Journey into Darkness (33 page)

When recruits enter basic training, they’re given their uniforms and caps. When they graduate, they’re given the Marine eagle, globe, and anchor insignia to put on the cap. There is a photograph of Suzanne receiving her insignia from the drill instructor who gave her such a hard time. Suzanne has a beaming grin on her face, as if to say, “You said I couldn’t do it and I did it!” For her, that was perhaps the proudest moment of all.

Before taking up her first temporary duty assignment at Cherry Point, North Carolina, Suzanne came home on leave. Her parents noticed a difference right away, and so did Steve. She was totally confident, utterly sure of herself. “When she came back,” Stephen says, “her attitude was, ’Hey, this is my life. I’m on my own now. You can make suggestions, but I make the decisions for myself now.’”

She also finally got her driver’s license and bought herself a car—a used red Pontiac Firebird that had a tendency to break down. But now she could go where she wanted, when she wanted.

Stephen drove her down to Cherry Point and they had a lot of time to talk along the way. At the Marine Corps Air
Station there, she was assigned to the Second Marine Air Wing, a Harrier jet squadron, for five weeks of on-the-job training while awaiting the next scheduled start of avionics technician class. By this time, Suzanne had begun giving serious thought to getting her higher education in the military and trying to become among the first female Marine aviators. The avionics training would be the first step. She set her sights on a fleet appointment to the Naval Academy and began writing letters asking for advice and recommendations. She was convinced that a strong military performance would overshadow her lackluster high school academic record and show she had gained the maturity and leadership capabilities to take on anything the Marine Corps had to offer.

Private First Class Suzanne Marie Collins reported to MATSS-902—Marine Aviation Training Support Squadron 902-at the Memphis Naval Air Station in Millington, Tennessee, on October 20, 1984, to begin Class A avionics school. As proud as her parents had been of her physical prowess and mental toughness at boot camp, they were even more impressed that she seemed willing and able to take on such technical subject matter as wiring diagrams and circuits and flight theory. “Had she had to take that course at Robert E. Lee High School, she would have flunked it; I’m sure of it,” says Jack.

At Millington, Suzanne was hard to miss—a tall, blond beauty with a striking figure honed by constant exercise. One of her fellow Marines, James Brunner, wrote, “She had a manner about her that was always so graceful and beautiful. I remember her walking through the mall, turning all the heads, wives nudging husbands and men tripping over themselves. Lord knows, the first time I saw her I walked into a pole.”

In March of 1985, Suzanne met the person who soon became her best friend: Susan Hand, who had arrived at Millington on March 11. In fact, the similarities between the two women were remarkable. Aside from their first names, they’d bought similar model cars without knowing each other. Both women were tall, blond, and widely considered to be knockouts; there are photographs in which Trudy can hardly tell them apart.

Though they didn’t go through boot camp together, they both entered basic training from comparable backgrounds that were different from those of just about anyone else around them. “Almost everyone else there was either a Southern hillbilly or from a military family,” Susan explains. “Neither one of us knew much about the military going in, so we were viewed as being prissy and stuck up, even though we weren’t.”

Susan was exactly a year and a month older than Suzanne. She was the oldest of five children from Lisle, Illinois, and after two years of college at Northern Illinois University in De Kalb, her parents couldn’t afford to continue her schooling. So Susan went into the military to pay for her education. “The Marines were a way out for both of us, a way to get far away from home and be on our own.”

Like Suzanne, Susan chose the Marines because she perceived they were the best. She was at Millington for air traffic control school and lived downstairs from Suzanne in the same barracks building.

Life at Millington was only slightly less spartan than boot camp. The barracks held two to four women per room, sleeping in metal rack bunk beds. The floors had to be polished and waxed daily. Suzanne decorated her part of the room with posters of the Chippendales male strippers.

Before too long, the pair of Susan and Suzanne became well-known throughout the base. “Everyone on base knew us,” says Susan. “We were always in the spotlight. When we’d wear our bikinis to the post pool, everyone would stare at us, but we didn’t care.” Both women were five foot seven and 118 pounds with the same build. Suzanne’s eyes were greenish blue and Susan’s are greenish brown and Suzanne’s hair was slightly lighter in color. But they could easily—and did—swap clothes, which gave Suzanne particular satisfaction.

