A seventh-grade history class assignment changed everything for Amy McGrath. The future Kentucky Senate candidate and Naval Academy graduate “had found middle school uninspiring,” she writes in her memoir, “Honor Bound: An American Story of Dreams and Service,” until she devoted a class project to military air power, specifically World War II aircraft. She built a model of a P-47 Thunderbolt turboprop, a brawny fighter bomber, and researched the plane’s role in the European theater. “I soon had a sense of the pure excitement, the thrill of flying this powerful, nimble aircraft in combat,” she recalls.
And from this moment McGrath became obsessed with turning herself into a fighter pilot. It was an obsession not customarily encouraged in girls. Indeed, her ambition was initially thwarted by laws prohibiting women from serving in combat roles. Outraged, the young McGrath wrote to her representative and both Kentucky senators (one was Mitch McConnell, her opponent years later in the 2020 Senate race). “The only one who bothered responding,” McGrath writes, was Rep. Jim Bunning. But his message got her “hackles up even more.” As McGrath puts it, “He made no bones about the fact that he wasn’t going to work to change the law, because he thought it was just fine as it was.”
McGrath explains that she was not “raised to fold in the face of adversity.” Strengthened by the unfailing support of her family, she refused to let the laws, her imperfect eyesight, the disapproval of some of her idols or the entrenched misogyny of the military derail her. The laws did finally change in time for McGrath to become the first woman to fly an F/A-18 Hornet combat mission for the Marine Corps; on that mission she was a weapons systems officer flying as a “back seater.” And when the Marines began to offer surgery to correct vision, she had the procedure and retrained as an F/A-18 pilot.
The most thrilling passages of “Honor Bound” describe the romance of the machine: the sensations of flying a powerful jet and the supreme test of a night landing on an aircraft carrier’s heaving deck. “At night, on the ocean, there is virtually no depth perception,” she explains. “It was so dark that I couldn’t make out the horizon line. Flying in on a landing approach, it would be incredibly difficult to discern between the back edge of the carrier, the water, and the sky.” When all three of her plane’s navigation systems malfunctioned — something that McGrath had been assured “never” happens — a remarkable feat of skill turned into something extraordinary. Despite the failure of her navigation systems, McGrath nailed the landing not once but three times to pass the final qualification required to become a pilot.
McGrath tells us she was drawn to the Marines because of a desire to serve her country. Service, patriotism and religious faith are central to the book, in which she outlines an “American ethic” defined as tolerance, decency, fairness, hard work, honesty and a willingness “to sacrifice for the greater good.”
McGrath also acknowledges that she was attracted to a military career because of her adventurous nature and love of physical and psychological tests. Her memoir abounds with stories of her tenacity on the playing field and in military training, as well as her resilience in the face of obstacles and injury. Her experience taught her that combat is “the most extreme form of competition.” But war involves more than competition. While flying a fighter jet fulfilled McGrath’s dreams, it also helped to disrupt some of her idealistic views.
Over the course of three deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, during which she flew 89 combat missions and then served as “a ground-based problem solver,” McGrath had to reckon with the violent nature of her vocation. She grappled with the realization that her role as a fighter pilot involved meting out death and destruction on a large scale. This revelation helps the book fulfill the promise of its subtitle: “An American Story.” Many Americans cling to an innocence about U.S. military force, believing it to be endowed with an exceptional purity.
McGrath found that her deployment to Iraq was more “intense than Afghanistan in almost every way.” It tested her fortitude and left her “with greater demons to wrestle.” She became increasingly frustrated by the ambiguity of many of her missions and found it hard to reconcile herself to the fact that she “had killed people, lots of people.” She felt betrayed by politicians who were so “casual” in their approach to war and who decided to invade Iraq on the pretext of the presence of weapons of mass destruction. She felt the “sting of Iraq, of the political nature and reasoning behind that war.” But all wars are political. And when they are justified, it is likewise their politics that makes them so.
McGrath rebounded from her disenchantment with the dysfunction she witnessed abroad and at home. She gathered strength from her view of herself as a pioneer and changemaker, and returned to her beloved Kentucky to run for office. After an unsuccessful bid for a congressional seat, she took on McConnell and relished the role of the underdog fighting the incumbent’s machine. Although her campaign raised an astonishing $96 million, McConnell proved too formidable an opponent. Viciousness has been an elemental part of American campaigning since the nation’s earliest days, but McGrath was surprised by the nastiness of the Senate race: “Outright dishonesty shouldn’t be a part of public discourse or politics,” she observes, referring to one of her opponent’s ads. One suspects that someone as committed and unrelentingly optimistic as McGrath will find her way back to the fray.
