Universal Soldier

...This is the stuff of Anita Hill’s worst nightmares circa 1983-and it was a collective acceptance of their plausibility that caused women to embrace her eight years later...

...I thought that was the right time,” she added primly-ignoring the fact that, without Coughlin’s willingness to take the risk that Barrett herself opted out of, that tim’e would never have come...

...A decade after Hill sat there and took it, and a year after she sat there and told it, her choice of silence has been so energetically defended it now seems to rank among the unassailable feminine prerogatives...

...When Coughlin reported her story to her superiors, she found herself in another gantlet-a kind of Let’s Go guide to institutional sexism...

...Her superiors ignored her...

...radio station whether Coughlin’s coming forward had prompted her to tell her story, she emphatically demurred...

...Fortunately, however, the past few months have been a long, harsh-lit morning for the American military, as the official Lessons of Tailhook swim into focus...

...And the women at Tailhook ’91 became victims, not just of drunken aviators, but of all the women before them who had made the same choice of silence...

...by Katherine 600 Deep in the 2,200 pages of Naval Investigative Service transcripts about the of humanity interrupts a catalog of outrage and indifference...

...Research assistance was provided by Emily Nelson...

...Yet, like Anita Hill, Coughlin was no bristling, broadcasting feminist...

...Although two civilian women filed official complaints aibout their treatment at Tailhook, the assaulted servicewomen, fearing professional reprisal, adhered firmly to the Anita Hill School of Silence...

...The gantlet continued...

...Could not provide any additional information...

...military casualties by the end of the Tailhook affair than there were in the Persian Gulf...

...A man sees a distraught woman flee onto a hotel balcony, her clothes stretched and torn and three naval aviators fast behind her...

...Then I felt it was my duty to come to the defense of the lieutenant who initially reported the incident...

...It was a justification that provoked instant empathy from working women...

...As male servicemen repeatedly noted to investigators, the gantlet, and the assaults it implied, had been going on at least since 1986...

...That, mind you, was well before the beerswilling, crotch-groping, criminal-making aviators’ party had made its way into the major press...

...Instead, in June she decided to go public...

...Who would have guessed, for instance, that Tailhook would revive the revanchist idea that women shouldn’t be allowed in the military...

...In the usual doomed-whistleblower scenario, Coughlin would today be selling discount fatigues at Sunny’s Surplus, cursing the day she spoke out against the Navy...

...In the months following the attack, she sobbed like a child and ate like a logger...

...You think, yes, perhaps this job is secure, but maybe they will post me in an office in a corner with a telephone and The Washington Post to read from nine to five, and that won’t get me anywhere...

...Rather, it was back when the odds of Paula Coughlin’s prevailing looked slim next to the odds of being ignored, marginalized, or even demoted-in other words, about as grim as young Anita Hill’s...

...And if that seemed to her female colleagues like career suicide, it ended up being the savviest move, on feminist and professional grounds, that she could have made...

...In the following weeks, she was told to get counseling, warned of the enormous professional folly of her actions (she could or be “blackballed by the aviation community,” a superior informed her), made fun of, and just plain ignored...

...But when another officer encouraged her to file charges, she decided to just “let it go...

...When Lt...

...Coughlin wasn’t the only officer who had personally learned the difference between good nature and hostile groping that night, but in the beginning she might as well have been...

...So you are quiet and you are ashamed and you sit there and take it...

...But after she wandered into a Las Vegas Hilton hallway that Tailhook weekend and faced the Navy tradition known as the “gantlet,” the bootstrap stuff must have seemed a little flimsy...

...And, hell, she can even prevail-not just for herself, as Anita Hill did in silence, but for hundreds of thousands of other women...

...Or maybe the lieutenant simply didn’t do enough TV...

...Universal Soldier What Paula Cougblin can teach American women...

...Amid the Navy transcripts is the testimony of another woman officer abused at Tailhook...

...Yet to fully appreciate her guts, it’s worth rewinding, via the Navy transcripts, to the Tailhook weekend and the months that followed...

...So why should female civvies care...

...And while dozens of aviators had witnessed the ’91 gantlet, they circled their wagons so tightly that Clarence Thomas’s fawning secretaries look like turncoats by comparison...

...There’d be a drink named after her-a sour one-at some Miramar aviators’ bar...

...Suddenly a chant of “admiral’s aide, admiral’s aide” rose up and several dozen of her service peers engulfed her, mauling her, pushing her to the ground, and attempting to take her clothes off...

