Gaining Altitude

We’re in the bathroom of America’s first female Marine Corps pilot, and let’s see . . . there’s moisturizer, a curling iron, hair scrunchies, a Goofy clock, Pep Boys heavy-duty grease cleaner. Oh, and a helicopter pressure guard chart.

“I look at the mirror,” says 1st Lt. Sarah Deal, drying her face with a towel, “to see my limitations.”

Some people would probably be referring to their looks. Deal, 26, is talking about that chart taped to her mirror.

“If you lose your rotor speed,” she explains, “it’s your life.”

Such are the concerns of a woman who makes her living flying one of the world’s largest combat helicopters, armed with twin machine guns.

Loved ones and fellow Marines at her Tustin air base squadron would tell you she’s as fierce a flier as she is a surfer or basketball player. But she wears her role as pioneer less comfortably.

Yanking her white-blond hair into a ponytail, Deal flicks off the light of her bathroom and adds: “Really. I was just at the right place at the right time.”

Although Deal understands and accepts the fan mail and attentions of admiring schoolgirls and servicemen, she sees the fuss as “kind of unnecessary.”

She has sacrificed nothing, she says, to reach this coveted and elite club that is military aviation.

She has committed to at least five more years with the Marines. After that, who knows? She is planning a large wedding at the Lutheran church in her Ohio hometown next spring. A country girl at heart, she also hopes eventually to settle and raise children in the Great Lakes region--somewhere with enough space around her so she doesn’t have to listen to her neighbors’ stereo, smell their food or hear their arguments. A place where you can swim down at the lake on a starry night.

Her immediate goal is earning the rank of aircraft commander as she prepares to go to Okinawa in May for a six-month tour; her supervisor expects Deal will earn it around June. Before then she will have spent a week--voluntarily--at prisoner-of-war survival training, then will meet friends and family in Hawaii for a vacation.

It seems about the only thing this lean former tomboy could improve is her diet: Most days it consists of M&Ms;, Kool-Aid and frozen anything that can be zapped in a microwave.

“I don’t think I’ve given up anything; I’ve gotten everything I wanted personally,” she remarks during a session with journalists. Despite her Midwestern manners, she is enduring this press te^te-a-te^te as a duty.

But whether it’s in the cockpit of a Super Stallion CH-53E helicopter or hanging out in her Lake Forest rental, one can sense that her dreams are coming true.

Not that it was always easy. She figures half of her fellow flight school students--yes, all men--urged her to drop out, said she couldn’t cut it.

“She’s gonna always be teased, because she’s a trailblazer,” says Maj. Jeff Bare, Deal’s commanding officer at the Tustin Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station. He laughs. “But she hooks and jabs and moves around the ring like the rest of them. . . . I think more fuss has been made by the press than the Marine Corps.”

*

There are 173,000 active-duty Marines in this country. Fewer than 5% are women, the smallest share among the four military branches. Male aviators or aspiring ones in the Marines total 5,044. Deal is the one female pilot, and fewer than a dozen more are in the aviation training pipeline, Marine Corps officials say.

There has been a push to open more jobs for women in all branches of the service since women served throughout the combat zone during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In April 1993, then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin lifted the ban on women serving as pilots of combat aircraft or on fighting ships. Women may serve in all but what are generally called ground combat troops.

Deal earned her pilot’s license as a flying major at Ohio’s Kent State University. When Aspin’s ruling came down, she had already been in the Marines, training to be an air-traffic controller. She still has the newspaper story that marked the day her world changed.

Her recruiting officer had had her take a flight aptitude test for Marine flight school soon after she joined in 1991--just in case. But she had never believed it would be possible.

Deal joined the military despite her father discouraging her and her three sisters from choosing it as a career.

“I was in the service myself,” said Richard Deal, a retired Marine and military policeman, “and it’s no place for my daughters. But once she was in, we supported her.”

Then there was Tailhook.

More than 80 women, including several Navy pilots, had been sexually harassed or assaulted during a drunken September 1991 Tailhook Assn. convention for military aviators in Las Vegas.

Initially there was no government investigation, despite Navy helicopter Capt. Paula Coughlin’s formal complaint of being assaulted by Navy and Marine Corps pilots, some of whom Coughlin knew by name.

When investigations were launched, nothing substantive came of them for 10 months. Then Coughlin shared her story on network television.

Two days later, Coughlin met privately with President George W. Bush. Later the same day, the U.S. secretary of the Navy resigned. Lesser charges of conduct unbecoming an officer eventually were filed, although there was no court martial. Many military careers were scarred. The military has never been quite the same.

Coughlin was ostracized for blowing the whistle on Tailhook. Her supervisors transferred her and eventually grounded her for mental instability--spawned, the Navy conceded, by the stresses of Tailhook. Before she resigned in May 1994, Coughlin was piloting the Navy’s biggest helicopter, the CH-53 Sea Stallion--similar to the aircraft Deal now flies.

“That was awful scary when it came about,” Deal’s father said of the sexual harassment revelations. “Not a day goes by, no, actually, not an hour goes by, that I don’t worry about it.”

