Norfolk-based seaman standing tall with warfare pins

When the Navy ship Vella Gulf leaves Norfolk next week for a months-long deployment to the Mediterranean Sea, at least one sailor on board will be walking especially tall through the cruiser’s narrow, winding passageways.

Twenty-year-old Jasmine Lee enlisted 14 months ago. As a seaman apprentice, one rank above the service’s newest recruits, she’s about as junior as a sailor gets, and her uniform says so. She’ll need a couple more promotions to begin wearing rank insignia.

Unlike most sailors in her pay grade, though, her chest bears more than her last name. Stitched into the fabric on the left side of her shirt are two symbols. The top one depicts a pair of cutlasses crossing over ocean waves. The bottom one is a ship’s anchor with wings. They’re called warfare qualification pins, and many sailors with twice her seniority haven’t yet earned them.

“The first thing I heard about the pins is that if you have them, no one on the ship will bother you,” says Lee, a Florida native who is petite, soft-spoken and unassuming. “It means you’re squared away – you’re a hard worker.”

More formally, the pins signify that Lee is both surface warfare qualified and aviation warfare qualified. That means she’s mastered all aspects of surface ship operations, from the engineering and reactor plants to administration and logistics, as well as operations on the flight deck.

While it’s unusual for sailors of her rank to have the qualifications, it is becoming less so – a trend that highlights a significant change for the Navy in recent years: If you want to stay in, you have to prove yourself, regardless of your rank and job.

“The Navy isn’t a guaranteed career anymore,” says Chief Petty Officer Tricia Ghunney, who was an important mentor to Lee during her quest for the pins. “If you’re not going above and beyond to show that you’re interested in your job and you want to advance, there’s a good chance that’s going to be noticed.”

Indeed, the Navy plans to discharge roughly 3,000 sailors next year in an effort to thin its ranks in overmanned job classes, or ratings, as the Navy calls them. Among the things the service considered in deciding who to let go was whether a sailor had earned warfare qualifications.

For Lee, the decision to start working for her pins early was driven more by her own motivation than by fear of losing her job.

“What I wanted was to really learn my rating,” she says, “and in my mind the best way to do that was to deploy.”

She started working for her first pin, in surface warfare, early this year. By then she’d been designated an operations specialist and had reported aboard her first ship, the Norfolk-based aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, which was undergoing an extensive maintenance overhaul in Newport News. Ghunney worked in the same department as Lee, and when she learned that Lee wanted to deploy, she made her a deal: Get your pins, and I’ll get you on a ship that’s going to sea.

So Lee redoubled her efforts. She attended a week-long academy for sailors trying to earn their pins, which gave her the basics. Then she studied on her own.

How many hours did she put in? “How many hours are in 10 months?” she answers. “I put all my spare time into it.”

Her work culminated with written tests for each pin, as well as oral exams before a board of experts – an experience she describes as “totally nerve-wracking.”

She finally received her second pin earlier this month. She credits Ghunney as a major factor in her success.

“She invested a lot of time in helping me studying and giving me those pushes I needed.”

She also credits her dad, Deorick Lee, who is a 20-year Navy veteran and a senior chief petty officer with Submarine Force Atlantic in Norfolk.

“I told her that knowledge is power,” he says. “I’m really proud of her.”

Lee says she’s fairly sure she’ll follow in his footsteps and make the Navy her career, too.

And as for the pins, she says what she heard about them has turned out to be true.

“Yeah,” she grins. “When people see them on your chest when you pass them on the ship, it definitely gets you a little extra respect.”

Corinne Reilly, (757) 446-2949, corinne.reilly@pilotonline.com