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The sky's the limit

Seven years after enlisting in the Marine Corps, a Tampa woman realizes her dream: a chance to pilot F-18 fighter jets.

By SUSAN ASCHOFF
Published December 16, 2005

[Times photos: Chris Zuppa]

Khadijah Nashagh, 30, is a little embarrassed as the family photographer asks her brothers Samar Nashagh, 31, left, and Muhammad Nashagh, 29, to give their sister a kiss during her commissioning ceremony in November at the U.S. Marine Corps 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion headquarters in Tampa. Both brothers are also in the Marine Corps.

	Nashagh, center, stands at attention during her commissioning ceremony. To qualify for flight training school she had to have corrective surgery on her eyes.
	Nashagh signs her commission papers while Capt. Paul Goguen, right, and her brother Samar Nashagh look on.
	Khadijah Nashagh cooks dinner with her mother, who shares the same first name as her daughter, at their Tampa home. She moved her mother, who had to retire after 17 years as a teacher’s aide, into her home.

TAMPA - If the U.S. Marines put Khadijah Nashagh on a recruiting poster, the camera would aim upward from her feet to make the 5-foot, 103-pounder with the girlish face appear as a tower of strength.

The photo would be accurate. The 30-year-old Tampa woman was among the brave and the strong before she ever signed up for the Corps seven years ago. In February, she takes another confident leap: The newly commissioned officer begins training to be a jet pilot.

"My goal is to fly F-18s," Nashagh says matter-of-factly.

The preflight checklist was tough. In 2003 she watched her reserve battalion go to war without her. Although she was one of its sergeants, as a woman she is barred from combat. She decided then she would get there as a pilot. She needed corrective surgery on both eyes and a waiver due to her age to go to flight school.

"It seemed like every time I put a check in the box there would be something else to get," she says.

Nashagh, or "Nash," as they call her at the Marine Corps Reserve Training Center on Gandy Boulevard, is not easily dissuaded.

"I wish I had a whole company of Sgt. Nashes. Her drive, her dependability, her integrity," says her supervisor, Sgt. Maj. Joe Capua.

She says she first thought about becoming a pilot when she attended her brother's pinning ceremony. Samar Nashagh, 31, pilots CH-53 helicopters, the behemoths that carry troops inside and vehicles below. A younger brother, Muhammad Nashagh, is also a Marine, an intelligence specialist in Maryland.

When Khadijah Nashagh targeted flight school, she was 26 years old. The cutoff is 27. She still needed to finish her bachelor's degree and go to officer candidates school to be eligible.

"I do know I have a lot of nerve," she says, "trying to go."

Nashagh enlisted in the Marine Reserves in July 1998, while working long hours as a manager at an auto parts store in Tampa. When she looked toward her future, she says she saw a dead end.

"I wanted to do something exciting, challenging." She visited the Tampa recruiting office on a Thursday. If she signed up for the Reserves today, they told her, she could leave Monday for basic training. She signed.

She spent the weekend at the Waffle House and over platefuls of lasagna, determined to gain the one pound she was shy of the minimum required weight. At basic training, she became a diminutive mom. Many of the recruits were teenagers, "crying every day."

"This isn't going to kill you," she'd tell them.

Nashagh thought she'd found heaven. "I was like, "I don't have to deal with customers today!' "

When the sergeant got in her face, she would think, he'll go away eventually.

When she failed the initial test for crunches, she did crunches while the other recruits slept.

"When I was a kid, I hated people. So I wanted to be a vet" and work with animals, she confesses. "I had a terrible temper when I was younger. I had a revelation" that I had to stop being angry. The Marines do not teach machismo, she says, but discipline.

Nashagh's life has always brought hard work. Her mother moved with her four children to Florida after the marriage fell apart in the early 1980s. The family lived in a van parked in Tampa for three months. Khadijah was 6 years old.

She didn't think it odd that they plugged their television into a Lowry Park Zoo pavilion. When they moved to a house, they'd hang blankets on the windows when it was cold and sleep in the living room. Her first paychecks, from a job at McDonald's, went to her mom "so the water wouldn't be shut off."

As Khadijah and her siblings slept, their mother would sit beside them and talk to them. "You're wonderful. You're beautiful," she would chant.

Today Nashagh works as facilities supervisor at Hillsborough Community College. She took night classes there, then went to the University of South Florida full time, graduating in August with a psychology degree. Her weekend reserve duty is in supplies - she'd been weaned in an auto parts warehouse. She quickly won promotions to staff sergeant.

She does not know why her family produced so many Marines. Samar has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan in separate tours and is leaving next year for a third. He happily says, "Dude, I get paid to do this!" When he comes home, he wants to run for Senate.

Muhammad, 29, is a cryptologist who has re-upped twice.

Sgt. Maj. Capua, Nashagh's supervisor, has been overseas four times in 25 years. In January 2003, when the reserves based at the Gandy center were activated for deployment to Iraq, Nashagh and three other female Marines remained behind. The 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion transports troops in combat. Though women may follow later, they couldn't be "AMTRAC'ers" leading the charge.

Nashagh dumped her anger and disappointment on Capua.

"That was extremely emotional for me. It was devastating," she says.

"We follow the rules and regulations," says Capua, the senior enlisted leader at the battalion. Nashagh was a platoon sergeant over approximately 30 Marines. She would have to step down so a male could take her place.

"These are your Marines. They're like your kids," she lectured her replacement.

She spent the eight months that her men were at war at home, on funeral detail, burying the war's dead with 21-gun salutes and precisely folded flags.

She was more determined than ever to become a pilot, a position open to women in the military since the mid 1970s. Women account for less than 7 percent of military pilots.

Nashagh used some of the proceeds from a sale of her townhome to pay for corrective surgery, one eye at a time, earlier this year. She believed during the two months it took for her eyes to heal that she would read the tiny type on the eye chart. Her vision improved from 20/400 to 20/20, she says.

As she sought the necessary guarantee of a pilot's training slot from the Marines, they measured and remeasured her limbs five times because she was so close to the minimum size required for the cockpit.

"It was nerve-racking," she says. "It was getting close to my 30th birthday."

There were well-intended cautions from some. "You may want to face that you may not get this to work," one colleague told her.

She is not the kind of person who takes no for an answer.

She moved her 59-year-old mother into a house she bought. Poor health forced her mother to retire after 17 years as a teacher's aide in Hillsborough County. "She's sacrificed a lot for us. The least I could do is make her life better," Nashagh says. Her brothers send money to help with expenses.

She is becoming reacquainted with her father, estranged from the family for years.

On Nov. 10, she was commissioned as an officer. Second Lt. Khadijah Nashagh will attend six months of officers school in February in Quantico, Va., then go to flight school in Pensacola.

She has no doubt she will be one of the best of the few.

- Susan Aschoff can be reached at aschoff@sptimes.com or 727 892-2293.

[Last modified December 15, 2005, 10:23:03]