PULLING THE WINGS OFF THE WARRIORS

Had Jackie Parker’s string of firsts continued unbroken, in the summer of 1995 she would have become the first female pilot to see combat, flying over the Iraqi no-fly zone as a member of the 174th — once known as “the Boys from Syracuse.” Like all National Guard flying units, the Boys from Syracuse were primarily part-timers. But this was hardly a weekend flying club for soft-bellied aviators, even if its nickname came from a Rodgers and Hart musical. The Boys were a tight, battle-tested unit — one of only two National Guard squadrons to fight in Desert Storm. Their commander, Col. David Hamlin, a wheat-farming former Marine, led them straight into the jaws. By the end of the Gulf War, the 174th had flown 1,600 sorties, and two-thirds of the pilots wore Distinguished Flying Crosses.

But what Saddam Hussein could not blow out of the sky, Jackie Parker did. After struggling in her F-16 training for a year and failing to complete it, she quit flying in June 1995 — but not before intimating to New York Guard headquarters that she had been the victim of an unfair and hostile training environment because she was a woman. That complaint ricocheted from New York to Washington and back again and prompted a hasty investigation by the New York Guard, with dire results for the pilots of the 174th.

Overwhelming evidence has since emerged that Parker was in no way victimized by her instructors; that she was the source of her own problems; that she herself engaged in sordid behavior that was winked at. Much of this evidence can be gleaned from a two-year civilian inquiry completed recently by New York’s inspector general. But it comes too late for the Boys from Syracuse. After a deeply flawed investigation in 1995, the top brass of the New York National Guard decided to appease the gods of gender integration. For starters, the 174th was ordered to drop its nickname. David Hamlin, the commander, was fired. His vice commander, Tom Webster, was transferred to another unit in a non-flying position. When members of the squadron protested, the higher command made examples of the most vociferous dissenters. The entire wing was grounded for over a month. By the end of 1995, ten of the squadron’s two dozen or so pilots ($ 1.5 million apiece to train) had been transferred and demoted. Six of those men have never flown again; they were assigned to dead-end jobs below their ranks and outside their specialties. All of them have either left the military or are stalled in their current grades, with their careers and reputations ruined, while Jackie Parker today is part of a California Guard unit, where she flies a desk in a command-post position.

The decimation of the Boys from Syracuse would be shocking if the story weren’t so familiar: A woman infiltrates a traditionally male domain and fails to measure up; her shortcomings are chalked up to an oppressive warrior culture by agenda feminists; said culture is then consigned to history’s slag heap by political invertebrates. It’s the formula that made Citadel-busting Shannon Faulkner a magazine cover girl and adulterous Air Force aviatrix Kelly Flinn a media martyr.

But the Jackie Parker story sheds light on the other half of the equation: the decline of the military man. Ultimately it was not Parker who did in the Boys from Syracuse but feckless military leaders who wanted to appear socially progressive, men who would tuck tail and acquiesce in the unjust punishment of top-notch pilots rather than stand up on their hind legs and admit a mistake. The story of the 174th is a case study of how, in the service of political expedience, the military devours its own.

From the beginning of her military career in 1980, Jackie Parker received extraordinary treatment, securing a waiver to join the Air Force though she stood an inch short of the 5’4″ minimum requirement. Over the next decade, she became a proficient “heavy driver,” piloting transports and tankers like the C-141 and KC-135. Her goal, though, was to become the first female space- shuttle pilot. That odyssey took her to Edwards Air Force Base, a key posting on the astronaut fast-track, the test-pilot school where leathered grizzlies like Chuck Yeager once punched holes in the sky over the High Mojave.

At Edwards, Parker got a crack at flying fighters and wasn’t particularly good at it. One of her instructor pilots, retired colonel Harry Walker, says that she was merely “competent” in maneuvers not requiring “a great deal of three-dimensional thought.” Though she was good enough to become the first female graduate, it was that distinction that marked her for celebrity, not her aerial skills. Walker notes that “she graduated near the bottom of her class.”