His daughter expressed less concern: “It’s just another part of society,” she says of sexual harassment. “I don’t know; it happens. It just happened on a larger scale because the military is a big place. But it happens whether you work at a small or a large company.”

*

Even as a little girl, Deal knew she wanted to become a pilot. She remembers as an 8- or 9-year-old gazing out at the airfield behind the family barn, where remote-control planes were flown.

When she finally took her first real plane ride, she was 10 and on vacation. With all the Deals on board--including Sarah, her brother and sisters--the family viewed the aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens volcano explosion. She felt “a natural high” that has never faded. By age 18, she was working toward her private pilot’s license.

Not believing she would ever be allowed to fly for the Marines, Deal set her sights on flying for a commercial airline, or perhaps becoming an air-traffic controller.

She enrolled at Kent State, where she lived in the dormitory and earned money for expenses by fueling, de-icing, taxiing and parking planes at the neighboring airport.

Because of the expense of flying time, the cost of a flying degree, is much higher than a standard one. Deal’s parents took out a second mortgage on the family home to loan Sarah the cost of tuition, and she is repaying them.

Summers she moved back home near Pemberville, a burg of 1,300 with a two-lane downtown surrounded by acres of corn and wheat. A place, she said, “where everyone knows everyone.”

She worked at Domino’s Pizza. She worked at McDonald’s in maintenance because she could earn $1.25 an hour more than food handlers. She worked nights doing chores for a local dairy farmer who paid her to clean stalls, bale hay and milk cows. She worked at a nursery, packed piston rings in a warehouse.

It seems the only job she couldn’t get was in landscaping: “I just wanted to be outdoors, mowing lawns, you know? But I think they didn’t hire females for that job.”

It was her only brush, she said, with discrimination.

*

Flying has always been her unwavering focus. “It’s all I ever wanted to do,” she said.

Once she got into the Marines, she thought it would be “intriguing” to fly the AV-8B Harrier, a jet able to take off and land vertically. Eventually the Super Stallion became her bird of choice.

“I liked its mission,” she explained.

The Stallion’s task: transporting troops and heavy lifting, especially ground artillery and vehicles, but also including downed aircraft. A pair of Super Stallions were used to rescue Air Force pilot Scott O’Grady in Bosnia last year.

Deal admits to a flicker of apprehension about flying for the Marines, but only about the degree to which she would be accepted.

“It was about 50-50,” she says about reaction she got from male Marines during flight school in Pensacola, Fla. Half of the men said, “Go for it.” The rest, she said, were negative. They remarked about her ability to make it as a pilot.

She says she chooses not to recall the bad comments.

Of the fan mail she still gets, a majority of it is from older retired military men, almost all of it encouraging. Last month, Deal spent an evening on-line, answering questions via e-mail from people all over the country.

Again, she would just as soon go about her business, although the Marine Corps has asked her to meet the press because “we want to tell her story to the public,” says 1st Lt. Douglas Powell, a spokesman for the El Toro and Tustin marine bases.

Deal is stunningly disinterested and unself-conscious about cameras and questions. No blush as the shutters click. She wears no makeup when she is interviewed at her condo; she is wearing running shorts and T-shirt, her shoulder-length hair absent-mindedly pulled into rubber bands.

Her parents are relieved that she has remained untouched by all the fuss, “a country girl at heart,” says mom Marjorie Deal, who has worked as a Kmart checker since the youngest of her brood got into school. (Deal’s father took early retirement from Teledyne CAE, where he worked on jet engines.)

That is not to say they don’t worry about her. She has been fearless since childhood.

“I remember once, when I was pregnant with my last child, Sarah was about 3, maybe, and her dad was up on the [roof],” said Marjorie Deal. “I looked away, and she climbed up the ladder all by herself.”

”

Is there anything their daughter is afraid of? Both parents are on the phone line now. Thinking, thinking.

“Hmm,” says Marge Deal, “let me see. Well, maybe. . . . No, no. Well, maybe, she’s afraid of snakes?”

“Noooo,” says Richard Deal. “She picked that snake up when she was little, remember?”

“Oh, that’s right. Well, no,” Marge Deal concludes with a giggle, “I guess there’s nothing, really.”

*

It is government issue, this two-story building where Deal’s squadron is housed, near the edge of the vast Marine airfield bumping up to Tustin suburbia. It is called Wolfpack, and its members work either here or in the sky.

The Wolfpack squadron is among four Super Stallion squadrons at the Tustin air station. Each has a crew of more than 200 officers and enlisted personnel. Wolfpack, 11 1/2 years old, was the first CH-53E squadron called to Saudia Arabia in support of Operation Desert Storm; it sent four aircraft to Somalia and supported Marines in Rwanda and Kuwait. It is the only CH-53E squadron in the Marine Corps to have earned 30,000 hours without a mishap.

Deal is among five women in the Wolfpack squadron. The others serve in administration, logistics and maintenance, says Lt. Col. Robert G. Garrison.

