Female airmen deadly in Iraq, Afghanistan
A small cadre of women prove their mettle in combat
By Patrick Winn - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Jan 2, 2008 21:52:41 EST
Their numbers are few. Their profile is small. But few groups of women have proven more deadly or destructive than Air Force women flying and fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Defense Department restrictions prohibit all services from placing women in direct ground combat. But Air Force women have been cleared to fight from the air in fighter jets, bombers and gunships since the mid-1990s. The current wars have been a proving ground of sorts for Air Force women in extended combat roles, dispelling any old-fashioned notion that women lack the skills to kill.
Female fighters, like their male counterparts, have also paid with their lives. Five Air Force women have died in the two wars. All told, the two wars have claimed the lives of 104 female service members, according to the Defense Department.
Air Force women with combat-centric careers describe a straight-up meritocracy — not a boys’ club — where gender fades away and respect is pegged to performance. Women remain a marginal presence in these jobs, although their numbers have increased since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
“If you’re new to the system, you prove yourself whether you’re male or female,” said Master Sgt. Kimberly Sulipeck, who has flown an estimated 450 hours on AC-130H gunships in Afghanistan.
As a sensor operator, she’s targeted and eliminated more than 150 enemy combatants, according to her bio. “I’m just one of the guys,” Sulipeck said.
“You do your job, do it right, and that’s the way it goes.”
And she’s not the only one with a story to tell.
Angel of death
Her gunship cruised low and loud over northeastern Afghanistan, a mix of milkshake-brown flatlands, grassy valleys and boulder-strewn mountain slopes. On Capt. Allison Black’s monitor aboard an AC-130H Spectre, the region below was a flickering sea of night-vision green.
It was mid-November 2001. As an evaluator-navigator with the Air Force’s 1st Special Operations Group, Black was plotting routes, communicating with ground forces and identifying targets in the darkness below. Just days before, the Afghan capital of Kabul had fallen to light-and-lean Special Forces teams relying on Air Force fighter jet and gunship strikes. They were aided with intelligence from the Northern Alliance — Afghans with their own vendetta against the Taliban.
Now the target was a smallish province along the northern border. Bearded American soldiers, relying on the Northern Alliance’s knowledge of local terrain and Taliban habits, were moving covertly through the surrounding hills on horseback.
For weeks, the Army detachment had lived with Northern Alliance Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, a hulking and prickly haired war veteran thrilled to watch American air power cripple his Taliban foes.
Just 16 hours after Black landed at Karshi-Kanabad Air Base in neighboring Uzbekistan, she had been shuttled to her first-ever combat mission. It was off to a choppy start. Although the crew had successfully destroyed a bank of rocket launchers and several Taliban trucks, they were forced to evade anti-aircraft fire that pelted the Spectre’s steel belly.
“All they needed was a high-caliber [anti-aircraft] system to present a problem,” Black said. “We were definitely on edge.”
Dented but intact, the gunship flew on. Operational Detachment Alpha 595, from the Army’s 5th Special Forces Group, lit up Black’s radio as her plane neared its encampment. With Dostum’s help, the troops had learned of a nearby safe house packed with more than 200 Taliban and al-Qaida fighters.
Black began to chart the course. When her voice crackled over the soldiers’ field radios, Dostum was delightedly incredulous. A woman? Sent to kill the Taliban? “He couldn’t believe it,” Black said. “He thought it was the funniest thing.”
The Spectre neared and its cannons erupted. Unaccustomed to the Gatling gun’s mechanized snarl, the fighters confused the airstrike with a ground assault. Militants scattered into the fields, seeking cover in ditches and vehicles, although Black could see their heat-signature silhouettes from her console by the cockpit.
Dostum, hidden with the Army detachment several miles away, said the Taliban also believed a high-powered laser pointer used by Spectre operators to identify ground targets — a “sparkle,” in Air Force spec ops speak — was a death ray that turned everything it touched to flames.
As the hailstorm of munitions continued, Dostum grabbed his walkie-talkie, switched to the Taliban’s unsecured frequency and relayed to them the sound of Black’s chatter coming through Army radio.
He used the female pilot’s voice to taunt them as they bled.
“He said, ‘America is so determined, they bring their women to kill the Taliban. You’re so pathetic,’” Black said. “‘It’s the angel of death raining fire upon you.’” After circling the safe house environs many times — striking militants after they’d regroup in threes and fours — the Spectre had just enough fuel to return to Uzbekistan. The crew had expended all of its ammunition: 400 rounds of 40mm cannon shot and 100 rounds of 105mm Howitzer rounds. Black contacted an incoming gunship sent to finish off the remaining militants with a fresh load of ammo.
In those few hours, Black had become the first female AC-130H navigator to shoot in combat. Six years later, she’s a combat-medal-wearing mother to two sons, ages 6 months and 2 years, and she expects to return to Afghanistan in early 2008. She estimates the total number of human targets eliminated on that first tour at more than 250 enemies.
“I’m so proud to represent women, and proud to represent the gunship community, but it’s very humbling,” she said. “Here I am, Captain Black, getting all this attention for something myself and 12 other folks did.”
Although her gender was used to rile the Taliban, Black said it’s never proven a liability with her crew. “I never have to worry about it,” she said. “Everybody I care about knows who I am. They know what Allison Black is about.”
Shock and awe
Seen from the glorious heights of Maj. Melissa May’s F-16 cockpit, Baghdad fell beautifully.
It was nighttime and the exploding artillery burst and glowed like a fireworks display.
“It was the whole ground war,” she said. “But way up there, it was serene and quiet.”
These were Operation Iraqi Freedom’s early days, before Saddam Hussein’s anti-air capabilities were fully known. May’s three-month deployment to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia was slated to end in January 2003. But her tour was extended indefinitely.
