Hell Hath No Fury (30 page)

Instead of a plan or a strategy, we get shallow slogans like Mission Accomplished and Stay the Course…. Those slogans are calculated to win an election. But they won't help us win our mission in Iraq…. I didn't cut and run, Mr. President. Like so many others, I proudly fought and sacrificed, my helicopter was shot down long after you proclaimed “mission accomplished.”

In her campaign, Duckworth was also fiercely critical of the wasteful management of the war in Iraq, pointing out that the lavish meals with which she and her colleagues were provided were no substitute for properly equipped and maintained hardware. She singled out the waste of huge sums of money on civilian contractors to perform tasks that could have been undertaken at a fraction of the cost by the US military. Her Republican opponents launched an expensive mailing campaign against Duckworth, attacking her as “unhinged,” and she failed to be elected.

Reference: www.TammyDuckworth.com.

HESTER, LEIGH ANN

US National Guardswoman, b. 1982

Hester was the first woman to receive the Silver Star, the third-highest US military service award, since World War II. Her undoubted courage nevertheless highlighted the dilemma facing the US military over the role played by its female personnel on active service (see Chapter 6).

Born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Hester joined the National Guard in April 2001 and was posted to Iraq as a sergeant in the 617th Military Police Company. On March 20, 2005, Hester's squad was shadowing an unarmed supply convoy when it was caught in an insurgent ambush south of Baghdad. Under fire from rocket-propelled grenades, Hester maneuvered her ten-man squad into a flanking position to cut off the insurgents' line of retreat, before launching an attack on the trenches from which they were firing.

Working with her squad leader, Sergeant Timothy Nein, Hester attacked the trench line with M203 grenade-launcher rounds and M4 rifle fire, killing three of the insurgents. At the end of a fierce skirmish, twenty-seven insurgents were dead, six were wounded, and one had been taken prisoner. Nein was also awarded a Silver Star for his part in the action.

Reference: Thomas E. Ricks,
Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq,
2006.

HOLM, JEANNE

First American Woman to Rise to the Rank of Two-Star General, USAF, b. 1921

Holm joined the US military in 1942 and retired three decades later after becoming the first woman in any branch of the service to rise to the rank of two-star general.

Born in Portland, Oregon, she trained as a silversmith and enlisted in 1942 after Congress established the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC). In 1943 she was commissioned as a third officer, the WAAC equivalent of a second lieutenant. By 1945 she was a captain in charge of a woman's training regiment. At war's end she returned to civilian life to earn a university degree.

In 1948, during the Berlin blockade, Holm was recalled to active duty and in 1949 transferred to the United States Air Force (USAF), advancing through the grades to become a major general in 1973, the highest rank achieved by any woman in the US armed forces.

One of her early assignments was to the post of war plans officer for the Eighty-fifth Air Deport Wing in Germany during the Berlin Airlift and the early stages of the Korean War. She was the first woman to attend the Air Command and Staff School and from 1957 to 1961 was based in Naples, responsible for supervising manpower needs at the headquarters of the Allied Air Forces for Southern Europe. From 1961 to 1965 she served in Washington as a congressional staff officer, after which she was appointed director of female personnel in the USAF. In this position Holm was a powerful force for the opening up of career opportunities for women in the USAF and the abolition of discriminatory regulations.

She spent her last two years before retirement as director of the Secretariat of Air Force Personnel. After her retirement Holm remained immensely active, working on the Defense Manpower Commission and serving as a member of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services. A strong supporter of the women's rights movement, Holm is a member of the National Women's Political Caucus and founder and first chairperson of Women in Government.

Reference: Jeanne Holm,
Women in the Military: An Unfinished Revolution,
1986.

HOPPER, “AMAZING” GRACE

Wartime Naval Officer and US Navy Computer Expert, b. 1906, d. 1992

Dubbed “Amazing Grace” and “the First Lady of Software,” Hopper chaired the committee that developed COBOL, the automatic programming language that in the 1940s launched computers as a universal instrument. She was also credited with coining the term “bug” to describe the problems that beset computers and their programs. Her lifelong love affair with electronics began when World War II drew her out of teaching math and into the US Navy Reserve.

