‘Being a chief was everything I wanted’
Help from family and the Navy got one candidate for top job through pregnancy and promotion
Twelve-year-old Nicholas called cadence — “Here we go again, Same old stuff again” — as his mom, Veronica Guadalope Foley, then nine months pregnant, kept on track with her training to become a Navy chief petty officer.
They hit the predawn streets of their Suffolk neighborhood for her daily P.T., because Foley’s promotion was a family effort.
It was a bigger family, too, than her Navy C-2 Greyhound aircrew husband and then-three children. The dozen chiefs from the Naval Expeditionary Combat Command proved it when they gathered on the family’s front lawn the day before she delivered her fourth child to celebrate the formal pinning of her CPO anchors.
Her master chief and husband arranged the surprise; her mom, in town to help with the new baby, and the master chief pinned the new badges of rank on her uniform.
It was her master chief and the expeditionary command’s chief of staff who had come around two months earlier with the news that a Navy selection board had decided she should become a chief — a key leader who even admirals will
say really keep the Navy on track.
To the unasked question of whether she’d opt to complete the final intensive eight weeks of training for the post, she simply pointed to her belly and told her two superiors that even with a baby coming, she could do the job.
“Being a chief was everything I wanted,” she said. Her dad was a chief, and knew from when she was little that the Navy would be her career.
Nicholas, her oldest, helped with her exercise routine — even if it meant getting started at 5 in the morning. Atticus, her 9-yearold, helped with the calland-response exchanges she was supposed to memorize.
He’d ask: “How long have you been in the Navy?”
She’d have to remember: “All me bloomin life! Me mudder was a mermaid, me father was King Neptune. I was born on the crest of a wave and rocked in the cradle of the deep. Seaweed and barnacle is me clothes, every hair on me head is hemp; every tooth in me head’s a marlinspike, every bone in me body’s a spar; and when I spits, I spits tar! I’s hard! I is, I am, I are!!”
The eight weeks of “chief season” including many more serious matters. There was intensive course work on the Navy’s history and heritage, lots of focused discussions on what leadership entails and what chiefand-sailor interactions she and the others in her class had experienced in their careers looked like from a chief ’s point of view.
There were scenarios to walk through, exploring how chiefs deal with the challenges they can be called on to face. One, drawn from real life, was about a new chief who hears from a sailor that he had killed his newborn baby, Foley remembered.
The lesson, that leaders sometimes have to confront the shocking and horrifying — but that there’s always help to be found.
Master Chief Jeffrey Barnes watched her go through chief season — and found some of the help that’s part of the Navy system was what she provided to the others in the group of sailors selected for chief.
“Initiation is tough enough without being pregnant ... Her grit and toughness allowed her to dig deep when the going got tough,” he said. “She often was the backbone of the selectee group and kept them moving towards their goal of pinning on chief. More importantly to me, she never lost focus of her daily job.”
The Navy helps with families like hers — those in which both parents are active-duty — making sure that when one is on sea duty, the other is on a shore assignment.
There’s still a lot that falls on Navy couples when balancing family responsibilities and work — “there’s a lot of time management and communication” that goes into keep a middle-school student, another in elementary school and soon two in day care on schedule, Foley said.
But her experience has been if a problem comes up, the word from her commanders is clear: Go and take care of it.
“I don’t know of another organization that could and would make the accommodations the Navy has to support sailors,” he said.
“On top of being pregnant, going through Chiefs initiation and balancing a hectic home life of four children at home, Chief Foley is also married to another sailor who is currently on sea duty,” he said. “Balancing all those could not happen without support from the commands she has been at.”
Some governors across the United States are taking widely diverging approaches to mask mandates, as federal officials, including President Joe Biden, warn that despite a drop in coronavirus cases, it is too soon to stop wearing masks.
On Thursday, Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, a Republican, extended her state’s mask mandate for another month. Striking a different tone than those of her Republican peers in Mississippi and Texas, she said she wanted to keep what she called an effective policy to require masks for a bit longer, telling residents that masks would not be required in public beyond April 9, when other restrictions would also be lifted.
“There’s no question that wearing masks has been one of my greatest tools in combating the virus,” she said at a news conference.
In response to decisions this week to lift statewide mask mandates by Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, Biden said Wednesday that those moves were a “big mistake.”
“The last thing we need is Neanderthal thinking that in the meantime, everything’s fine, take off your mask and forget it,” Biden told reporters at the White House. “It’s critical, critical, critical, critical that they follow the science.”
Even a fellow Republican, Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, said it was a bad idea to ignore the advice of the experts.
“I don’t know really what the big rush to get rid of the mask is, because these masks have saved a lot, a lot of lives,” Justice said Thursday on CNN, adding that he, too, looks forward to the day when he doesn’t have to wear a mask.
The governor issued a mask mandate over the
summer instructing people to wear masks indoors when social distancing was not possible. In November, he extended the mandate to wearing a mask at all times except when eating or drinking, and in recent months has become a Biden ally, at least on the stimulus package.
“If we don’t watch out, we can make some mistakes,” Justice said.
Biden has asked that for his first 100 days in office, which ends in April, Americans fight the spread of the virus in a variety of ways, including wearing a mask, getting vaccinated and continuing to follow health precautions. He and his top health advisers have emphasized the benefit of wearing masks and warned about the trajectory of cases nationwide and the detection of more cases of virus variants across the country.
At the White House Thursday, Jen Psaki, the press secretary, said the president’s comments about “Neanderthal thinking” was “a reflection of his frustration and exasperation” with the governors of Mississippi and Texas for undermining the message about the need to continue wearing masks.
“Our concern here is on the health, welfare and well-being — and survival,
frankly — of people across the country and in states where the recommendations from leadership is not following health and medical guidelines,” she said. “So we have concerns about the impact on the population.”
In Mississippi, Reeves was unrepentant after Biden’s admonishment.
“Mississippians don’t need handlers,” he said. “As numbers drop, they can assess their choices and listen to experts. I guess I just think we should trust Americans, not insult them.”
Reeves did, however, encourage his citizens to “do the right thing” and wear a mask.
So did Abbott this week in Texas, where vaccinations considerably trail the national average, more than 7,000 new cases are being reported a day and, in recent weeks, ominous variants of the virus have appeared.
Kaitlyn Urenda-Culpepper, a Dallas resident whose mother died from COVID19 in July, said there was no choice now but to hope that the governor had made a wise decision.
“I don’t want him to be wrong,” she said. “But obviously, for the greater good of the people, I’m like, ‘Man, you better be right and not cost us tens of thousands more people.’ ”