Behind the tragedy of the Navy’s greatest scandal is the untold story of the heroic women flyers who refused to consider themselves victims.
Tailspin — The Kara Hultgreen Story
It was already over. Only the lite had been so glorious, so god-damn much tun, that no one wanted to admit they were the walking dead. It was like Tibetan mythology, where the dying don’t realize the actual tact of their death until long afterward, and continue with a sort of dreamy momentum to behave like the living.
Every male on the third floor that night, every guy standing around with a drink in his hand, wearing the off-duty uniform of the aviator — clipped hair, a T-shirt, and shoes without socks — had at least a dim awareness that the culture that had sustained his world for so long was undergoing a vast change. Their response was so automatic as to seem inborn.
That was part of it, part of what happened on Labor Day weekend in Las Vegas, part of what turned the 1991 Tailhook Convention into the scandal it was. There was a fundamental misunderstanding in the Navy that nothing was ever going to change. But, in fact, the old rules had changed — the ones that said that the Navy was an old boys’ club, the ones that said no girls allowed — and nobody was owning up to it. Women were entering the service in record numbers. The legal rule that kept them out of combat squadrons looked like it was going to be shredded by Congress. So the old order had disappeared, but none of the fliers at Tailhook that year seemed to believe it.
Dead? How could they be? They were bulletproof. Naval aviators were selected, trained, and groomed for invincibility. The ones who didn’t believe, who had some niggling, secret flaw in their character that allowed doubt to creep in, who didn’t swagger out onto that tarmac every day as if they were immortal — those men were banished. Eliminated by official action or struck from the skies by a flick of God’s little finger. The life they had chosen was so dangerous, so close to the edge — fliers have by far the highest casualty rate in the peacetime military — that whoever blinked in the face of it was immediately smoked.
The way to survive, the pilots would tell you, was not to turn away from the dangers, but never to discount them.
The most successful aviators learned to take their lessons from those who messed up, and, finally, to relish the risks themselves, to love the dangers as though they were life-sustaining. When you are focused like that, when you are immune and certain and self-contained, the world can change around you, but you yourself are never affected.
The jacket patch that aviators receive at the Top Gun training school at Miramar Naval Air Station, San Diego, California, continues to feature a Soviet MiG centered in the middle of a set of gun sights. The world had moved on with the collapse of the Cold War; anyone, even a civilian, could now rent a ride on a Russian MiG in Moscow. Every sign pointed to the fact that the role of war fighter as the Top Gun pilots had known it was sorely in need of revision. It didn’t matter. They were bulletproof.
Likewise, Congress could legislate women in warplanes, and the secretary of the Navy could make male fliers train with females. They could even see women pilots with their own eyes enter and hormonally desecrate the sanctum sanctorum of the jet community — and they would still tell themselves it would never happen.
In the months after it became uncomfortably clear that something had gone wrong at Tailhook 1991, a handful of women — Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, civilians Lisa Reagan and Marie Weston, an ensign out at Miramar named Kim Ponikowski, and the Las Vegas minor who had been stripped of her clothes — told of the assaults they had suffered. Gradually, as their stories surfaced in the local news, and as local news stories grew into national headlines, people outside the military demanded explanations.
But what no one seemed to grasp was that Tailhook, an event that called out for change, was itself an aftershock of a seismic change within the aviation community. Women had entered and irrevocably transformed what had theretofore been a closed clique. No longer was naval aviation a place where men were men and boys would be boys. But the men just kept clinging to their old world, and the boys went on acting like boys. What the whole Tailhook affair really represented was a lesser Gotterdamtnerung. It was the happy hour of the gods.
When a species nears extinction, certain behavioral niceties drop away, and its individual members begin to perform desperate measures — roaming huge territories in search of mates, for example, or senselessly attacking non-predators. The more any group is threatened, the more it tends to lash out at enemies, real or imagined. So perhaps the threat of extinction was what made them party a little harder on the third floor that night, act a little crazier than in the past. It put a hysterical edge to the celebrations. The feast in the midst of the plague.
For the naval aviator, there was something askew in women’s presence in the cockpit, something so fundamental and challenging to life’s basic assumptions that it couldn’t be talked about. Everyone knew that some part of the old order was gone, but no one knew what to do about it. So there was a sort of group-think agreement to act as if nothing had really happened at all.
