COMMANDER Robert Stumpf, former commanding officer of the Navy’s elite Blue Angels precision-flying outfit, wasn’t counting on unfriendly fire when his promotion to captain was forwarded to the Senate for approval in 1994. He holds the Distinguished Flying Cross for his performance in the Gulf War, where he led a strike that destroyed 21 Iraqi storage facilities for SCUD missiles, despite “bursting anti-aircraft fire and active surface-to-air missile systems.’ And since he had been cleared by a Board of Inquiry the previous year of any misconduct arising from the notorious 1991 Tailhook Convention, he had every reason to think that his promotion was assured.
Instead, he became yet another male victim of Tailhook.
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