She's Got Grit: Navy Pilot and Commander Karen Fine Brasch

LCDR Karen Fine Brasch (Photo: The Grit Project)

by Shannon Huffman Polson

“Someone once asked me how I became a Navy pilot,” Karen Fine Brasch says. “I responded without thinking, 'It never occurred to me that I couldn't.' " 

One of three girls with a father who had been an Air Force fighter pilot, Brasch picked up the flying bug early. Her father was thrilled that one of his children wanted to follow him into the skies. When she was nine years old, he bought her a book "Anyone Can Fly," by Jules Bergman. It still sits on her bookshelf today. He built model airplanes with her and took her to nearby airfields to watch the planes. Her dad instilled in her the belief that she could do anything she wanted to do and be anyone she wanted to be. She didn’t set a path for the military initially, heading to college instead and taking classes while working full time to pay for school. Humble beginnings and upbringing required her being able to independently set goals and deliver on them. On one tough day of class, she stood in the elevator heading to another class and saw a poster that read: “Learn to fly with Bubba.”

“I took the poster off the wall, skipped class, drove over to the little airfield, set the paper on the guy’s desk, and said ‘I want to learn to fly.’ He took one look at me and laughed. I was a twenty-one year old, big haired Texas co-ed sorority girl.”

The instructor composed himself, and offered to take Brasch up flying on the spot.

“I was wearing a jeans mini-skirt and holding a can of Diet Coke,” she remembers. “We preflighted and got in the aircraft. I remember handing him my Diet Coke because I had nowhere to put it. He just laughed. So I dumped it out and put the can on my lap. He gave me the controls and told me to take off. I did. I was the opposite of scared. It was exhilarating!"

After eight lessons Brasch started her application to Navy Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS), a four month boot camp and accelerated officer training program for flight candidates. That’s where things got tough.

LCDR Karen Fine Brasch in the cockpit. (Photo: The Grit Project) 

"Adversity tempers steel." That was the sign hanging in the entrance of AOCS. "It became the voice in my head over my flying career as I sought one challenge after another," says Brasch. "As we lined up to enter training, a big burly instructor came up behind me and grabbed the car keys I had hanging from a shaking hand. 'Trying to get away already?' he boomed. 'You wont be needing these anymore.' Strangely enough, I wasn't nervous anymore. It felt like an acknowledgement that my new adventure was beginning."

“I could not have been more of a fish out of water,” Brasch says. “I had hair down to the middle of my back when they cut it all off on the first day of indoctrination. Even with incredibly short hair, I did not fit in. I was weak academically. I was weak physically. And it showed. I realized how different I was when I was picked last in some silly swim competition. I felt the sting of humiliation and exclusion. Even my class didn't think I should be there. I remember wishing I had studied harder in school and spent more time in physical training."

The USMC drill sergeants running AOCS had no patience for weakness. “I had a lot of extra time with the drill instructors,” Brasch remembers. “Their job was to weed out the weak. I pushed through, because I had literally nowhere else to go, and no where I would rather have been. I was up for the challenges, and I did not want to be treated any differently just because I was a woman."

One challenge required of candidates was getting themselves over an eight foot wall without assistance. “I just could not get over the wall,” she remembers. A small group of women including Brasch realized, then, that there was a wall in the barracks showers exactly the same height as the obstacle they were required to climb. “After the guys went to bed, we would run at this concrete wall in the shower,” she said. “There wasn’t room to get much of a running start, but we worked it anyway. We were all black and blue down one side of our bodies. I remember the day I finally got myself over the wall on the obstacle course. The drill instructor happened to be standing right there. He stood back and just said in his disgusted gruff drill instructor voice: 'Oh. My. God.'"

There were many more challenges to come. One was the fifteen-foot high dive. 'We had to jump in with full flight gear and swim twenty meters underwater without coming up for air."

“I wouldn’t jump off of it,” Brasch says. “I was inexplicably terrified. Another woman was assigned to walk me down to the pool every day and sit there while I waited to go jump and swim. I wasn’t allowed to speak. She just marched me there, and I would stand on the high dive and stare down at the pool-- paralyzed with fear and unable to jump. One day I decided she shouldn’t have to babysit me anymore. It was one more thing I needed to do. I thought to myself, 'there's always going to be one more thing, so what the heck?' I jumped. It was her quiet support that helped me jump.”

Whatever the Navy threw at her, however unprepared she was at times, “I was 100% all in," Brasch said. "The only thing I wanted to do was fly. I was going to do whatever was required to get there.”
Brasch started flight school in 1993, just after combat exclusion was lifted and all aircraft were opened to women. She remembers her training class being really angry because 'the women were going to steal all the pilot slots." Despite the gender protests, by the end of flight school she was qualified in the Navy T-34C fixed wing aircraft and TH-57 helicopter.  At the end of flight school she was qualified in flying the Navy Seahawks.

“The men didn’t want to fly with us,” she remembers. On one of her final primary flights with an instructor she'd never flown with before, she landed, feeling great about the flight, but her scores were low. Low scores were not necessarily an aberration, but this had been a particularly great flight. She could navigate, hold altitude, perform aerobatic maneuvers, nail the emergency procedures and fly in formation.

“I went in to the instructor’s office and asked him to explain. I told him I thought I’d nailed each part of the flight. He looked at me wearily and uninterested and said ‘Look, I’m retiring from the Navy in a week, and I only signed up to fly with you so I could say I had flown with a woman.’”

That was the end of that.

Brasch headed to California for her first assignment, flying the SH-60/HH60H Seahawk helicopter. She was scheduled to deploy on a six-month carrier rotation after initial Seahawk training on the U.S.S. Nimitz. She would be the first female pilot in her squadron and on the second aircraft carrier ever to deploy with women on board. "I should have been more nervous," she says, "but I could not have been more excited about my first deployment. The adventure, the responsibility and the patriotism I felt was indescribable."

“The week before I deployed I met a friend at the Officer's Club in Miramar. I lived just across the street. We were having a drink when one of the F-14 Tomcat flight officers came over to my table and said: “The only role for women on carriers are as surrogate wives, whores or mothers to the men on board. Your flying is inconsequential.”

My first book on flying when I was nine years old. I read it on my first Navy deployments to pass the time. It was a great story to escape into while at sea. I read it several times and loved it. My first lab was named Monte. Slow burn descriptive books transform you completely to another time and place with breath-taking descriptions of scenery and life from a time gone by. I also love Jane Austen novels for the same reason.

I've been learning a lot about classical music. I have also always regretted not taking more science and math in school. This book creatively brings it all together in a captivating story told through human experiences. It was completely above my head and I loved it. I learned a lot, too, but still haven't learned to break the code that is on the first page.

On deployment, she flew Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) missions and sub-hunting missions, flying the HH-60 and the SH-60.

“Anytime the jets were flying we had one helicopter in the air for SAR, and another one farther out conducting training,” she says. “One day we were the helicopter doing training. The weather was terrible. We were more than twenty miles away from the carrier. The ceiling came down to three to four hundred feet, and it was rainy, stormy, really unusual weather,” she recalls. “There was no visibility above us, and max of a thousand feet in a given direction. The carrier called all the aircraft back for inclement weather, but they forgot about us. We were out over the ocean, bingo fuel, with nowhere to land.”

Brasch and her crew were twenty miles off the coast of Iran, but landing there wasn’t an option.
“We started to go through the ditching (when a helicopter is forced to land in the water) checklist,” she said. “We knew there would be a lot of shrapnel once the blades hit the water, so we planned to drop the crew with a boat a distance off. We came down to a hover and they prepared to get out, when the carrier called and came back for us. We were below bingo fuel.”

“By my second deployment, the men were a little bit more used to women,” she said. “On February 17, 1998, I came back from my second deployment (on the U.S.S. Nimitz), an around the world tour. I returned exactly five years to the day from when I joined the Navy.”

