Jet Girl: My Life in War, Peace, and the Cockpit of the Navy’s Most Lethal Aircraft, the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Caroline Johnson with Hof Williams. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2019.
Although women officially began serving in the U.S. military as nurses in 1901, it was not until 1948 that the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act made women a permanent part of the U.S. military outside of the nursing corps. Even then, it took another 25 years before women could become naval aviators. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, women have had many more military firsts, including the first woman becoming a four-star general in 2008, the creation of Female Engagement Teams in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s, the end of the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in 2011, and the removal of combat restrictions by 2016. Two women completed Army Ranger School in 2015, and 2016 saw the assignment of the first woman infantry officer. Today, more than 200,000 women serve on active duty in all branches of the U.S. armed forces.[1]
In the last two decades, many of these women have written about their time in the military, particularly as they move into new positions. Perhaps most noticeably, General Janice Karpinski wrote about her military career in 2004, shortly after the Abu Graib prison controversy. Eileen Rivers also interviewed three women involved in Female Engagement Teams in Afghanistan in Beyond the Call, showing how women are helping to change how the military operates by taking on new roles, particularly engaging with female civilians in war zones. In addition to women’s experiences as they serve, women veterans’ experiences also are becoming more visible. Writing in 2019, veteran Brooke King (Iraq 2006) highlights her life after the military, explaining how her identity as a woman has specifically shaped her. Jet Girl is part of this larger genre of servicewomen’s memoirs and books.
Although there are now more women in the military than ever before, some servicewomen continue to find themselves one of just a few women in their fields. This was true for Caroline Johnson, and her experiences as a “jet girl” highlight the ways in which being a woman in the military still matters. Nearly thirty years after the first women plebes stepped through its doors, Johnson entered the U.S. Naval Academy in 2005. After graduation, as she recounts in her memoir, she secured a spot in flight school and, subsequently, a career as a Weapons System Officer.
Given all the work to eliminate gender-based restrictions on the military, it might seem that being a woman has little to do with Johnson’s military experiences, but the title of the book is not meaningless. Although women have come a long way since the early and mid-twentieth century, Jet Girl makes it clear that being a woman still matters in today’s military because, as she explains, her identity as a woman created obstacles to her acceptance within her male-dominated team. Johnson’s memoir suggests she is still trying to come to terms with the ways in which gender affected her military service, and it is not evident until late in the book just how much her identity as a woman shaped her experiences.
By 2014, Johnson was one of three women flying the F/A-18 Super Hornet while stationed aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. As she described it, this was “the most feared plane of all, the most technologically advanced.”[2] In the opening pages, taking the reader through a tense moment of preparing to intercept an Iranian F-4, Johnson emphasized that her identity as a woman mattered in that moment. As she readied for the mission, she reflected, “The braid was also a reminder that as a woman I was willing to die for my country that lets me fly an $80 million plane while women in other nations aren’t allowed to drive a car.”[3] But while Johnson makes clear early on that, despite her gender, she has opportunities to do things women elsewhere in the world could never imagine, it is not immediately evident that Johnson is on a mission to explain the challenges of being a woman in today’s military.
An F/A-18C Hornet takes off from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush (MC3 Joshua Card/U.S. Navy Photo)
Johnson’s approach to telling this story is uneven, alternating from her time aboard the George H.W. Bush, back to the Academy, and then to points in between. The benefit of this narrative approach of jumping back and forth in time is that readers do not have to wait until the end of the book to get details of her time as a Weapons System Officer, arguably the most interesting feature of the book. Narrating through various episodes of her military service, Johnson continually builds on the ways in which her identity as a woman shaped her experiences in the U.S. Navy, not just on board the George H.W. Bush, but throughout her naval career. However, the disjointed narrative chronology is also challenging because it means that it is never fully clear just what Johnson wants her readers to understand about the status of women in the Navy—at least, not until the final pages.
Johnson infuses her memoir with the suggestion that her identity as a woman matters, from the publisher’s description, to the opening pages of the prologue when she mentions her braided hair, through to the end. The question however, is why that identity matters, and the answer is more elusive. Early in the book, it seems that Johnson’s identity as “jet girl” is one she constructs, based on her own femininity. That is, her identity as a woman matters to her personally, but it does not seem to have affected her actual job. Early on, Johnson emphasizes how she worked to remain feminine both in the Academy and early in her career. She describes, for example, how she managed to stay within the bounds of Academy dress and maintain her femininity by using just the right shade of nail polish, and wearing Italian leather shoes after having the heels lowered, in addition to using a tailor to make her uniform fit right.[4] Moreover, after successfully completing Sea Trials at the end of her Plebe Year, Johnson recounts how the admiral’s wife noticed with surprise that Johnson completed the rigorous training course “without breaking a nail!”[5]
…it was not her clothing or makeup that made that acceptance elusive, of course, but larger cultural issues within the naval aviation field.
