“Hotel. The Las Vegas Hilton. And they’re aviators. They land on carriers at night in pitching seas. They’re aviators.”
“Rapists is more like it. A hundred drunken rapists. I know what they land on at night.”
“The navy’s working on sexist attitudes,” Bobbie had argued. “The secretary of the navy resigned, for crying out loud. Three admirals got stripped of their commands.”
“The women were the ones got stripped. What’d the one admiral say? Female pilots … excuse me, aviators are like hookers or go-go dancers? I wish you’d consider leaving it. You don’t belong in the navy. You’re not even twenty-eight years old. Your life’s ahead of you.”
“I love the navy. I love my job.”
“You love being called Bad Dog?”
“It’s not meant in any mean or sexist way. It’s my name. Bobbie Ann Doggett. B-A-D. Doggett. Bad Dog. It’s natural.”
Going home on leave to Kenosha, Wisconsin, had come to mean spending a few days with her parents, seeing her married brothers and their kids, and going out on the town with two high school girlfriends, both divorced. A surprising number of her classmates were gone from the Kenosha area, and before the leave was up, Bobbie was ready to go back to her real home. Back to the navy. At present, back to Naval Air Station, North Island, on the Coronado peninsula, across from downtown San Diego, where she served as a “command investigator.”
Whenever she’d tried to explain to her mother what sweet shore duty it was, and how lucky, and yes, honored, she felt to have the job, her mother would heave a sigh. And as soon as it was tactful, her mother would bring up the name of some blind-date yuppie puppy who worked with Bobbie’s brother at his insurance office.
Her father had given up long ago. Having served in Korea as a dogface grunt, he knew a lifer when he saw one. When Bobbie had made 2nd class petty officer during the Gulf War, her dad had sent a congratulatory telegram that caught up with her in Saudi Arabia where her tender serviced the fighting ships. That’s the kind of ship women got put on, big ships like tenders, machine shops that float. The male personnel, both officers and enlisted men, made bets on how many pregnancies would occur during their sea tour, and what made Bobbie really mad was that there were quite a few. Dumb. Sailors of either sex could be so dumb.
Her defense of the navy to her mother was always upbeat. To other females, navy or civilian, Bobbie said that the Tailhook aviators who assaulted the women as they ran a “gauntlet” ought to be sent to federal prison. There they should have their pubic hair shaved into hearts after which they should be made to run a gauntlet in the shower room between two rows of only those psychopaths who’d been longest in solitary confinement. That’s what Bobbie said to women other than her mother. Still, Bobbie Ann Doggett truly believed that in her present assignment she had the greatest job in the navy, and she wouldn’t trade with any sailor on ship or shore.
On the day that Bobbie left home to return to the base, her teary-eyed mother gave her some cookies to take on the plane. Her mother was at least glad that Bobbie’s weight was “just right.” Her mother always thought Liz Taylor was “just right” before her diets, and “drawn and haggard” after them.
When Bobbie got harassed at the airport terminal by a persistent Krishna who couldn’t’ve been stopped with a blowtorch, she tossed the homemade cookies to the skinhead, saying, “Phone your mom, Dribble-lips.”
On her first day back, Bobbie decided to bicycle to work. She could bike it because she lived nearby in an over-the-garage apartment at the rear of a residence belonging to a pair of elderly sisters. It would’ve been a lot cheaper to live in the barracks and eat navy chow, and her off-base allowance didn’t cover her rent and food by any means, but the freedom and privacy meant a lot to Bobbie. Another reason she rode her bike that day was because she had to shoehorn her hips into a mulberry slim-skirt that she’d worn comfortably before going home on leave.
Even without her sweet assignment as a command investigator, Bobbie Ann Doggett would’ve considered any shore duty at North Island to be primo. NAS North Island had a twenty-four-hour operational air field, the only one of its kind in the state of California, and was headquarters for the largest over-haul and repair organization in the world, as well as being home to two carriers: USS Ranger and USS Kitty Hawk, each ship bringing with it about 2,500 personnel.
North Island was the birthplace of naval aviation, the point from which Charles Lindbergh took off bound for St. Louis, New York, Paris and immortality. The air station covers about 2,800 acres and requires a force of 24,000 workers, both military and civilian. It is a small city within the small city of Coronado, across the harbor from the sixth-largest city in America, San Diego.
Like any small city, NAS North Island had its own police and fire departments and its own crime. Bobbie Ann Doggett was a plainclothes detective assigned to investigate those crimes, most of which were misdemeanors. When they were felony crimes, the Naval Investigative Service usually handled the cases.
Because she was a command investigator Bobbie was “designated” by the base commander to interrogate anyone regardless of rank. This meant that an E-5 like Bobbie could, theoretically, grill a command officer. She hadn’t felt so powerful since those days when she’d first earned the “crow” of a petty officer, taking on the responsibility of command over subordinates.
Hers would be an exciting job for an E-5 of either sex, but was especially so for Bobbie, whose career hadn’t been easy but had been interesting. She’d especially loved the schools: master-at-arms school where she’d learned about policing, and later, investigator’s school.
There’d been two tours at sea, one of them in the Gulf War, and Bobbie had learned very quickly that master-at-arms is not a popular rate on a navy ship. She’d been made to feel like a cop from the very beginning, in a job that didn’t attract the most feminine of females. A lot of the female masters-at-arms were butch and looked it. But it was easier for Bobbie to deal with them than with the male personnel who assumed she was gay because of her master-at-arms rate, and because she preferred to wear her blond curly hair loose, short and uncoiffed, avoiding eyeliner, skin toners, and excessive lipstick. Bobbie figured that was their problem.
The funny thing was, Bobbie Ann Doggett didn’t mind feeling like a cop. She’d never dated a cop but had always wanted to, and like the rest of her generation she’d grown up watching television cop shows. The first time Bobbie got to introduce herself as “Detective Doggett,” it was awesome.
Bobbie worked with two other investigators, both civilians, both men. She was the only military investigator in that nontraditional job. Like a city police detective, she wore civilian clothes, and unless something unusual occurred, she worked 7:30 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., Monday through Friday.
Her civilian colleagues were okay guys, but they were civilians, and much older. They didn’t bring the same enthusiasm that a young military investigator brought to the job, and no wonder-they made about $1,000 less a month than their counterparts at nearby San Diego Police Department. In fact, when they factored in Bobbie’s pay and her military fringe benefits, she cost the navy twenty-five thousand a year more than her civilian colleagues did.
Civilian investigators tended to stay on the job a long time except for one who’d recently resigned to take a position with a police department in northern California. He was the one who took a look at Bobbie Ann Doggett and said in a stage whisper to a senior chief petty officer: “Bad Dog, my ass. Five foot three in platforms. It’s what the navy’s come to: runts ’n cunts!”