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To: markomalley
I was active from 76-84, ADA. I was lucky, serving in a composite Chaparral-Vulcan battalion. Women weren't allowed in our battalion, as our "other" mission was with an infantry or armor division.

Primary mission was air base defense, at Hahn, Bitburg, and Spangdahlem.

I saw the havoc it wreaked when they force fed women into remote Nike-Hercules batteries, before the site was upgraded for women. Imagine telling Sergeants they had to move back on site, because the facilities weren't suitable for women.

LOL, it affected the air base I was on, as they had the first woman to serve as Base Commander.

During the first tac eval after her promotion, it was business as usual. When an NBC input was announced, I was called to the Eagles Nest to advise the Wing Cdr (why I, an Army 2LT was called for that is another story, from a year previous).

After I gave my "flawless" (LOL) recommendation, I returned to my station. I overhead the Base Cdr question the Wing Cdr, "why is that Army LT involved, we have a Base Disaster Preparedness Officer for those situations."

The Wing Cdr proceeded to rip into her for a couple of minutes, reminding her that he was the Wing Commander. She was gone within 12 months.

80 posted on 05/26/2022 4:44:51 AM PDT by Night Hides Not (Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad! Remember Gonzales! Come and Take It!)
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To: Night Hides Not

I was on a mountaintop site in Turkey from 1983-84. While I was there, the Air Force, in their infinite wisdom, decided that remote mountaintop sites needed to have the blessing of having females on the sites. On our site, they decided that we would benefit from a female site commander.

Well, this female commander shows up. She was appalled at some of the site’s long-standing traditions to keep morale up. (Chug-ins for newcomers, chug-outs for departing people, various other initiations, regular parties that were a bit rowdy lol, and so on). She called a halt to everything.

Needless to say morale dropped. And performance also dropped (this was a radio site that did long-haul communications in the era prior to wideband satellite communications and fiber optics. There was a long-standing tradition that we had zero reportable outages, even though the site was 100% generator powered and the equipment was such that battery backup was not possible.

See, because we had high morale and pride, when a generator dropped off, literally everybody on site would rush to their stations and get things prepared for bringing another generator online....certain actions had to be fine quickly so that the radios wouldn’t automatically go into a warm up cycle when power was restored.

Under this female commander, morale dropped and off duty people didn’t bother to take the above-and-beyond actions needed. Performance dropped from 0 reportable outages during the year to an average of 1 or 2 outages a month.

The higher-ups were not happy and guess who got replaced about halfway through her tour...


92 posted on 05/26/2022 6:17:06 AM PDT by markomalley (Directive 10-289 is in force)
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