That hardly slowed Parker’s public-relations regimen. While fliers of Chuck Yeager’s generation were shoulder-shrugging repositories of muted cool, Parker was a neon Wheaties box, giving motivational speeches at Girl Scout cookie conventions and Rotary Club luncheons on topics like “Reaching for the Stars.” When defense secretary Les Aspin opened combat cockpits to women in April 1993, Parker seemed poised for glory.

After graduating from Edwards, Parker had become acquainted with Mike Hall, who would shortly be named adjutant general of the New York National Guard, the top commander, by Gov. Mario Cuomo. Over the years, Parker and Hall saw each other at professional events and became quite close. Parker was a guest at Hall’s family farm on one of her visits to Syracuse, and Hall stayed with Parker overnight while they both attended an Air Force event in Ohio (he was married, she wasn’t). Hall decided to make Parker the first female fighter pilot in New York’s Guard — and not just because of their friendship. Such a high-profile appointment would provide political insurance in a climate of base-closings. It would enhance Hall’s reputation as a female-friendly commander. And with post-Cold War downsizing underway, a publicity magnet like Parker would help the 174th Fighter Wing stay at full strength and retain its F-16s. On the day of Aspin’s decision, Hall saw his opening. He gave Parker clearance to announce on CNN’s Sonya Live that she would be joining the Boys from Syracuse.

This was news not just to CNN viewers, but to the unit’s commander, Col. David Hamlin. Though it is often assumed that male fighter jocks would rather swig from their cockpit piddle packs than fly next to a girl, Hamlin, who also pulled two tours in Vietnam, was amenable to recruiting female pilots. (One who accepted Hamlin’s bid flies with the 174th to this day.) But he balked at Hall’s pet project. By then a 33-year-old major recently separated from the Air Force, Parker had developed a career’s worth of habits in heavy aircraft that he feared would not be conducive to flying F-16s (a handicap Hall later acknowledged). Then there was her personality, which is always a consideration when hiring for a close-knit Guard unit.

Both male and female unit members say Parker made a bad impression. She was obnoxious — a chronic name-dropper more interested in plugging resume holes to become an astronaut than in the mission of the wing. During initial interviews with Parker, pilots say dialogue ranged from things Jackie wants to be to important people Jackie knows. “For 14 hours, it was the Jackie Parker Show,” says former pilot Anthony Zaccaro. “She never asked us a question about Syracuse.”

Hamlin rejected Parker, but Hall pulled strings to get her into the unit anyway. While training with the 174th, Parker would be a “headquarters pilot” technically reporting to Hall. This high-handedness did little to endear Parker to the unit. And her own behavior compounded the animosity. She engaged in sexual banter that might easily have seen a male counterpart facing court martial. She grabbed a major’s crotch while apparently inebriated. Several pilots reported that during her first unit training lecture, an instructor commented that an aircraft’s targeting was “a hair off. ” Parker piped in that it was “a c–t hair off, a red c–t hair, and I should know.”

Worse behavior was corroborated in sworn testimony by unit males and females alike. In one instance, pilots charged that Parker grabbed the hose of a major’s fight suit, asking, “Hey, Omar, want a blow job?” Parker would not consent to an interview for this article, saying she wanted to get on with her life. But testifying in the Guard investigation after her resignation she said she couldn’t recall the incident, adding, “It is not uncommon for me to make a nasty comment.”

Anthony Zaccaro, the unit’s scheduling officer, had the most contentious relationship with Parker. He told investigators that Parker frequently grabbed him, pinched his butt, called him “big boy,” and accused him of playing “hard to get” — though the soon-to-be-married Zaccaro sternly warned her to keep her distance. Zaccaro later brought a sexual-harassment suit against Parker, which was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. Parker, who framed her behavior as normal horseplay, conceded much of the activity during the Guard investigation: “I’m sure I tried to bother him all the time. . . . I would touch him because I know it drove him totally nuts.”

