“And why couldn’t she have been trained by the Navy for a less strenuous position? Not everyone in the Navy has a position that is physically demanding.”
Here’s why. Navy officers go to sea. In fact, I can’t think of a navy officer job that doesn’t go to sea. Dentists, lawyers, supply officers, intelligence officers, cryptologists all go to sea, not just the pilots, submariners and surface warfare types. What are considered REMF-type jobs in the army, those which mostly require sitting at desk and producing paperwork, are done at sea in the navy. Navy officers, therefore, must be deployable, which precludes a lot of medical conditions that may be acceptable in the other services where REMF-types can be are stationed at bases with good medical facilities. Not so in the Navy. At sea, an asthma attack can become a medical emergency that requires a whole lot of manpower and extraordinary effort, effort that is not, at that point in time, going into accomplishing the mission. The navy, understandably, goes to great lengths to minimize medical emergencies at sea.
In my experience the navy is a whole lot faster to “medical board” an officer (toss them out for medical reasons) than the army or air force. I had a friend with cancer who sought treatment at army facilities instead of navy facilities for that reason.
I was a senior officer in the reserves when I developed asthma in my early forties. Even though I hadn’t been “haze gray” (deployed) in decades, I was told I had to retire. Bottom line is—navy officers must remain deployable, or they must go.
But there ARE jobs that are done, onshore, in the Navy. Seems they could have left her in and had her taken one of those. There are Navy folks serving at the Pentagon, for example.
We have some friends whose son graduated Annapolis, and went to train as a Navigator. Turned out, he had an inner ear problem that kept him from flying, but since he'd graduated with a degree in Computer Science, he was sent to DC to work on Computer Security. I don't think he's EVER been on a ship for any duty. Oddly, his brother, who is an AF Academy graduate, did serve on a ship in the Persian Gulf, because he's a missle specialist. Go fig.