Captain of Her Ship Blazes a Trail--at Sea

Navy Capt. Deborah A. Loewer is in the engine room of this 54,000-ton replenishment ship, where giant boilers produce the steam that turns the turbines that power the shafts that keep the 769-foot ship plowing through the water at 30 knots or more.

The engine room is cramped, hot, noisy, dangerous and decidedly unglamorous.

“This is my favorite part of the ship,” Loewer said. “This is where I learned how to be a sailor.”

In 1979, as a self-described “baby” junior officer of 24, Loewer was assigned to work below decks on the destroyer tender Yosemite. The Springfield, Ohio, native was among the first group of women assigned to sea duty after Congress in 1978 dropped its ban on women serving aboard ships.

Loewer and three other women served amid the Yosemite’s 1,100 men, many of whom bitterly resented the women’s presence. The men taught their female shipmates the intricacies of running a ship at sea but often through clenched teeth.

“We were accepted,” said Loewer, who will turn 46 next month. “ ‘Accepted’ is the right word. I won’t qualify that with the word ‘well’ accepted or ‘gladly’ accepted or ‘happily’ accepted. . . . It wasn’t fun; it was long, hard work. But I think we and the Navy learned much more about what it took to go to sea.”

Two decades after her indoctrination on the Yosemite, Loewer is the Navy’s senior female surface warfare officer--a designation involving extensive training, testing and sea duty in the areas of ship handling, combat systems, engineering and more.

Of 315 Navy ship commanders, Loewer and three others are women.

If you want to gauge how far the male-dominated Navy has come in accepting women as equals, and how far it may have yet to go, Deborah Loewer is a case in point.

Her word is law for Camden’s 565 crew members, all but one of whom is taller than Loewer, who is 5 foot 1 and weighs 110 pounds. She is confident, energetic and seems to bounce from place to place on the ship.

If her authority is virtually unlimited, so too is her responsibility.

If anything goes wrong on the Camden, Loewer alone is responsible to the admirals ashore and the brass at the Pentagon. An error by the youngest of sailors can get a commanding officer sacked.

“I have no fear in that regard,” Loewer said. “I have done everything that I can to train my folks.”

She is a hands-on manager, a taskmaster. By her own measure, she’s a boss who is demanding but fair. She praises in public and, with some notable exceptions, criticizes in private. She has been known to lapse into German when she is very angry.

“She really knows her stuff,” said Lt. Cmdr. Lawrence Holloway, the ship’s chief engineer. “Don’t ever try to woof [mislead] her; she’ll pop you right back. That’s what a good captain does. Everybody needs to be recalibrated once in a while.”

Loewer has 13 years of sea duty, plus high-level assignments at the Pentagon and time out to earn a doctorate in international law at the University of Kiel in Germany.

To pursue her Navy career, she made a conscious, and emotionally difficult, choice to forgo family life and children. She does not regret her decision, she said. Still, she wishes the Navy would do more to help women avoid having to choose so severely between a career and a family.

“Maybe we need baby leave for both men and women, just like the two-year sabbaticals available for graduate work,” Loewer said. “If we want to build a better company, maybe we should look at our assignment and retention policies, begin to think out of the box. If it takes longer sabbaticals to maintain the best and brightest in the Navy, let’s do it.”

It is not the first time Loewer has suggested the Navy think “out of the box.”

In the early 1990s, while working in strategic planning, she told the admirals running the Naval Academy that they were courting a class-action lawsuit if they did not change an assignment system that seemed to steer female academy graduates away from sea duty.

The system was changed, and today 13,000 women--1,000 officers, 12,000 enlisted--serve aboard 156 Navy ships. Only the SEALs and submarine duty are still off-limits to women.

“I love what we’ve accomplished,” Loewer said. “Things are so much different now. [Still] there are some old crusty people out there. I recently transferred a chap, a mid-level supervisor, a real hot-cold performer. It took me a year to figure out what was wrong: He didn’t want to work for women.”

Her advice to women is that the Navy is a great place to start a career, with unparalleled opportunities and challenges. But be prepared for an occasional example of male chauvinism. The Navy has improved immeasurably in eradicating sexual harassment, Loewer said, but like any large work force, there is still some retrograde behavior.

“I’ve been harassed by some of the best of them, as recently as 1992 by a two-star admiral,” Loewer said. “I was stomping-furious-fists-on-the-desk mad. I told the admiral what I thought of his actions and comments. I honestly believe he thought he was being fatherly and endearing.”

