A year ago when the Air Force opened fighters to women, she had been an obscure if talented captain flying C-141 transports. This attitude earned her the nickname of “Nutcracker.” Instead of angering her, Diana was proud of the nickname, so proud that she used it as her radio call sign. Those superiors she couldn’t or wouldn’t fuck, she blackmailed.Īs a woman, the pressure on her superiors to ensure that she succeeded was already great adding the threat to file a sexual harassment complaint made it irresistible. She soon realized that the Air Force’s equal opportunity program was the perfect “ticket to ride” for someone like herself with a lot of ambition and few scruples.
She had used every resource at her command to get ahead in the air force, discovering in her first year at the academy that it was not so much a case of how good you were as how well you could manipulate the system. She had spent the last ten years of her life working toward that goal. All she could think of was how this was going to screw up her plans for getting a star. After all the hype, the first woman combat pilot had let herself get shot down on her first combat mission. But most of all, she was pissed because she knew that she had blown it. She was thirsty, her body ached from the jolt she received when she ejected from her F-16, and she was afraid.
Part of this was attributable to the fact that she was sitting in the back of an Iraqi army truck with her hands tied behind her back and a bag over her head. It was the second day of the air war and Air Force Major Diana Barker was feeling very unhappy.
Both were, to use the official phrasing, “sexually abused.” This story looks at what might have happened if women had been full combatants in that war.
One was a truck driver with a bad sense of directions the other a doctor flying in a search and rescue helicopter. INTRODUCTION: During the Gulf War, two American female service members were captured by the Iraqi Army.