The important thing was to maintain the aura of invincibility. Even though you are flesh and bone, insist that you are bulletproof. Even when the Naval Investigative Service comes to call, pulling your chain about the stuff that went down at last year’s Tailhook, don’t worry. It’s the end of the world, R.E.M. is singing, and you feel fine.
Considering the outrage it ignited, the final report on the N.I.S. investigation is an unlikely document.
Released on April 30, 1992, the N.I.S. Tailhook report is impenetrable, unwieldy, impossible. There is no title page, no index, no table of contents. The blocky sans-serif print is difficult to read, its computer-generated characters soft, gray, and broken, created by a photocopier with toner levels at low ebb.
The report is made up of the rawest of raw material. Its features all seem to run together: the prosecutive summaries, the complaints of the victims, the reports of interviews with suspects, the sworn statements of witnesses. Dates are jumbled.
The text consists simply of interview after interview, all “redacted, “ as the government calls it — which means edited for the privacy of the individuals involved. The heavy blue pencil of the government censor gives the pages a gap-toothed, jack-o’-lantern effect. Some pages show more gap than text.
“No, we didn’t put out a big P.R. thing,” says Bill Hudson, formerly an El Paso, Texas, cop and head of the criminal division at the N.I.S. throughout the Tailhook investigation. Which was putting it mildly. The N.I.S. report was a clay-tablet-and-cuneiform text for the computer age. As an attempt to lay to rest the myriad questions about Tailhook, it failed miserably.
There was plenty of dirt, however. The lurid party practices of the naval aviators were trotted out for national display. Witnesses described the flier wrapping his “crank” in a woman’s waist-length hair, the minor “left on the floor at the location where she was stripped … totally naked.” A bartender remembered a woman who was “visibly upset and her clothes were stretched and torn”; she was being chased by three men who “were laughing and urging the woman to come back to them.” There were detailed analyses of the gauntlet, of what it was and wasn’t: “not constant but more a flowing thing,” “a good-natured, fun practice which was conducted with a jocular-like [sic] attitude.”
“The life they had chosen was so dangerous, so close to the edge, that whoever blinked in the face of it was immediately smoked.”
But what the N.I.S. report didn’t have, what it lacked in spades, was names. There was no payoff.
Later on, the N.I.S. would insist that the report probably should not have been released at all, that it was an internal document, about as suitable for public consumption as a police blotter.
The Navy inspector general’s office released its piggyback report at the same time. Summed up in a media-friendly six pages was the I.G.’s gloss on the N.I.S. findings: a terse catalog of sexual assaults, stonewalling, and systemic hostility toward women in the naval-aviation community. Faced with the daunting prospect of plowing through the N.I.S. report itself, many peopfe in Congress, in the media, and in the Navy itself opted for the streamlined I.G. version.
The I.G. noted a “marked absence of moral courage and personal integrity,” “a gang mentality,” “a sense in the TACAIR [tactical aircraft] community that what happened on the third floor was acceptable social conduct.” It also noted that the gauntlet had existed at least for the previous two years — probably for the past five. It concluded that much of the behavior examined fell into the category of “conduct unbecoming an officer.” But the I.G., too, failed to identify any suspects.
Dirt, but no names. Crimes, but no one held responsible. It was a lethal combination, one that was to twist the spine of the public response to Tailhook from that point on. The media stepped in to act as purveyors and packagers of the information. And the press quickly decided that what it had on its hands was a travesty of justice. Eric Schmitt of The New York Times pegged the most dynamic tally (on page 14 — Tailhook wasn’t yet front-page news), the proportion of indecent-assault suspects to number of victims: “A Navy investigation into sexual abuse at a convention of naval aviators last September has found that dozens of women, rather than the five or so who initially filed complaints, were assaulted there.”
“Further,” he continued, “the investigators have been able to identify only two suspects despite evidence that scores of officers took part in the assaults. The investigators attribute that outcome of their inquiry to the refusal of many pilots, some with senior rank, to cooperate with them.”
A consensus quickly formed. For a press corps that had cut its teeth on Watergate, the behavior of the Navy pilots targeted by the investigation was instantly recognizable.
“When investigators questioned the pilots, they ran into a stone wall of silence and lies,” reporter David Martin told Dan Rather in a lead segment on the CBS evening news. Twenty-six women, he stated, testified they had been assaulted or molested at what he somewhat disingenuously labeled the Tailhook “cocktail party.”
Rather also featured the electronically altered voices of Lisa Reagan and Marie Weston, and he quoted Navy Under-secretary Dan Howard, who explained the failure of the investigative process he had managed by saying that some of the pilots interviewed had flat-out lied.