The investigations of Parker’s tenure in Syracuse generously concurred with her that she was just “trying to fit in.” Neither report, however, details any sexually charged banter returned at her. Unit pilots cautioned Parker about her behavior; and Hamlin gave several lectures on appropriate conduct. This, despite the fact that many unit members felt powerless to take issue with Parker’s behavior because of her political patron, Adjutant General Mike Hall. That perception was magnified by Hall’s practice of personally calling Parker’s instructors to check her progress, talking to her on the phone, and allowing Parker (who was several ranks below him) to call him “Mike” and occasionally dine with him during her training. Worse yet, in violation of military regulations, Parker developed a romantic relationship with her immediate supervisor, Bob Rose, which he would later lie about to Guard investigators. If there was hostility towards Parker in the unit, it was well earned.

Though the Boys from Syracuse were never found to have engaged in an intentional or concerted effort to hinder Parker’s training, the 174th was still faulted by the New York Guard’s top brass for disparate treatment of Parker. When Parker had not made it all the way through her training program in time to deploy with the squadron to Turkey to fly patrols over Iraq — technically a combat mission — she quit in frustration.

Parker thus missed the opportunity to be the first female F-16 pilot in combat, a distinction that she was intent on having on her resume. The New York inspector general’s report, in other respects harsh on Parker, repeatedly laments the loss of this “historic opportunity.” And no doubt from Parker’s point of view, it was all fairly tragic. But it’s also clear that any disparate treatment she received worked for and not against her getting that opportunity: A male pilot performing as Parker did would have washed out of the program.

While Parker had long since perfected the skills required to pilot jumbo transport planes, she never consistently demonstrated that she could “employ” a fighter jet. In layman’s terms, the difference between merely flying an F- 16 and successfully employing one as a weapon is the difference between driving a car, and driving a car while talking on the phone, playing video games, performing geometry, and getting shot at. Perhaps the most damning testament to Parker’s deficiency — and there are many — is Parker’s own testimony to the military board. When asked a fluffy question about what she was best and worst at, she admitted that her worst area “is probably just basic tactical flying. You know, just turns? That part.” Such a concession is tantamount to a NASCAR driver’s saying he’s in command of his car — except for those nettlesome curves. “She quit because she realized she couldn’t do it,” says former pilot Ray DuFour, “but to save face, she had to blame us.”

The unit was faulted for Parker’s protracted training, which included roughly 60 graded missions over the course of a year, when the syllabus can theoretically be completed with as few as 12 rides in a matter of months. While the length of Parker’s training was unusual, it was not unprecedented. John Whiteside, one of the pilots affected in the Parker fallout, had taken nearly 50 rides over the course of eight months before he passed.

And Parker’s own work habits cut into her training schedule. Former 174th intelligence officer Maureen Murphy says Parker “manipulated the system,” bragging that she was taking lots of sick days, and that when she said an illness was a “female thing, they always back right off.” (Parker has admitted undocumented absences.) For 40 days of the training year, Parker was on vacation or leave — often at awards ceremonies where she rubbed elbows with the likes of Norman Schwarzkopf, Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall, or Maj. Gen. Don Shepperd, the former director of the Air National Guard, who once offered to assist Parker in securing a coveted full-time position.

But Parker’s frequent absences tell only half the story. Unit pilots say they thought they had unlimited time and resources to pass her, because she was the pet project of Mike Hall. Hamlin says that the adjutant general instructed him, as regards Parker’s training, simply to “make it happen,” the inference being that, barring catastrophe, she should not be allowed to fail. (Hall has denied this, and refused to be interviewed for this article. The pilots say they therefore assumed Parker was best served by being brought along slowly and safely.

Not like that helped. Her grade slips were riddled with critiques of persistent problems. Jeffrey Ecker, who provided a synopsis of Parker’s grades to investigators, compiled a list of recurrent deficiencies that included serious G-tolerance problems (which can cause a pilot to pass out), flying out of formation, cockpit-display confusion, incorrectly identifying targets, and forgetting to aim her missiles. On one flight to Ft. Drum in upstate New York, Parker got lost and went in the opposite direction. During another ride, Parker bombed the wrong target five times — dropping her 25-lb. smoke bombs a mile and a half from their target and putting ground troops who were also training in peril. A witness called it “one of the worst missions I’ve ever seen.”