“There are so many stories,” she laughs. “On another flight, we were cleared back to the carrier on the fantail (the rear of the carrier). Usually we came in from the side, matched the speed of the carrier and landed. On approach I saw an F-14 Tomcat on the catapult preparing to launch. I called the air boss and asked him if the jet would be taking off. He said no, so I made the approach. Just as we were about to land, the Tomcat launched. We sucked in all that exhaust, and it caused a dual compressor stall and we barely made it to the deck.”

Looking back over her career (Brasch retired as a Navy Commander), Brasch appreciates the bonds that form among diverse groups of people all going through challenging circumstances together. Nothing was ever easy; she remembers a time on a deployment when she went to her department head and asked why she wasn’t slotted on any of the night CSAR operations.

“He leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on his desk and looked at me and said, 'It has nothing to do with your flying. Quite frankly, it's because you don't remind us of ourselves. We all (the men) like to fly with young bucks that remind us of ourselves. And you don't remind us of ourselves. I’m just being honest with you.”

What would Brasch recommend to new leaders starting out? 

1. Respect is more important than being liked. It takes a long time to earn and seconds to lose it. ”I remember a commander calling me into his office,” Brasch says. “He told me ‘Everyone likes you, but what will you do when they don’t? You need to know that not everyone is going to like you...and that's ok.' I thought about his words a lot. I decided I would rather be respected for what I knew than liked for any other reason.

2. Be present in the moment. If you're flying, the aircraft neither likes nor respects you.  It doesn't care where you went to college or where you grew up. The difference between living and dying is attention to detail, situational awareness and competence.” She pauses. “You have to respect yourself,” she says. “Many will doubt you along the way. The bigger your dreams, the bigger the doubts.”

3. Be adaptable. Brasch remembers the change in identity necessary as well. “Sometimes you have to alter who you are to adapt to a situation," she says. “I had to ask myself: how much do I have to change? How much am I willing to lose of what I am? I had to learn to speak guy,” she says with a laugh. In a commencement address Brasch gave to a local high school, she suggests: “Expect a lot of change. Plan on it. Learn to reinvent yourself, while still remaining you."

4. Be okay with being alone and self reliant. “You will be your own obstacle or propellant,” she says. “You have to learn to thrive alone. That was one of my hardest lessons. Every woman should be her own worst critic and her own biggest advocate.”

5. Practice resilience and reflection. It takes more than passion and perseverance. You have to be able to bounce back from adversity. You have to be willing to risk failure in order to succeed. Replay your actions in your head and determine what you did right and what you can do better. 

6. Don't let fear control you. Build up the skills you need to face your fears. At the moment of truth, those skills will make all the difference. 

As for grit, Brasch clearly has it. “Grit comes from within. It starts from something feeling overwhelming or even impossible. It requires all of your focus and fortitude as you’re going through it. You might think you will fail all the way up until the moment you succeed. Grit isn’t something you learn, but it’s something you do. And it’s something you do alone. Grit is meeting a seemingly insurmountable challenge head on despite adversity."

For someone who wants to build grit, she suggests “Take on challenges outside your comfort zone. Start small and build up endurance for things that make you feel uncomfortable. Learn to rely on yourself.”

Now a mother of three and a program manager, Brasch has taken on additional challenge and passion: playing the cello. “I’ve been playing for three years now,” she says. "It's complicated and requires 100% focus. The first time I played gave me the same exhilaration that I felt the first time I flew. I love a good challenge."

She's Got Grit: Navy Pilot and Commander Karen Fine Brasch

by Shannon Huffman Polson

“Someone once asked me how I became a Navy pilot,” Karen Fine Brasch says. “I responded without thinking, 'It never occurred to me that I couldn't.' " 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="512.0"] LCDR Karen Fine Brasch (Photo: The Grit Project) [/caption]

One of three girls with a father who had been an Air Force fighter pilot, Brasch picked up the flying bug early. Her father was thrilled that one of his children wanted to follow him into the skies. When she was nine years old, he bought her a book "Anyone Can Fly," by Jules Bergman. It still sits on her bookshelf today. He built model airplanes with her and took her to nearby airfields to watch the planes. Her dad instilled in her the belief that she could do anything she wanted to do and be anyone she wanted to be. She didn’t set a path for the military initially, heading to college instead and taking classes while working full time to pay for school. Humble beginnings and upbringing required her being able to independently set goals and deliver on them. On one tough day of class, she stood in the elevator heading to another class and saw a poster that read: “Learn to fly with Bubba.”

“I took the poster off the wall, skipped class, drove over to the little airfield, set the paper on the guy’s desk, and said ‘I want to learn to fly.’ He took one look at me and laughed. I was a twenty-one year old, big haired Texas co-ed sorority girl.”

The instructor composed himself, and offered to take Brasch up flying on the spot.

“I was wearing a jeans mini-skirt and holding a can of Diet Coke,” she remembers. “We preflighted and got in the aircraft. I remember handing him my Diet Coke because I had nowhere to put it. He just laughed. So I dumped it out and put the can on my lap. He gave me the controls and told me to take off. I did. I was the opposite of scared. It was exhilarating!"

After eight lessons Brasch started her application to Navy Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS), a four month boot camp and accelerated officer training program for flight candidates. That’s where things got tough.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="550.0"] LCDR Karen Fine Brasch in the cockpit. (Photo: The Grit Project) [/caption]

"Adversity tempers steel." That was the sign hanging in the entrance of AOCS. "It became the voice in my head over my flying career as I sought one challenge after another," says Brasch. "As we lined up to enter training, a big burly instructor came up behind me and grabbed the car keys I had hanging from a shaking hand. 'Trying to get away already?' he boomed. 'You wont be needing these anymore.' Strangely enough, I wasn't nervous anymore. It felt like an acknowledgement that my new adventure was beginning."

“I could not have been more of a fish out of water,” Brasch says. “I had hair down to the middle of my back when they cut it all off on the first day of indoctrination. Even with incredibly short hair, I did not fit in. I was weak academically. I was weak physically. And it showed. I realized how different I was when I was picked last in some silly swim competition. I felt the sting of humiliation and exclusion. Even my class didn't think I should be there. I remember wishing I had studied harder in school and spent more time in physical training."

The USMC drill sergeants running AOCS had no patience for weakness. “I had a lot of extra time with the drill instructors,” Brasch remembers. “Their job was to weed out the weak. I pushed through, because I had literally nowhere else to go, and no where I would rather have been. I was up for the challenges, and I did not want to be treated any differently just because I was a woman."

“I did not want to be treated any differently because I was a woman.”

One challenge required of candidates was getting themselves over an eight foot wall without assistance. “I just could not get over the wall,” she remembers. A small group of women including Brasch realized, then, that there was a wall in the barracks showers exactly the same height as the obstacle they were required to climb. “After the guys went to bed, we would run at this concrete wall in the shower,” she said. “There wasn’t room to get much of a running start, but we worked it anyway. We were all black and blue down one side of our bodies. I remember the day I finally got myself over the wall on the obstacle course. The drill instructor happened to be standing right there. He stood back and just said in his disgusted gruff drill instructor voice: 'Oh. My. God.'"

There were many more challenges to come. One was the fifteen-foot high dive. 'We had to jump in with full flight gear and swim twenty meters underwater without coming up for air."

“I wouldn’t jump off of it,” Brasch says. “I was inexplicably terrified. Another woman was assigned to walk me down to the pool every day and sit there while I waited to go jump and swim. I wasn’t allowed to speak. She just marched me there, and I would stand on the high dive and stare down at the pool-- paralyzed with fear and unable to jump. One day I decided she shouldn’t have to babysit me anymore. It was one more thing I needed to do. I thought to myself, 'there's always going to be one more thing, so what the heck?' I jumped. It was her quiet support that helped me jump.”

Whatever the Navy threw at her, however unprepared she was at times, “I was 100% all in," Brasch said. "The only thing I wanted to do was fly. I was going to do whatever was required to get there.”

Brasch started flight school in 1993, just after combat exclusion was lifted and all aircraft were opened to women. She remembers her training class being really angry because 'the women were going to steal all the pilot slots." Despite the gender protests, by the end of flight school she was qualified in the Navy T-34C fixed wing aircraft and TH-57 helicopter.  At the end of flight school she was qualified in flying the Navy Seahawks.