Such was the overwhelming image communicated to the public in the wake of the N.I.S. report. Male sexual transgression linked with female innocence, victimization, and accusation. A stone wall of silence in response to a botched investigation, and a lingering smell of cover-up.
What left the deepest impression was the assault on justice itself. Whatever the merits of the he-said-she-said Tailhook testimony, there was a blatant imbalance here that offended what was customarily identified as “the American tradition of fair play.” The sense of outrage over this state of affairs became the engine that would drive the Tailhook scandal for many months to come.
Tailhook’s “man-brute-woman-victim” equation aligned itself neatly with prevailing cultural mythology, electrified by the currency of the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings. As a broad-brush characterization of reality, it was reasonably accurate. But it wasn’t necessarily the whole truth.
While the press could characterize the N.I.S. findings in a thoroughly black-and-white manner, in substance the report contained not only shades of gray, but a crazed sort of herringbone.
A central paradox concerned the accounts given to the N.I.S. by women who attended Tailhook. One would have expected to find anger, resentment, or, at the very least, an eagerness to see justice done. Again and again, these expectations were confounded.
N.I.S.’s Bill Hudson explains, “If you read through the statements, you can find that they described approximately 50 women who went through the gauntlet. And many of these women were described by the people standing there as willing participants. They said some of them went through a second time or a third time. We would have liked to have identified some of them, because they might be able to recognize some of the gauntlet participants. But the only victims that we were able to find were the ones that were identified by boyfriends or people that were interviewed. None of these people were coming to us. They weren’t lined up coming in to report assaults.”
Sexual-assault victims who are unwilling to come forward represent a familiar paradigm for investigators. What perplexed the N.I.S. agents more was the almost surreal gulf that existed in women’s perceptions of the Tailhook convention in general and the gauntlet in particular. There were women who were haunted by being assaulted, and others who professed to enjoy, even relish, the experience.
One woman told investigators that she had traversed the hallway many times on Saturday night. She remembered walking, down the corridor with two girl-friends at one point and seeing ten to 15 men standing on both sides of the hallway. She and her friends, according to the report, “were carrying beer in their hands as they walked down the hallway.”
As she went past the group of men — a trip of some 20 feet that took her less than a minute — some of them “reached out and pinched her on the buttocks.” She “stated she was laughing the entire time and was not offended by the situation.” They didn’t even spill their beer, she said. The woman “strongly stated that at no time was she touched or grabbed in any of her private areas, and she did not observe anyone being touched or grabbed in such a manner.”
A golf-course attendant from the Naval Air Station at Fallon, Nevada, was asked to tend bar in one of the hospitality suites. She staunchly defended the behavior of the men at the convention, and told investigators she had walked down the hall by herself many times without being bothered or touched.
“She said that she was… in the hot tub with ten men, and no one made any advances… she had received worse treatment… at the gold course.”
“She said that a few comments were made, but she said that they were regular comments and they did not bother her at all,” read the N.I.S. agent’s summary of her interview. “She said that everyone she came in contact with treated her very nicely. She said that she was even in the hot tub with ten men and no one made any advances toward her.” In fact, she stated that “she had received worse treatment from persons at the golf course!”
The exclamatory gloss suggested a deliberate mind-set on the part of the N.I.S. agent receiving the woman’s testimony, and brings up the question of objectivity — which lingers in the background of the entire document. The effect of the observer upon the observed is less than clear-cut here, but the image of the prototypical N.I.S. agent that comes across in these interviews is not of a person attempting to cover up or deny the existence of serious wrongdoing.
That said, there is throughout a flavor of the Puritan’s double standard. The report was full of hearsay evidence by women about women, describing a female who “strutted” through the gauntlet “wearing only a U.S.N. member’s white hat, a Sinatra T-shirt, and panties pulled up to expose most of her bottom”; another, a groupie who “stripped to her thong”; others who “wear enticing dress and readily go down the gauntlet whooping and hollering,” who “incite the male behavior.”
Some of this fit all too easily into the stereotype of the party girl. However, the cumulative impression of the N.I.S. report was undeniably one of a wide spectrum of female experiences at Tailhook — much wider, at any rate, than was portrayed at the time of its release in the press.
