While coming down a passageway during the ``Hour of Power'' inspection, Command Master Chief Petty Officer Beth L. Lambert, right, acknowledges Airman Jahaira Figueroa on the Roosevelt this week.
Chris Tyree / The Virginian-Pilot
Posted on 04/05/2003 3:48:34 PM PST by COBOL2Java
While coming down a passageway during the ``Hour of Power'' inspection, Command Master Chief Petty Officer Beth L. Lambert, right, acknowledges Airman Jahaira Figueroa on the Roosevelt this week.
Chris Tyree / The Virginian-Pilot
ABOARD THE ROOSEVELT -- Twenty-five years ago, the military recruiting offices in America's small towns used to line up one right next to another -- Marines, Navy, Army, Air Force.
Beth L. Lambert, daughter of a Marine, made her dad's service the first stop. She wasn't exactly embraced.
"There was a pretty grumpy first sergeant who told me he had already met his quotas for female recruits," Lambert said.
Oh, if the Marines knew then what they were passing up.
Lambert, a brash, gregarious upstart from North Fort Myers, Fla., walked down the street and took the Navy by storm.
She became a chief petty officer in a blistering eight years, Shore Sailor of the Year in 1988 and, her most recent accomplishment, the first command master chief of an aircraft carrier earlier this year.
"It's kind of like being mayor, but the sailors don't get to vote," Lambert quipped.
On the Theodore Roosevelt since February, Lambert talks about the stunning singularity of her career with equal doses of pride, laughter and Southern charm. She also doesn't shy away from chatting about her gender breakthroughs despite years of repeating her story over and over.
"For so many young female sailors, I represent something," she said.
Lambert entered the Navy 20 days after her high school graduation as an undesignated sailor. Simply, she had no rating to back up her gumption.
So Lambert "struck" the aviation structural mechanic rating in 1979, becoming the first woman to do so. But her early years were hindered by the military no-combat rule for women, essentially keeping her away from key sea assignments.
"I was ready to get out at that point," she said, adding that the male sailors in her shop showed open disdain at her presence.
One of the final straws was her effort to make petty officer second class. She earned 72 out of a possible 80 on the exam; her competitors scored 32 and 48.
They got the promotions. She didn't.
"It only made me work harder," said Lambert, who earned the rank soon afterward.
When she did, she nailed chief in almost half the time many do. She later did stints in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and Souda Bay, Crete. When the carrier Eisenhower accepted its first female sailors, Lambert was among them.
Her job today is to be the voice for the enlisted sailors onboard the Norfolk-based carrier Roosevelt. But the position also carries a stick to make sure that the thousands of mainly teenage sailors follow the orders of their chief petty officers and the officers above them all.
Lambert calls about the progress on the maintenance of one of the hatch doors on the carrier Roosevelt.
Photo by Chris Tyree / The Virginian-Pilot.
To get a sense of her enthusiasm, watch her hands. They're everywhere.
As she walks the entire portside of the carrier for its regular "Hour of Power" cleaning effort, she reaches out to grab a shoulder, pat a back and stroke a grimy angle iron -- the Navy's term for a gutter-like shelf near ladder wells and passageways.
Her shoulders broad and straight, the wife of a Navy Seabee and mother of three notes the problem areas in the ships that sailors fail to keep clean. But her comments, instructive instead of barking, serve as a balm to the executive officer, whose criticisms on this tour outweigh his compliments.
And her voice. Listen to her sing-song of those encouraging questions.
"How ya doing, sailor?" Lambert says.
"Shipmate, you good?"
"You've been working out? You look buff, man."
Her openings are contagious. Sailors call back: "Hey Master Chief!" "Isn't our space cleaner today?"
When she finds a problem, Lambert often sounds like a mom.
"I still love you," she tells one red-faced sailor. "But pick up your dirty socks."
And then she cackles as the sailor does just that.
She also relishes her power -- and the people who recognize it.
"Master Chief is right all of the time," jokes Airman Richard Bailey, a 21-year-old with the Hawkeye squadron on board.
Lambert peers around the corner to check on the cleaning of one of passage ways of the Roosevelt.
Photo by Chris Tyree/ The Virginian-Pilot.
Lambert lets out a throaty laugh and unleashes a beaming smile.
"You're going far!" she tells him.
While she blends well with these men and women, there are certain things that never change. In most of the berthing on the TR, she still needs to announce "Female on deck!" But most male sailors don't flinch, and a few even pulled her aside for a private conversation.
What they probably don't know is their master chief's own challenges. Her husband, deployed in Kuwait, reached her on the phone this week for the first time in three months. Her children are in the care of relatives, her eldest working to complete her last year of high school.
Lambert says she's confident that her place is rightly here. Back in her office, she turns to her personal aide, another female sailor. Just the kind of young woman that she hopes to inspire, the kind of sailor she'll never forget she once was.
"We're going to make this sailor admiral, aren't we?" Lambert asks her.
"Yes, Master Chief," the sailor says. "Yes."
They got the promotions. She didn't.
Unless she had really crappy evals, or they had lots of award and PNA points, I'm not sure how this would be possible.
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