“The men didn’t want to fly with us,” she remembers. On one of her final primary flights with an instructor she'd never flown with before, she landed, feeling great about the flight, but her scores were low. Low scores were not necessarily an aberration, but this had been a particularly great flight. She could navigate, hold altitude, perform aerobatic maneuvers, nail the emergency procedures and fly in formation.

“I went in to the instructor’s office and asked him to explain. I told him I thought I’d nailed each part of the flight. He looked at me wearily and uninterested and said ‘Look, I’m retiring from the Navy in a week, and I only signed up to fly with you so I could say I had flown with a woman.’”

That was the end of that.

Brasch headed to California for her first assignment, flying the SH-60/HH60H Seahawk helicopter. She was scheduled to deploy on a six-month carrier rotation after initial Seahawk training on the U.S.S. Nimitz. She would be the first female pilot in her squadron and on the second aircraft carrier ever to deploy with women on board. "I should have been more nervous," she says, "but I could not have been more excited about my first deployment. The adventure, the responsibility and the patriotism I felt was indescribable."

“The week before I deployed I met a friend at the Officer's Club in Miramar. I lived just across the street. We were having a drink when one of the F-14 Tomcat flight officers came over to my table and said: “The only role for women on carriers are as surrogate wives, whores or mothers to the men on board. Your flying is inconsequential.”

My first book on flying when I was nine years old.

I read it on my first Navy deployments to pass the time. It was a great story to escape into while at sea. I read it several times and loved it. My first lab was named Monte.

Slow burn descriptive books transform you completely to another time and place with breath-taking descriptions of scenery and life from a time gone by. I also love Jane Austen novels for the same reason.

I've been learning a lot about classical music. I have also always regretted not taking more science and math in school. This book creatively brings it all together in a captivating story told through human experiences. It was completely above my head and I loved it. I learned a lot, too, but still haven't learned to break the code that is on the first page.

I read it in high school, and it always really stuck with me. I didn't love the book, but I've never been able to forget it or the symbolism and how it relates to our society.

Or any of his books. I like the fast-paced spy adventure novels. Also Robert Ludlum's Parisfal Mosaic and original Bourne series.

She laughs. “That pretty much summed up the feeling of a lot of the men,” she says. “Not all of them, but a lot of them.”

On deployment, she flew Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) missions and sub-hunting missions, flying the HH-60 and the SH-60. 

“Anytime the jets were flying we had one helicopter in the air for SAR, and another one farther out conducting training,” she says. “One day we were the helicopter doing training. The weather was terrible. We were more than twenty miles away from the carrier. The ceiling came down to three to four hundred feet, and it was rainy, stormy, really unusual weather,” she recalls. “There was no visibility above us, and max of a thousand feet in a given direction. The carrier called all the aircraft back for inclement weather, but they forgot about us. We were out over the ocean, bingo fuel, with nowhere to land.”

Brasch and her crew were twenty miles off the coast of Iran, but landing there wasn’t an option.

“We started to go through the ditching (when a helicopter is forced to land in the water) checklist,” she said. “We knew there would be a lot of shrapnel once the blades hit the water, so we planned to drop the crew with a boat a distance off. We came down to a hover and they prepared to get out, when the carrier called and came back for us. We were below bingo fuel.”

“By my second deployment, the men were a little bit more used to women,” she said. “On February 17, 1998, I came back from my second deployment (on the U.S.S. Nimitz), an around the world tour. I returned exactly five years to the day from when I joined the Navy.”

“There are so many stories,” she laughs. “On another flight, we were cleared back to the carrier on the fantail (the rear of the carrier). Usually we came in from the side, matched the speed of the carrier and landed. On approach I saw an F-14 Tomcat on the catapult preparing to launch. I called the air boss and asked him if the jet would be taking off. He said no, so I made the approach. Just as we were about to land, the Tomcat launched. We sucked in all that exhaust, and it caused a dual compressor stall and we barely made it to the deck.”

Looking back over her career (Brasch retired as a Navy Commander), Brasch appreciates the bonds that form among diverse groups of people all going through challenging circumstances together. Nothing was ever easy; she remembers a time on a deployment when she went to her department head and asked why she wasn’t slotted on any of the night CSAR operations.

“He leaned back in his chair, put his feet up on his desk and looked at me and said, 'It has nothing to do with your flying. Quite frankly, it's because you don't remind us of ourselves. We all (the men) like to fly with young bucks that remind us of ourselves. And you don't remind us of ourselves. I’m just being honest with you.”

“It does not have to do with your flying. Quite frankly, it’s because you don’t remind us of ourselves.”

What would Brasch recommend to new leaders starting out? 

1. Respect is more important than being liked. It takes a long time to earn and seconds to lose it. ”I remember a commander calling me into his office,” Brasch says. “He told me ‘Everyone likes you, but what will you do when they don’t? You need to know that not everyone is going to like you...and that's ok.' I thought about his words a lot. I decided I would rather be respected for what I knew than liked for any other reason.

2. Be present in the moment. If you're flying, the aircraft neither likes nor respects you.  It doesn't care where you went to college or where you grew up. The difference between living and dying is attention to detail, situational awareness and competence.” She pauses. “You have to respect yourself,” she says. “Many will doubt you along the way. The bigger your dreams, the bigger the doubts.”

3. Be adaptable. Brasch remembers the change in identity necessary as well. “Sometimes you have to alter who you are to adapt to a situation," she says. “I had to ask myself: how much do I have to change? How much am I willing to lose of what I am? I had to learn to speak guy,” she says with a laugh. In a commencement address Brasch gave to a local high school, she suggests: “Expect a lot of change. Plan on it. Learn to reinvent yourself, while still remaining you."

4. Be okay with being alone and self reliant. “You will be your own obstacle or propellant,” she says. “You have to learn to thrive alone. That was one of my hardest lessons. Every woman should be her own worst critic and her own biggest advocate.”

5. Practice resilience and reflection. It takes more than passion and perseverance. You have to be able to bounce back from adversity. You have to be willing to risk failure in order to succeed. Replay your actions in your head and determine what you did right and what you can do better. 

6. Don't let fear control you. Build up the skills you need to face your fears. At the moment of truth, those skills will make all the difference. 

“Grit isn’t something you learn. It’s something you do.”

As for grit, Brasch clearly has it. “Grit comes from within. It starts from something feeling overwhelming or even impossible. It requires all of your focus and fortitude as you’re going through it. You might think you will fail all the way up until the moment you succeed. Grit isn’t something you learn, but it’s something you do. And it’s something you do alone. Grit is meeting a seemingly insurmountable challenge head on despite adversity."

For someone who wants to build grit, she suggests “Take on challenges outside your comfort zone. Start small and build up endurance for things that make you feel uncomfortable. Learn to rely on yourself.”

Now a mother of three and a program manager, Brasch has taken on additional challenge and passion: playing the cello. “I’ve been playing for three years now,” she says. "It's complicated and requires 100% focus. The first time I played gave me the same exhilaration that I felt the first time I flew. I love a good challenge."

She's Got Grit: The Very Few, The Very Proud.

by Shannon Huffman Polson

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="399.0"] LtCol Jen Nothelfer. (Photo: She's Got Grit/Jen Nothelfer) [/caption]

Jen Nothelfer's journey of leadership and grit began when she joined the Navy to prove she could when a boyfriend after college said she'd never get a flight assignment because she was a woman. After graduating college in her home state of Virginiawith a degree in business and paralegal work, she’d hoped to become a lawyer, but bombed the LSAT. A girlfriend suggested they train as flight attendants, so she flew for two years, taking the jump seat every time she could. 

Her boyfriend's comment changed everything. “He obviously didn’t know me,” she says. “That comment lit a fire in my belly.”

She started taking flight lessons at home, and when she went out flying with a friend, “I knew I had to do this.” Since Nothelfer was pursuing a flight contract in 1995, just two years after the lifting of combat exclusion, there were few women preceding her in the world of Naval aviation. When she first visited a recruiter, they offered her a supply position.

“I told them they could stuff that where the sun don’t shine,” she says.

