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INSIDE THE WAR ZONE
Flight Plan
Parham spent the first months of the war flying combat missions over Iraq, often at night, from an air base in Qatar. So what did she do in her down time? As it turns out, she didn't really have any.
8:00 (a.m.) The commander overseeing the air war delivers the game plan for the day to Parham's base. It includes details on targets, ordnance, and timing, down to the minute.
8:00-4:00 (p.m.) Parham and other pilots scheduled to fly that night snooze.
5:00 The mission commander briefs Parham and other pilots and crew. Details of the briefing include the latest weather forecast and when and where the fighter jets will be refueled.
5:45 Parham's group of F-16 pilots breaks off for individual briefs. They discuss details about the route, timing as well as contingencies. If a plane
is shot down, for example, where are the best places to bail out?
6:30 Yet another briefing. Parham gets more detailed intelligence on the location of surface-to-air missile sites and antiaircraft batteries. She learns the word, letter, and number of the day, along with the "duress code," to be used in the event she is shot down or crashes. She also gets a durable local map and a blood chit (a note written in different languages asking for help in exchange for a reward).
6:45 She picks up life support gear, which includes a G-suit, harness, survival vest, helmet, night vision goggles, beef jerky, water, and 9mm Beretta.
7:00-7:38 Parham goes through her preflight checklist, starts the
engines, and does a radio check.
7:40 She taxies to the end of the runway, where safety pins are removed from her ordnance.
8:00 Takeoff. She will spend nearly six of the next eight hours over the target area. She will refuel in-flight as many as six times.
4:00 (a.m.) Lands back at the air base in Qatar, and then debriefs.
6:00 Back to barracks for a meal and sleep.
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Over Baghdad, a Brush with Disaster
By Ben Hallman
The American Lawyer
June 1, 2007
Tally Parham was already suited up and ready to fly when word came down that the war with Iraq was about to start, and she was going to be one of the pilots to start it. Thirty minutes later, she was airborne, piloting an F-16 Fighting Falcon from an air base in Qatar on a nonstop flight to Baghdad.
Her first thought on entering the airspace over the city was that the antiaircraft fire wasn't as fierce as expected. Still, she could see the tracers from surface-to-air batteries lighting up the sky. Her job was straightforward: knock out the batteries. She fired her first rocket, and felt a shudder. She brushed it off.
When she got back to base, she learned that exhaust from the rocket had blown into an air intake, triggering an engine stall. The engine has a restart mechanism, which kicked in after a second or two, but Parham was fortunate. "In a single-engine aircraft, an engine seizure is as threatening as a surface-to-air missile in terms of going down in enemy territory," she says. "And we were right over Baghdad."
That Parham, a white-collar litigator, was on the mission in the first place was unusual. The petite 37-year-old hardly fits the Top Gun stereotype: She is the only woman in her squadron (the Swamp Foxes of the South Carolina Air National Guard; her call sign is "Vixen") and is one of about 50 women who fly fighter aircraft in any Air National Guard or active U.S. Air Force unit.
Her father, who was also a pilot in the South Carolina guard, took her up for the first time when she was a child. After a wild ride of rolls, dead stops, and other aerobatics, she was hooked: "After that, flying was all I wanted to do." She took lessons in high school and paid special attention when, in 1993, the rule banning women from combat jets was rescinded. She resolved then to fly a fighter. She was drawn to the action, and it would allow her to fulfill what she saw as her patriotic duty.
But she would soon realize that removing a barrier does not remove stereotypes. "Being a female fighter pilot was not much different from being a woman bond trader or lawyer early on, when women were integrating into those professions," she says. "There was a tradition that these professions were for men, and there was a lot of bravado, a lot of ego." When she enlisted in 1996, a recruiter told her that her ambition to fly a fighter was "cute."
Cute hardly describes the missions she's flown. Parham enforced the "no-fly zones" over Iraq from Turkey in 2000 and from Saudi Arabia in 2001. In 2003 she was ordered to the tiny Persian Gulf state of Qatar, where she was based for the opening months of the second Gulf War. After flying dozens of sorties during the first three months of the war-she had other mechanical problems, but nothing as potentially lethal as the stall she experienced on the first night-she returned with her unit to the United States.
Soon after her return, she moved with her husband, also a pilot, to Baltimore, where he attended medical school at The Johns Hopkins University. She joined Venable as an associate in 2005 and worked on white-collar investigations, spending the majority of her time advising clients under investigation by regulatory and law enforcement agencies.
Parham says she doesn't bring up her alternate life with clients-it doesn't have anything to do with lawyering, she says-but she doesn't avoid discussing it, either. Occasionally she meets a client with an aviation background, and they talk shop. As for the partners at Venable, Parham says they've been supportive, but, like any associate with an obligation that takes her away from her work, she feels the pressure to keep up. To allow for her National Guard duty, she asked for, and received, an 80 percent time arrangement with her firm. (A Venable spokeswoman says Parham was one of a handful of firm lawyers working less than full-time.)
Last month Parham's husband graduated from medical school, and the couple made plans to return to South Carolina. Parham quit her job at Venable. As of press time she was negotiating to join a small firm with offices in Columbia and Greenville.
The move will make her life easier. She had been commuting once or twice a month to McEntire Joint National Guard Station in Eastover, South Carolina, where her squadron is based. To maintain combat mission-ready status, she must fly six to eight sorties per month.
As part of that training, Parham now instructs younger pilots. The men, typically in their twenties, are more accepting of flying with a woman. She is still on the receiving end of the occasional off-color comment, but they don't bother her anymore: "Now I just worry about their enlightenment."
E-mail Ben Hallman: bhallman@alm.com
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