For Parker to deploy to Turkey with the unit, the last training mission she had to complete was a low-altitude exercise in which she would locate enemy aircraft (two American fighters had recently shot down their own Blackhawk helicopters in the no-fly zone where the 174th was heading). Parker had passed the bulk of her syllabus, and if she passed this last test — and the 174th had already purchased her airline ticket — she would go to Iraq. Ecker, her instructor for the exercise, who was flying alongside Parker’s F-16, testified that after Parker failed to locate the planes visually or by radar three different times, he took the lead in a final attempt. Ecker “shot” one of the “enemies” and was headed for the other. He then noticed a disoriented Parker finally identifying the planes only after they had managed to sneak behind her. She then overbanked her plane and pulled the nose down in a maneuver that Ecker says would have had her drilling a hole in the ground if he hadn’t yelled, “Knock it off.” Parker flunked the ride. Her complexion was the color of Bisquick. And the unit deployed to Iraq without her. Three make- ups of the exercise were scheduled, but she was sick all three times.

That was when Parker quit in frustration, warning Hamlin, according to his sworn testimony, that she was “going to take this unit down.” Ecker says he always expected an investigation. But he thought it would be along the lines of, “How could you let her kill herself?”

If Mike Hall’s public-relations stunt became a comedy of errors, there was nothing amusing abut how military brass destroyed David Hamlin and the Boys from Syracuse to cloak the embarrassing failure of their poster girl. Hall himself was replaced in April 1995 by the new governor, George Pataki, who installed John Fenimore as the new adjutant general. Fenimore had been Hall’s number-two man and had gone along with the Parker hire. When Parker told Fenimore that she was quitting her training, Fenimore immediately initiated an investigation. “Fenimore was so goddamned scared of the issue because she was a high-profile threatening presence,” says one headquarters source. “This girl was linked. Everybody was scared of her.” Fenimore too refused to be interviewed for this story.

Fenimore kept an interested Pentagon informed of his moves. The day Parker resigned, Fenimore was on the phone to Washington promising that he had ” talked with Jackie Parker” and that the New York Guard would be “resolving [the] problem.” Parker had not even filed a formal complaint, but Fenimore appointed a four-member investigative board, all from the ranks of the New York Air National Guard. During the investigation, Parker took a non-flying position in the same Guard headquarters running the investigation.

After a month, the board forwarded an interim report to Fenimore, who notified Hamlin that his promotion to brigadier general would be delayed because there were indications of an atmosphere of “discrimination and harassment” under Hamlin’s command. Fenimore gave Hamlin 15 days to respond in writing, then denied Hamlin a copy of the accusatory report — Hamlin says he felt he was “shadowboxing in a dark room.”

That was far from the only instance of star-chamber protocol. The National Guard report was a collection of errors, botched leads, and perjured testimony. Tapes malfunctioned and testimony was never recovered. Investigators argued with witnesses and went off the record in the middle of interviews. None of the squadron’s non-flying women, who almost unanimously supported the male pilots, was called to testify. Parker was initially interviewed off the record, and a board source allows that Parker had some input into who was interviewed. Of the ten pilots who graded Parker, the three who scored her lowest — and who accounted for nearly 40 percent of her rides — were never called to testify (including Jeffrey Ecker, who oversaw her disastrous last ride).

The military report documented virtually no untoward behavior directed at Parker. The only arguable incident came when Anthony Zaccaro, who’d been physically manhandled by Parker, was kidded on the radio by squadron mates as they flew over his mother’s residence in Queens. When they joked that they saw Parker approaching his mom’s house (Parker was not flying with the squadron that say), and that his mother had scored a head shot, Zaccaro suggested his mother would target the stomach, resulting in a slower death. ” It was more of a goof on my Italian heritage and my mother,” explains Zaccaro. “Just don’t tell my mother that.”

Other instances of animus, however, had to do with the improper relationship that developed between Parker and Bob Rose, her direct supervisor in the wing. As the later civilian inquiry noted, “the Rose/Parker relationship virtually destroyed the already tenuous link between Parker and the unit.”