She made her way to the Naval OCS and flight school, though due to a blown ACL from her soccer days she had to fight all the way to the Pentagon to get a flight slot. She finally landed in the Marine Corps flying the CH-46. 

Though she was a team player, things did not go smoothly. In OCS, just before meeting her husband, she was sexually assaulted by another student. 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="431.0"] Marine officer and pilot Jen Nothelfer on her CH-46E (Photo: She's Got Grit/Jen Nothelfer) [/caption]

“I never reported it. I just covered it up and put it away for the longest time,” she said. "I just wanted to get through flight school and get my wings."

One of the saving graces of her career was a small group of women she has known through her time in the military. 

“I had Navy and Marine aviator girlfriends,” she says. They helped her keep it real.

Early on at the fleet replacement squadron when Nothelfer was learning to fly the CH-46, she and another female officer went to the Officer’s Club (The O Club). 

“There were only three or four of us women in aviation slots on base,” she says. “I went to the bathroom partway through the evening. When I walked in I thought I’d gone into the wrong head. In the powder room there was a commander of one of the other squadrons, who was very married, and two other officers I didn’t know. Three of the waitresses were straddling them.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! I had to figure out what I was going to do, but I really had to pee. So I just said “hi there,” and walked back to the stalls. When I left I walked straight out of the club and drove home. I shouldn’t have been driving. But that’s when I knew how things were going to be. That event tainted my views of how squadron life was going to be. I looked at that and thought, 'You can choose to be better.' " 

As reality set in about the environment, Nothelfer made her way. 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] They all have grit: Nothelfer's female colleagues helped her through the hardest times in the Marines. To her left, Jennifer Merrill. Right, Suzanne Krauss. (Photo: She's Got Grit/Jen Nothelfer) [/caption]

"There was a woman in front of me at the fleet replacement squadron who performed poorly," she said. "When I came through, everyone judged me by how she had performed. I had a bad FAMO (the ground check ride) with an instructor who was trying to get at me, and I walked away from that finally understanding. That's never going to happen again. No one will ever have a reason to doubt me. I studied like a crazy person. Some of the guys started getting pissed off because I'd do so well. 

When I got to my first squadron, they scheduled me for a flight-- you might as well have called it a check ride. They were putting me through the ringer. I went out and I nailed it. I must have had the biggest grin on my face. There was still a lot of crap, but that set the tone for me as an aviator."

Overall, her first squadron experience was positive. “I’m still friends with my first commander and sergeant major,” she says. "They have had a lifelong impact on both leadership and values for me."

She wouldn’t be friends with everyone.

"That was one of my hardest decisions. Realizing not everyone would like me. I have a strong personality.  Driven, demanding, but insanely loyal.  Not everyone saw that.  I also covered myself with fairly thick armor – it was my way to survive.”

“You know what it’s like,” she tells me, and I do. “You get in that cockpit and know you’d better do better, fly better than anyone around you. You’re just waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under you. And then you worry about that other shit too.

You survive because you put that armor on. It doesn’t let anything in, but it doesn’t let anything out, either.”

If she were talking to herself as a new lieutenant, I’d say “Be true to yourself. Don’t try to put on someone else’s armor. It’s ok to be who you are. You’ll find your people…wait for them.”

Then Nothelfer hurt her back.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Grit in action: USMC officer and pilot Jen Nothelfer on mission. (Photo: She's Got Grit/Jen Nothelfer) [/caption]

“I was about to fly a mission with ten Marines in the back a few months before deployment. During preflight, I couldn’t feel my hands. I couldn’t feel my arms all the way up to my armpits.”

Alarmed, she told her copilot she wouldn’t be able to fly. She went back to fight operations and to her state room.

She heard the commanding officer coming down the hall long before he arrived at her room. “He was a woman hater,” she says. “He started banging on my door,” she said. “I opened it, and he said: ‘Get your shit on and get out to that bird.’

I told him I couldn’t feel my arms, and he repeated himself, more loudly: ‘Get your shit on and get out to that bird!’

I went to the flight surgeon. He sent me directly to the ER where they shot lidocaine straight into my back.”

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Nothelfer was pulled from the deployment.

“That was the lowest point of my career,” she said. “Having to go back on that ship and get my gear and walk off again was devastating.”

It was not the end of harassment. When a fellow woman officer discovered she was pregnant before a deployment, Nothelfer found herself standing at attention in front of the Group Commander. 

"When are you going to tell me you're pregnant, too?" he yelled.

Then there were the briefings when the commanding officer repeatedly referred to the "gents," despite the several women in the room.

At one briefing for a mission in Mogadishu, she'd had enough. 

"I guess this isn't a briefing for me," she said, and walked out.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="333.0"] The softer side of grit: USMC officer Nothelfer with her twin daughters Bridget, left, and Alexis (Photo: She's Got Grit/Jen Nothelfer) [/caption]

With respect to challenges, Nothelfer says “They made me who I am. I’ve moved past them. But if I see something today that doesn’t look right, smell right, watch out.”

What would Nothelfer tell a new leader today? "Stay true to your course. Work hard, play hard, and always give 100%." 

Nothelfer is proud of her career. “I’m proud of being one of the first women to fly in the Marines, and proud for sticking around,” she says. "I started to develop an internal dialogue: I can't quit. I still believe I am doing good for the mission and good for the Corps. I think there's some purpose for the pain and suffering."

When I ask why she stuck it out in the face of the constant harassment, she mentions her three daughters. “What kind of example would I set if I just left?” she asked. “I hope I might have made a difference for at least one person over my career. Maybe I've even changed the mind of one of these dinosaurs who are still around.”

Her most memorable experience recently came when she was asked to assist at the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. "I was asked to accompany the family of Corporal Jason Dunham who would be awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously," she says, and her voice breaks. She takes a moment to recover. "It was such an honor, such an incredible honor."

As for grit, Nothelfer clearly has it. "Grit is unstoppable determination," she says. 

Now Nothelfer works as a Marine Recruiting Support officer in the Reserves. Her husband is retiring after a full career on active duty next year.

With all she faced each day, “I feel so loyal to the Marines,” Nothelfer says. "For all the challenges, they are still my people."

She's Got Grit: Sometimes They Aren't Ready For You

by Shannon Huffman Polson

When Jody (Vander Hyden) Carman swore into the Coast Guard in the mid-1980s, they turned her down for OCS because “they didn’t need any theater majors,” she laughs. She had tried unsuccessfully to make it into a couple of professional theater companies after graduating University of Wisconsin, and so she enlisted in the Coast Guard after moving to San Francisco to live with her sister for a while. “I met a couple of women who were in the Coast Guard and talked to their recruiter,” she says. 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lq7B2mRXdvs&w=560&h=315]

Carman grew up in Wisconsin. Spending a lot of time with her father at his home on Lake Winnebago sailing, boating and swimming working as a lifeguard and swim instructor. She was naturally athletic and stood 5’11”, “all legs,” she says. “My father always suggested I’d like the Coast Guard,” she says, “but I loved theater most. I didn’t see myself there.”

Her first assignment was in San Diego where she did Search and Rescue and operational work, and trained as an emergency medical technician. 

“I always wanted to do medical work,” she says. “But the next training available wasn’t for four years.” The Coast Guard put her in for law enforcement training. Something hit a nerve.

“I’d signed up to save lives. I didn’t feel comfortable with the idea of law enforcement,” she says. She turned down the training, angering her commander. He put her on cleaning detail.  

“Things changed because of luck,” she says. “The (air station) needed someone else to stand duty for the (H-65) helicopters, and because I was EMT trained, they sent me.”

Right away, she started flying as part of the aircrews doing Search and Rescue.

“I flew with H(H)65s, and Lyre Jet (HU 25) Medevacs,” she says. “I did these missions, and I wasn’t even trained.” She laughs. “Once they lowered me down on the hook and (the aircraft commander said through the helmet headset): ‘Don’t forget to ground the basket!” I had no idea you had to do that. I’d never been through training. I just learned on the job.”

