By CLAUDIA PARSONS
USS CARL VINSON - One of the few women in the elite corps of Navy fighter pilots on the US aircraft carrier Carl Vinson gets more jokes about her English accent than her gender.
And the only difficulty about being a woman fighter pilot is when you're cooped up in the cockpit for hours after drinking lots of water to avoid dehydration.
A petite and soft-spoken woman whose accent veers between educated English and Texas drawl, "Mumbles" went home to the United States at the age of 22 after growing up in a small town called Oxted in southern England.
She lived most of her life in England and studied accountancy before joining up.
"We're so few we stand out, unfortunately, but we just do our job," Mumbles says of being the only female pilot in her squadron, the Black Lions, and one of just a handful on board the Carl Vinson.
She was nicknamed Mumbles by her US colleagues because they said they could not understand her accent.
Navy personnel are not allowed to give their full names to the media.
Mumbles says one of the only difficulties of being a woman comes up during long missions such as those she has flown in the past 11 days as part of the US bombing campaign against Osama bin Laden and the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.
Pilots can spend more than six hours in the tiny cockpit with nowhere to "go" when the water they need to stay hydrated gets too much.
"It's emergencies only. There's a way, but it's not user-friendly," Mumbles says, declining to elaborate on the technicalities - beyond saying it is easier for men.
Other pilots make more jokes about her being almost English than about her gender. "We speak the same language, but it isn't the same language," she says.
Mumbles says she became interested in the military around the age of 16 and, while studying at City University in London, decided she wanted to be a Navy pilot.
"Carrier aviation is the be-all and end-all, the ultimate in aviation."
She says the F-14 Tomcat, a twin-seat jet that is as happy in a dog-fight as dropping precision-guided bombs, is at the top of a pilot's wish-list.
"It's an awesome Machine, it really is."
Like all the pilots on board the Carl Vinson, Mumbles says she does everything possible to avoid civilian casualties.
"We don't drop unless we're 100 per cent sure it's our target. Collateral damage is something we want to avoid at all costs," she says.
And while she is fully committed to what the United States is doing, she admits she would rather not have to do it.
"In an ideal world, we'd never be bombing. As one of the admirals said to us, the best-case scenario is there's not a shot fired. Unfortunately, it's come to that."
- REUTERS
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