The two made a show of their affections. In the throes of a troubled marriage and midlife crisis, Rose boasted of his carnal intentions. Parker approached a stitchless Rose in the shower. They went sailing, sipped wine, and in the middle of flights discussed future rock-climbing excursions and the brilliant fall foliage over the unit radio. In addition to privately catigating their old friend Rose, members of the 174th began publicly chiding the two. Rose was given the annual “Most Disgusting Guardsman” award for extracurricular Parker-related activities. Parker was presented the “Toilet Bowl” award during the squadron’s monthly vinegar session where dubious achievements are rewarded. One pilot, Major Ted Limpert, had his law partner call the unit to pretend he was a journalist doing a story on the Parker/Rose relationship.

Hamlin, without hard evidence of an affair, admonished Rose three times to cool his relationship with Parker. When Rose failed to, Hamlin finally removed him as Operations Group commander. The military investigators, however, failed to pursue this obvious explanation — the affair with Rose — for Parker’s chilly relations with fellow pilots. When Parker was questioned under oath, she volunteered that she had not had sexual intercourse with Rose, admitting it was the rumor, “which isn’t unusual for me, because I’m always accused of having an affair with someone.”

When Rose was questioned by Fenimore’s investigators, he twice asked for a lawyer and then said the relationship was never more than a professional association. His interviewer quickly led him away from the subject. Rose later admitted to both Hamlin and a member of Fenimore’s staff that he had lied in the interview, that he had enjoyed an improper relationship with Parker, even spending the night with her, though he maintained the two never had sex. Fenimore decided that this amounted only to “rumors,” and he didn’t himself contact Rose or halt the release of the board’s report, though he had evidence it was based on false testimony.

On October 17, 1995, three days before Fenimore released the investigative report, Parker made a surprise visit to the Pentagon to see then-secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall’s staff. Parker regularly dropped Widnall’s name around the squadron, though Widnall told me she has no idea why Parker stopped by, and never saw her personally. A source familiar with the visit says Parker “just wanted to tell her side of the story.” It was hardly necessary. On the same day, the director of the Air National Guard, Don Shepperd (who was in contact with Parker during the investigation), e-mailed Widnall, the Air Force chief of staff, and the undersecretary of the Air Force, notifying them that Fenimore would be taking tough actions and that the event would draw significant media interest. Shepperd said that the Guard wanted “to be proactive and get this story out before we have to react. . . . We will not hide problems. We will investigate and hold people accountable.”

Hiding problems, though, was precisely what Fenimore and his investigators did. With a press conference at the Pentagon and two in New York, Fenimore issued the results of the investigation. Parker had been treated unfairly, he said, and the “Boys from Syracuse” moniker had to go. Zaccaro and Limpert were to be disciplined for their radio and fake-journalist incidents. With stunning bad faith, Fenimore said that the most difficult thing for him was disciplining Hamlin, a “genuine American hero.” So difficult, apparently, that Fenimore didn’t notify Hamlin until after his Pentagon press conference that Hamlin would lose both his promotion and command and would be forcibly retired.

Though the investigators had concluded their duties a month before the report came out, one investigator received information that Parker and Rose had spent the night together during a deployment. He sent a memo to Fenimore on the day of his press conference warning that if such an accusation were true, their testimony should be reviewed for perjury and the board’s recommendation to let Parker return to flying at the 174th should be reconsidered.

But Fenimore was too busy singing the praises of Parker, whom he called a ” very assertive bundle of energy.” No discipline was recommended for her; she was free to fly at the 174th, or Fenimore would work to find her a good slot elsewhere. In a final indignity to the unit, a Guard spokesman in Washington told the New York Times that Parker had been subjected to sexually offensive comments, though she had been the one making them. Parker, meanwhile, began the inevitable transition from assertive bundle of energy to long-suffering martyr, assuring one paper that she spent a year in training not because she was a below-average pilot, but because she “had to endure to show that I wasn’t treated right.”

But if Fenimore thought he could railroad the Boys from Syracuse without a fight, he was badly mistaken. Hamlin refused to retire and filed a complaint. When he was forced out anyway, nearly 5,000 letters of support were generated in his behalf in his home county. Limpert and Zaccaro, slated to receive non- judicial reprimands that can kill future promotions, began speaking out against the decision to the media, state senators, and whoever else would listen. Other pilots took their concerns of perjured testimony and kangaroo- court proceedings to congressmen and military investigative agencies.

