Books, Arts & Manners February 9, 1998

A I RF A R C E

FLORENCE KING

Miss King is the author of The Florence King Reader and other books.

MOST of Kelly Flinn's book reads like an adolescent adventure series, ``The Cosmo Girls Go to War,'' but one passage stands out as a brilliant, if unintentional, example of satirical parody:

I arrived in Minot in early October: Winter had already begun. . . . To my right, to my left, for miles, I could see only farmland. It was flat. Extremely flat. No hills, no mountains; just plains. The ground was yellow and brown and the crops looked dead. The main road through town was only five miles long. . . . I saw a small college, a big red brick factory called the Sweetheart Bakery, and a large number of railroad tracks. . . . The city still had the feeling of something half-finished. Despite all the wide-open spaces around it, it felt very claustrophobic.

This is Carol Kennicott of Main Street arriving in Gopher Prairie, determined to change hearts and minds and anything else that gets in her way to realize her dream of bringing culture and refinement to Midwestern boosters. That Carol was destined to get into a great deal of trouble was obvious to everyone but Carol, and so it was with

Proud to Be: My Life, the Air Force, the Controversy,
by Kelly Flinn (Random House, 259 pp., $23) BUY IT
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the equally obtuse Kelly Flinn. If only she had been able to appreciate her resemblance to her literary predecessor she might have done things differently, but her DNA is missing an irony gene and she doesn't seem to have read anything except manuals.
Flinn, the baby of her family, has four much older siblings; her two brothers were 14 and 8 when she was born and her two sisters 10 and 11. Apparently she was what is tactfully called a ``surprise,'' but she is blind to the connection between being an unwanted child and her need to push herself into places where she is not wanted. Of the circumstances of her birth she says only, ``My role in the family was to be cute.''
Anxious to establish her tomboy credentials, she dwells on her days as the pride of the monkey bars and the only girl on the soccer team. In high school she compromised with femininity by being ``well-rounded,'' i.e., majoring in extracurricular activities while still keeping up her grades, though she never tells us what the latter were. Like all Great Girl types she used overscheduled joinerism to simulate popularity; finding herself with no date for the senior prom, she had to ask a boy she met at Space Camp.
The first thing she saw when she entered the Air Force Academy was a wall inscribed ``Bring Me Men.'' The second was the marble statue of Pegasus, which, male cadets prophesy, will fly off its pedestal when a female cadet graduates a virgin. Flinn was a virgin and wanted to remain one, but she would awaken at night to find her roommate having sex, and once, two men entered their unlocked room and fondled them as they lay in bed. She wanted to file a complaint but her roommate, sounding as complaisant as a tired old streetwalker, said, ``It really wasn't so bad.''
Flinn went into gender shock. ``I so wished that I didn't have to be around men: since my world was 90 per cent male, I was in a state of anxiety all the time.'' Even worse than the constant sexual tension were the ``gross-out contests'' in which, to use the only printable example, male cadets drank to get sick and then ate each other's vomit.
Her feminine side wanted to quit but her tomboy side feared the stigma of not being able to take it ``like a man.'' After the fondling incident, a female counselor told her she would lose her fear of men once she learned how to control a sexual situation. She took this to mean she must initiate sex to prove she was aggressive, so she picked a cadet she calls a ``male friend'' and told him what the counselor had said. He was silent for a moment, then: ``Would you like to go out?'' On that drab note she was deflowered. Afterward, instead of feeling the usual female regret, she told herself that ``by having meaningless, casual sex without a relationship, I'd just, once and for all, become one of the boys.''
She spent a summer at Kunsan AFB in South Korea where, desperately seeking that elusive camaraderie (her favorite word), she tagged along on sprees with F-16 pilots. ``Every night we went to bars where women danced naked and swung from poles,'' and got falling-down drunk on soju, or Korean moonshine. This time she did not flinch from the gross-out contests.

Basically, the men vomited and blew chunks off the second-floor balcony of a restaurant. Since I enjoyed going out and drinking hard with the boys, I was quickly integrated into the group and given a nickname of my own, although I did not get sick. Joining comrades named Chunk Nose, Chunk Lips, and Chunk Face, I was called Chunk Tits.

Her Class of '93 had a high female attrition rate due to a gang rape on the athletic field, several ``forced sex'' incidents, and indecent exposure in parachuting class, but Flinn, taking strength, she says, from Anita Hill, hung on and graduated.
Next came flight school, where she alienated her male classmates. A highlight of the bonding process was choosing the shoulder patch that would identify them as comrades. The men wanted a naked girl with planes flying through her spread legs, but Flinn, taking strength now from castratrix Lorena Bobbitt, suggested ``a knife and a cucumber.'' The Anita Hill case had made the Air Force nervous about obscenity, so the men had to choose an innocuous patch.
Having signaled her womanly delicacy, Flinn now switched signals and played the consummate tomboy. ``I picked up a male pilot's jaunty way of walking, talking . . . I talked fast and low. I kept my intonation flat . . . I never wore makeup in uniform; it made me look too much of a woman.''
She was ready for combat, so sunk in unintrospective self-absorption that she assumed everyone else agreed with her: ``Faced with growing numbers of women in all areas of professional life, Americans were slowly coming to grips with the idea of seeing their daughters held as prisoners of war and young mothers coming home in body bags.''
When her request to fly B-52s was granted, she was heralded as the first female bomber pilot and sent to Minot AFB, home of the B-52, to be the official poster girl for the feminist-hounded Air Force. At last her conflicted family dynamic was resolved: now she could be unwanted and cute.
North Dakota should call itself the ``Aphrodisiac State.'' Sex was rife at Minot, Flinn says, because there was nothing else to do. As the bleak vastness settled over her, she caught the spirit of prairie bacchanalia and began to realize what she had been missing.
Her first tumble in the tundra was with an enlisted man, Colin Ferguson, whom she met when she gave what she calls a wine-tasting party. ``People were staggering around the house drunk and flopped out all over the lawn.'' She didn't think she was fraternizing with Ferguson because ``I didn't use rank to get him into bed. He was so drunk he just sort of oozed in.''
The rest of the book consists of a retelling of her well-publicized downfall. The familiar details need not concern us but her thought processes are not to be missed: ``True, women do pose a problem for the Air Force brass. But that problem isn't rooted in the fact that we are women per se. Rather, we're a problem because, in the Air Force's collective imagination, we're identified with sex.''
The Air Force is stuck, she believes, in a 1950s morality that makes it associate sex -- i.e., women -- solely with marriage and brothels.

But when the objects of their affections started accompanying them into battle, the whole system seemed to fall apart. . . . For if the men of the Air Force are no longer traditional macho warriors, upholding God and country by day and whoring at night, who are they? Sentimental soldiers who risk falling in love with their crew? . . . The fear isn't just of women distracting men in the Air Force from their work. It's of women feminizing men altogether.

That's an argument against women in the military if I've ever read one, but for the life of me I don't think she realized it.
A psychologist who examined Flinn said she has ``the social skills of a 12-year-old.'' While this seems to be true, I see something else. She's a type America turns out in droves: the ``natural leader,'' student-council junkies who lead where everyone else is already going, bowing to every cultural ukase along the way while cherishing a fantasy of independence instilled in them by half-baked teachers who hate original thinkers.
Happily for Flinn, America reserves a special niche for natural leaders. ``I've been asked,'' she writes, ``to run for Congress.''