Before I turn the podium over, I’ve got to tell a little story. You’ve got to get into the “Way Back Machine” for this one, because there’s midshipman Donald, midshipman Donnelly, and midshipman Donaldson, all of us are here tonight, who were at the Naval Academy when Commander Holland was our battalion officer. We all knew him. He was the submarine guy in the battalion hierarchy.
He was a man of influence, as you may well imagine. Here we are in the beginning of our first semester of our first-class year, and it’s time to do service selection. But prior to service selection you get your commissioning physicals and all of that. It turned out that I had, like the junior officer this afternoon and not unlike most midshipmen coming in, you all want to be aviators. That had sort of been my aspiration.
I go, and I take my commissioning physical, of which the last part of that was the flight physical, and I proceeded to flunk the eye exam. Needless to say, I was a bit disappointed in all of that, so I left with my head hanging down a little bit and started heading back to my room. Little did I know, and I don’t have it straight from the horse’s mouth that this was the case, but it was on pretty good intel, that there was an intelligence network in the clinic that for any engineering major with okay grades who flunked the eye exam, there was going to be a notification to said battalion officer and the network would go into effect. Sure enough, by the time I got back to my room, which was probably about a five-minute walk, I was met by a submarine lieutenant. He said, “I heard the bad news. Would you like to be a submarine officer?” As has been my career management planning before, then and after, the answer was sure, why not?
I give Admiral Holland the credit for getting me in the right place at the right time, because I’m sure I was a better submarine driver than I would have been a pilot, in spite of my best intentions. But that’s just an example, and I suspect many of you have examples of that where you’ve interacted with Admiral Holland over the years, and examples of leadership, maybe a little chicanery on the side, but there’s certainly
that leadership and good spirited submarine comradery. As much as anything, I think the thing that many people know him by is as a master of the written word, having mastered the craft of writing and expressing himself. He won an award today for an article that he has written for the Submarine Review, but encouraging others to do the same thing, but as a force in our Force and one of the people that we all owe a great debt of gratitude to, I recognize Admiral Jerry Holland as a Distinguished Submariner.