She counsels women to deal with untoward behavior swiftly and through the chain of command and to reach an emotional midpoint: Don’t suffer the behavior in silence, but don’t let it undermine your self-worth.

“You get over it. You shouldn’t have to, but you do. You’re professional. You press on.”

In a few months, after finishing her 24-month tour as commanding officer of the Camden, her second tour in such a post, Loewer will be evaluated for possible promotion to rear admiral. The Navy has 11 female admirals and 225 male.

Before taking command of the Camden, she was a top aide to Defense Secretary William Cohen and before that to Deputy Defense Secretary John P. White. Washington gave her a taste for politics; when she retires from the Navy, she may run for Congress from Ohio, she said.

“There are still some people in the Navy waiting for Deb Loewer and the other women to fail,” said White, now on the faculty at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. “Deb Loewer is not about to fail. She’s terrific.”

Camden Brings Supplies to Battle Ships

The role of the Camden, whose home port is Bremerton, Wash., is to accompany aircraft carrier battle groups patrolling the Persian Gulf region. The Camden and other replenishment ships allow the battle group to stay afloat longer by supplying them with fuel, ammunition and groceries--in a complex, dangerous maneuver known as an “un-rep,” or underway replenishment.

In the maneuver, one or more ships will sidle alongside the Camden and while the ships continue steaming ahead, supplies are transferred with ropes and pulleys and helicopters. Fuel is transferred through high-pressure hoses.

At 769 feet in length, 107 feet in width and a draft of 38 feet, the Camden is one of the Navy’s largest ships. Because its weapons--Seasparrow missiles and several large-caliber machine guns--are designed to destroy incoming aircraft or ships rather than land-based or distant targets, it is listed as a noncombatant ship.

Still, due to its size, complexity and the crucial nature of its mission, the Navy requires that the commanding officer be at captain rank. Many combatant ships are under the command of commanders, a rank lower.

Women have been allowed on noncombatant ships since 1978, on combatant ships since 1994, and now comprise about 14% of Navy personnel.

On the Camden, Loewer faces challenges similar to many Navy ship captains: an aging ship (35 years), a young crew (more than 300 members under age 22), and a tight budget.

In her cabin, just behind the bridge, Loewer has a quotation from novelist Joseph Conrad:

In each ship there is one man who, in the hour of emergency of peril at sea, can turn to no other man. There is one who alone is ultimately responsible for the safe navigation, engineering performance, accurate gun firing and morale of his ship. He is the commanding officer. He is the ship.

Ships have changed mightily since Conrad’s day, but the role of the captain has not.

“There’s a lot of soul-searching before you go into command; if there isn’t, you’re probably not in the right business,” Loewer said recently during a three-day training cruise off the Washington coast.

In times of emergency--fire or flooding--it falls to the captain to give orders to close off below-deck compartments to keep the damage from spreading, even if that means sacrificing lives.

“Can I ask people to go into a burning space?” Loewer asked. “Can I close a hatch on someone if I know that if I waited 10 more seconds I might save them but lose two or three more [occupied] spaces? Can I take the ship down Puget Sound at zero-zero visibility? Things I do can end people’s careers. It’s not all glory of standing on the bridge and making port visits.”

Deborah Loewer had not planned to join the Navy. Her father was a civilian employee of the Air Force and she had been a member of the Civil Air Patrol.

Air Force Had Its Quota of Officer Trainees

After graduating from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, with a degree in theoretical mathematics and computer science, she tried to enlist in the Air Force. The Air Force quota for officer training school was full.

“I didn’t know what to do,” Loewer said. “I had told my dad I was going off to join the Air Force. How am I going to go home and tell him they didn’t want me? Well, the recruiting station next door was the Navy. I walked in and it was that easy.”

After being commissioned an ensign in December 1976, she was assigned to the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Washington. Then came surface warfare school, where she placed first in her class, and assignment to the Yosemite.

She remembers her time studying in Germany from 1984 to 1986 as an intellectually exciting time but also one fraught with personal doubts.

“I was 32 years old and in law school saying, ‘Why am I doing this? Why aren’t I married? Why don’t I have kids? Everybody else is having a normal family life and I’m over here studying like a maniac.’ It’s a screaming, raging hormone drive, like a lot of enlisted women and officers of a certain age go through.”

She opted against a “normal family life,” and after earning her doctorate, she was assigned to a destroyer tender and then an oiler. In 1993 she became commanding officer of the ammunition ship Mount Baker and in 1998 she took over the Camden.