She was born in New York. Her grandfather was a civil engineer commissioned to lay out a section of the Bronx, and as a small girl she spent many happy hours trailing around after him, carrying his measuring stick. The experience fostered a love of geometry and maps, and Hopper later confessed that she would have become an engineer herself on graduating from Vassar with a degree in mathematics, had that career path been open to women in the 1920s. She contented herself with a doctorate in mathematics from Yale and in 1931 returned to Vassar to take up a teaching post.

In December 1943 Hopper joined the navy reserve and was posted to the computer laboratory at Harvard, where she had a life-defining encounter with the first large-scale digital computer in the United States, the Mark I. In 1945, when Hopper was a lieutenant assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance computation project, a breakdown in one of the Mark I's circuits was found to have been caused by a trapped moth, which was removed with tweezers and prompted Hopper to coin the word “bug.”

Hopper had had a much better war than most and developed a liking for the service. When she was demobilized, she was informed that she was too old (at forty) to join the navy proper, but she retained her place in the reserve and joined a company that was building Univac 1, the first commercial computer. The company subsequently merged with the Sperry Corporation, and it was with Sperry that Hopper worked on the programming idea that led to COBOL. In 1966, Hopper retired from the reserve, only to find that she was still needed. She was recalled a year later to active duty with the Naval Data Automation Command (NDAC), where she was tasked with imposing a standard on the US Navy's plethora of computer languages.

In 1975, Congress passed legislation enabling the navy to promote Hopper to the rank of captain, as she was still theoretically on the retired list. In 1983 she received a special presidential appointment to the rank of rear admiral. She became head of the NDAC and for two decades worked at the Pentagon. A slight woman of intense vigor, Hopper was a firm believer in giving her juniors (or “kids,” as she called them) complete creative freedom. She found Pentagon bureaucracy irksome and was happy to encourage her “kids” to cut through red tape, observing, “You can always apologize later.”

Hopper had even less time for feminism and in 1969 was delighted to be named the First Computer Sciences Man of the Year. She once remarked, “I'm thoroughly in the dog house with the women's liberation people. They once asked me if I had ever met prejudice, and I said I've always been too busy to look for it.” Hopper chose to go her own way, a self-professed “old-fashioned patriot” who wore a full medal-beribboned uniform at every opportunity and smoked like a chimney. Sadly, she was not granted her wish to live until the age of ninety-four and witness the ending of the year 1999, when she would have been able to whoop it up at the parties given to usher in the millennium. After that, she declared, she would like to “retire to a mountaintop with a computer and send messages to everyone telling them where they are going wrong.”

Reference: Patricia J. Murphy,
Grace Hopper: Computer Whiz,
2004.

LITVAK, LILY

“The White Rose of Stalingrad,” Red Air Force Fighter Pilot, b. 1921, d. 1943

Litvak was not only a seasoned World War II fighter ace but also a gift to Soviet propaganda during a key passage of the war on the Eastern Front. Such was the respect in which she was held by her opposite numbers in the Luftwaffe that, according to legend, it required no fewer than eight of them to put an end to her life.

From her teenage years, Litvak was “air-minded,” and at the age of fourteen she joined her local Aeroklub, making her solo debut a year later and subsequently joining the Soviet paramilitary air formation, the Osoaviakhim, as a flight instructor.

In the opening phase of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, the Red Army Air Force (VVS) suffered grievous losses at the hands of the Luftwaffe. On the first day of Barbarossa, Luftflotte 2 (Second Air Fleet), supporting Army Group Center, destroyed 528 Soviet aircraft on the ground and 210 in the air. Between June and October 1941 the VVS lost 5,316 aircraft, many of them on the ground. However, in the depths of disaster lay the seeds of recovery. The large numbers of obsolete aircraft destroyed on the ground did not entail the loss of aircrew, who were retrained on the potent new types that the VVS was bringing into service.

The disastrous performance of the VVS in the first two months of Barbarossa encouraged the formation of female aviation groups. The driving force behind this innovation was
Marina Raskova
(see Chapter 7), a celebrated record-breaking aviatrix of the 1930s, who secured the formation of three complete women's air regiments, the 586th Fighter, the 587th Bomber, and the 588th Night Bomber Regiments.