As interesting as these anecdotes are, they are also bewildering until later, as it becomes increasingly apparent that Johnson’s fighter squadron did not accept her because she was a woman. As she struggled to fit in, it was not her clothing or makeup that made that acceptance elusive, of course, but larger cultural issues within the naval aviation field. One of only two women in flight school, the male students took to calling her and the other woman “fembots—a reference to the robotic babes from Austin Powers, beautiful ditzes who unleashed lethal bullets from machine guns mounted in their nipples.”[6] After joining her squadron, she was assigned to plan change of command parties for the skipper and his family, including a going-away party for the skipper’s wife. Although the event went well, one of the wives cautioned Johnson that the dress she wore was “far too revealing.”[7] She discovers that, even though she is a highly skilled professional, she is more likely to be assigned tasks like making coffee, “duties considered beneath our male counterparts,” because she is a woman.[8] When she asks a junior officer to clean up something he spilled on a desk, he tells her that cleaning is something women do.[9] Later, when trying to talk to her flight doctor about physical symptoms that seemed to stem from the navy switching out her birth control pills to a generic brand, the doctor refuses to listen to her concerns and accuses her of being “a brand snob” rather than assessing the problem.[10]
Pilots of Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron 34 (VAQ-34), LT Sue Hart, LT Brenda Scheufele, and LT Pamela (Pam) Lyons Carel (left to right), in front of an F/A-18A Hornet aircraft in 1992. (PH2 Thomas Milne/U.S. Navy Photo)
Johnson wants readers to understand that her experiences are part of a larger trend, noting in the epilogue that while more than half of male F/A-18 aviators leave service as soon as they can, the numbers are remarkably higher for women in the same roles: “83 percent (four out of every five) of women in the fighter community get out at their first chance.”[11] While it is unclear why women are leaving in such large numbers, Johnson argues that the problem lies in the fact that fighter aviation culture enables continued harassment and gender discrimination. Also, because there are so few women in that community, “our voices aren’t heard, we’re not promoting and rising up, so we don’t have many like-gendered role models and mentors.”[12]
In the epilogue, Johnson begins to speak about the challenges women continue to face in the military. This is an important topic and one that deserves attention, but it is not a strong element of Johnson’s memoir. In part, this is because while Johnson pays consistent attention to her identity as a woman, that identity seems only to be an asset until suddenly, it is not. In the first portion of the book, she details things like keeping a feminine, decorated living quarters on board the George H.W. Bush, references her braid as a reminder that she is a woman, and recounts her efforts to find ways around makeup regulations in the Naval Academy. All of these examples do not seem like they interfere with her military service. But, taken together, they seem to indicate that it is possible to join the military and maintain a feminine identity without problem. For example, although her experiences at the Naval Academy and her efforts to maintain her femininity sound at first like only positive experiences, very late in the book Johnson reveals an encounter at the Academy where she fended off several male students who were intimidating and harassing underclasswomen. While talking to two women plebes, two male midshipmen come down the hall, one of whom was visibly drunk and proceeded to try to masturbate in front of the women. His friend propping him up only remarked to Johnson, “He’s not being inappropriate; what’s inappropriate is you telling him to stop.”[13]
Jet Girl also suggests that it is difficult to honestly talk about the ways in which gender still matters in the military—and this is a topic that is clearly ready for further discussion.
The challenge with memoirs like Johnson’s is that they tell one person’s story. And yet, hers is a book that has been positioned as a “remarkable” story, because it is about “women fighting at the forefront in a military system that allows them to reach the highest peaks, and yet is in many respects still a fraternity.”[14] While Jet Girl illuminates the ways in which that fraternity still works to exclude women in uniform, it does so on an individual rather than collective level. The reason why Johnson’s shift in focus to the problems servicewomen face is jarring is because for so much of the book, it’s not evident that she faced many problems as a result of being a woman.
Jet Girl succeeds most when Johnson shares her experiences honestly, and when she rightly celebrates her accomplishments in naval aviation. In the epilogue, she indicates that one of the challenges women like her have faced is that they are in a male-dominated field and lack mentors and role models. Seeing other women’s honest military experiences is valuable because it can offer women realistic assessments of what to expect if they join the military, and also because understanding the problems women face is an important step to raising awareness about how to improve military culture to support all personnel regardless of gender. But Jet Girl also suggests that it is difficult to honestly talk about the ways in which gender still matters in the military—and this is a topic that is clearly ready for further discussion.
Tanya Roth teaches world and US history at MICDS in St. Louis, Missouri. She is the 2019 recipient of the Society for Military History Edward M. Coffman First Manuscript Prize. Her forthcoming book on American women in the Cold War military is under contract with UNC Press.
Have a response or an idea for your own article? Follow the logo below, and you too can contribute to The Bridge:
Enjoy what you just read? Please help spread the word to new readers by sharing it on social media.
Header Image: Caroline Johnson taking off from the USS George Bush (YouTube)
Notes:
[1] For a timeline of women’s military service and recent statistics, see the Service Women’s Action Network’s “Women in the Military: Where they Stand” 2019 report.
[2] Caroline Johnson with Hof Williams, Jet Girl: My Life in War, Peace, and the Cockpit of the Navy’s Most Lethal Aircraft, the F/A-18 Super Hornet (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2019), 2.
[3] Johnson, Jet Girl, 6.
[4] Johnson, Jet Girl, 17.
[5] Johnson, Jet Girl, 18.
[6] Johnson, Jet Girl, 96.
[7] Johnson, Jet Girl, 169.
[8] Johnson, Jet Girl, 40.
[9] Johnson, Jet Girl, 170.
[10] Johnson, Jet Girl, 278
[11] Johnson, Jet Girl, 318.
[12] Johnson, Jet Girl, 321-322.
[13] Johnson, Jet Girl, 272.
[14] “Jet Girl,” MacMillan Publishers, accessed March 7, 2020, https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250139290.