For Women in the Navy, Rough Waters Run Deep

When Lt. Monica Rivadeneira, one of the Navy’s few women pilots, stepped to a microphone at a convention of naval aviators and asked nine male admirals how long it would be until women were permitted to fly combat missions, scores of male fliers took to their feet with a rising tide of hisses, jeers and catcalls.

Within hours of that ominous outburst at the 1991 convention of the Tailhook Assn., Lt. Paula Coughlin, a Navy helicopter pilot and admiral’s aide, wandered into a third-floor corridor of the convention’s Las Vegas hotel and experienced a sense of betrayal by her colleagues that was as sharp as Rivadeneira’s, but much more frightening.

Groped and grabbed by a gantlet of hissing, jeering male officers, Coughlin fled in terror .

“I’ve worked my ass off to be one of the guys, to be the best naval officer I can, and prove that women can do whatever the job calls for,” Coughlin later told an interviewer. “And what I got: I was treated like trash. I wasn’t one of them.”

Not one of them. Treated like trash. Second-class citizens in a culture that values maleness and risk-taking and the rigors and hardships of service at sea. The plight of women in the Navy has careened dramatically into the public eye following Tailhook 1991.

So sensitive is the issue, that a “very upset” President Bush called Coughlin to the White House on Friday to promise a full investigation, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater said.

But a day after Navy Secretary H. Lawrence Garrett III resigned in hopes of quelling the furor, experts said there is much, much more to be done before the Navy will be able to declare sexual harassment--and its violent brother, sexual assault--expunged from its midst.

The problem is, they say, as deeply entrenched in the Navy as salt in a ship’s belly. And just as corrosive.

The September incident, a Defense Department criminal investigation of it and swirling charges of a cover-up by senior naval officers have focused attention on what Adm. Frank B. Kelso, chief of naval operations, has called “a male culture.” Navy men, Kelso warned, will have to “make fundamental changes in some of our behavior and our way of dealing with women, and even in some of our long-held traditions.”

Although Garrett’s gesture in resigning was dramatic, much of what remains to be done is not. The task, Kelso said, is “training people . . . correcting a lot of people along the way.”

“We can’t make an assumption (that) because we recruit an individual, he has any certain set of values we might want him to have, so we need to tell him what we think those sets of values are,” said Kelso. “It takes a long time to change people’s attitudes . . . so I know this is not going to be something I can put away in a minute.”

Kelso, who said he wants to stay and “fix the problem,” recently unveiled a program of training and discipline designed to teach all naval personnel the definition of sexual harassment and the consequences of engaging in it.

But for many women, it will take a much more dramatic gesture than that or even Garrett’s act of professional self-sacrifice to eradicate sexual harassment.

Many Navy women insist that part of the solution lies in allowing them to participate in combat. Today, women are permitted to serve on only 66 of the Navy’s 480 ships, and while Navy women are trained to fly combat aircraft, they are barred from flying them on combat missions. That, said one, casts Navy women in the “minor leagues.”

“Sexual harassment will continue to be a problem in the military services as long as women are barred from combat duty--as long as we are considered institutionally inferior,” said Cmdr. Rosemary B. Mariner, the first woman qualified by the Navy to fly its warplanes, and the woman who first asked Rivadeneira’s question at a Tailhook convention in 1979.

“Just as in matters of race,” Mariner added, “separate is inherently unequal.”

It is an argument that Kelso has acknowledged “you have to consider.”

But interviews with some of the Navy’s officers indicate they are far from comfortable with women in the service at all, let alone fighting shoulder-to-shoulder in warfare.

On the morning after Garrett’s resignation, the difficulty of the Navy’s task was readily evident as Navy and Marine personnel hit the military’s golf links in Norfolk, Va., the East Coast’s principal fleet headquarters.

“You know what? I don’t like what’s happening to society today. I don’t like 1992,” said one naval aviator when asked about the prospects of expunging sexual harassment from the Navy. “I’m appalled at some of the changes,” said the officer, who like others declined to identify himself.