That was true of men, too. While many male aviators were assaultive during the convention and presented a stone wall to the investigation, others actively intervened against the assaults, and were more than forthcoming afterward. One officer, for example, eventually led N.I.S. agents to Lieutenant Gregory “Goose” Geiss, identified as one of the instigators of the gauntlet. This witness and a friend had stationed themselves at the gauntlet’s head, “about ten feet from where the guys [had] organized themselves.” They leaned against the wall and waited. The officer told investigators that “a woman approached the gauntlet, and she was hesitant to go through the crowd. She leaned against the wall near us, and I told her that if she went through she would get touched, and if you really need to get to the other end of the hall, I would take an alternative route.” He told this to two women, and both went the roundabout way.
Then the two men were approached by Geiss, an aviator who, like them, was assigned to the Naval Air Station at Whidbey Island, Washington. Geiss “got very close to our faces,” the witness related to N.I.S. agents.
“He said if we didn’t like what was going on to leave, that we didn’t deserve to be on the third deck. He asked if this was our first Tailhook. We both said yes and he replied with ‘that figures.’ He said the gauntlet was a Tailhook tradition, and we were going against tradition, and made us feel that we weren’t players, real aviators, or one of the guys. We tried to talk to him and confront him about violating women. He said the women knew what they were in for when they came to Tailhook. He didn’t seem concerned with how the women felt about being touched. We stood there and listened to him for about ten minutes. It was obvious that he had been drinking. He told us that a girl had passed out in the hallway earlier and her clothing was removed. I don’t really know what happened. He was really proud of the behavior of the guys in the gauntlet.”
“We thought we got through to him because he seemed to understand our point,” he went on. “We reminded him that we were naval officers and this type of conduct was unbecoming of a naval officer. We didn’t want to be associated with a group of men that attacked and molested women and treated women so rudely. He kept defending the gauntlet tradition. He said we would be here in three years doing the same thing.”
Kara Hultgreen was unquestionably a woman, but she was also one of the boys. She had made that clear back in flight school, in the late eighties, enduring the kinds of brush-with-death experiences that are the Navy jet pilot’s casually worn badges of honor.
There was the very first time Hultgreen went up solo to do “aerial combat maneuvering” (dogfighting) in an A-4. Oddly, given the paucity of female aviators, she found her instructor was another woman. “Like a big cat-fight — meow! I’m like, I thought there was a rule against females flying together, because I’d never flown with her the whole time I’d been in the squadron.”
What jet pilots love to do more than anything else is describe their aerial encounters. On these occasions, they break from their usual laconic prose style and rise into only slightly less laconic poetry. Intent and gesticulatory, they mimic the high-altitude maneuvers of jet aircraft until their hand motions resemble complicated Indian mudra. The specifics of the flight stories differ. Always, though, they feature spins, dives, and flame-outs, with remarkable, miraculous recoveries each time. Again, just beneath the surface is the unalterable moral of every jet-jock lesson: I’m invincible. Look at this, I can fly in the face of death — and come out alive!
Female pilots are just as likely to buy into this as males. Hultgreen and herfemale A-4 instructor were doing some “nose-high” maneuvers that day, pointing the front part of the jet toward the sky. Following behind the instructor, Hultgreen suddenly realized her plane was out of control, “departing” (entering a spin) violently. “I did all the procedures to recover, and still we’re tumbling out of the sky, end over end. I’m getting smashed up against the canopy, just all over the place. I’m like, What the hell? I’m checking my altimeter. The first time I looked we’re at 18,000 feet, and then it’s winding down like you wouldn’t believe. I’m getting thrown all over the place trying to keep the controls neutral and make sure my ailerons were neutralized, because in an A-4 that’s real important. Your ailerons will put you into a spin — they’re the surface on the wings that make you turn. So I’m looking in the mirror at my ailerons, making sure they’re level, and looking at my turn needle and my air-speed and my angle of attack to check to see if I’m actually in a spin, because then you have other procedures to do.”
“At 10,000 feet, if you’re out of control, you’re supposed to eject. So I’m tumbling out of the sky, I’m waiting for this airplane to recover. Usually the nose points down and you accelerate and you fly away and it’s not such a big deal. All of a sudden I hear ‘14,000 feet. Check your ailerons,’ and it was the other airplane just sort of following me down. I’m like, What do you think I’m doing in here, filing my nails? Of course I’m checking my ailerons, you idiot! Then I look at my altimeter — it’s going to 11,000 feet. I’m like, Oh man, the next time I look at that gauge I’m supposed to eject. I thought, I don’t want to have to eject. I’m not going to be able to get my wings on the fourth of August. That was July 1989; I was on my last couple of flights before graduation. All these things go through your mind in a nanosecond: I’ll have to call my dad, he’ll have to get his plane reservation changed. I’m just like, I can’t eject out of here! Jeez! I’m scope-locked on the airspeed, because I didn’t want to look at the altimeter anymore, because then I’d have to eject. We’ll wait till it gets to five — to hell with 10,000 feet. We’ll give it an extra couple of thousand, see what happens.”