Someone suggested Carman attend the Navy rescue swimmer school. Only a few years earlier, the Coast Guard had graduated its first woman from the school, Kelly Mogk (Larson).

“I didn’t even think about the fact that there weren’t any women there, that the swimmers were all guys,” she said. “I’d always been strong and I was bigger than a lot of the guys anyway.”

Still, Carman’s legginess didn’t help on the required pull-ups for entry. When she arrived, she was reverted a week for extra pull-up training. 

“The Navy guys worked with me. They were super respectful, really nice guys,” she says. “No ulterior motives. All good guys.”

Then she started the notoriously difficult training.

“Every morning I looked at myself I the mirror and said to myself ‘Always do your best. If you do your best and you fail there’s nothing more you can do. If you don’t do your best and you fail, you have to live with that for the rest of your life.”

She did her best. 

The last day of training brought the dreaded final multi-exam. 

“You sit in the locker room and wait,” she explains. “Then you hear this loud pounding on the door and you have to come out on the deck, climb the platform and jump. When you’re in the water there are three training casualties and you have to triage them.”

Carman was the first in her class to go through the exam. Then she was sent away, as students aren’t told if they pass the exam or the course until after all their fellow students have made it through.

Once her class had finished their exam, she was told she’d have to go again.

“I went back into that locker room and just sat there,” she remembers. “They made me wait. I listened to the droop-drip-drip of the shower. Then there was the pounding on the door. I ran out jumped off the platform. There were twenty five guys in the water! I didn’t know where to start, then saw the instructors laughing on the deck. It was all for fun.”

Carman graduated as honor graduate from a course only one woman before her had ever completed.

Training though, was just the beginning. Her first assignment took her to Hawaii.

“Having women in a unit was new then,” she says. “I was excited, ready to work. I’d just graduated as honor grad from the swimming school. I got up my first morning and walked down to the hangar.”

The guys were waiting for her. Twenty of them, lined up in a row.

“No one smiled. No one said hello. They just watched me walk in, looking me up and down, as though they were saying ‘who the hell do you think you are?’” she says.

“I reported to the shop supervisor, and instead of assigning me to aircraft maintenance, which my position required, he put me on a computer typing in maintenance reports. The guys in the shop started getting upset, like I was getting over, and asked why I wasn’t doing the work that I was supposed to do. The made it really hard to get qualified. I’d come in as an honor grad, and now I wasn’t getting a chance to meet the basic requirements of my job.”

When  Carman and other female Coasties reported inappropriate behavior, nothing happened to the supervisor. “He stayed in his job. He actually got the chance to retire,” Carman says.

She talked to the one other woman working in the aircraft hangar, a female pilot.

“She told me ‘you just gotta put up with it or get out.’ I decided I’d get out. There was a big world out there with a lot of things to do.”

She pauses.

“I love the Coast Guard mission and I love the Coast Guard,” she says. “But I wasn’t going to put up with being treated that way.” 

Her voice trails off. “Sometimes I wonder if I gave up too soon. I wish I had waited for the (Corpsman) training I had really wanted to do.”

Carman left the Coast Guard, married another rescue swimmer, and had two children (she and her husband divorced after thirteen years. She later remarried.) Unable to get the Coast Guard out of her system, she went back to work as a civilian in support of the Coast Guard, where she still works today in Kodiak, Alaska, helping to manage programs that weren’t available when she wore the uniform. “I still miss wearing the uniform every day,” she says. Remembering her original desire to work in the medical field, she went back to earn her Masters in Public Health.

Almost thirty years of service have given her excellent perspective for new Coasties— or any young leaders— starting out. 

Remembering how she left her original interest in health to the detriment of her career satisfaction, she says: “If there’s something you want, wait it out.”

Though the rescue swimmer track took her away from her goals and turned out to be a disappointment, she looks back on the experience as some of her proudest moments. “I’m proud of being a pioneer for other women and setting the example— and men too,” she says.

About grit, she says: “Grit is not being soft. Being resilient. You suck it up. You might be a little rough. You do what it takes to get through.”

I ask her where she found her own grit. “I have a strong relationship with God,” she says. “There’s strength in that for me. And my dad always said you have to be able to land in a pile of shit and come out smelling like a rose. It’s a funny saying, but you have to make the best of whatever you’re given. And you have to make it happen. You can only depend on yourself.”

Her advice to young women just starting out is tactical and grounded by three decades of experience. “Keep boundaries with your co-workers,” she says. “Especially for women in mostly male organizations, have a strict policy not to date your co-workers or anyone associated with your organization,” she says. “It can prevent you from focusing on what you’re there for. Get involved in the community around you and make your social life there.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDhPMBQma7U&w=420&h=315]

Remember that you represent the Coast Guard 24 hours a day, seven days a week, on and off duty.”

Carman has come full circle. Though she didn’t make the uniform a career, she found a way to stay with her beloved Coast Guard. She returned to the field of health with her MPH. She returned to community theater productions. She still swims “all the time,” she says.

She's Got Grit: LtCol Sarah Deal Burrow, First Female Aviator In The USMC

by Shannon Huffman Polson

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="401.0"] Sarah Deal Burrow, USMC officer and aviator [/caption]

Sarah Deal Burrow joined the Marine Corps knowing she couldn’t fly. After growing up in a town of 1,000 outside of Toledo, Ohio, Deal grew up running cross country and track and playing basketball, raising a pig a year (one that she had to catch at a greased pig contest), and working on a dairy farm. She did 4-H for ten years and was heavily involved in her church youth group. “We had an annual drive your tractor to school day,” she remembers with a laugh.

She earned her pilot’s license for single and multi-engine commercial flight while in college at Kent State in Ohio, and competed on the precision flight team there. 

The daughter of a Marine, Deal only looked briefly at the Army, but her parents convinced her brother’s girlfriend to talk her out of it. Her father discouraged the Marines. He thought it was too rough, too dangerous. “He was a Marine in the 50s when they still made trainees to pushups and pullups until they threw up,” Burrow laughs. “But I’d always wanted to join.”

“I was hanging out at the airfield and ran into the Marine recruiters there,” she says. It didn’t take long for her to sign up, even though in 1992, though women had flown for the Navy two decades earlier, the Marines still weren’t permitting women in the cockpit.

Deal completed the Marine basic camp at Quantico, requested aviation maintenance and was assigned to aircraft control school. 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Deal and friend Karen Fine Brasch, naval aviator on board the U.S.S. Nimitz [/caption]

“I was halfway through aircraft controller school when Les Aspin lifted the flight restrictions on women,” Deal remembers. She read about it in the newspaper, and holding the article in her hand, called Marine headquarters, and said “This is what I want to do.” After a short pause, she continues: “I can’t imagine what that Colonel must have thought about a little second lieutenant calling up and telling him she’d read something in the newspaper.”

She was given a lateral transfer and arrived in Pensacola. “It sucked,” she says, of arriving at flight school. “I was a loner. I had to be. People who had been my friends at basic were no longer my friends. There was a small group of us that had gone on weekend trips together, celebrated birthdays together. I saw one of them when I arrived at Pensacola, and said “Hey! Let’s go do something!”

Her friend looked at her and said “I can’t.” When she asked why, he said “It wouldn’t be right.” 

She never talked to him again. 

“It was a really hurtful time,” she says. 

“I knew I was under the microscope, and that they were giving reports all the way back up to Marine Headquarters,” she says. 

Both the Navy and Coast Guard had a couple of women training when Deal was in Pensacola, and these women became friends (including Karen Fine Brasch, featured in last week’s Grit Profile). Deal also met her future husband while in flight training, an F14 Tomcat pilot who would later fly for United Airlines. The Marines wouldn’t send another woman to flight school for a full year after Deal arrived. 

Deal qualified in rotary wing and was stationed flying the CH-53Es on the west coast flying cargo and troop resupply.

