MY BATTLE AS A SISTER IN ARMS
How hero vet earned her wings Book bares her war on sexism Her courage under Taliban fire
M ARY Jennings Hegar’s first childhood memory was watching her father throw her mother through a plate-glass door. Hegar was 4 years old. Her sister Elaine was 10. Her father then grabbed Elaine by the throat and held her a foot off the floor while their mother begged for mercy. He finally let Elaine go.
“I don’t know if it was at that moment or sometime later,” Hegar writes, “but I knew I would never — ever — find myself trapped like that again: weak, unable to protect those I love from evil. But that was definitely the moment I figured out what feeling I hate most in the world: fear.”
It took another three years for Hegar’s mother to get the courage to take her girls and leave, but Hegar believes her traumatic childhood led her to pursue, against all odds, a vanguard career as one of the few female pilots in the Air National Guard.
“When someone calls me brave,” she writes, “I think: Hell, flying helicopters under fire in Afghanistan is nowhere near as scary as the thought of being that little girl again.”
Her lifelong dream was to be a military pilot, but Hegar had no idea her true fight would be against institutional sexism, abuse and the official exclusion of women from the battlefield — even though women have been secretly serving in combat for decades.
“Many don’t think that there are women serving in combat roles,” she writes. “Others think that women who do serve in combat shrink in fear when the bullets fly. I know differently.”
I N her new memoir, “Shoot Like a Girl: One Woman’s Dramatic Fight in Afghanistan and on the Home Front” (above), Hegar recounts her career with exhilaration, anger and a good dose of black humor.
As a high-school freshman in Texas, Hegar was mentored by a man she calls Mr. Dewey. He had served in the Navy and encouraged Hegar’s most evident traits: bravery and natural leadership. When it came time to apply to colleges, Hegar went after an ROTC scholarship and asked Dewey for a letter of recommendation. She was shocked to find he had described her in the worst possible terms: lazy, undisciplined, unworthy.
Hegar confronted him. “What the hell, Mr. Dewey? Is this really how you feel about me?”
Dewey looked at Hegar with a mixture of pity and contempt.
“The Navy is no place for you, Mary,” he said. “What are you trying to prove? This isn’t a game. Defending our nation should be left to the strong, and it’s no place for a woman.”
Shaken to the point of tears, Hegar left his classroom and immediately called her Navy recruiter. After she told him what happened, he sighed.
“MJ, I’m going to be honest with you,” he said. “You might as well get used to this.”
Hegar enrolled at the University of Texas at Austin. The Navy tainted by her former mentor, she joined the Air Force ROTC instead, and in the summer of 1997 began her field training — “pretty much my version of Disneyland,” she writes.
Within days, Hegar and her fellow cadets faced their first obstacle course. She breezed through the first three, but at the fourth, the drill instructors announced that women wouldn’t need to participate. Incensed, Hegar rushed to the front of the line and wound up cracking her kneecap while trying to jump on a rolling log. The pain was unbearable, but even as she was being loaded into an ambulance, she refused to cry. Her drill instructor climbed in and kept her talking.
“Hey . . . HEY. What’s your name? Where are you from?” he asked.
“Cadet Jennings, Austin, Texas, Drill Sergeant!” She was fighting the urge to vomit.
“You want to be a pilot, right?” her instructor said. “Yes . . . why?” “You do know that if you ever pass out and that gets on your record you can’t fly, right? So if you’re hurting, just f- -king scream and cry already. It’s better than going unconscious.”
Hegar’s injury sidelined her for months. By the time she was a senior, she had fallen in love with another cadet, Jack, and earned a slot at a base in Japan, learning aircraft maintenance. In her first week there, she reported to her commanding officer, an imposing 6-foot-tall man she calls Major Johnson.
“Sir, Lieutenant Jennings reports as ordered!” she said, holding her salute.
“S--t,” he muttered. “Lieutenant, the first time your time of the month gets in the way of doing your job, you’re fired. Now get out of my office.”
It was the kind of casual sexism Hegar had come to expect — it always bruised, but she never showed it. “I feel strongly that your success in life has little to do with your situation and everything to do with your reaction to it,” she writes. She channeled her anger at the shooting range and was surprised when a male instructor high-fived her when she finished.
“Outstanding, Jennings,” he said. “You shoot like a girl.”
This again? Jennings knew her face betrayed her thoughts.
“No, really,” he said. “Women are physiologically predisposed to being excellent marksmen. It’s about their muscle tone, center of gravity, flexibility, heart rate, respiration and, in my opinion, psychology. A lot of guys let their egos get the best of them and feel like they’re not a real man if they can’t shoot. I try to teach my guys to shoot like a girl when I can. You know, the Soviets were extremely successful at using women as snipers during World War II.”
Jennings learned that women had other advantages not just in combat but as fighter pilots. Physically, they handle sharp turns and climbs — what they call “pulling G’s,” which feels like plummeting in a roller coaster times one thousand — much better than men.
“If this was true,” she writes, “and the military seemed to make decisions about who should do which job based on gender stereotypes, why not make all of their snipers and fighter pilots women?”
W EEKS after Sept. 11, 2001, Jennings had her pilot’s license and was about to be assigned to Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, commanding the troops maintaining the fleet of B-52 stealth bombers. She was gearing up to train as a search-and-rescue pilot and reported for her annual physical to a military physician she refers to as Dr. Adams.
He told her she needed a gynecological exam. He was not a gynecologist. “Put your feet in the stirrups,” he said. “What? No,” Jennings said. “You don’t understand. I just had an exam. I gave the paperwork to the nurse at the front for you to review.”