“Suzanne was completely open and friendly all the time, and always fun. But I think we were resented by a lot of the other women there,” Susan observes. “We were two tall blonds, more intelligent, better spoken, and better looking than most of the others in the military, especially at Millington. The guys really liked us, and our superiors, too. I know that caused some trouble for Suzanne.”

She came in for the particular ire of a staff sergeant and a warrant officer who seemed to resent her looks, attractiveness to men, and easy charm with superior officers.

“These two were really mean to both of us,” says Susan. “They were always calling us into their office. Suzanne made them mad all the time with her independence and free spirit. She’d go off post with friends and not come back when she was supposed to. They’d go after her for anything. She really tried their patience. I would try to stay more within the system. If they said we couldn’t do something, I’d call the captain and get him to fix it, which made them even madder.”

Another thing that got Suzanne into difficulty occurred early on in her time at Millington when she dated an NROTC university student. Though Susan comments that “The people we had most in common with were officers,” and though she herself ended up marrying an Army infantry lieutenant, of all the services, the Marine Corps took the dimmest view of fraternizing between enlisted personnel and officers. “I think the other girls were jealous,” she says. “It reminded me a lot of high school.

“We would date a lot, but it was innocent. Suzanne was both innocent and outgoing at the same time.”

Also, about that same time, Suzanne had been promoted from PFC to lance corporal.

Actually, it was another woman, a friend of Suzanne’s named Sue Drake, who introduced her and Susan to their boyfriends. Chris Clarkson and Greg “Gonzo” Gonzowski, both Marine air traffic control technicians, were best buddies from their hockey-playing days in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and co-captained the Memphis Naval Air Station base soccer team. They hit it off immediately and soon the two couples of Susan and Chris and Suzanne and Gonzo would go everywhere and do everything together. Suzanne and Susan were just about the only two girls considered good enough to be invited to play soccer with the guys.

“I never saw her depressed,” says Susan. “She was a really good friend—caring, fun, adventuresome when she wanted to be. I was more quiet and reserved. I always wanted to be more daredevil and spontaneous like she was. The one who was really adventurous was Patti Coon, who
was one of her roommates, and I think after Suzanne’s strict high school years, she was trying to be like Patti sometimes.” Next to Susan, Patti was probably Suzanne’s best friend. Whenever she was off duty and wasn’t around Susan, she was often with Patti.

“She always wanted to go out dancing,” Susan continues. “She liked really upbeat music and she was good at improvising. We went to clubs on Beale Street in Memphis, or in Germantown, a Memphis suburb which was considered a little tamer and safer. We tried every food for the first time.”

James Brunner, who was stationed with Suzanne at Millington, remembers, “She was such an outstanding Marine, and yet when in civilian clothes and off-duty, she was so charming you couldn’t help but like her—a sense of humor that was very cute. I could be depressed all the way and in ten minutes I’d be laughing. She could be such a lady and also one of the guys, yet always a lady, even take a shot of whiskey that would make my eyes water and choke, and still dance me til I would drop.”

Being tail and very attentive to their figures, Suzanne and Susan were always worried about their weight. “We didn’t like the mess hall because everyone would be staring at us, so instead we’d go out a lot with Chris and Gonzo. We particularly liked Wendy’s salad bar. We’d starve ourselves all day, then go pig out on their salad.”

The main thrust of their weight control and fitness program, though, was exercise, and they’d frequently go out running together. Susan could handle seven or eight miles at a time, but Suzanne would often go another two or three after that. The base was divided by a highway with a walkway built over it and Suzanne would frequently run around the golf course on the north side of the base, either by herself or with the guys, when she wanted to go longer distances. Suzanne became fanatical about running and would try to get out for a long run almost every day. She also worked out regularly in the gym, and seemed to like the fact that all the men would always watch her work out. Aside from being flattering, it gave her extra incentive to show them what she could do.