“Nobody wanted me assigned to them,” she says. “I found this out years later. Finally the commanding officer of my first unit said: is she a qualified pilot? I don’t care if it’s a man or a woman, send her this way.” 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Marine Corps trailblazer, aviator and leader Sarah Deal Burrow in the cockpit of the CH-53E in Lashkar Gah in Afghanistan [/caption]

The positive experience of her first unit did not continue into subsequent assignments. On one assignment she was prepared to deploy to Kuwait less than a year after the birth of her twin boys. “I was part of a seven ship armada leaving from San Diego to fight the war,” she says. 

The commanding officer decided to send her off the ship to take care of a rear detachment command. Just as the unit was preparing to redeploy, they called her back to ride the ship back to port. 

Deal thought she’d lost her final opportunity to fly and do what she had trained to do in a real world scenario, and in the meantime had missed precious time with her very young twin boys.

“I felt more like my boys’ aunt instead of their mom, as I saw pictures of them growing and wearing clothes and playing with toys I had not gotten for them. Even more difficult was when I returned home from deployment and my boys cried every time I tried to hold them,” she says. She decided to leave active duty for the reserves in order to have more time with her family.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] A USMC CH-53E doing sling load operations in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom [/caption]

Six years later, flying in the reserves with three children now at home, she deployed to the British base Camp Bastion in Afghanistan as part of the Marine Aviation Group 40. Their primary mission was to fly support of Operation Enduring Freedom and the International Security Assistance Force.  “We flew six to seven hour missions every day,” Burrow says. “We hauled generators, moved diplomats and POWs, transported ballots for the elections,” she says. 

“We kind of got used to being shot at,” she said. At least with small arms fire.

On one flight Deal narrowly avoided being hit by a rocket propelled grenade. “It was scary as hell. I swear it was within our rotor arc.”

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Deal preflighting her USMC CH-53E [/caption]

“The opportunity to do a true combat deployment and fly made everything worthwhile,” she said. “Finally I could do what I’d been training to do for so many years.”

Even so, the deployment wasn’t easy. The group commanding officer “was intolerable,” she says. “There were three squadrons on the flight line and he hated every one of us. He made our lives miserable.”

Missions were schedules for six hours but frequently ran well over. One mission ran from a scheduled six hours, but "we had multiple mission changes, and by the time we finished we had eleven hours," she says, "most of it flight time." 

Deal recalls one of her most difficult missions. 

"On August 7th we took off for a routine mission we dropped off some Marines at a Cobra crash site for recovery effort and investigation then off to pick up some food and water externally.  We were on our way into the Golf Company of 2/8's zone to drop off the water and we had just checked in with the radio operator. 

The first call was calm, but then you heard the panic and out breath Marine asking us to pick up two wounded Marines. One of them was a double amputee. They had stepped on an IED during a patrol along the Helmand River. Technically we were not supposed to pick up any casualties because there was another helicopter unit assigned that mission. But hearing that Marine on the radio frantically asking us if we would take his two Marines to the Hospital at Dwyer, the thought of saying no never occurred to us. We were only a minute from the pickup zone. We quickly dropped our load of food and swung around to find the location of the wounded. They popped smoke (a military marking technique in tactical conditions, releasing colored smoke into the air) and we landed, very close to where the IED had gone off in a make-shift landing zone and picked them up. 

The young Marines were in really bad shape. Our corpsman on board did the best that he could to continue first aid and we flew directly to the aid station at Dwyer. When we landed the medics didn’t understand why we had landed, because casevac is not our mission, and so no one came to help. Our aircrew and corps carried both Marines off the helicopter.

I remember them not being able to hold the double amputee on the make-shift stretcher and dropping him in the sand. He seemed to look right at me. Finally we got the attention of the medics and they brought real stretchers over to help. We got the Marines off and I remember sitting there for a moment in silence. The other pilot asked the crew chief to clean all the blood off the deck in back. We still had to complete our mission and our next task was inserting more Marines. Later that day those 2 Marines died along with another one from Golf Company. Today I remember LCpl Dennis Burrow, LCpl Patrick Schimmel and LCpl Javier Olvera."  

Returning home wasn't easy, either. After a year away, though her boys were older, Deal realized she had missed major milestones of all three of her children while deployed. She found herself having trouble sleeping. “Out of the blue, I feel like I overreact to a situation,” she says, “or respond more emotionally than usual.”

After her deployment, she left the squadron to find assignments permitting her to have more time with family. “Nothing beats a good, strong family,” she says. “A wonderful family and good friends are keys to a happy life.” Sage and thoughtful advice from a combat veteran.

Still, Deal is proud of her years in service and getting to do what she loved in the Marine Corps. “Graduating from flight training, receiving those coveted wings of gold, and achieving the status as the first female aviator in the Marine Corps stand tall on my list of highlights,” she says. 

About grit, which she clearly has, Deal suggests: it is the stuff in inside you that allows you to get overcome obstacles and criticism. It is what keeps you moving forward to accomplish your goals.

What would Deal tell new lieutenants starting out today? She has a few direct pieces of advice. 

“Be strong. Do your job. Don’t expect anything special. And…know who your friends are.”

SHE'S GOT GRIT: ADVICE TO NEW LEADERS

by Shannon Huffman Polson (aborderlife.com)

Recently I had an email from someone getting ready for her first platoon, a good prompt to compile some of the best advice for new leaders from the incredible women profiles in The Grit Project. You couldn't ask for a better panel of experts. 

1. First Lead Yourself. Brigadier General Becky Halstead's book is subtitled The First Person You Must Lead is You, and a great place to start. A number of profiles, including BG Halstead's, have discussed the need to be yourself. Your mission is to be yourself, she reminded herself when coming up against opposition. "If I had to do it all over again, I'd realize fitting in didn't matter." LCDR Krysten Ellis reminds new leaders "You don't have to be everyone's best friend." Lieutenant Colonel and fighter pilot Tammy Barlette realized quickly that "I just had to be myself." At the same time, the "yourself" you present needs to be professional, too. Remind yourself with this Dear LT. 

2. Plan for resistance. You might not face any, but it's good to be prepared that going to your first unit isn't college anymore, or Officer Basic, either. "I learned not everyone wanted me to succeed," says LTC Nadine Kokolis. Once you leave the schoolhouse environment, things will be different. Last week's profile of BG Rhonda Cornum reminded us to stay optimistic and “In your mind rehearse. Rehearsal (of all possible outcomes) is key…your feelings and your behavior are based on what you think and believe.” Coast Guard Commander Alda Siebrands suggests "Go in with your eyes open."

3. Listen to the people who work for you. BG Halstead discussed the challenge of taking a platoon with combat experience as a new lieutenant. She'd tell them to sit down and listen to their stories. Ask them where they served, what they learned. This means spending time with your people, something an earlier Dear LT column discusses. Taking care of your people is your first priority as a leader. You can't do that if you don't know them.

4. Find a mentor. Several women in the Grit Project spoke of mentors, both women and men, being important to them (or recognizing their absence as an inhibitor to success.) Naval commander Karen Baetzel and her Command Master Chief Patty Shinnick spoke of the power of this relationship in The Grit Project. "A mentor would have made a world of difference," says early Naval navigator Linda Maloney. Air Force fighter pilot and Lieutenant Colonel Tammy Barlette reminds young officers to "show respect for the senior enlisted corps. They are a huge asset to you." LCDR Krysten Ellis suggests finding mentors, both male and female. 

5. Exceed the standards, and try to make a difference everyday. These are General Ann Dunwoody'swords and advice which are echoed by several other of the exceptional women in the Grit Project. 'You get in the cockpit and know you'd better do better, fly better than anyone around you," says Marine LTC Jen Nothelfer. "As a woman, I really believe we have to hold ourselves to a higher standard," says LCDR Krysten Ellis, one of the Navy's first female submariners. 

6. Take advantage of every professional opportunity. Coast Guard Commander Alda Siebrands jumped at every opportunity she came across, including the Special Forces Jumpmaster School and then flight school. “Wait and see what the opportunities are and be ready for them. I never turned down any course that came available, and each of those opportunities will open up additional paths.” Air Force LTC Tammy Barlette jumped at the Air Force Weapons School, even though she'd just had her second child. It is one of her proudest accomplishments. You may have to ask for the training or the opportunity (see the stories of WASPs Alyce Rohrer and Edna Davis), more than once. Don't expect anyone to offer it to you.

