Females On Board Slowly Gain Acceptance Navy Attempts To Integrate Warship By Putting Men And Women Together

To say it was tense is an understatement. A female Navy ensign was put in charge of the boatswain’s mates of 3rd Division, some of the crustiest salts on the USS Nimitz.

The young officer was one of just three women among 3,000 men assigned to the aircraft carrier when she first stepped aboard last December.

“Everyone was very cautious,” recalls Ensign Jules Hebert. At first, some of the men seemed reluctant to even talk to her.

That faded over the next few weeks, and eventually the tension evaporated, said Hebert, a graduate of Boston University. “My guys have no qualms now. … They stick up for me. That really surprised me,” she says.

In the months since, variations on Hebert’s experiences have been repeated over and over in every department of the huge warship, as the previously all-male fortress dealt with having women shipmates for the first time.

It hasn’t always gone smoothly.

With 180 women now in the crew and 120 in the carrier’s air wing at sea, the novelty is starting to wear off.

“At first I was skeptical about women coming aboard,” says Master Chief Aviation Boatswain’s Mate John Tullock. “I didn’t expect them to perform as well as they have. … Now you’d swear they’d been aboard the ship for a couple of years already.”

The Nimitz, based at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, is working up toward an overseas deployment to start in November. At present, women are in 14 of the ship’s 17 departments, including the largest, the air department, which oversees the carrier’s 4-1/2-acre flight deck and the hangar deck below.

“We’re a living experiment,” Hebert says. “You have a warship out here that needs to be (battle-ready). But on the second hand you’ve got sociology. People are going to become friends, and it’s hard to define the limits of that. It’s hard to come up with a policy that’s workable.”

Under the ground rules established by the Nimitz’s commanding officer, Capt. Alfred G. Harms Jr., no public display of affection is allowed aboard ship or within sight of the vessel. There are no restrictions on what happens away from the Nimitz, but romantic relationships among crew members are strongly discouraged.

Nevertheless, hormones are hormones.

“It’s worse than high school,” says Photographer’s Mate 3rd Class Kelcey Brown.

Harms said he has had to discipline several crew members for holding hands or kissing, but nothing more.

There are more mundane problems than romance.

Less than a fifth of the ship’s heads, or rest rooms, are for women.

The ship’s store lacks such items as bobby pins, women’s uniforms, women’s deodorant and so forth. And the ship’s laundry has a reputation for destroying or losing women’s underwear.

Aviation Boatswain’s Mate 3rd Class Katherine Belcher, an aircraft handler in the hangar bay, says 90 percent of the men favor having women on board. But there’s that other 10 percent.

“I’ve actually had a guy say, ‘You shouldn’t be here.’ They say it’s a warship and women shouldn’t be aboard,” Belcher says.