WASHINGTON– The most dreaded name in the U.S. Navy today may be Lt. j.g. Rebecca Hansen.
Mention this 29-year-old Great Lakes Naval Training Center officer in the corridors of Pentagon and congressional power, and the response will likely be hushed tones and cautious words–such as one Senate staff aide’s: “Stay as far away from her as you can.”
A one-time naval aviator trainee now assigned to writing self-help articles for the Great Lakes base newspaper, Hansen is the focal point of a sexual-harassment case that has dragged on for more than two years without resolution and is already being taught in military-law classes as the epitome of the “botched job.”
For the traditionalists who still run the Navy, Hansen is the foe who won’t give up. She says all she wants is justice.
The Navy has no dispute with the essentials of her sexual-harassment charges.
The man involved was disciplined and left the service.
Hansen’s difficulties have to do with what happened next. Though always a marginal pilot, she contends she was dropped from flight training in revenge for her harassment complaint. The Navy insists her dismissal was warranted.
Hansen enrolled to become a Navy pilot in 1991. After completing her initial phase of flight training in March 1992, she was assigned to instructor Lt. Larry Meyer. According to Hansen, he told off-color jokes and made suggestive comments to her and harassed other women student pilots as well. She said she tried to make the best of it, until one day he completely crossed the line.
“I was in a hangar,” she said. “I was speaking to another student about an upcoming flight that he had. He was asking me questions about a previous flight because he was flying with an instructor I had flown with a day earlier.
“I was speaking to him, and Lt. Meyer came up behind me. He grabbed my hair and turned me around by the head and brought my head down to his crotch and held it there as he said, `This is the way I like to control my women.’ “
Hansen filed a harassment complaint. Meyer was found guilty of a lesser charge of using “insulting language” and left the service after a letter of reprimand was placed in his file.
But Hansen has officially complained that she lost her flying career as a consequence. According to pilot witnesses she has cited, Meyer later boasted that his friends among the other instructors would avenge him.
A marginal student pilot before the incident, maintaining a 3.0 grade point average out of a possible 4.0, Hansen found her marks suddenly falling below the line to 2.997 afterward.
When her grades fell, a three-member pilot review board ruled that “Hansen is an extremely motivated SNA (student naval aviator) who appears to have the ability to complete the flight program.” The review board attributed her marginal performance to excessive delays in her training schedules, some of them because of the harassment problem, and voted to continue her in the program.
Despite this, she was later graded below passing by other instructors, who the Navy contends acted appropriately. She was washed out of flight training in March 1993 with just 10 weeks left of her 18-month program.
She cried foul, however, and filed a complaint with the Navy inspector general and demanded to be reinstated. The Navy’s refusal to do that or to explain its position fully after two years of congressional inquiries has led to the current impasse.
The Navy’s response to her continued complaint has included sending her for psychiatric evaluation.
Her psychiatric examination did not find her unfit for military service.
It is not easy to imagine Rebecca Hansen at the center of such a controversy.
Hansen grew up in Harvard and Woodstock, Ill. After graduating from Woodstock High School and Iowa State University with a degree in journalism, she took a job as a sports reporter with a small television station in Mason City, Iowa.
Then came the Persian Gulf War. Hansen decided to serve her country by becoming a Navy helicopter pilot. It would be an eight-year commitment after she won her wings, but after that, she hoped ultimately to serve God as a flying Christian missionary.
“I had in the back of my mind doing something like the Missionary Pilots Association,” she said. “But I really felt led to go into the Navy. I’m a Christian, and I did a lot of thinking about this decision, and a lot of praying about it.
“There are times when you make a decision and you feel so good about it that you know it’s the right decision no matter what happens after that. It wasn’t something I took lightly. I just never thought it would end up this way.”
Now she is denounced by right-wing commentators in such hawkish publications as the Washington Times and the Navy Times as a feminist troublemaker who destroys the careers of admirals.
Before his retirement from Congress, Sen. David Durenberger (R-Minn.) took up Hansen’s case. He put a hold on the promotion of one of her commanders, the popular and much-decorated Adm. Stanley Arthur, until the Navy responded to his queries. Instead of answering Durenberger’s questions on the Hansen case, the Navy withdrew the admiral’s promotion.
“It’s hard because I’m very passionate about what has happened to me,” Hansen said during a recent interview in Washington. “I still am very patriotic. I feel strongly about this whole issue–yes, because it happened to me, but at this point I’m not asking anything for myself. I just want to make a positive difference.”
Of all the scandals and conflicts arising from the move of American servicewomen into combat roles in the 1990s, some of the worst have been in naval aviation.
One of the darkest blots on this service branch was the 1991 Tailhook party episode, in which female civilians and woman naval officers were sexually mauled and abused by drunken male pilots indulging in celebratory tradition.
The Navy would now like to put Tailhook behind it. In the wake of new reports showing sexual harassment still widespread in the service academies and a commonplace complaint of women veterans, the Pentagon last month came forth with a 48-point reform program.
Subject to approval by Congress, it recommends making commanders and others in the chain of command directly accountable for incidents of abuse in their jurisdiction and procedures to resolve sexual-harassment cases swiftly.
With the assistance of Rep. Bruce Vento (R-Minn.) and others, Hansen has continued to press her case up the chain of command to Navy Secretary John Dalton and Secretary of Defense William Perry. She went to Perry’s office in April and filed charges against six admirals, four captains and a Marine Corps flight instruction major for their involvement in the handling of her case.
She said that on May 31 she received a letter from the chief of naval operations’ office saying, without explanation, that the charges had been dismissed on the recommendation of the secretary of the Navy. Asked for confirmation and comment, Lt. Kim Dixon, of the Pentagon’s Navy information desk, said she would make inquiries, but no response was immediately forthcoming.
In May, Vento received an official report from Eleanor Hill, inspector general of the Defense Department, on Hansen’s charges. Its contents were classified “For Official Use Only” and were not to be made public, but the accompanying summary stated:
“We recently completed the investigation into LTJG Hansen’s allegations of reprisal and concluded that the allegations were not substantiated. Specifically, we found the actions taken by Navy officials were reasonable and consistent with Navy policy and practices. In that regard, we found the officers responsible for their personal actions were aware of the visibility and sensitivity of the case and appropriately measured their actions to void perceptions of reprisal.”
Hansen has added another major complaint to her huge case file. While skiing in Vail, Colo., in February 1994, she injured her knee in an accident. She claims that when she reported to her commanding officer, Capt. R.O. Abshier, from the emergency room of the Vail hospital, he told her to go instead to the Air Force Academy Hospital in Colorado Springs, necessitating a three-hour bus trip with skiis, boots, luggage and crutches. Abshier denies this, according to the inspector general’s report.
Once she arrived there and was scheduled for knee surgery, she said, Abshier ordered her to return to the naval base at Pensacola, Fla., and enter the naval hospital there. She said he refused her permission to fly from the Academy to Denver on an air force shuttle, requiring her to make the trip on two buses. With the help of Vento, she was admitted to a a Veterans Affairs hospital near her parents’ home in Minnesota instead.
Hansen, who writes a weekly self-help article on “quality leadership,” said she has received a report from a Navy medical board recommending that she be medically retired from the service because of her knee injury.
She said the Navy high command did offer to put her through graduate school and to serve in any Navy field she wished, except aviation.
“Threats and bribes,” she said. “I told them, over and over, that all I’ve said I want is for you to deal with the facts. I don’t want to play `Let’s Make A Deal.’ I want to play `Truth or Consequences.’ “