7. Get in your training and education as early as you can. Several of the Grit Profiles, including an important future interview, mentioned this. Naval navigator Linda Maloney recommends "get your masters as early as you can." BG Anne Macdonald, the first women aviator to hold the rank of general officer, suggests getting as much flight time as you can, up front. "It will never be easier than it is now." 

8. Know that you will make mistakes. You'll recover. Keep the course. In one of the Dear LT posts, I suggested that the hardest place to get to that thing called grit is in the face of your own failures. Own them, and move on. "We should all realize that we don't get it right 100 percent of the time," says BG Becky Halstead. 

9. Read about the people who came before you, and keep this as a part of your reading program. Connecting with the stories of others who have been where you are going is a great way to both prepare yourself for the challenges and gain strength. (Are you signed up for the Grit Newsletter? Do it now!) The Grit Profiles are great examples. All the women of the Grit Project have suggested books. "Read about people who have (grit)," says. "Read their stories and you find strength in yourself."

 

She's Got Grit: Lessons in Grit from a Female POW

by Shannon Huffman Polson (aborderlife.com)

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="650.0"] Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum [/caption]

I first saw Dr. Rhonda Cornum speak at a Triangle Securities Conference while I was still a cadet in 1993. I vividly recall a general officer at the conference expressing opposition to women serving in the Army because women’s lives were more important than men's. Dr Cornum spoke evenly, challenging that assumption, recalling an earlier Grit interview and similar question asked by WASP Alyce Rohrer. I was awed by her strength.

On February 27, 1991, Major Rhonda Cornum was in the back of a Blackhawk helicopter at refuel prepared for a passenger shuttle when they got a call to change mission. An F-16 had been shot down, and the downed pilot was in radio contact but had a broken leg. The Blackhawk launched for the new mission. They were flying fast and low across the desert, “so low that the pilot of our helicopter had to pull up to fly over the convoy of American trucks streaming through Iraq,” she writes in her book She Went to War. 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300.0"] Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum [/caption]

Just 45 seconds after crossing over the American convoy Cornum recalls green tracers streaking up from the ground “as if we were a lawn mower that had run over a beehive, and the bees were coming up to sting.” The soldiers on the door guns returned fire, and one of the shell casings from the machine gun hit Cornum in the face as she lay on the floor, anticipating one stray round to rip through the floor from below.

“I felt something big hit the aircraft,” she writes. “The engine strained and the fuselage shook and shimmied.”

Then she heard the pilot yell “We’re going in!” She remembers having time to grab on to the aircraft, and wondering if it was the end. Then everything went dark.

NOBODY'S EVER DIED FROM PAIN

The helicopter crashed at 140 knots onto the desert floor. Cornum remembers it was daytime when they crashed, and when she came to it was dark. She did not think she could move, but saw a fire in the distance. Aware of the dangers of post crash fires, she pushed aside the wreckage to find her way out of the mangled fuselage. She later remembers that her first thought was “Nobody’s ever died from pain.”

Cornum was a flight surgeon for the 229th Aviation Regiment, and held a PhD in biochemistry and nutrition from Cornell University. She had been recruited into the Army to work in a research facility in San Francisco. 

“I was the least likely person,” Cornum says. “I really joined because I wanted to do research and I didn’t want to teach.” She ended up liking the Army, too. 

“I liked the camaraderie, I liked the mission focus,” she tells Dr. Linda Tucker on the podcast Challenge Your Thinking.

She didn’t expect to deploy.

Cornum was a finalist for the astronaut training program, but was not selected. “I looked at that not as a failure,” Cornum says. “I realized it really probably wasn’t what I wanted to do.”

Instead she became a flight surgeon. When she deployed, her husband was a flight surgeon as well in the Air Force, and she had a fourteen year old daughter back in the states.

When Cornum pushed her way out of the wreckage of the Blackhawk, the noise of the engagement and crash had disappeared. It was silent, so quiet that she thought she was the only one alive. She couldn’t stand up, or even turn over. Making one more effort to stand, she looked up into the barrels of five Iraqi rifles. Cornum noted the soldiers' good uniforms and concluded that they were members of the Republican Guard. 

One of the men reached down and grabbed Cornum by her right arm. A flash of severe pain ripped through her body and she screamed. She realized from the pain that her arm was broken. His tug dislocated it. From the angle her other arm was hanging in front of her, she could see it was broken, too. The man took her by the hair and dragged her after him.

Initially Cornum was led into a well fortified bunker deep in the earth for her first interrogation. There she saw another of her crew members, a young pathfinder, who had also survived. Then they were pushed into a truck and taken to a second bunker, and then a third, each time interrogated by a new group of soldiers. Then they were put in another truck, and this time the guard in charge of Cornum sexually assaulted her. She remembers feeling as amazed as she was repulsed. Her hair was matted with blood over one eye, both arms broken, her knee badly injured. 

The most difficult part of her captivity was a mock interrogation, the feeling of the pistol against the back of her head, the wait for the click. 

Cornum was rescued a week later. Then and now, she isn’t about to admit to problems with pushing through and past the experience. 

CHANGE AND ADAPTATION

When she talks to Dr. Linda Tucker on the podcast Challenge Your Thinking this year, she remembers seeing help with everything in captivity because of her injuries. 

“I don’t do helpless at all,” says Cornum. “That was probably the most difficult thing, getting someone, especially the enemy, to help you.”

What did help her was changing her focus. Once captured, Cornum decided that she had a new mission. That ability to change and adapt is something she recommends for anyone going through challenging times. 

“It’s all about plan B.” Cornum indicates that she saw her next job to keep the prisoners alive. “You just have to have a mission change. Adaptability and flexibility are key.”

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Rhonda Cornum after her rescue, continuing to show resilience and grit in the face of adversity. [/caption]

“I think trauma’s in your head,” says Cornum. “One of the most important things you can learn is that what you think and how you perceive events is totally up to you. The enemy may be able to tell you everything else…they cannot determine what you think. It is your choice. I took that quite seriously.”

“What you can’t do is let it take over your life and you can’t ruminate about the bad part. I was grateful I was alive and I was grateful I was in the war that I was in. I felt very confident that I might be there for weeks, months, but I wasn’t going to be there for seven years.”

Cornum refuses to label her experience as trauma.

 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="454.0"] Cornum and her daughter after her return to the states.  [/caption]

“It’s an adversity…everyone has an adverse experience,” she says.

Cornum’s upbringing clearly contributed to the person she became today.

“My father told me you can do anything,” she says. “You can do anything but not everything. If you want to do something, you have to figure out how. You have to want to, but it’s up to you.” Cornum took that into her life with skydiving, steeplechase and shooting.

Adversity is just part of the process, as far as Cornum is concerned. “Women who run and have some of that compression have stronger bones than women who sit. It takes some adversity,” Cornum says. “I think it’s the same thing. There’s an optimal amount of disappointment and frustration and delayed gratification that you have to learn.”

Cornum considers an occasional comment she gets after her talks when listeners say “I could never have done that.” She won’t have it. “Fear limits the choices you see. The problem isn’t that they like being afraid or miserable, they don’t know how to get out of it. So that was something we tried to teach in a comprehensive stepwise fashion (in the Comprehensive Soldier’s Fitness Program).”

“You can never judge someone else’s difficulty by your own stories,” Cornum says, “you can just use the same steps to get over it.”

FEAR NEVER HELPS YOU

 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="236.0"] Leader and resilience expert Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum [/caption]

When asked if she is afraid of anything, Cornum only reiterates that “fear never helps you.”

To combat fear, she suggests: “In your mind rehearse. Rehearsal (of all possible outcomes) is key…your feelings and your behavior are based on what you think and believe.”

“Resilient people have optimism in common,” Cornum says. “Resilient people believe a problem is specific and not global, that they are in a timeframe and not forever, and that there is something you can do about it.”

The reports of Cornum’s abuse during the eight days of her capture sparked controversy in the discussions of opening combat roles for women. 

