After three weeks in the Saudi desert without a shower, soldier Tiffin Woody desperately wanted to bathe.
Woody had seen the guys string up a blanket for privacy when they wanted to scrub off the desert dust. But, as the only woman in a tent with 12 men, she did not trust such a flimsy barrier.
Carrying warm water and a rag, Woody locked herself into a portable tool supply room near her tent. On the door she tacked a warning: ”NOBODY COME IN.”
Stripped down to her socks, Woody was about to reach into her duffel bag for soap when she noticed a small open space under the air conditioner. Through it, she saw eyes.
”What the hell?” shouted the 21-year-old, a Spec. 4 with the 101st Airborne Air Assault Division.
The eyes vanished. Woody threw on her fatigues and ran outside. No one was in sight.
In 1992, a military woman can die flying a helicopter on the edge of the combat zone, become an expert mechanic on a sophisticated weapons system or instruct soldiers in how to survive a chemical attack.
But she never can be one of the guys.
Despite images of women marching off to war in the Persian Gulf, the armed forces remain male-dominated. Women make up about 12 percent of the Army, 10 percent of the Navy, 14 percent of the Air Force and 5 percent of the Marines.
In the tight-knit fraternity that still dominates the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, women sometimes are locked out like would-be party crashers. And sexual harassment is one way to keep them on the other side of the door.
It took the Navy`s recent Tailhook scandal to lay open the issue of sexual harassment in the military. One year ago this weekend, more than two dozen women, some of them Navy officers, battled their way through a gantlet of groping naval aviators at a wild convention in Las Vegas.
Stories told by other women in the military indicate that the Tailhook conventioneers` attitude is not uncommon among military men.
Former air weapons system technician Heather Lail says she faced no severe sexual harassment, such as sexual demands, during a four-year stint in the Marines. But men in her workshop routinely told dirty jokes and passed around pornographic magazines, commenting on the centerfolds` body parts.
She found the comments irritating, but Lail didn`t complain. She didn`t want to be seen as raising a fuss over a minor issue.
”It`s so common you`d have to have an investigation on everyone in the Marine Corps,” she says.
But Lail did speak up one day when one Marine pushed her too far. The man-a corporal one step above her in rank-suggested that her husband, also a Marine, would wind up having oral sex with a prostitute within an hour of his being deployed to the Philippines.
Lail reported the comment to her workshop supervisor. At first, he tried to brush her off, saying she should get used to that kind of talk. Lail threatened to take up the matter with his boss if she didn`t get an apology from the corporal. The next day, the corporal grudgingly apologized.
Lail believes harassment is a test the men use to size up women Marines, known as ”WMs.”
”Men are tested with how many beers they can drink or how many push-ups they can do,” Lail says. ”I think this was a test for how much this WM can take. I believe if I had not stood up and stated my position and meant it, that I would have been ridden over and it would have happened repeatedly.”
The 22-year-old, who was honorably discharged in November after finishing her stint, continues to live near Cherry Point, N.C., with her husband, Thomas Lail II, and their 21-month-old daughter.
Army Lt. Marsha Bryant Whittenburg of Highland Park, Mich., says she, too, was tested. At her first posting at Ft. Bragg, N.C., a sergeant turned up one night at her door, drunk and leering.
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”I`ve been watching you,” he told her.
Whittenburg sent him away and discussed the incident with a male friend the next day. ”He told me this was going to happen-being female in the Army- and the only way you can stop it is to confront the person and let them know you won`t stand for it,” says Whittenburg, who is based at Hunter Army Airfield in Savannah, Ga.
The next chance she got, the 26-year-old called the soldier over and ordered him to stand at attention.
”I told him, outside of work, we didn`t have anything to say to each other. After that, he didn`t even look my way.”
More than one-third of the nearly 9,500 women responding to a September 1990 Pentagon survey reported experiencing some form of harassment, including touching, pressure for sexual favors and rape.
In 1991, about 430 complaints of sexual harassment were reported to the Army`s equal opportunity or inspector general offices. That number was down significantly from 1990, with about 970 reported complaints.