On a bright, cool morning in March, Deal meets nine reporters and photographers in an upstairs squadron classroom. She is wearing an olive jumpsuit and an easy smile. She answers questions for more than an hour. Her superiors pipe in with a statistic here and there and commentary--like the fact that Deal is “a holy terror” on the basketball court. Otherwise she is on her own.

Later in the hallway, one officer is overheard joking good-naturedly to another about this being a bit of a “dog and pony” show.

The media squad next is taken to the Wolfpack’s “ready room” to observe a flight briefing. There are some pointed questions to Deal, mostly for the benefit of reporters, and some well-meaning banter.

Downstairs, crash helmets on, we are led out to the tarmac to await the helicopter. We board the Super Stallion, buckle in and take off to circle the base. Then we head for Black Star Canyon near the Cleveland National Forest.

Deal is flying the helicopter under the supervision of her commanding officer.

Two hours later, she lands the Stallion, and we follow her around some more during her “normal” day.

Normally, though, she would be up in the helicopter working toward her commanding officer qualification. Her supervisor expects she will earn it around June. Or she would be at her squadron job, which is scheduling.

Deal wears the same jumpsuit and black leather high-top boots that the other pilots do. Their hair is buzzed; hers is braided tight at the back of her head. As per regulations, hair cannot touch the collar, and there can be no visible “foreign objects” (say, a bobby pin). She also has to look “feminine,” she says, quoting military regulations. She takes a tube of lip balm out of a sleeve pocket as she says this.

She makes no to-do and asks for no special treatment; the men in her squadron offer none and seem very comfortable with her.

Her fiance, Phil Burrow, says he understands this dynamic.

“I flew with two women in training,” says Burrow, 31, a retired Navy fighter pilot now flying for United Airlines. “One was the type who said, ‘I’m a woman, and you gotta give me special treatment.’ The other one was more like Sarah, with an attitude of, ‘I’m a better flier than you, so shut up.’ That one woman, she is better than most of the guys. She was the one people liked. But nobody likes someone who wants special breaks to make up for their lack of ability, male or female. You want to know the person you’re flying with isn’t going to get you killed.”

He certainly doesn’t worry about his fiancee inordinately. “She’s her own person, most definitely.”

*

Deal finishes up a 24-hour shift, snoozes for four hours then gets up to do weekday chores. She gets her car washed, banks, returns to her condo by midafternoon for her daily run.

Her decor reflects her divergent interests: hand-me-downs, a hint of military macho with woodchopper knickknacks and a twist of Disney. That would include a 101 Dalmatians desk calendar.

She is not much of a reader, she says, but there are books and magazines--from National Geographic to Cosmopolitan--stacked here and there.

Her favorite movies are “The Princess Bride” and “The Lion King,” one of many Disney videos stocked under her small TV.

Television doesn’t interest her much, but she listens to a lot of CDs. They are alphabetized by genre--country, Christian rock and ‘70s bands such as Journey.

The inside of her refrigerator is dominated by a large cardboard pizza box. Photos of family and friends plaster the outside. In one, she and relatives form a totem pole of look-alikes.

Attached by Seven Dwarfs magnets to the refrigerator is an editorial cartoon a female pilot sent her. Two female pilots are in their fighter jets. Two men are fueling them from below. One says to the other, “Of course, women in combat have affected a few old traditions.” Painted on the nose of the planes are beefcake profiles of two hunky guys flexing their muscles.

Pictures of Deal and her fiance monopolize most surface areas. Like Gidget and Moondoggie in wetsuits, propping up his and her surfboards. In military blue uniforms.

Burrow tells how they met.

He modestly points out that after the movie “Top Gun” became the top box-office hit of 1986, it was not unusual to be pursued by women wanting to land a Navy flier.

Each was the designated driver for a group of friends when they met at a well-known Pensacola bar two years ago February. “I think it was the fact that she didn’t seem to be interested in me one bit!” Burrows says.

Eventually, months later, he charmed her during a weekend trip she made to Virginia, where Burrow was stationed.

Did he ever dream he’d marry a pilot?

“No,” he says with a laugh. “It’s funny how things work out. And a Marine to boot!”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Super Stallion CH-53E Helicopter

The Marine Corps’ heavy lift helicopter is designed to transport equipment and supplies during amphibious assaults and subsequent operations ashore.

Function: Capable of lifting 16 tons at sea level, transporting load 57.5 miles and returning. Typical load would be 16,000-pound M198 howitzer or 26,000-pound light armored vehicle. Can retrieve downed aircraft, including another CH-53E. In 1995, two Super Stallions were used to rescue Air Force Capt. Scott O’Grady in Bosnia.

Armament: Two XM-218 .50 caliber machine guns.

Size: Length 99 feet, 5 inches; height 28 feet, 4 inches; rotor diameter 79 feet. Powered by three General Electric T64-GE-416 turboshaft engines.

Speed: 172.5 mph.

Range: 621 miles without refueling; indefinite with aerial refueling.

Crew: 3.

Features: Dual digital automatic flight control system; all-weather capability. Seats 37 passengers in normal configuration.

Replacement Cost: $26.1 million.

Inventory: 160.

Manufacturer: Sikorsky Aircraft; introduced June 1981.