Meet The First Woman To Disarm Bombs For The U.S. Military
When Linda Cox, then known as Linda Cranford, a smiley 18-year-old from rural Chickasha, Oklahoma, wanted to join the Air Force in 1971, she had to take two tests.
The first was a standard academic exam: math, writing, plus a practical section on machines and tools. Cox aced that test, especially the last part; growing up dirt biking with her brothers in West Texas, she knew all about fixing engines.
The second was a little different. The recruiter took Cox’s measurements — bust, waist, and hips — and then pulled out a camera to take a photo. “We have to see your legs,” he said, as Cox adjusted her skirt for the best possible view. The full-length photograph, body measurements, and aptitude test were reviewed; if they could stomach the altitude chamber, the top candidates became stewardesses on a general’s aircraft.
“I was a scrawny little thing,” Cox said to me over iced teas, her tan face crinkling as she laughed at her former self. Forty or so women tried to enlist with the recruiter that day, but only Cox and one other were chosen for the WAF, the Women’s Air Force. At the time, she wasn’t offended. “It was prestigious. Hey, cool — I get to fly! Everybody else got shuffled down to the Army.” Besides, she knew her dad, a World War II veteran, would be proud of her choice to serve; her older brother had already gone to Vietnam and her mom had worked as a code breaker in the Navy.
But from the beginning, she didn’t quite fit in. The majority of women joined the WAF for clerical or nursing positions. Not Cox. “We’ve never had a woman score so high on the mechanical test,” the recruiter told her. So instead of going to the secretary pool, she learned to operate a printing press at the prairie outpost of Grand Forks, North Dakota. One evening, while hanging out in the women-only barracks, her good friend Peggy McCormick handed her an advertisement for a job called explosive ordnance disposal (EOD). Cox had never heard of it, but the page said EOD was short volunteers and paid an extra $55 a month.
“Bet you won’t do that,” McCormick said. All she knew was that EOD was dangerous and somehow involved bombs.
“Bet I will!” Cox said.
“I dare ya,” McCormick said.
That’s all it took. The nation created its first female bomb technician on a dare.
Cox was done printing newspapers. She would make it through EOD School, survive the ridicule of narrow-minded officers and the unwanted attention of journalists and the women’s liberation movement. She broke every glass ceiling in Air Force EOD: first to lead her own unit, first to go to war, first to be awarded a Bronze Star, first to hold the highest enlisted rank of chief master sergeant.
Today, women are knocking down the last barriers in the U.S. military; on April 27, the Army announced that Capt. Kristen Griest will be the first female infantry officer. And Linda Cox is still at work at the age of 63, as a contractor disposing of dud munitions around the world.
Seth Lowe for BuzzFeed News
In April, I met up with Cox at the decommissioned Savanna Army Depot, a stripped railhead and bunker complex on the eastern shore of the winding Upper Mississippi River. From the air, the old post looks like a moldy checkerboard, overgrown with trees. She had only been on the job a few weeks, leading a crew using a ground-penetrating radar to make 3D maps of metallic signatures under the dirt; anything that looks like a mortar or grenade or bomb has to be dug out and blown up. The scrawny girl has toughened up from decades of range work, her formerly dark curls weathered into a startling gray shock of Einstein hair. I had been warned by Tim Callahan, a fellow EOD technician who rose through the ranks with her, that Cox was “always a lady, but a tough old broad.” Warm but firm, genteel but not gentle, she shared her thoughts — on her career fitting in as an “EOD guy,” women in combat, and what lies ahead — with me in an easy Texas drawl.
For her part, she sounded a cautionary note for military women today, that significant challenges still lie ahead for soldiers like Capt. Griest, and that her own path is not easily reproduced. The Air Force EOD community was tiny, under a thousand people. Breaking into that insulated elite is a vastly different proposition than cracking the massive infantry representing a wide cross-section of America, enlightened and not.
“I’ll tell you what, I had it easy,” Cox said. “These gals coming up, going into combat units now, they’ll have it a lot harder than I did.”
Courtesy Linda Cox; PHAA James Cassidy / U.S. Navy
It was an administrative oversight that allowed Cox to attend EOD School at all. Her first sergeant, the traditional overseer of welfare and discipline in all military units, helped her fill out the application form, but almost immediately the training headquarters sent it back, saying that she had made a mistake. The "F" box was checked, rather than the "M." Certainly it was a man applying? Cox resubmitted the form, but it was returned again, indicating her name was misspelled. She meant “Larry,” not “Linda,” right?
