Right Place, Right Time

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--the Super Stallion CH-53E--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 bathroom light and says: “Really. I was just at the right place at the right time.”

Although Deal understands and accepts the fan mail and attention 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 hopes 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’ stereos, 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, which Deal’s supervisor expects her to achieve during a six-month tour she just began in Okinawa.

While one can sense that her dreams are coming true, it has not always been 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. Less 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.

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 was already 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 her take an aptitude test for Marine flight school soon after she joined in 1991--just in case. But she never believed being a pilot was possible.

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

“I was in the service myself,” says 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, were sexually harassed or assaulted during a drunken September 1991 Tailhook Assn. convention for military aviators in Las Vegas.

“That was awful scary when it came about,” her father says. “Not a day goes by, no, actually, not an hour goes by, that I don’t worry about it.”

His daughter expresses 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.”

Even as a young girl, Deal knew she wanted to be 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, the family viewed the aftermath of the Mt. St. Helens volcano explosion. She felt “a natural high” that has never faded. By 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 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 her the cost of tuition, and she is repaying them.

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

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 explains.

The Stallion’s task: transporting troops and heavy lifting, especially ground artillery and vehicles, but also including downed aircraft. A pair of Super Stallions was 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 the men said, “Go for it.” The rest, she says, were negative. They remarked about her ability to make it as a pilot.

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 encouraging. In March, Deal spent an evening online, answering questions from 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],” says 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 Saudi 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 squadron. The others serve in administration, logistics and maintenance.

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 is next 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. Or she would be at her squadron job, which is scheduling.

Deal wears the same jumpsuit and black leather high-top boots as other pilots. 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 while taking a tube of lip balm out of a sleeve pocket.

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, an ex-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 inordinately about his fiancee: “She’s her own person, most definitely.”

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!”