“No, you don’t understand,” he said. “I can fail you for psychological reasons. You can kiss being a pilot goodbye.”
Jennings, normally so stoic, cried hysterically as Adams violated her, and when her group commander learned of it — Adams, for reasons unknown, confessed of his own volition — he encouraged Jennings to let the Air Force discipline him “their way.” A few months later, at an awards ceremony where she was named Operations Group Company Grade Officer of the Year, she encountered Adams. He was being honored as Medical Group’s Company Grade Officer of the Year.
Weeks later, she left. “I tried not to blame the entire Air Force,” she writes, but “it was
I’m not sure they noticed I was a woman under all that body armor and helmet. Now they stared openly — at my Hello Kitty panties. — Mary Jennings Hegar, recalling gawking soldiers’ reactions as medics tended to a combat wound on her leg
hard not to. It was the general culture of the Air Force that had given Dr. Adams the idea that he could treat me like that. Clearly, he was right. He was never punished for it.”
Again, she funneled her anger and despair into work, and in March 2004 was offered a job flying Combat Search and Rescue helicopters with the New York Air National Guard. Here, she first encountered pararescue jumpers, or “PJs.”
“PJs are a unique group of people,” she writes. “I like to think of them as a mix between . . . SEALs, Rangers, Coast Guard rescue swimmers and combat medics.”
When Hegar finally deployed to Afghanistan, PJs would help save her life.
I N May 2007, Hegar landed in Kandahar and a few weeks later was assigned to a small Dutch base. Her excitement at flying rescue missions was soon tempered: One night, they were called out to rescue a 3-year-old boy who had been badly burned by his father’s homemade explosive. They had a two-Apache escort, which made Hager nervous: This could be an ambush.
They rescued the boy, who was carried on to Hegar’s aircraft by his father, who said nothing. The little boy was obviously in pain and terrified in this hulk of a helicopter, surrounded by armed and uniformed Americans. Then her medic, Thor, did something unexpected.
“I had never really noticed, but apparently Thor carried a Beanie Baby-sized teddy bear on his vest for times just like this,” she writes. “When he lifted the boy’s hand to place the bear on his chest, the little boy’s fear disappeared.”
They got the boy and his father safely to their base, and Hegar kept a close eye on his progress. On Day Three, she learned that the boy had contracted pneumonia the night before and died.
“To this day,” she writes, “I cry for that sweet casualty of this terrible war.”
That mission came to define her 2007 deployment. The mission that defined her second and last, in 2009, nearly killed her. It was early in the afternoon of July 29 when word came that three American soldiers had been critically injured in a roadside explosion outside Kandahar. She, a co-pilot she calls George, and three PJs boarded a helicopter and flew out, their “sister ship,” — a backup helicopter — right behind.
As they flew over the scene, they saw “the line of drab US Army trucks . . . like a toy train,” pinned down by armed Taliban hiding to the south. As they made their descent, Hegar heard a hard crack: Her windshield had blown out, and she looked down to see blood seeping through the clothing on her right thigh and forearm. Her co-pilot couldn’t hide his alarm.
“I’m hit, but I can still fly!” she yelled. She had never been shot before, but flew enough injured soldiers to know her wounds weren’t life-threatening. “We’ve got three soldiers down there,” she said. “Let’s get back to it.”
The PJs jumped out. George landed where the IED had exploded — anywhere else posed the risk of another bomb. As they touched down, the helo began taking heavy fire from the Taliban — this was, they realized, Part Two of the attack, a planned ambush. Their sister ship had lost one gun, and the pilot radioed that he couldn’t follow through with the mission as planned. “All of us who had done tours in Afghanistan had seen someone lose their courage,” Hegar writes. “There was no coming back from that.”
They landed, and within a minute, the PJs boarded the three wounded, and then they took off again, losing fuel rapidly. They had to make an emergency landing in the hills, their sister ship hovering high above, refusing to land. They radioed a Mayday call, and Hegar, in full body armor, took position with her rifle. Shots kept coming, but her training kicked in: Don’t waste your ammo on a target you can’t see.
She later learned that 150 Taliban were in the vicinity and had been closing in until two Army helicopters suddenly descended. “It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen,” Hegar writes. When she got back to base, she was too wired to submit to a medical exam, and a number of soldiers watched as she fought with the medic, eventually allowing him to look at her leg.
“I’m not sure they noticed I was a woman under all that body armor and helmet,” she writes. “Now they stared openly — at my Hello Kitty panties.”
A soldier named TJ, who had just flown the same mission, pushed himself nearly flush with the nearest gawker. “What the F- -K are YOU looking at?”
No one on that base ever doubted Hegar’s abilities, or her true warrior spirit, again.
I N 2010, Hegar began to think about leaving the military. She had suffered a serious back injury in the Kandahar crash and had just met the man she’d go on to marry. His daughter looked up to Hegar, and one day in 2012 came to her in tears.
“Why did you let me think I could be a Marine?” she asked. “My mom told me I can’t be a Marine because that’s a boy’s job.”
Hegar, who had received a Purple Heart, had retired as an Air National Guard major.
“Well, she’s wrong,” Hegar told her stepdaughter. “I know lots of female Marines.”
That same year, Hegar joined a class-action lawsuit against the secretary of defense, demanding women be officially allowed to serve in combat, and was named one of Newsweek’s 125 Women of Impact. In 2013, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta lifted the ban, but institutional sexism and outmoded gender stereotypes remain. Today, Hegar continues to speak and advocate for women in the military.
“History will do what it always does,” she writes. “It will make ignorant statements, in retrospect, seem shortsighted and discriminatory, and the women who will serve their country bravely in the jobs that are now opening up will prove them wrong. Just like we always have.”