Cox sent in the paperwork a third time. She and her first sergeant had researched the obscure regulations guiding her application, and nowhere in the job description were women barred from joining. Until then, the Air Force didn’t have to explicitly exclude women. “They just never even thought about it,” Cox said
Like an IRS audit, the application came back with additional instructions: Cox had to go to the base hospital, where under the watchful eye of a doctor she would take a fitness test to prove she could carry 100 pounds. This was outside of regulations; back then, men had to pass no such physical. Unsure how to administer the test, the medical staff loaded a bucket with rocks and bricks, which Cox lifted and carried a few steps. The Air Force was out of excuses.
“After I proved that I could qualify in all respects, they couldn’t very well turn me down,” she said to a newspaper reporter at the time.
No one told Cox she was the first female student until she arrived at the EOD School at Indian Head, Maryland, in January 1974. The commanding officer looked confused when a woman appeared at his desk to report for duty in her dress blues. By way of welcome, he said only “Don’t go to the Sportsman,” a notorious dive bar outside the gate. Cox would begin class wearing a men’s green fatigue shirt and pants — the closest utility uniform for women consisted of a large, light-blue denim skirt — and jungle combat boots that had to be special-ordered, her small feet traced on a sheet of paper.
The EOD School is known as one of the toughest in the U.S. military, a physically demanding high-speed mental grind with a graduation rate as low as 15%. Over six months, students learn a bewildering variety of tasks. Demolitions. How to clean up liquid mustard agent. Rope tricks to winch a 500-pound aircraft bomb out of a hole. The use of mine detectors and stainless steel wrenches activated by coiled springs. Plus the safest way to disarm thousands of types of munitions: grenades, rockets, mortars, nukes.
I can attest that the school is grueling for anyone (I attended nearly 30 years later), but Cox had to endure personal hazing as well. A few World War II– and Korean War–era instructors promised her she wouldn’t graduate. During rainstorms, her ordnance practical exams would invariably be underwater in a crater, or on the far side of the range, so she had to lug her equipment the maximum possible distance. “Your problem would be way over there,” she said to me, pointing to a building hundreds of yards away, “but you had to carry everything with you in one trip. I’ve got ropes around my neck, I’ve got a 20-pound sledgehammer, I’ve got the toolbox, and this one officer wrote me up, ‘Linda can’t handle this field. She can’t do it. It’s obviously not for her,’ because I put my toolbox down and switched hands.”
The male students worked in the water and carried heavy loads as well, but special scorn was saved for Cox. “Some of the Navy guys, the Marine guys, they were embarrassed for me being there,” she said. One anonymously left a newspaper article on her desk, about a girl who wanted to join the Boy Scouts. “I had people poking me in the chest saying, ‘If you make it through my class I’m retiring!’ I would call home crying, ‘What did I do?’”
Cox found support from her fellow classmates, who were nearly as powerless — and just as desperate to pass — as she. One was Donald Wetekam, an Air Force lieutenant who went on to become a three-star general and the nation’s highest-ranking EOD officer. “We knew Linda was the first woman,” Wetekam said. “She was mildly interesting at first, a minor celebrity. But then you get down to work, and cooperate to graduate.”
She could have quit and returned to printing base newspapers, but Cox was succeeding; Over the entire course, she would fail only one test. More important, she was captivated by the job from the first moment she plugged a blasting cap into a block of TNT. We can really blow things up? she recalled thinking, as if she was getting away with something. She could put explosives on anything — a pile of old land mines, cardboard boxes, a wooden table — and it would cease to exist and “turn into air.” It was a revelation.
The Vietnam War (and its related anti-war activism) winding down, Cox faced few external rebukes, but her bid to make history was almost upset by an unlikely source: the National Organization for Women. Cox still isn’t exactly sure how they found her, but guesses she was spotted at the 4th of July parade in Washington, D.C.; Cox rode on a float, a massive Nike Hercules missile, and waved to the crowd. Days after this public display, Cox says NOW contacted the EOD School, searching her out. They wanted her to stand up, speak out, proclaim herself a feminist, and become a poster child for their cause. “Look what you’re stirring up,” one instructor told Cox, when giving her the news. It was part of the feminist movement’s campaign to identify new positive public role models for young women, but that’s not how Cox took it; she felt threatened by the attention. “I didn’t want these people interfering with what I was trying to do,” she said of NOW.
