Navy Captain Proves She Belongs, Has Station Helm

In 1970, when Patricia A. Tracey showed up for her first assignmentas a young Navy ensign, her commanding officer welcomed her by telling her that women didn’t belong in the Navy. Furthermore, he said, he had only accepted Tracey and another female officer into his unit because he couldn’t get anyone else.

“I was one of the first two women assigned to the space surveillance system,” recalled Tracey. “Everybody looked around the command center to see us come in and were surprised that we came in a uniform. They didn’t know that women in the Navy would wear uniforms. . . . Big shock.”

Not only is Tracey still in uniform, she assumed command in August of the Long Beach Naval Station, only the second woman in the Navy’s history to take charge of a station. She oversees the second busiest Navy port on the West Coast, home base to 38 ships and 17,000 Navy personnel. However begrudgingly, she says, the Navy has come to accept that Tracey and other women do belong.

“Women couldn’t even be in command in 1970,” she said. “I know that it took us probably a month longer to be qualified to stand the watch at the space surveillance system than every other person who checked in there during the time I was there--and I don’t think I was much dumber than everybody else was.”

Even as sexual harassment of women remains a persistent problem in the military, Tracey is one of a small cadre of women establishing a beachhead in the Navy command. There are now 122 female captains, including Tracey, in the Navy--compared to just one in 1967, a few years before Tracey signed up. Late this year, a woman for the first time will command a ship.

And when coffee is served for visitors in Tracey’s office, it’s a male sailor who does the pouring.

But please, don’t call Tracey, 39, a warrior in the feminist vanguard. Just call her an ambitious naval officer.

“There will be women who come behind me who will have an easier time of it because I got to do this job. That’s true,” Tracey said in an accentless voice that belies her Bronx upbringing. “That’s not really the thrust of why I wanted this job. I’ve not looked on my Navy career as an opportunity to break down barriers for women. I really enjoy being a naval officer just for being a naval officer.”

Bright, articulate and direct, Tracey has wanted to run a naval station ever “since women could go to major command” in the ‘70s. She had one previous command post, as the head of the Naval Technical Training Center in San Francisco between 1986 and 1988, and arrived in Long Beach from Arlington, Va., wreathed in praise from her former boss.

“She was really a special talent here that I miss,” said Vice Admiral J. Michael Boorda, chief of naval personnel, who supervised Tracey during the past two years in her job as head of military personnel management for the Navy.

“She’s absolutely insightful . . . (and) she solves problems before they become problems,” continued Boorda, who credits Tracey with devising plans to shrink Navy forces nationwide by 6,000 people in the coming fiscal year without forcing any of them out of the service.

The daughter of an accountant and a bookkeeper, Tracey can’t say why she chose the Navy except that it was an escape from the conventional. During her 20-year career, the math major has zigzagged through a variety of jobs: predicting the orbits of satellites, overseeing the purchase of computers for shipboard use, working in recruitment and personnel management.

In the process, she has spent about half of her 13-year marriage to former naval officer Richard Metzer apart from him. “About average for a Navy family,” Tracey noted with an air of resignation.

Early on, Tracey added, she and her husband, who now is in the computer field, realized that if they were both to pursue successful careers they could not always be together, nor would they have children.

The two met as lieutenants working on the same project. “I worked for him for six months. We didn’t speak for a year afterwards. It was an interesting experience. We were both anxious to be in charge,” Tracey remembered, smiling slightly.

One place her rotations have not taken her is aboard ship, an assignment that wasn’t even open to women until 1978.

“I would like to have served on board a ship, but I couldn’t tell you a job I’ve had that I would give up in order to have been at sea,” Tracey said.

Combat duty remains off bounds for her or any of the other women who make up 11% of the U.S. armed forces. Tracey can help take care of the five Long Beach-based ships that have steamed off to the Persian Gulf in the Iraqi crisis and wave goodby to them, but she can’t sail off on them.

“I think anybody who’s a professional would like to be fully involved in their profession and that’s a whole area of my profession in which I have not been involved. So yes, I wish that I was qualified to go do that,” Tracey said, using carefully chosen phrases. “But I think the job that I’m doing here is no less important.”

She says that women--who make up 10.3% of the Navy force--are both capable and willing to go to war. But she skillfully avoids saying whether they should.

The taboo against shedding women’s blood on the battlefield, Tracey observed, “is a part of our culture. It’s a part of our tradition, part of our society. And changing the law is something that society has to decide to change.”

Although a Pentagon study released in September found that the level of sexual harassment of military women far exceeded that experienced by women in private business, Tracey says she has been lucky.

“I have not encountered sexual harassment from a senior (officer) ever. I have encountered, early on in my career, enlisted folks who were resentful of working for or with a woman and I guess I just ignored the problem and got on with the job.”

That remains her approach in Long Beach, where she supervises 374 Navy personnel and 176 civilians involved in fleet support. In fact, the career men who joined when women were all but invisible--and who have been less than thrilled with their growing numbers--are the very ones Tracey is the most likely to work with, since they are at the higher levels of station command.

She appears to relish the challenge. “I get the opportunity to overcome (that resentment). I’d much rather have people be up front with me than have something lurking in the background . . . and getting in the way of getting the job done.”

Indeed, by the time that first commanding officer who greeted her so brusquely in 1970 had left for another assignment, he told Tracey that not only had he become accustomed to having women in the Navy, he even conceded she and the other woman had done well.