50 Posts for 50 Years · Post 17 · Memorial Day 2026
On our induction day in the summer of 1977, the speaker on the podium delivered the standard warning to the assembled plebes: “Look to your left.“ Look to your right. One of you will not be here at your commissioning.
For the roughly 90 women who entered that day, scattered among a class of 1,000, the math proved almost exactly right. About a third of us did not make it to graduation. The Naval Academy was still learning how to want us and keep us there.
But the women who stayed, we stayed hard. We earned our place and went on to do remarkable things in uniform and beyond. And some of us paid the final price that this day asks us to remember.
This Memorial Day, I want to honor eight women of the Class of 1981 who have since been taken from us, by accident, by violence, by illness, and by time. They were my classmates. Some were my friends. All of them matter.
Cary Jones — The One We Measure the Others By
Cary Jones was third-generation Navy: grandfather ’27, father ’53, and she wore it not as a legacy but as a launch pad, full of the kind of exuberant energy that made everyone around her more alive. We took a summer trip to Puerto Rico together and planned a post-graduation trip to Europe that she never got to take due to a last-minute illness.
The memory that best captures her is from auditions for Fiddler on the Roof. The director wanted her for Golde, the fussy, bossy mother. Still, Cary wanted the daughter’s role, so when she was called up to sing, she hit every note with operatic, pitch-perfect clarity, no matter how many times he coached her toward off-key. I got the part of Golde. Cary got the part of the daughter. She made plans, and they happened.
On July 8, 1982, two T-44A training aircraft collided near Corpus Christi, and all six aviators were killed. Cary was 22, the first female Naval Academy graduate and first female Naval officer to die in an aviation mishap. I was stationed in the Philippines and found out, reading Stars and Stripes. I couldn’t believe what I was reading and reached out to a mutual friend to confirm the horrible news. Cary was designated a Naval Aviator posthumously, and her gold wings were carried into space by Sally Ride aboard STS-7 in 1983. It was the closest the Navy could come to giving her the stars she was already aimed at.
Kathy Holt Moeller — The Long Career, The Quiet Excellence
If Cary’s story breaks your heart all at once, Kathy Holt Moeller’s asks something different of you: sustained admiration for a life of steady, serious service.
Kathy grew up in Flagstaff, Arizona, graduated in Chemistry, and headed straight to medical school at the Uniformed Services University. During our time at the Naval Academy, we all knew about her medical school intentions and that she had the tenacity and smarts to be selected to that highly demanding career. She became a Naval Flight Surgeon in 1987 and, from there, built a 24-year career that took her across the country and around the world serving aboard USS Lexington as a wing flight surgeon and aboard USNS Comfort. She retired as a Captain in 2005 and continued working as a radiologist until 2019.
As the women in our class began to form annual retreat weekends together, I got to know Kathy better, sharing stretches of long conversations, hearing of life’s struggles, still never knowing the depth of all that she carried for others and put on herself. She loved her sons.
That kind of career arc doesn’t happen by accident. It happens because someone shows up, earns trust, and keeps doing the work long after the novelty has worn off. Kathy was that person. She was the kind of officer who made the institution better just by being in it.
She died on April 22, 2020, in Gainesville, Florida. She was one of the finest physicians and officers our class produced, and she wore both titles with the same quiet dignity.
The Others — Lives Full and Interrupted
Cary Jones and Kathy Holt Moeller are the two I knew best. But the other six deserve more than a footnote. Their lives were full of meaning.
Paula Plott dreamed of commanding a submarine and earned her first tour aboard research vessel USNS Chauvenet before beginning her doctorate in Oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. She died on June 15, 1985, at just 25, curious and resilient to the end.
Cathy Thomas was among the first women designated as a Surface Warfare Officer, serving aboard USS L.Y. Spear, and was remembered by everyone who knew her for her constant smile and her gift for Russian. She was murdered near Williamsburg, Virginia, one of the victims of the Colonial Parkway Murders, at 27; the Naval Academy gives the LT Cathleen Thomas Russian Award in her name every May.
Mary Kaye Kopper Olsen left the Navy after seven years, earned a master’s in computer science from USC, and went on to become NASA’s Program Manager for the Mars Global Surveyor, the mission that mapped the Martian surface for over nine years. She carried a picture of the rocket in her wallet, and died unexpectedly of a pulmonary embolism at 37, mid-mission, and still reaching.
Melissa Matthews built a full life after the Navy, a master’s degree, marathons, legendary dinner parties, and years of travel with her partner in Atlanta. She fought hard when her health began to fail in 2015; her ashes rest in the Columbarium at the Naval Academy.
Diana Snyder Stockdale became a Radiation Health Physicist and Vice President of Rayscan, and loved Jimmy Buffett, the beach, and her family equally. She died in West Palm Beach on November 15, 2015, at 57.
Joan Farnett Brown went from Ship Superintendent at Long Beach Naval Shipyard to newspaper reporter to flight attendant, a second and third act that matched the same energy she brought to the Navy. Her grandson graduates from VMI this year.
What We Carry
When I was a plebe, being one of 90 women in a class of 1,000 meant visibility was a constant. You could not be invisible if you tried. Everything you did, or failed to do, reflected on all of us. We knew it. We carried it.
What I didn’t fully understand then was how much that weight could become a kind of privilege. To represent something larger than yourself, at a moment when the question of whether women belonged was still genuinely unresolved, that was something. We were answering a question by living our lives.
Eight of my classmates are gone now. They answered it fully.
On this Memorial Day, I remember them not as symbols or statistics, but as the specific, vivid, irreplaceable women they were: a pilot who dreamed of the stars, a physician who kept showing up for 24 years, an oceanographer who never stopped being curious, a mission manager who carried a picture of a rocket in her wallet, and four others whose lives were threaded through with the same seriousness of purpose that brought all of us through that gate in Annapolis in the summer of 1977.
Look to your left. Look to your right.
I remember.
Part of the 50 Posts for 50 Years series, reflecting on a life in and after the Navy, and the women who changed what that life could mean.