Master Chief Petty Officer Misty Flynn

By Abigail Blonigen

WhenMisty Flynn told her mother she was joining the Navy, her mom laughed.

When Flynn asked her what was so funny, she replied, “Misty, you don’t like to get up in the morning, you don’t like people in your face, you don’t like being told what to do. Why do you think I’m laughing?”

“She was absolutely right,” Flynn said. “All of those things were true, but all of those things were part of the problem.”

Flynn, now ranked Master Chief Petty Officer, was born on the Iron Range and raised in Duluth, graduating from Denfeld High School in 1992. She was a smart but unmotivated student who “drove teachers crazy.”

“I just had a philosophical disagreement with the concept of homework,” she joked.

Despite this, Flynn enrolled at Mankato State University with a number of scholarships. However, by the end of her freshman year, it became clear that college was not the best option for her, as poor grades caused her to lose scholarships.

“College requires a work ethic that I just didn’t have,” she said.

Feeling adrift, Flynn moved back to Duluth and picked up a couple of minimum wage part-time jobs to make ends meet.

Some months later, a friend of Flynn’s who joined the Navy right out of high school came back to Duluth on break to do some recruiting. At the same time, the Navy ship USS Estocin was in the Duluth harbor on its Great Lakes Cruise, where small Navy ships sail along the Great Lakes and visit port cities since the Midwest doesn’t have as much interaction with the Navy.

The sailors visited the restaurant where Flynn was working and they hit it off. Flynn ended up hanging out with the crew the entire time their ship was in Duluth.

“They had this camaraderie with each other that really hit me, and that was something that I wanted,” she said.

It was after this experience that Flynn decided to join the Navy, recognizing that she needed to make a drastic change if she were to find any direction in her life.

In 1995, at 20 years old, Flynn headed off to bootcamp in Great Lakes, Ill. She started her service as active duty, and vividly remembers leaving a Duluth snowstorm for the heat and humidity of Jacksonville, Fla., for her first duty station.

“That’s where I learned humidity and I are not friends,” she said, as she was sent to medical for dehydration about once a month for her first six months.

Flynn was later stationed in Japan, and then back to the Great Lakes before being assigned to her first ship — eight years into her Navy service. Women were only allowed on ships beginning in the early 1990s, so it took some time to find ships that had availability for women sailors as they had been primarily built for men.

Since then, Flynn has served on three aircraft carriers, each with roughly 5,000 people, functioning as a “floating city.” Sailors are assigned to a ship for three years, but that entire time is not spent at sea. When in port, the ship basically functions as a floating office building.

Through her service and deployments, Flynn has been all over Europe, and to a few countries in the Middle East and the Pacific coast of Asia. She is currently stationed in Hawaii.

“The biggest thing that the Navy taught me is how big the world is outside of the bubbles that we come from,” she said.

The first time that sentiment began to sink in was after the required swim test in boot camp. Flynn recalled that many of the women who failed the test were from big cities, and many were African American.

She mustered the courage to ask her bunkmate, one of the women who failed, why she didn’t know how to swim. Her bunkmate was from a larger city where, unlike Minnesota, not everyone knows someone with a cabin on a lake. Her bunkmate’s school didn’t have a swimming pool or a swim team. The only pool she would have had access to was at the local YMCA, and that is where the drug dealers hung out.

“That was the first time that I truly started to understand that we don’t all grow up the same. We don’t all live the same life. We may all be Americans, but we don’t all come from the same America.”

Flynn has worked her way up to Fleet Mass Communications Specialist for the US Pacific Fleet, meaning she is responsible for making sure that every Mass Communications Specialist (MC) on every ship in her area is properly trained and equipped. She oversees approximately 400 MCs across five aircraft carriers, 100 other ships, and bases from the West Coast of the United States to the East Coast of Asia.

Flynn is grateful for her incredibly supportive family in Minnesota. She has two children who grew up as Navy kids, and although it was difficult to miss significant events in her kids’ lives, she said her children are now adaptable, independent, strong, and understand sacrifice.

Citing all the ways in which the Navy has broadened the horizons of her and her family, Flynn said, “I joined the Navy because I needed something to propel me because I was stuck, but what I found in it was so much more attractive.” D