Rosemary Bryant Mariner

"CAPTAIN Rosemary Bryant Mariner was a pioneering woman, and she was in the first class of six women to earn their Navy wings in flight training for active military service.  Born in Texas to an Air Force pilot, Captain Cecil Bryant, and a World War II Navy nurse, Constance Boylan Bryant, she was a native of San Diego where she learned to fly at Brown and Gillespie Fields at age 15.  Rosemary was a graduate of Purdue University, the first woman in their aviation technology program, before she joined the Navy in 1972.  Earning her Wings of Gold in June of 1974 as female Naval Aviator #6, she became the first woman to transition to tactical jet aircraft, flying the A-4L in 1975 and then the frontline A-7E attack jet in 1976.  She proceeded in 1982 to be the first female Naval Aviator assigned to an aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington (AVT 16), where she earned her Surface Warfare Officer pin and carrier qualified, landing on her ship and later aboard the USS Constellation (CV 64).  In July 1990, she became the first woman to command an aviation squadron, the VAQ-34 Flashbacks.  In 1991 and 1993, she led the Women Military Aviators association in spearheading on Capitol Hill the change of the Department of Defense law and policy restricting women from service in combat.  She retired in 1997 after service as a J-7 branch head on the staff of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and as a professor of joint military studies at the National War College where she earned her Masters degree in 1992.  She taught military history at the University of Tennessee for 15 years after retirement.  She was a national resource on women's integration into the military for PBS, ABC News and the Department of Defense.  In 2022, CAPT Mariner was inducted into the Women in Aviation International Pioneer Hall of Fame as an individual after her class on female women Naval Aviators were inducted as a group in 2017.  Her military awards include the Defense Superior Service Medal and the Defense Meritorious Service Medal.  She was married to CDR Tommy Mariner for 39 years, living after the Navy in Norris, Tennessee. At her funeral in 2019, she was honored by the U.S. Atlantic Fleet with a four-plane F/A-18F "missing woman" flyover conducted by an all-woman flight crew and supported by an all-woman enlisted ground crew, the first such honor given to a woman.  They had one daughter, Emmalee Ann Mariner, who graduated from Duke University in 2021.  In November 2023, a new Veterans Affairs facility, the Captain Rosemary Bryant Mariner Outpatient Clinic, was named by Congress in her honor in Ventura, California near the home near NAS Point Mugu where she served in command of VAQ-34.  It was the third VA facility named in honor of a military woman."