'It was more physically and mentally challenging than I ever could have imagined.' Via MilitaryTimes
There’s no room for nerves in the cockpit of F/A-18 fighter jets, according to former Naval flight officer Caroline Johnson, who participated in combat missions flying over Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria.
Now Johnson is sharing her story with others in a memoir released last month called “Jet Girl: My Life in War, Peace, and the Cockpit of the Navy's Most Lethal Aircraft, the F/A-18 Super Hornet.”After graduating from the Naval Academy in 2009, Johnson headed to the so-called “cradle of Naval aviation” at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Florida where she excelled and was consistently the top of her class during multiple levels of flight school.
Fast forward to Valentine’s Day 2014, and Lt. Johnson was departing Norfolk aboard the USS George H.W. Bush with her squadron, the VFA-213 Fighting Blacklions. “No matter how many times the weed comes back, we can’t stop taking action,” Johnson wrote in her book. “We must continue to save the lives of those threatened by ISIS.”
As a result, Johnson said she developed close friendships with the other women alongside her from her days as a midshipman, to when she was assigned to the Blacklions. But things didn’t change. She recounted how another junior officer once told her that “cleaning is a woman’s job” as she detailed a series of “microaggressions” she experienced in the squadron.
The Pentagon announced in September that the number of active duty service members who are taking their own lives is increasing. According to the Pentagon’s 2018 Annual Suicide Report, 325 suicides were reported in 2018 — 40 more than in 2017. “Deviating from that, and the consequences that came with that were heartbreaking because, I kind of knew it was a chapter being closed on my flying career,” Johnson told Military Times. “Like you mourn the death of somebody, you have to mourn that, and so it was really hard, and I lost the support network of being in one of the F-18 hubs.”
Specifically, she cited a 1996 Navy Equal Opportunity/Sexual Harassment Survey study detailing various gender discrimination behaviors female officers serving in aviation were subjected to, such as offensive jokes and negative comments, to physical assault.
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