I spent another 35 months in that unit. Twenty-four of those months were in combat. The standardization pilot never left but shared his plight and feelings about me with every new pilot that would join the unit throughout those 3 years. He promoted junior pilots with much less experience and skill ahead of me. Some pilots came that didn’t care what they heard, which helped. Much later, on a night flight with a pilot who commanded a high level of respect and regard in the unit, my crew almost died in a midair collision. As a thank you for my actions on the controls that night, that pilot stood up for me, finally. Within a week, I was promoted to pilot-in-command and given my own crew. When I told him thanks, he told me that I had earned it a long time ago, and everyone knew it.

Looking back, there is no doubt that the lesson was meant for me. While they meant it to harm me, maybe it was ultimately for my good.