“Suddenly my airspeed went from zero to like 200 knots, boom. I pulled out of it at around 7,500. The heart’s going a mile a minute. So I was going back up on the lead, and we just went and did some more dogfighting. It was so funny, because I kept thinking, I don’t want her to think that I’m going to be less aggressive now. So I do this max performance turn to join up, we did some more engagements, and then we went home. The thing is, I never departed the A-4 again, I never made the same mistake. I made. sure that my airspeed was in my scan.”
Kara Hultgreen wasn’t one of the women assaulted in the Tailhook gauntlet. She found her friends that evening and left the Hilton early, as she’d planned. She was, however, one of those interviewed by Navy investigators in the wake of the scandal. And maybe it wasn’t so strange that the ingrained attitude of invincibility came into play when the agents of the N.I.S. began to pay calls on those female aviators who had been in Las Vegas. Hultgreen was visited by N.I.S. investigators, and duly gave them a full account of her encounter with a butt-biter. But the attitude of the N.I.S. investigators infuriated her. “They called me a victim!” she said, indignant. “Certainly nothing happened to me that I didn’t handle. Nobody maliciously tried to assault me. So the guy was just being an idiot. Once I made it perfectly clear that I was not receptive to his advances, it was over.”
Hultgreen rejected the N.I.S. characterization because it would challenge the very core of her self-image-a self-image based on the same feelings of bulletproof invincibillty that existed in the hearts and minds of male aviators. It was such an essential component of being able to walk out to the flight line every day. Nothing will happen to me that I can’t handle. You had to believe that, or you couldn’t function.
There was a crucial difference between the male and female versions of being bulletproof. Kara Hultgreen could still summon a fiery anger about the physical assaults in Las Vegas. Just because she refused to let anyone term her a victim did not mean she withdrew compassion for others. “They say, ‘You see, Kara, it didn’t happen to you because you were smart enough to leave the third floor.’ Or, ‘You were smart enough not to go near the hallway.’ Now, does that make it right? No. I don’t agree with that attitude. That attitude really pisses me off.”
If flying jets taught arrogance, invincibility, there were other lessons to be learned from it, too — lessons that were closer to humility. A close friend of Hultgreen’s in flight school had crashed his plane and died. This was the guy who had turned her on to the whole idea of flying with the Navy to begin with, when they were in R.O.T.C. together at the University of Texas. But just before they were to go to the boat to qualify in A-4s, he made a mistake from which he couldn’t recover.
“It’s not that big a deal that he died,” Hultgreen said. “The hard part about all that is when you have to go to the funeral and see his parents. And you just sit there and think, That could be my parents. The mother’s in tears, and everyone’s crying. You’re like, That would be bad. But I don’t feel half as bad for him, because he died doing something that he really liked doing.”
Don’t cry for me, Argentina. The guy knew what the risks were. If this attitude seems cold and unforgiving, there was a purity to it, also, a clear-eyed sense of life’s possibilities, both terrible and courageous. And it was an ask-no-quarter attitude that fed the reactions toward what happened on the third deck, on the part of Kara Hultgreen and a lot of other female fliers who had been there.
“When I went to Tailhook,” Hultgreen said, “I certainly knew what Tailhook was all about. I had heard about the third floor, and I knew that I probably didn’t want to be up there after about nine. I wasn’t going there fearing for my life, but I certainly went there realizing exactly what goes on, and taking precautions so I wouldn’t get caught in a situation I wouldn’t want to have to deal with.” Then it finally happened.
“‘It’s not that big a deal that he died,’ Hultgreen said. ‘The hard part about all that is when you have to go to the funeral and see his parents.’”
On April 28, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin issued the order that Kara Hultgreen and thousands of other women had been waiting for. “The services shall permit women to compete for assignments in aircraft,” read the memorandum, “including aircraft engaged in combat missions.” Aspin also directed the Navy to “develop a legislative proposal, which I will forward to Congress, to repeal the existing combat-exclusion law and permit the assignment of women to ships that are engaged in combat missions.”