...other victims deserted her...

...There’s vast difference between privately tendered sexual innuendo and a populous hallway brawl...

...This time around, as naval officers and enlistees take their new training on sexual harassment policies and hear rumors of another officer canned for looking the other way in a harassment case, the old message has gone the way of the B-1 bomber...

...She personally is enough of an icon that campaign literature from Senate hopeful Carol Moseley Braun gives the Oklahoma law professor as much space as the candidate...

...I had worked my ass off trying to be one of the guys,” Coughlin noted later, “to be the best naval officer I can and prove women can do whatever the job calls for...

...Sure, the smarmy slogan now playing on billboards at bases across the country -“Not in Our Navy”-will probably never be true, but the Navy’s commitment to making it so may be...

...Katherine Boo is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...And even the NIS agent assigned to help her identify her attackers came on to her, at one point calling her “Sweet Cakes...

...It’s the lesson embodied by 30-year-old Naval Lieutenant Paula Coughlin, a pilot mauled by her peers that weekend, who came forward at considerable professional risk to demand that the Navy bring her attackers to justice...

...Recall that, like Anita Hill, these were women of considerable accomplishment and leverage-in this case, naval officers...

...it was, as one put it, “an honored tradition...

...Paula Coughlin reminds us that, if we sweat for it, we may sometimes have it both ways...

...Hill seemed to concentrate primarily on personal preservationwhat George Bernard Shaw called the Gospel of Getting On...

...It takes true doggedness to force an organization to live up to its ideals, and the media are full of stories in which the innocent lose when they fight...

...But a year after the raucous convention that ushered Tailhook into the civilian lexicon, this isn’t shaping up like the usual story...

...But the most important outcome of Coughlin’s action is a subtler one...

...before Navy leaders had their mouths frozen into outraged ‘0’s...

...And that woozy night, it seemed as if you had to live outside military culture to recognize that attacking women isn’t just boys being boys...

...Because a few weeks after Paula Coughlin was attacked, she and the rest of America heard lawyer Anita Hill explain her decision not to protest Clarence Thomas’s repeated sexual harassment over the years in which she worked for him: “I was aware,” she said, “that telling at any point in my career could adversely affect my future career...

...Nevertheless, we shouldn’t allow the lesson to float away...

...So she tried to change that image...

...She had thought it better for her career to stay silent, Barrett said, until the Naval Intelligence Service came banging on the door...

...A male officer-acquaintance who had consoled Coughlin immediately after the attack felt compelled to note, when interviewed by the Naval Intelligence Service (NIS), that the skirt she had been wearing was rather short...

...They had a lot more credibility than the drunk teenage girl who that night had been stripped of her clothing, manhandled by dozens of aviators and left exposed and confused in a Hilton hallway...

...Anita Hill’s message to American women was that it’s okay to choose our own professional advancement over loftier social goals...

...Still, in interviews with “World News Tonight” and The Washington Post, Coughlin criticized the Navy bluntly and allowed her name to be used...

...Y “may have attended Tailhook ’91 but he is not sure...

...Still, as anyone who’s been there knows, there’s a yawning chasm between believing that something should be changed and actually making it happen...

...The detailed complaint she wrote languished in the hands of her boss...

...The folks who ignored Tailhook, on the other hand, weren’t nearly so well protected...

...This was not the Navy officer image I grew up with, that I worked with,” she later said...

...Commander Roxanne Barrett, one of the highest-ranking women harassed at Tailhook, was asked recently on a D.C...

...They had more power than the hundreds of enlisted women raped and otherwise abased annually in the service...

...X refused to participate in any “witch hunt for admirals and had no further information concerning this investigation...

...In other words, it was because one woman stood up and spoke out that a misogynist culture is now forced to reconsider its ways...

...And as many aviators also pointed out, this Tailhook gathering was a heck of a lot less raucous than the previous year’s...

...Perhaps it’s because we like stories of damsels in distress better than stories of women triumphant...

...Coughlin, on the other hand, seemed to get the big picture...

...In the beginning I thought about reporting it,” she told Navy officials later, “but I thought that there was nothing anyone could probably do about it anyway...

...We’ve had lessons about outlaw aviator culture, about convoluted chains of command, about widespread service alcoholism, about women’s place on the front lines-military lessons, all...

...As the men laugh and taunt, the Samaritan intervenes...

...By summer, the chief of naval operations, Admiral Frank Kelso, found himself publicly vouching for Coughlin’s career on national TV...