The aviator said he “logically” felt “at ease” with women in the military performing equal tasks--even combat missions, alongside men. “But my gut tells me something else. There’s this all-encompassing sexual tension loose in society that is simply out of place in some military settings.” Putting women in positions where they could be an amorous distraction to men, he said, “could affect your concentration. It could affect a fellow pilot or the guy who fixes your plane. It could kill you.”

Warrant Officer Walter Turner, a 25-year veteran, said women clearly were discriminated against in the past, “but that’s all changing now.”

“There’s a place for them in the Navy, and they do a good job. But a lot of the pressure comes from wives. They don’t want their husbands locked up on ships with a bunch of women,” Turner said.

Meanwhile, military officers throughout the Navy have been widely quoted calling the Tailhook investigation a “witch hunt” that has blown the Navy’s sexual harassment problem out of proportion.

According to Defense Department investigators, commanding officers and even some of those conducting the naval investigation have dismissed the Tailhook incident as overblown, and have obstructed efforts to complete the inquiry.

Mariner and other female officers have said that in the period leading up to and including the Tailhook ’91 convention, senior Navy officers did little to shore up the positions of Navy women in the face of mounting hostility from small groups of Navy men. When Rivadeneira asked her question about female Navy fliers, “the legitimacy of women in the Navy was called into question, and the leadership failed to affirm that legitimacy,” said Mariner. “What those (jeering male officers) hear is, they must agree with me.”

What would have happened, asked Mariner, if at least one of the admirals present on the dais had confronted Rivadeneira’s question--and the hostile reaction to it--with clear support for women? “What if he’d said, ‘Let’s get something straight here: Women are going to fly, because Congress has said so. The American public has spoken. They have earned it in the war, and we’re going to support it 100%. And if you don’t like it, get out,’ ” said Mariner. “Do you think the group of junior officers on the third floor would have thought of that when they decided to have a little fun?”

Instead, Vice Adm. Richard M. Dunleavy answered that Congress’ hand-picked commission of experts--not the Navy--would determine whether women would be permitted to fly in combat, in spite of Congress’ clear vote in November 1991 to repeal the combat exclusion for women in that case. The assault several hours after Rivadeneira’s question, said Mariner, “was like a tar-and-feathering. It’s done to humiliate a member of a group subject to bigotry.”

Like sexual harassment in civilian settings, sexual harassment in the military is about humiliation, several Navy women interviewed for this story said. One woman officer said that when she was an ensign, her breast was squeezed by a senior officer; another said she was told bluntly by a senior officer that he didn’t want her in his unit.

Navy women, who make up only 10% of the service’s ranks, say their humiliation is more painful because of the military’s premium on being “one of the guys.” Recounting their own experiences of harassment, several Navy women, like Coughlin, said they felt a sense of betrayal from the comrades they thought they could count on, even for their lives. To become the butt of their male colleagues’ jokes or the victim of their disrespect is the cruelest cut of all, one said.

“There really is a very strong impulse to do the things that make you a . . . part of the command team,” said one naval officer. “That’s strong for women. You don’t want to stand (apart) more than you already do.”

In the end, said Cmdr. Tom Mariner--an aviator who is Rosemary Mariner’s husband--the exclusion of women from combat ships itself helps drive a wedge between men and women who must trust and count on each other if the Navy is to accomplish its missions efficiently.

The bar on women’s service aboard many ships, said Tom Mariner, “engenders its own resentments,” as Navy men consider the hardships and family separations they must endure while many Navy women stay ashore. Because most men at sea cannot point to differences in promotions or pay between themselves and Navy women on shore, many feel women’s presence in the service makes the men shoulder heavier burdens, he said.

But some members of the Navy’s next generation of officers appear ready to go further to eradicate sexual harassment.

“The general attitude around here is that women should be allowed to do anything,” said one senior Saturday at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

Another senior was even more matter-of-fact. “If women are not going to go into combat, why have them come here? Why spend money on them?”

Healy reported from Washington and Bornemeier from Norfolk. Also contributing was Times staff writer Stephanie Grace in Annapolis.

* APPRECIATION: Women should appreciate Bush’s concern, aide says. A23