“This is sort of like being able to vote,” Kara Hultgreen said. “This is historic. I feel super. I’m ecstatic, I’m thrilled!”
One of the operative ironies of the Tailhook scandal was that it represented the final impetus, the last little shove, that overturned the rules that were keeping women from combat. What was horrible for victims of the gauntlet eventually proved, through vast convolutions of the political process, a momentous career break for women like Kara Hultgreen.
On November 15, 1994, two female F/A-18 pilots became the first American women to fly combat sorties. Flying off the U.S.S. Eisenhower in the Persian Gulf, they patrolled the no-fly zone in the skies over southern Iraq.
Kara Hultgreen did indeed become the first woman to qualify in a combat-ready F-14 Tomcat, the famed Top Gun fighter jet, previously the purlieu of the jet bubba. She joined the Black Lions of VF-213, who were getting ready to deploy for the gulf. On Tuesday, October 25, 1994, she was approaching the flight deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln. It was a clear day and visibility was good. As she was lining up the aircraft for a landing on the deck, the Tomcat suddenly lost altitude. Hultgreen’s radar-intercept officer, Lieutenant Matthew Klemish, successfully ejected, 200 feet above the ocean and less than half a mile from the flight deck. He was rescued with minor bruises. Hultgreen ejected a moment later, but by that time, the jet had rolled sharply. Hultgreen hurtled sideways. After an extensive search failed to recover the plane or her body, the Navy declared her lost at sea.
Hultgreen’s death was accorded full honors, but no extraordinary measures were taken to mark her passing. She was celebrated not as the first female Tomcat pilot, but as a fallen aviator. To single her out might somehow lessen the sacrifice of other downed Navy pilots (ten F-14 pilots had died since 1992). In the brutal calculus of naval aviation, the death of the first female Tomcat pilot could not be in any way romanticized or drawn out. “She was a smart girl. I know she knew the chances she was taking,” said Hultgreen’s grandmother, and the same quiet stoicism seemed to characterize much of the Navy’s response to her death.
But there was an ugliness, too, that marred that response, a series of anonymous faxes sent from somewhere within the Navy impugning (falsely, as it turned out) Hultgreen’s flight record. In its efforts to desegregate naval aviation, stated the authors of the fax, the Navy was rushing unqualified personnel onto the flight lines. The faxes were an unpleasant reminder of the depth of enmity toward women in naval aviation. How easy it seemed to abandon the Navy’s vaunted code of honor, its chatterings about “officers and gentlemen,” when the painful question of women in uniform arose. It was an unheard-of breach of naval-aviation etiquette to question the flight record of a pilot who had gone down. It was just not done. Except with Kara Hultgreen.
Against this slander, the Navy maintained its stoic silence, refusing (as was policy) to release the flight records of the deceased, stating only that Hultgreen was “average to above average” as an F-14 pilot. Hultgreen’s mother, Sally Spears, provided the records to the media herself, showing her daughter was ranked third of the seven pilots in her class. “The way I look at it is,” Spears said, “being a slightly above average F-14 pilot is like being a slightly above average Phi Beta Kappa.”
Because of the controversy, the Navy was forced to perform a salvage operation (at a cost of $100,000) to bring up Hultgreen’s Tomcat, in order to analyze what went wrong with the flight. A four-month investigation ended with the conclusion that the crash was caused by technical malfunction, not pilot error, that when the left engine stalled on approach to the ship, virtually no pilot on earth would have been able to save the plane. Hultgreen’s body was recovered also, still strapped to the ejector seat.
In hindsight, the crash rendered Kara Hultgreen’s concerted efforts to fly tactical jets in tragic high relief — all those days spent in congressional hearings, all those requests for transfer to combat aircraft, all that striding through the corridors at Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services conferences in her flight suit, as if she had spent the last four years of her young life committing slow-motion suicide by idealism, lobbying for her right to die. Hultgreen was, of course, after something else: the right to live her life on her own terms. What was especially bitter was that every person has to fight to be in her line of work, but nobody had to fight as hard as she did. Her death might have placed her activities in a light both ironic and cruel, but it cannot detract from the essential dignity of that effort.
As far as we have heard, this current administration has yet to officially target women fighter pilots – although the Secretary of Defense née Fox News host has publicly come out against the idea. Back in 2020 the military was still bragging about how things were improving, though, so maybe we’ll eventually have hope again. We’d hate for Kara Hultgreen to keep rolling over in her grave, after all. Coffins are small. That can’t be easy.