Among her greatest accomplishments at Millington was membership in the honor deck. As the official description
put it, “Only the most motivated students are selected as members of the honor deck, after being recommended by their troop handlers and maintaining an eighty-five percent academic average. Members of the honor deck participate in Color Guard details, formation runs for charity, and various civil functions throughout the Memphis area.”

What this description fails to mention is that before Lance Corporal Collins came to Millington, all members of the honor deck had been male.

Suzanne saw no reason for this and she wanted badly to prove that women could do just as good a job as men. She researched the regulations in the Marine Corps Order, which made reference to appropriate elements of “Marine manpower” for rifle drill and firing. She then convinced the authorities that manpower was a generic term and did not imply “male power.” If women were admitted into the Marine Corps, even if their numbers were specifically and officially limited to five percent, then they were part of the manpower, just like the men.

Like Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers, making the team is one thing, being accepted by your teammates is another. For the first several weeks Suzanne was on honor deck, the men gave her a very hard time. Many of them even admitted as much after the fact, clearly defying her to prove herself. They were convinced she’d been assigned because of her striking good looks rather than her ability to cut it with her peers, and it took her some time to win them over. But win them over she did.

Richard Tirrell, a member of the Millington honor deck, reminisced, “I have to admit that for quite some time after Suzanne joined the honor deck I wondered why she would subject herself to the ridicule and harassment that she experienced from other women Marines and male Marines alike. However, it wasn’t long after getting to know her better that I realized that Suzanne had deeply imbedded principles and moral standards that minimized the obstacles in front of her to reach the goals that she set for herself. In all honesty, she brought the best out of me. Her vibrant attitude, zest for life, and sense of humor created an air that was naive and sophisticated at the same time, even though that would seem to be contradictory. For myself, that particular combination
helped me to become more effective and more motivated in my work with honor deck.”

As it turned out, her fellow Marines were so impressed with her that they added her name to the physical training—or PT-cadence count which enumerated Medal of Honor winners and other Marines noted for their exploits.

To a former Marine friend of Jack’s Suzanne wrote, “They have a PT chant about Dan Daley and other famous Medal of Honor winners and such. Well, now they have added a couple of lines down here about Lance Corporal Collins. Our honor deck PT is used almost every day, so I hear that many times a day. Every time I hear it I become more inspired and honored that I was able to join the U.S. Marine Corps.” If she hadn’t been famous enough around base before, she certainly was now.

While Suzanne was fighting the battles of honor deck equality, Susan Hand was achieving her own independent fame by winning the title of Navy Relief Queen by the largest margin in the base’s history. Navy Relief is a charity for enlisted personnel and their dependents and the voting for queen is an annual fund drive and major base event. You vote by contributing a dollar in the name of the candidate of your choice. In 1985, it had been twenty-six years since a Marine had won the title and Captain Nowag was determined that the losing streak was going to be broken this year. He approached Susan and said, “You’re going to be the next Navy Relief Queen.”

Out of 200,000 votes, Susan received 125,000. Prizes included a four-foot-tall trophy, a gold chain, and $200 for dresses. Suzanne was thrilled for her friend and arranged to get off school two days before graduation to see Susan crowned.

As graduation quickly approached, the only dark cloud on the horizon was that Suzanne had been assigned back to Cherry Point, while Susan was going to be an air traffic controller at El Toro Marine Air Station in California. Greg Gonzowski was going to California, too. Greg loved her and wanted to start thinking about marriage. Suzanne liked him very much, but according to Susan, she was having too good a time to settle down yet.

For the long term, the two women knew they’d always be
close and envisioned ultimately raising their kids together. But they also wanted to figure out a way that they could be together for the short term. The hope seemed to be getting Suzanne transferred to California, and both of them agreed to start working on it as soon as they took up their new assignments. Then, if all went well, they’d both be going to Annapolis together on fleet appointments. After graduation, Susan thought she would transfer into the Navy to become a pilot. Suzanne was convinced the Marines would start letting women fly.