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 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 wer