But the vast majority of cases are never reported to equal opportunity or inspector general channels, Army spokesman Bill Buckner says. Instead, they are resolved through the chain of command, the Army`s recommended approach. The Army has no statistics on these cases, Buckner says. It`s similar with the other services.
Of course, sexual harassment is not part of every woman`s military career. Take Capt. Robyn McCauley and Capt. Kim Northrop, for example. They are two of just four female pilots in a tanker refueling squadron at K.I. Sawyer Air Force Base near Marquette, Mich. They say the men they regularly work with treat them with respect and friendship.
McCauley says the Air Force typically trains men and women together, a policy she believes builds healthy working relationships.
”When you go through rigorous training programs like these alongside the guys, they see that you`re out there doing the same things they are, taking the same risks and looking for the same treatment and the same rewards,” the 26-year-old says. McCauley went through a year of pilot training as the only woman in a class of 20. Last year, as the ranking officer, she led seven men through a grueling week of wilderness survival.
The training is designed to push people to their physical and mental limits-hiking through the woods with 60-pound backpacks, sleeping five hours a night, getting by on one meal a day. It`s not uncommon for a trainee to break under the stress. But when one of the men in McCauley`s group said he wanted to quit, the other men had a quick rejoinder.
”They said, `Hey, if she can do it, you can do it,` ” McCauley remembers.
When the week was over, one of the men came up to McCauley, patted her on the back and praised her leadership.
”I don`t know if they expected me to be whining or something,” she says. ”But this was a para-rescue guy, one of these Green Beret types who go through some really tough training. This was just one of the neatest things anyone ever said to me.”
But in direct combat units and positions-the military`s remaining all-male domain-the attitudes of men with whom they associated less regularly can be frustrating.
Northrop says that during Desert Storm she would take her plane up to 25,000 feet to refuel combat planes near the Iraqi border.
”These people, who we are refueling to give them the gas to get home from their missions, are the same pilots who say they don`t think women are good enough to be in their squadron,” the 27-year-old says. ”But they couldn`t get their job done without us.”
Brian Salenik, who served with the Michigan National Guard`s 210th Military Police Battalion in Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war, says most female MPs did their jobs at least as well as the men did.
But Salenik, whose unit was stationed a half-mile from the barracks where 28 people were killed by an Iraqi Scud missile, says he would not feel as confident near the front lines with a woman as he would with a man.
”It`s just that you`re raised to take care of the female, to watch over them and you`re sort of always worrying about them,” he says. ”It`s like you`ve got to watch your back and her back.”
Some men and women fear that in trying to stop sexual harassment, military brass could make it nearly impossible for men and women to develop good working relationships.
”Guys are going to be afraid to have a party at their house and invite girls,” Lail says. ”It`s going to make things stiffer and uncomfortable. Guys are going to go around thinking every WM is going to turn them in.”
But others say the military has a long way to go before stopping the sexual harassment that goes on.
For Tiffin Woody, the shower incident didn`t end when she shooed away the peeper. The aftermath was as bad.
A male friend told her not one but three soldiers in her unit had been spotted crouching outside the room when she went in for her bath.
Worse, some of her male comrades blamed her for the incident.
”One guy said that being female was making it real inconvenient on them,” Woody recalls. ”He said that women shouldn`t be allowed in the war because we were a temptation.”
Although she took the matter to her sergeant and then to his boss, two weeks passed with no action. She decided to take the unusual step of going outside the chain of command to a female captain, who Woody says got on the matter right away. The men, two sergeants and a specialist, were all demoted one rank with a corresponding salary cut.
”The chain of command totally failed,” Woody says. ”If I hadn`t gone to that female captain, they would have totally covered it up.”
Woody`s version of what happened differs from that of Army spokesman Bill Harralson, who says the Army took the quickest action possible. He says Woody needn`t have skirted the chain of command and that all three men were questioned within four days of the incident and swiftly punished.
”They took her complaint very seriously and responded in a timely manner, given that it was a wartime involvement,” Harralson says.
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But Woody, who joined the Army at 19 because she felt it would open doors to other opportunities, now hopes she`ll get an early hardship discharge within the next few months to care for her 3-month-old daughter.
”I don`t like the Army anymore. It doesn`t work the way they said it would,” Woody says. ”I viewed this as an opportunity. Now I just want to get out.”