Key Tailhook Accuser Has No Regrets

For Lt. Paula Coughlin, the 31-year-old Navy aviator who blew the whistle on sexual assaults at the 1991 Tailhook Assn. convention in Las Vegas, the waiting ends today, when the Defense Department publicly releases its report on the now-infamous party and its aftermath.

But Coughlin’s role at the center of the scandal has been a bruising affair. The scars--both hers and the Navy’s--are likely to remain throughout her career.

While her colleagues pore over the findings of an investigation that could break scores of careers, send some officers to jail and prompt major reforms in the Navy, Coughlin will spend her day working at the headquarters of her helicopter squadron in Norfolk, Va., immersing herself in a job that she hopes to protect. But if today is like most others since Tailhook, the incident will never be far from her mind.

Since going public with her story last June, Coughlin said she has endured the chill of resentful male colleagues, found comfort in the often-whispered support of fellow Navy women and lived with the burden of having, almost single-handedly, fomented a social revolution in her branch of the service.

She discussed her experiences in an interview with The Times several months ago and confirmed those views again through a spokesman Thursday.

After her public comments, Coughlin was barred from piloting the Navy helicopters that she said she loves to fly--an action that also called into question her psychological state and her future in the Navy. Her grounding was in line with common Navy practice when pilots are undergoing significant emotional strain.

Coughlin said she originally feared that the Navy’s move was the “first step” in an effort to ease her out of the service and that she has resisted what she believes have been other pressures to quit.

Since January, however, she has been flying again, piloting the CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter on a two-year assignment with Helicopter Combat Support Squadron 2 in Norfolk.

Does she regret going public with charges that Navy and Marine Corps officers groped and grabbed dozens of women in a third-floor hallway of the Las Vegas Hilton during the convention?

Not for long.

“If it happened all over again, I would do the same thing, probably sooner,” Coughlin said. “I look at many of these guys--who still don’t get it--and I think to myself: ‘It was their Navy. It’s soon going to be my generation’s Navy.”

That process is not expected to happen quickly, in spite of the Navy’s determined efforts to institute training programs against sexual harassment, to punish offenders and to expand job opportunities for women. But the turnover to the new-generation Navy is almost certain to get a major push today, as Derek Vander Schaaf, the Defense Department’s acting inspector general, releases a report that has been more than 10 months--and millions of dollars--in the making.

Vander Schaaf’s investigation is expected to make the case for criminal proceedings against at least a dozen officers and some form of lesser punishment for as many as 140 more, according to knowledgeable officials.

The inch-thick report, complete with censored snapshots of participants exposing themselves and engaging in public sex, paints what one official called a “tawdry picture.”

Among those officers expected to be criticized are several admirals who investigators concluded failed to set a tone of leadership and respect for female naval officers.

In a period of dramatic shrinkage for the Navy, any officer touched by the scandal--however lightly--will, as a practical matter, have his career marked for an early end, experts said.

Coughlin said she remains determined to continue with her own career. Even so, the coming months are nearly certain to bring further distractions and more pain. She probably will have to testify at the courts-martial of men she accused and face questions about her own conduct and motives.

After going public with her story, Coughlin said, a senior Navy officer--apparently wanting to be helpful--told her bluntly: “Wow, there are a lot of people who don’t think you’re going to make it, not going to stay in the Navy.”

She said a retired aviator, an acquaintance of Coughlin’s, stopped her last October as she was shopping on base and told her that he was “199% behind her.” He then asked what she had been wearing that night.

“I was furious and I said so,” Coughlin said. The aviator protested, evidently hurt and bewildered. From behind him, the man’s wife stepped forward in his defense. “He’s your friend,” the woman told Coughlin, “and you don’t have that many.”

In the meantime, Coughlin said she has fended off a constant stream of rumors--untrue, she insists--that she was involved in sexual misconduct that made her a mark for rowdy naval officers.

“You say to yourself: ‘I did the right thing, I’m a good person,’ ” Coughlin said. “But I’ve run into attitudes, people who don’t acknowledge me in a room. And it beats you down. After awhile, you think: ‘What’s my job here? To endure, or to come to work and do my job?’ I’ve developed a huge appreciation for women who work in an environment that’s just not conducive to doing their job.”

For all of its costs, the Tailhook scandal and its aftermath have brought Coughlin a measure of fame. She was one of Glamour magazine’s 11 “Women of the Year” in 1992, and her photograph appeared in a December, 1992, article called “A Few Good Women” in Vanity Fair magazine.

“Paula did what any self-respecting naval aviator would have done if they felt they’d been attacked or abused: She stood up for herself and kept with it,” Cmdr. Rosemary Mariner, one of the Navy’s most experienced female aviators and a lifetime member of the Tailhook Assn., said in an interview Thursday.

Mariner compared Coughlin to Rosa Parks, the black woman whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man prompted the 1955 Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott and helped spark the civil rights movement.

“The fact that she had the courage to take a stand, that always makes a difference,” Mariner said. “When one individual has the courage not to accept something that’s wrong, it inspires other people to have the courage to stand up.”