“In the military, you can’t express those kinds of opinions,” she said. “And anyway, I thought, that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m just a gal, one of the guys, I came by it honestly, I grew up with brothers. I didn’t know I was doing anything different.” Cox didn’t want to be a maverick or a spokeswoman. She didn’t want to be first. “I was Blue,” she said. Air Force Blue. She just wanted in.
An Air Force Explosive Ordinance Disposal badge
Naval Media Center
Cox adopted a strategy that would serve her well throughout her career. She shut out distractions, including NOW, and got to work. Competence would see her through, she decided, and a sense of humor to defend against bullying. Out on the demolitions range, to indicate where students should urinate, the instructors nailed two signs on opposing trees: “Men” and “Linda.” Cox pulled out a funnel painted gold that she was given for the task and happily complied. She could laugh because her classmates and just enough instructors were on her side. For every Navy officer who would browbeat her, there was someone ordering her special combat boots, or a first sergeant submitting her application three times.
In the end, even the commanding officer came around. When she graduated in August of 1974, he personally pinned Cox with a special EOD badge. This presentation of the crab, as the insignia is colloquially known, is the highlight of the ceremony for every student. But in Cox’s case, the badge itself was unique. It had a large brooch clasp and was stamped “sterling silver” on the back. The officer told Cox that it was one of the original EOD badges created soon after World War II, the very first off the assembly line, just like her.
Courtesy Linda Cox; PHAA James Cassidy / U.S. Navy
The hazing stopped once Cox wore the crab. The infamous training course is a universal crucible; survive and you’re in the club. “I immediately had a thousand brothers,” she said. But it is also true that Cox helped the transition by seeking to integrate herself into the existing culture, rather than act as a change agent.
Explosive ordnance disposal has always been an insulated tribe: few practitioners, classified methods, an air of mystique. Plus the famous brash ego presented to all outside the clan. Within the unit, though, display that same attitude and you’ll be quickly knocked down to size. Notoriety is punished, making Cox’s quiet, hardworking attitude — “I’m no better than the guys, but they’re no better than me” — a natural fit. By never claiming that she was different or special, Cox was the model young EOD airman.
She even adopted the language. The Women’s Air Force program wasn’t officially abolished until 1976, but Cox rarely used the term herself. “I still consider myself an EOD guy,” she told me. “We’re all EOD guys. It means we’re all in it together. When I see another woman, she’s an EOD guy. It’s a term of endearment.”
Cox was sheltered from the media while a student, but once she arrived at her first assignment, McChord Air Force Base outside of Seattle, she was followed by reporters, awed that the EOD Man could be a woman. This lasted until one journalist asked what part of disarming bombs was hardest for a lady. Cox answered: “Keeping my manicure.” The Air Force stopped the interviews, and the EOD tribe protectively closed ranks around her. “I was just being a smart aleck,” she said later. She was sick of getting asked, though she considered the answer the truth; everyone who knows Cox mentions her perfect nails, and I can report Sunday is still “nail night.”
After a quick tour in western Washington, Cox was assigned to Travis Air Force Base in California, and then Bagotville, a nuclear weapon storage depot north of Quebec City in Canada. She was the only woman on base, and there she met and married a bomb maintainer named Paul Cox; the joke went that he built the nukes and she took them apart. Paul and Linda Cox would serve together in Albuquerque, England, and Germany, classic Reagan-era Cold Warriors. By the late 1980s, they settled in San Antonio, where she led a unit of a dozen EOD technicians at Lackland Air Force Base.
The hazing was long gone, but sexism occasionally appeared as she rose through the ranks. Rumors spread that she had an advantage as the first woman, despite the military’s reputation for merit-based promotion. Others complained about the possibility of working for a woman at all. Cox was a different kind of boss: She would make her troops stay home for wedding anniversaries or wives' birthdays. But her old friend Tim Callahan said he typically saw her airmen defend her when she wasn’t around, and when he first had a young woman work for him in the early 1980s, he called Cox for advice. “Don’t treat her different than anyone else,” she said.
Gender-blind equal treatment defined Cox’s leadership philosophy. She felt pressure to be an example, not a mentor, and didn’t intentionally take female subordinates under her wing. Tina Stetson worked for Cox at Lackland in the late 1980s. “She wasn’t an inspiration,” Stetson said. “She was my boss.” Nor did it matter to her that Cox was the first. “Do you see any tits on my crab?” Stetson would say. Stetson eventually retired as a senior master sergeant and is now the military liaison to the Department of Energy at the Sandia National Labs in Albuquerque, where she develops the procedures to disassemble U.S. nuclear weapons.
Courtesy Linda Cox (3)