Litvak joined the 586th Fighter Regiment, which had been intended as a reserve formation flying support missions. However, in the spring of 1942 the attrition of the air war on the Eastern Front thrust the 586th into the front line.

Litvak and a number of other women, including Katya Budanova, earned transfers in September 1942 to the all-male 437th Fighter Regiment flying over Stalingrad. On September 13, piloting a Lavochkin La-5 fighter, Litvak scored her first victory, shooting down a Junkers Ju88 fighter-bomber. She scored two more victories with the La-5 before switching to the durable Yakovlev Yak-1, with which she scored all her subsequent kills. In late 1942, Litvak was transferred to the Ninth Guards Fighter Regiment and then, in January 1943, to the crack 296th Fighter Regiment (subsequently redesignated Seventy-third Guards Fighter Regiment), flying “free hunt” missions against targets of opportunity. Shortly afterward she received the Order of the Red Star to add to the Order of the Red Banner and the Order of the Patriotic War. Twice she had to make forced landings due to battle damage, and twice she was wounded.

In February 1943 Litvak married Aleksei Solomatin, a fellow pilot from the Seventy-third Guards Fighter Regiment, who was killed in May of that year. A month later, she lost her comrade Budanova, who also died in air combat. Litvak was by now a national heroine, albeit a most reluctant one who was physically and emotionally exhausted by the strain of combat flying. Photographs of the time show a slim, fair-haired woman with a steady but anxious gaze. She became expert at giving Red Army photographers the slip.

On August 1, 1943, while escorting ground-attack aircraft on her third sortie of the day, Litvak's fighter was intercepted and shot down by a gaggle of German fighters. Her aircraft was not found, prompting the Soviet high command to surmise that she might have been captured, and thus to deny her the award of Hero of the Soviet Union.

It was not until 1979 that the crash site was found. Litvak's remains lay beneath her aircraft's wing and indicated that she had succumbed to a head wound. She had flown 168 combat missions, gaining twelve individual kills and three shared victories. Ten years later Litvak was given an official burial, and in May 1990 President Mikhail Gorbachev posthumously made her a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Reference: Reina Pennington,
Wings, Women, and War: Soviet Airwomen in World War II Combat,
2002.

LYNCH, JESSICA

US Prisoner of War in Iraq, b. 1983

When PFC Jessica Lynch was freed from a hospital in An Nasiriya, Iraq, on April 1, 2003, it was the first rescue of an American POW by US forces since World War II, and the first ever of a woman. However, soon after the operation had been completed, it became clear that the US Army's account of her capture and rescue was not wholly accurate. As it turned out, the pretty, petite, blond and blue-eyed Lynch was rescued only to be exploited as a propaganda tool.

Lynch was born in Palestine, West Virginia and, while serving in Iraq as a supply clerk with the 507th Maintenance Company, was captured by Iraqi forces after the convoy with which she was traveling on March 23 made a wrong turn and was ambushed near An Nasiriya, a major crossing point over the Euphrates River northwest of Basra. Eleven soldiers were killed in the ambush, including Lynch's friend PFC Lori Piestewa. Lynch was initially listed as missing in action.

After a period in the custody of the Iraqi unit that had taken her prisoner, Lynch was taken to the Saddam hospital in An Nasiriya. After her rescue, staff at the hospital, including two doctors, Harith al-Houssona and Anmar Uday, stated that they had done their best to protect Lynch from the Iraqi fedayeen and government agents who were using the hospital as a base for their operations. When she was rescued, Lynch was suffering from a head laceration, an injury to her spine, and fractures to her right arm, both legs, and her right foot and ankle. Most of these are consistent with the injuries noted on her arrival at the hospital by Dr. al-Houssona. However, al-Houssona was later adamant that Lynch had not sustained gunshot and stab wounds, nor had she been raped and sodomized, as claimed in an authorized biography of Lynch written by Rick Bragg,
I Am a Soldier, Too.
When first seen by al-Houssona, Lynch was fully clothed and exhibited no signs of having being raped or mistreated.