 Well, the Navy changed my life. It gave me confidence and it allowed me to become the person that I am now. I would never have thought as a child that I would have my PhD for one thing, that I would have retired from the Navy as a commander, that I would have been the CEO of a ship, that I would have been a Navy diver, so I've just done so many really cool things in my life that the Navy allowed me to achieve. One of the things that was happening back in the late 70s was opportunities for women who were just opening up and I didn't realize it at the time but the diving community had just recently been opened for women officers. So I was actually one of the first three women to go to the Navy Diving School in the Washington Navy Yard and what that taught me was that I was physically able to do a lot of things that I had never really done before. So it challenged me to an area where it gave me a lot of confidence and a lot of ability to actually lead later on because I did find out that men seemed to cherish people who have good physical ability. In the early 1980s there were no other ships really for women to go to so I kind of found my career stalled because men were able to go back-to-back sea tours, women didn't have that opportunity. So I went to a command that was a training command, so I was an instructor for two years and then I found out that the new class of salvage ships, ARS, auxiliary repair and salvage, a new class was opening up the safeguard class. So I called my detailer and asked him if I could be assigned to the new ship. There were going to be four in the class and the first ship had already been manned, the USS Safeguard, so he says I can put you on the second ship, the USS Grasp. I said great. So I terminated my shore duty after two years and then set out to be on this pre-commissioning unit, the USS Grasp, so I was on the Grasp from 1984 until 1987. While I was on the Grasp, of course, I got all my qualifications being the officer of the deck underway and all those kinds of things, so I was selected for executive officer. So I was executive officer right after that on the USS Preserver, which was an older salvage ship, so I built the 40s. And I also had the opportunity to do a dual EXO tour, so I crossed decked over to the USS Hoist and where we did a Mediterranean deployment, got my engineering quals, and then after that I was selected for commanding officer. Now at the time, there were other women in the running to become the first commanding officer of a Navy ship, but that other woman who was actually senior to me and a surface warfare officer was on her shore duty tour after her EXO tour. So I had the opportunity to be the first woman CO, which was not something I had ever thought would happen. You know, I was always thinking someone else would do it first, but it should not be me, so I took command of the USS Opportun in Naples, Italy in December of 1990. Well, of course, even though the Navy was 21 years of my life, which is now only about a third of my life, it is with me every single day. I went to graduate school after I retired in 2000, and I actually got a PhD in sociology, and my experiences in the Navy framed my outlook on the sociological experience. My specialty areas were the military, the sociology of military, as well as gender work and family, so I have combined those two specialty areas to do research in gender and the military. So I have one book that under my belt, actually two, because my dissertation was about the senior women in the military, and then the second book was actually about issues that women face in the military environment, and I'm currently working on a third book about women military divers, so hopefully that will be done sometime in the near future.