Zaccaro lost his full-time hours and thus saw his pay cut from $ 50,000 annually to $ 6,900. In a display of solidarity, 18 pilots asked to have 15 days of their pay donated to Zaccaro, who ended up on unemployment for six months before finding an airline job. When even liberal feminist state senators started making noise to Pataki about the apparent injustice, the pilots pressed their offensive. Eleven of them backed Limpert and Zaccaro at an American Legion hall press conference, where Jeffrey Ecker also detailed Parker’s near-fatal last ride. The day of the press conference, the entire unit was grounded by Fenimore’s chief of staff, Col. Archie Berberian, purportedly for safety reasons. Two days later, Limpert and Zaccaro were pushed into non-flying jobs at other units for “career broadening.”

Throughout the ordeal, the pilots were met with obfuscation, duplicity, and betrayal by their own chain of command. When Berberian came to ground the unit, he lectured on the “good ol’ white boys club,” which he said the national leadership was committed to changing. In a briefing for pilots, he said something nearly unimaginable. In the fall of 1994, the squadron had been rated “excellent” on an all-important combat-readiness test. But Berberian told the pilots they “would have been better off getting a satisfactory” on that inspection and managing instead “to train the first female fighter pilot in the F-16.”

I called Berberian to see why he would recommend public-relations stunts over combat readiness, and he said, “I never suggested that.” But he did. The pilots recorded him. And they weren’t the only ones recording. Berberian’s remarks were also videotaped. Mike Otis, a retired public-affairs officer for the 174th, says that he was asked by the vice commander of the 174th to make a copy of the tape, destroy the original, and send the copy to Guard headquarters. Otis says the nervous superior told him that he didn’t “want that goddamn [tape] on my base.” The pilots tried to get the videotape with a Freedom of Information request, but the state headquarters responded that no tape was to be found. When I called headquarters spokesman Walt Wheeler, he admitted he may have “recycled” the copy he was sent. Otis also says Guard headquarters suggested he gin up a letter-writing campaign to local papers against the pilots.

The pilots were grounded and demoralized. They knew the truth of Parker’s tenure, and of her relationship with Rose, which was ignored by their commanders all the way up the chain. John Whiteside, the pilot who had once spent eight months qualifying, called an Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent to relay his concerns. The agent, after a call to the deputy director of the Guard, told Whiteside that the Guard investigation had been adequate. Whiteside, a pilot who lives in Chicago, then went to Rep. Henry Hyde, his congressman, whose office contacted Sheila Widnall’s office on behalf of their constituent. Because of the sensitivity of the matter, Hyde’s staff asked Widnall’s staff not to forward the information to Fenimore. Shortly thereafter, Hyde’s office received a letter of response from none other than John Fenimore.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, at the end of December 1995, Col. James Burdick, who had replaced Hamlin as commander of the unit, transferred eight more pilots. Though they were highly skilled fliers and decorated combat veterans with model records, many were transferred to non-flying jobs. “They put me in a corner like a mushroom to mind the copy machine,” says Whiteside, a lieutenant colonel who was transferred to a captain’s position in maintenance, for which he had no training. The official reason: “career broadening” — though Whiteside and other pilots insist it was to make examples of them. Burdick had been handpicked by Fenimore to replace Hamlin as interim commander, and before even reading the report and meeting the unit, Burdick had been quoted in the press suggesting “sensitivity training” for the pilots.

To this day, the excuses for the retaliatory transfers are utterly inconsistent. Walt Wheeler by himself has offered multiple explanations: that the pilots failed to “maintain good order and discipline”; that their transfers were meant “to increase their chances of rising through the ranks”; that they were transferred because of their “inattentiveness to flying.” Anonymous headquarters sources told Air Force Times the transfers were for “discriminatory behavior.” Burdick, too, has floated several scenarios for Whiteside’s transfer: from career broadening to failed leadership to mental instability (a charge so baseless that Hyde had the Pentagon expunge it from Whiteside’s record). Ecker says he has heard every reason for his move from career broadening t his early-retirement wishes (which he didn’t have) to his flying with low fuel a year and a half before Burdick even came to the 174th. Burdick, for his part, hadn’t given any of the pilots reasons for their transfers besides career broadening.