...Thus the likelihood of obtaining professional equality with male peers probably already seemed a long shot to Coughlin, an aide to Rear Admiral Jack Snyder at Maryland’s Patuxent River Naval Air Test Center...

...Those stories surely crossed Coughlin’s mind as the Navy dawdled after her attackers...

...And thanks to enormous public pressure to ensure that this time around the charges are tlhoroughly investigated, there may be more U.S...

...That part of the story is kind of fun to watch...

...But while civilian women had occasionally protested their treatment, women officers-the ones with real love for, and leverage in, the Navy-had seldom joined them...

...To the average woman discriminated against at work, “going public” means getting a lawyer, turning to an advocacy group, perhaps talking to the local paper...

...In fact, there’s a chance that Paula Coughlin’s courage will actually change a culture many feminists had long given up as lost...

...He’s a bartender...

...For eight years she adhered to the bootstrap philosophy of equal right,s: By making it yourself, you do a service to womanhood in general...

...I didn’t think about reporting this to anyone,” she stated, until she read an article about Coughlin, whom she had previously met and respected...

...Fear of professional reprisal is no idle worry, and post-Hill surveys have shown it’s still a primary concern of victimized women...

...Fu I I-meta I jacka Is With a wider lens, it’s hard to deny that knowledge of wrongdoing should carry with it some obligation: to do what you can to stop the drug company executive who suppresses negative evidence from laboratory studies, to keep the head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from breaking the rules he’s been entrusted to implement, to turn a time-honored atrocity into an obsolete one...

...Babes in boyland The comparison between the two women is, of course, a ragged one...

...As Coughlin yelled for help, they laughed, abandoning her only to treat more women walking down the hall to the same giddy molestationattacks meant, as one Whidby Island, Washington, airman later noted, “in a good-natured, lighthearted way...

...Yet the timeliest lesson may speak, not to the guys in uniform, but to that anonymous woman who was chased around the Hilton-and to every other woman in America...

...And Paula Coughlin wasn’t victimized (at least at first) by her boss...

...While you’d have to strain to find a “good” arena for a professional woman to fight sexual harassment (although Hill’s Equal Employinent Opportunity Commission should’ve come close), the military may have been the consummate hard-luck setting-a truth founded on much more than a few rowdy weekends...

...Two days after Coughlin went to the media, Navy Secretary Lawrence Garrett, who himself had attended Tailhook (lie was hanging out on the patio outside a suite where strippers and prostitutes were working), was forced to resign...

...Of course, it is futile to try to predict the full repercussions of speaking out <as Coughlin did...

...Her boss’ response on the morning after the attack was, “That’s what you get when you go to a hotel party with a bunch of drunk aviators...

...Z defended a suspect by noting, “[Accused] was a very handsome person and . , . women were attracted to him...

...So why hasn’t People magazine called...

...What she didn’t do, however, was shut up...

...And why not accept it...

...Yet, as they repeatcdly indicated to Thus, at about the same time that Hill was explaining her eight years of silent suffering, Tailhook assault victims found themselves following her example...

...It says that a woman can fight against injustice in a closed, hierarchical, defensive culture...

...In 1989, when Admiral Virgil Hill dismissed as “highjinks” the (chaining of a female Naval Academy student to a toilet, and the five midshipmen who had abused her were allowed to graduate, the semaphore was surely read by the ranks...

...For Coughlin, who happened to be sitting on a major story, it meant essentially telling the world...

...Yet it’s critical that feminists count in the social cost of keeping quiet-a cost that the Tailhook victims had cause to understand firsthand...

...One female officer, who had earned a certain fame among Tailhook attendees for having decked one of the men who attacked her, cried for days after the incident...

...More and more officers joined her, until a dozen had disgorged their stories...

...Ordering the offenders to leave her alone, he ferries her out of the melee and into safety, Unfortunately, our hero isn’t a serviceman...

...The Navy now had on its hands something too noisome to ignore...

...I think that is something that a woman in that situation would do,” asserted Hill’s friend Ellen Wells at the hearings, a speculation that had women nodding in agreement across the nation...

...And as for credit, don’t count on it, even from 1 hose you help...

...Yet it is precisely for those who argue that Anita Hill had no other choice that Paula Coughlin’s story is a countermyth of crucial importance, one that cries to be rescued from the brig of military lore...

...even the mini-skirt she wore that evening was held up to the light...