Yep, I did indeed say “fog-a-mirror.” The military understands some are late bloomers. As long as O-1s and O-2s are serving honorably, developing professionally, performing their duties reasonably competently, meeting requirements, there is no reason the CO will not check the “promotion recommended” block on the performance report. It gets serious when the first O-4 promotion comes up, as that is a board process, and selection percentage drops steeply from the 90+% range of earlier years.
My first Navy job, age 20, DivO for 4 tugboat crews and small boat crews, 60+ people, at Naval Station Rota Port Services. God bless my 4 tugboat chief petty officer tug masters and my two CWO4 fellow DivOs and the 3 master chief harbor pilots and my LDO mustang department head who took this green OCS Ensign in hand and trained me properly. I learned to drive everything we had in the water and all the forklifts and trucks, worked all hours (Rota is a tidal port), was down in tug bilges and over in the repair yard in Cadiz, drafting and coordinating all the LOGREQ message responses, standing in front of my people at oh-dark-thirty quarters on big Fleet inport arrival and departure days - astonished at what I was learning to do, when I had time to think about it. None of my high school or college friends had anywhere near this responsibility. No regrets, best thing that ever happened to me, laid the foundation for everything else.
[In case people are wondering what career path that was, as a lead-up to women eventually being allowed into warfare communities and while waiting for legislation and policy to change, female line officers were sent to non-traditional jobs ashore - at Naval Stations, comm stations, computer commands, shore duty aviation training squadrons, and many other types of duty stations that had never had women assigned. Female line officers, in the past up into the early 1970s, had only come out of WOCS, and went to jobs such as Protocol Officer, Personnel Officer, social aide to the admiral’s wife, Admin Officer, etc. Some were in restricted line Intel and Crypto. The majority of female officers at that time were Nurse Corps. As the 70s progressed, female officers showed up in JAG, Med Corps, Supply Corps, restricted line and staff corps, in bigger and bigger numbers.]
Sorry, I looked into my sea story chest and fell in.
Tell your daughter to take lots of photos of herself doing interesting things. I wish I had taken more. And I wish I could find that photo of me driving my YTB, in my RayBans and garrison cap, and neatly parking it all by myself with no coaching in its assigned berth, and my tug crew clapping.