“It was remarkable,” Cornum says. “The most difficult thing about coming back was having to deal with the press…dealing with the Army and combat exposure…that was an expected risk. But I had never in my head prepared myself for the publicity that ensued from that experience.”

“We do two things that aren’t helpful. One is we tell people that they are a trauma survivor and then we tell people they are going to be damaged by it…people live up to your expectations.”

“You do need to have enough self efficacy to not be negatively influenced by what people expect of you. You will be surrounded by people with low expectations…mediocrity really loves company.”

 

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Cornum used her own understanding of adversity and resilience to develop and run the Comprehensive Soldier’s Fitness Program and now speaks and teaches about resilience. Since her Army retirement as a Brigadier General, she earned a doctorate in philosophy and became a urologist.

Cornum was not interested in a personal interview for this project, staying focused on her work in resilience.

Sources:

1. Challenge Your Thinking podcast with Dr. Linda Tucker

2. She Went to War, Rhonda Cornum as told to Peter Copeland

3. NYT

4. Official Army website

SHE'S GOT GRIT: THE VERY FEW, THE VERY PROUD

by Shannon Huffman Polson (aborderlife.com)

Jen Nothelfer's journey of leadership and grit began when she joined the Navy to prove she could when a boyfriend after college said she'd never get a flight assignment because she was a woman. After graduating college in her home state of Virginia as a collegiate soccer player and swimmer with a degree in business and paralegal work, she’d hoped to become a lawyer, but bombed the LSAT. A girlfriend suggested they train as flight attendants, so she flew for two years, taking the jump seat every time she could. 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Nothelfer with John Glenn at the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps [/caption]

Her boyfriend's comment changed everything. “He obviously didn’t know me,” she says. “That comment lit a fire in my belly.”

She started taking flight lessons at home, and when she went out flying with a friend, “I knew I had to do this.” Since Nothelfer was pursuing a flight contract in 1995, just two years after the lifting of combat exclusion, there were few women preceding her in the world of Naval aviation. When she first visited a recruiter, they offered her a supply position.

“I told them they could stuff that where the sun don’t shine,” she says.

She made her way to the Naval OCS and flight school, though due to a blown ACL from her soccer days she had to fight all the way to the Pentagon to get a flight slot. She finally landed in the Marine Corps flying the CH-46. 

Though she was a team player, things did not go smoothly. In OCS, just before meeting her husband, she was sexually assaulted by another student. 

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="431.0"] Marine officer and pilot Jen Nothelfer on her CH-46E [/caption]

“I never reported it. I just covered it up and put it away for the longest time,” she said. "I just wanted to get through flight school and get my wings."

One of the saving graces of her career was a small group of women she has known through her time in the military. 

“I had Navy and Marine aviator girlfriends,” she says. They helped her keep it real.

Early on at the fleet replacement squadron when Nothelfer was learning to fly the CH-46, she and another female officer went to the Officer’s Club (The O Club). 

“There were only three or four of us women in aviation slots on base,” she says. “I went to the bathroom partway through the evening. When I walked in I thought I’d gone into the wrong head. In the powder room there was a commander of one of the other squadrons, who was very married, and two other officers I didn’t know. Three of the waitresses were straddling them.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot! I had to figure out what I was going to do, but I really had to pee. So I just said “hi there,” and walked back to the stalls. When I left I walked straight out of the club and drove home. I shouldn’t have been driving. But that’s when I knew how things were going to be. That event tainted my views of how squadron life was going to be. I looked at that and thought ‘You can choose to be better.’”

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] They all have grit: Nothelfer's female colleagues helped her through the hardest times in the Marines. To her left, Jennifer Merrill. Right, Suzanne Krauss. [/caption]

As reality set in about the environment, Nothelfer made her way. 

"There was a woman in front of me at the fleet replacement squadron who performed poorly," she said. "When I came through, everyone judged me by how she had performed. I had a bad FAMO (the ground check ride) with an instructor who was trying to get at me, and I walked away from that finally understanding. That's never going to happen again. No one will ever have a reason to doubt me. I studied like a crazy person. Some of the guys started getting pissed off because I'd do so well. 

When I got to my first squadron, they scheduled me for a flight-- you might as well have called it a check ride. They were putting me through the ringer. I went out and I nailed it. I must have had the biggest grin on my face. There was still a lot of crap, but that set the tone for me as an aviator."

Overall, her first squadron experience was positive. “I’m still friends with my first commander and sergeant major,” she says. "They have had a lifelong impact on both leadership and values for me."

She wouldn’t be friends with everyone.

“That was one of my hardest lessons. Realizing not everyone would like me. I have a strong personality.  Driven, demanding, but insanely loyal.  Not everyone saw that.  I also covered myself with fairly thick armor – it was my way to survive.”

“You know what it’s like,” she tells me, and I do. “You get in that cockpit and know you’d better do better, fly better than anyone around you. You’re just waiting for someone to pull the rug out from under you. And then you worry about that other shit too.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="300.0"] USMC officer and pilot Nothelfer on ship quals [/caption]

If she were talking to herself as a new lieutenant, I’d say “Be true to yourself. Don’t try to put on someone else’s armor. It’s ok to be who you are. You’ll find your people…wait for them.”,

Then Nothelfer hurt her back.

“I was about to fly a mission with ten Marines in the back a few months before deployment. During preflight, I couldn’t feel my hands. I couldn’t feel my arms all the way up to my armpits.”

Alarmed, she told her copilot she wouldn’t be able to fly. She went back to fight operations and to her state room.

She heard the commanding officer coming down the hall long before he arrived at her room. “He was a woman hater,” she says. “He started banging on my door,” she said. “I opened it, and he said: ‘Get your shit on and get out to that bird.’

I told him I couldn’t feel my arms, and he repeated himself, more loudly: ‘Get your shit on and get out to that bird!’

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500.0"] Grit in action: USMC officer and pilot Jen Nothelfer on mission [/caption]

I went to the flight surgeon. He sent me directly to the ER where they shot lidocaine straight into my back.”

That wasn’t the end of it, though. Nothelfer was pulled from the deployment.

“That was the lowest point of my career,” she said. “Having to go back on that ship and get my gear and walk off again was devastating.”

It was not the end of harassment. When a fellow woman officer discovered she was pregnant before a deployment, Nothelfer found herself standing at attention in front of the Group Commander. 

"When are you going to tell me you're pregnant, too?" he yelled.

Then there were the briefings when the commanding officer repeatedly referred to the "gents," despite the several women in the room.

At one briefing for a mission in Mogadishu, she'd had enough. 

"I guess this isn't a briefing for me," she said, and walked out.

With respect to challenges, Nothelfer says “They made me who I am. I’ve moved past them. But if I see something today that doesn’t look right, smell right, watch out.”

What would Nothelfer tell a new leader today? “Stay true to your course. Work hard play hard, and always give 100%.”

Nothelfer is proud of her career. “I’m proud of being one of the first women to fly in the Marines, and proud for sticking around,” she says. "I started to develop an internal dialogue: I can't quit. I still believe I am doing good for the mission and good for the Corps. I think there's some purpose for the pain and suffering."

When I ask why she stuck it out in the face of the constant harassment, she mentions her three daughters. “What kind of example would I set if I just left?” she asked. “I hope I might have made a difference for at least one person over my career. Maybe I've even changed the mind of one of these dinosaurs who are still around.”

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="400.0"] LTC Jenifer Nothelfer [/caption]

Her most memorable experience recently came when she was asked to assist at the opening of the National Museum of the Marine Corps. "I was asked to accompany the family of Corporal Jason Dunham who would be awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously," she says, and her voice breaks. She takes a moment to recover. "It was such an honor, such an incredible honor."

As for grit, Nothelfer clearly has it. “Grit is unstoppable determination,” she says. 

Now Nothelfer works as a Marine Recruiting Support officer in the Reserves. Her husband is retiring after a full career on active duty next year.

With all she faced each day, “I feel so loyal to the Marines,” Nothelfer says. "For all the challenges, they are still my people."

Are you caught up on the She's Got Grit Profiles? Catch up on other profiles on Shannon's website!