“There is nothing that compares to the personal satisfaction you get from commanding a ship, especially one this big,” Loewer said. “Getting the mission done, knowing that there are people at sea counting on you to get them fuel, groceries, bombs. They really need us. It’s so important to me to make sure we can do everything we can to support those ships.”

Aboard the Camden, where women comprise 10% of the crew, Loewer made a series of changes.

Pornographic movies were banned on the shipboard TV system. So were movies showing sexual violence. Slasher-style movies could still be shown but only sparingly.

More fish and less red meat were to be served in the mess halls. For the first time, a salad bar was installed. Before going on liberty, sailors were given sunscreen and warned about coming back sunburned. “It’s the mom in me,” Loewer said.

At the same time, Loewer served notice that she would not tolerate any sailor disobeying an order. The incident that tested her resolve involved sailors who became known as the Tijuana Seven.

The Camden had sailed to Coronado but because the ship was due to leave the next morning, Loewer ordered that no one leave base, which is equipped with movies and recreation clubs.

But seven young sailors went to Tijuana for a night of frolic. While they made it back to the ship in time to sail, word of their escapade soon reached the captain.

“I was furious,” Loewer said. “The idea of sailors disobeying a captain’s direct order seems to me as heinous a thing as possible. I knew I had to make a show of their punishment or my orders would never be worth anything on this ship.”

Within hours she had summoned the entire crew to witness a “captain’s mast,” the highest level of punishment that can be meted out by a commanding officer without a court martial.

The seven were lined up, bawled out and given 30 days of additional work hours and restriction of privileges during their off-hours. The incident left an indelible impression on younger crew members; months later they speak of it only in hushed tones.

Loewer is the first woman to command the Camden. Probably more important, she is the first surface warfare officer to act as commanding officer in nearly a decade.

Previous commanders had been aviators, some on their way to getting the most prized command in the surface Navy: an aircraft carrier. As a group, aviators--known as Airedales--are known to be hands-off, more prone to delegating authority.

Surface warfare officers tend to have much greater knowledge of the ship than aviators and are less likely to delegate or take a subordinate’s word at face value.

“If you have a foible someplace, if you don’t document maintenance well, if you don’t hold your training frequently enough, if you’re not expansive enough on your risk-management issues, then I’m going to make sure you know it,” Loewer said.

The transformation on the Camden from an “Airedale” commanding officer to a surface warfare officer was not without bumps.

“The old captain used to always call on the phone before he’d come down to our space, but Capt. Loewer just comes down,” said May Clarete Cobb, who runs the ship laundry. “It took me several months to get used to that. I think some of the men still aren’t used to it.”

(Cobb has the distinction of being the only crew member shorter than the captain.)

The biggest jolt came during a recent extended stay at Bremerton for repairs. Such periods can often be slack times for crews, compensation for the long, arduous months at sea.

But Loewer was determined to get more maintenance done in a shorter period of time than ever before. Commissioned in 1965, the Camden is one of the Navy’s older ships; the corrosiveness of salt water can take a frightful toll.

Loewer devised a two-shift system and dissolved the “walls” between ship departments. For the first time, officers and enlisted worked in departments outside their specialties.

“You could say it was a collective groan,” Loewer said. “We had people painting, welding, scraping, doing valve repairs and other things they’d never done before.”

As the Camden left in May for a major exercise off Hawaii, the crew had accomplished twice as much maintenance as during a previous layover period. And the captain was convinced her “nontraditional” way had worked.

“You have to plan, you have to focus, you have to execute,” Loewer said.

‘Male or Female, Captains Are the Same’

Loewer said she feels no extra pressure to prove herself as a “woman” captain. “I let my competence speak for itself,” she said.

If there is a reigning mood among the male personnel on the Camden it’s this: A captain is a captain is a captain.

“Male or female, captains are the same,” said Master Chief Petty Officer James Rickel, the ship’s senior enlisted man. “You do well, you get praised. You do poorly, you hear about it.”

Lt. Cmdr. Robert Loken, with 28 years of service as an enlisted man and now officer, joined the Navy when only men went to sea and when a woman aboard ship was considered bad luck. He has since learned how to work with and for women.

“The hardest part is learning to call a captain ‘ma’am’ rather than ‘sir,’ ” he said. “After that, it’s all pretty easy.”

He offers his three rules for getting along with any captain, male or female.

“Keep the captain happy. Do your job. Try to leave the ship a better place for the next man.”

Pause.

“Or woman.”

*

Tony Perry can be reached at tony.perry@latimes.com.