With the rest of America, she and others in the 14th Fighter Squadron restlessly watched the buildup to war on cable news.
“There was a sense of excitement ... and a fear of the unknown,” said May, a 1995 Air Force Academy graduate. “Now, we’re going to cross that line into Baghdad. So are they going to shoot at us? Are there things we don’t know about?” May, whose call sign SHOCK — or “Scarlet-Headed Ovulating Commie Killer” — hints at her strawberry-blond curls, finally got orders to cross the southern Iraqi no-fly zone in April. The Army was penetrating the city, which was ringed with Saddam’s surface-to-air missile sites. May’s four-ship formation would hit the sites with slender, supersonic AGM-88 anti-radiation missiles, allowing bomber jets to strike Baghdad safely.
“Usually, I’d go out to the jets with my wingman, telling jokes in the van,” she said. “You just say, ‘See you, dude. Don’t suck!’ But there was a different feel that night. We were going into Baghdad.”
That night, her mission went down without a hitch. But days later, her fourth combat mission was marred by blinding weather and a hit from an Iraqi missile.
May and her four-ship, with a bomber formation, had just taken out several missile sites when they received time-sensitive intelligence from an Airborne Warning and Control Systems surveillance jet.
The F-16s were asked to hit mobile, Soviet-made surface-to-air missile launchers. Flying through a wall of thick storm clouds, which limited visibility from 5,000 to 40,000 feet, May’s crew broke from the larger strike package and veered toward Baghdad.
“The weather was still horrible,” said May. “We couldn’t get below or above it.”
As one of the F-16s dipped to bomb the site, an Iraqi launcher nailed it with a Roland missile. The pilot expelled his external fuel tanks — a measure to drop weight and increase maneuverability — and performed a series of countermeasures to dodge more strikes.
“There we were, in the weather and getting shot at,” May said. “And, after dropping his tanks, he was low on gas.”
The four-ship departed for Prince Sultan Air Base with all of its weapons dropped. For that mission, May and her fellow fighter pilots received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
She left Iraq in April 2003. Two years later, while stationed at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz., May and five other female fighter pilots established an alliance known as the “Chick Fighter Pilot Association.” Although it began as an inside joke — and an excuse to round up female fighters each year for a big night out — they may have inadvertently formed the world’s most lethal sisterhood.
Shock, Gunna, Trix, Thumper, Torch, Pinball and the other dozen or so pilots who keep in touch through the group probably wouldn’t describe it in such bang-up terms. “It’s just a joke,” May said. “It’s an excuse to bring a bunch of chick fighter pilots together ... and offer a little mentorship. There just aren’t that many senior female fighter pilots out there.”
In the turret
Of the Air Force jobs with combat exposure, only elite special operations positions require more outside-the-wire bullet-ducking and M4-toting than Security Forces.
And it just happens to be a career filled with women, who account for nearly 16 percent of the more than 24,150 enlisted Security Forces airmen.
Staff Sgt. Summer Everts-Kunard, a Texas-raised 29-year-old, enlisted specifically to join Security Forces and make herself a more attractive candidate for the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Central Intelligence Agency. She wanted to carry guns, conduct searches and learn police techniques.
During a six-month tour with 149th Security Forces that started in February, she patrolled the perimeter of Iraq’s Kirkuk Air Base in a Humvee turret with a .50-caliber machine gun. She took cover as mortars rained down 30 meters in front of her. And whenever jobs took place outside the wire — such as a construction project — she locked and loaded with her fellow airmen when suspicious vehicles veered too close.
“This work is right up my alley,” Everts-Kunard said. “My dad didn’t treat me like a fragile girl growing up. I grew up working outside.”
Everts-Kunard was the only woman on her quick-reaction force, but even the Security Forces countersniper team contained women. Seeing women in the .50-cal turret gun seat was common, she said. Still, according to Defense Department regulations, women are barred from combat.
“I wouldn’t want anyone in any Air Force career field to lower the bar for women,” Everts-Kunard said. “But people have evolved to understand what we can do. Just hold everybody to one standard. If women can’t do it, we can’t do it.”
All but one bomb
High above Afghanistan, in the cockpit of a B-1B Lancer, co-pilot Capt. Kate Hamilton worked to save men she could not see.
Roughly an hour into the mission earlier this year, ground control dispatched Hamilton and her four-person crew to a compound where an Army unit and an Air Force joint terminal attack controller were taking fire. They steered the long-nosed bomber toward the transmitted coordinates, and soon the JTAC’s voice filled the cabin.
This was Hamilton’s first combat experience, kicking off early in her January deployment supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for six months. She had been an Air Force Academy junior in 2001 when the Afghanistan-harbored al-Qaida network struck the U.S. “We tried to get there as quickly as we could to put bombs on target, just to alleviate some of the fire they were taking,” Hamilton said.
Inside the B-1B, the Americans weren’t sure of the militant force’s size. They only knew that, for the guys on the ground, the assault was nearing. The JTAC, Hamilton said, “was one of the most ballsy guys I’d talked to. He kept initiating fights with bad guys to figure out their locations.”
Then, through the radio hiss, they heard the punctuated sound of rifle fire.
“We all sat up straighter in our seats,” Hamilton said. She tried to cool her nerves, to pace her actions. Don’t rush this, she told herself.
The B-1B helped back down the insurgents for more than eight hours. The air crew veered off several times to refuel and returned to spill more rivulets of bombs.
“We kept doing run after run after run.”
As the fighting peaked, medics poised to recover soldiers from the compound were told to bring extra body bags. But later, Hamilton and her crew heard that “every single guy in the unit was coming home alive because we helped support them,” she said.
The Lancer, an aircraft that boasts the largest bomb-carrying capacity of any Air Force jet, left the area with only one bomb undropped.
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