Shortly after those transfers, a conflicted Bob Rose signed an affidavit admitting his false testimony to Fenimore’s investigators and his unprofessional relationship with Parker. That admission was sufficient to cause Pataki to order the New York State inspector general to conduct what would become the two-year investigation. This civilian report strongly suggests that both Rose and Parker lied under oath to Fenimore’s investigators. But neither Fenimore nor the Pentagon’s National Guard bureau has ever displayed any appetite for pursuing perjury charges against them, though Fenimore’s chief of staff had been quick to threaten Limpert and Zaccaro with sanctions if they lied under oath. Fenimore wrote the Wall Street Journal that he might have pursued Rose and Parker if Rose had signed the affidavit before retiring (Rose did sign the affidavit before retiring). A suddenly uncooperative Parker refused to testify to the state investigation, and Guard officials didn’t order her to cooperate, despite Gen. Shepperd’s earlier promise to “hold people accountable.”

The New York inspector general’s report so eviscerates the Guard investigation that the pilots have constructed what they call a “Page by Page Destruction” of the military report using the state’s evidence. But they weren’t exonerated as they had hoped, since the executive summary of that report neatly parcels blame all around, giving Pataki and his adjutant general cover to move on without apology or redress. Rick Butterfield, a New York state policeman who worked for the inspector general’s investigative team, says, “All of the factual information is in there. But it’s like in English Lit. when you discuss Catcher in the Rye. By the time the professor gets done, you wonder if he read the same thing you did.” Although detailing everything from the discredited military report to Parker’s flying mishaps to the Parker/Rose relationship, the executive summary is thick with weepy regrets over Parker’s — and the Guard’s — lost chance at making gender-integration history.

“We thought we’d get justice,” says Anthony Zaccaro, “but they gave us something that reads like a bad issue of Cosmo.”

In another stab at justice, six of the transferred pilots filed whistleblower complaints with the Department of Defense inspector general, alleging that they were retaliated against for their complaints about the Guard investigation. The whistleblower investigators concluded that various pilots had been banned from the squadron building, had had their flight gear taken and their pay withheld, had been threatened with AWOL notices, had had their mental fitness questioned and negative comments added after the fact to their performance reports, and had been lied to about their “career broadening” transfers that were actually career-ending.

Nonetheless, the inspector general concluded that the pilots had not been retaliated against. To prove that charge, it must be shown that adverse actions are taken because of protected contacts the pilots made that are known by the repriser, and that wouldn’t have occurred anyway.

Translation: The Boys from Syracuse may have been screwed, but it wasn’t because they called their congressmen. A disgruntled source close to the investigation frames it thus: “That report sat and got hacked up four or five times. It’s a bunch of bulls–.They fired a bunch of guys who shouldn’t have been fired. If they didn’t shut up about what went on — they were gonna hammer you.”

The horror story at Syracuse may not be an isolated one. Almost weekly, there is another report on how the military is hemorrhaging pilots, who are ostensibly lured by better hours and paychecks at civilian airlines. But in a recent Navy Times survey, “loss of confidence in leadership” is the top reason given by 75 percent of officers who are planning to leave after their current commitment (95 percent of Navy pilots say they are planning on departing).

That’s hardly surprising. In a climate where military leaders join their civilian counterparts in trying to stamp out the much dreaded “warrior culture,” why shouldn’t the warriors take their leave? As former pilot Ray DuFour says, “People come up to me all the time and say, ‘It must be the ultimate game.’ But there are no playoffs. There’s no bronze medal, no silver medal. There’s a winner and a loser. I have over 40 friends that are dead from my ‘business.'”

The story of the Boys from Syracuse is lamentably ironic. Decorated men of valor who’ve spent lifetimes wagering their hides in their country’s service are telling their kids to stay out of the military. Three investigations cataloging inequities have managed to give the guilty enough cover to continue the charade. And the only justice the Boys from Syracuse are likely to get will come because they’ve held their noses, pooled their money, and hired Kelly Flinn’s PR firm.

Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.