NMCP Khaki Say Bye to the Bucket

Photo By Petty Officer 1st Class Laura Myers | 181030-N-IY469-032 – A Korean War era female cover and the current female combination or "bucket" covers in white and khaki. The last day for female officers and chief petty officers to wear the bucket is Oct. 31, 2018. “Looking at my grandma’s cover and my soon-to-be older cover, without change we would still be wearing the straw hat that Loretta Walsh wore so where as it is bittersweet to have change sometimes it’s not bad,” HMC Julie Dye said.  

PORTSMOUTH, VA, UNITED STATES

10.30.2018

Story by Christina Johnson 

Naval Medical Center - Portsmouth

A group of female Naval Medical Center Portsmouth's Navy chiefs and officers gathered Oct. 30 to observed colors and to say goodbye to their combination or "bucket" covers on the eve of the khaki bucket's last day on active duty.

One of former Navy Secretary Ray Mabus' main initiatives was to make the Navy more gender neutral. Requiring a unisex cover was part of many uniform and personnel policy changes he made in an effort to eliminate perceived male/female segregation and to integrate women more effectively into the sea service. His original push was to have the change made in the uniform policy, as stated in NAVADMIN 236/15, for the mandatory wear of the male-ish unisex cover version as of Nov. 1, 2016. The 2017 National Defense Authorization Act gave the khaki bucket a reprieve until Oct. 31, 2018.

“I think we’ve had a year to adjust to the change because of the deadline shifting, so I think that the mindset now is let’s move forward," said the group’s coordinator, Hospital Corpsman Master Chief Roona Jackson. "However, it’s a great opportunity to honor the past and honor tradition and I understand where the Secretary of the Navy and big Navy is going, wanting to make things more unisex and so forth, but it is nice to have something that is traditional that we can celebrate, and we had a moment to do that today.”

According to a military.com 2017 article, Mabus told reporters he made the decision to change the style of the covers during an Army-Navy game. He said he couldn't distinguish the male from the female Army cadets as they marched onto the football field, but it was very obvious when he saw the Navy midshipmen - and the difference was the cover.

Compared to other uniform items, female covers haven't changed that much since the first Navy females, the "Sacred Twenty" Navy nurses in 1908, and the first woman to enlist in the Navy in a position other than as a nurse, Loretta Perfectus Walsh, in 2017. The Navy History and Heritage Command website noted the initial female covers were wide-brimmed flat-top hats, which shifted to a tight-fitting cloche hat in 1929, to the current version that Navy women have been wearing for decades.

One of the chiefs brought an earlier version of the bucket that belonged to her grandmother who served during the Korean War.

"It’s an anchor and a blade, but it’s not a propeller from a boat, it’s a propeller of an airplane. It represented both the air side of the house in the Navy as well as shipboard," explained Hospital Corpsman Chief Julie Dye. "My grandma was a yeoman striker, she did a lot of basic yeoman training in Great Lakes, and then she was stationed here in Norfolk."

“I think that the photo op was to solidify a moment in history, you know, to celebrate one last hooyah," added Jackson. "The females with the service dress blues have it until the end of 2019, but for us, it ends tomorrow."

Navy enlisted women, E-1 to E-6, can hold onto their buckets for a little more than a year while their uniforms shift from the four-button blazer to the unisex version of the male dress blue crackerjacks and a new cover, a dixie cup, on Jan. 1, 2020.

“Without change we would still be wearing the straw hat that Loretta Walsh wore," said Dye. "I’m very lucky to have been able to wear the khaki version too, and be pinned to chief in that, so it’ll be a little sad for my retirement when I have to wear a different cover and not the cover I was pinned in.”

Ironically, the final goodbye to the enlisted version of the bucket next year, and the change to the unisex uniforms, will mimic a 1917 U.S. Navy recruiting station poster showing a woman dressed in a male's dress blue crackerjack uniform, featuring an enlisted second class crow and a dixie cup, with the statement, "Gee!! I wish I were a man, I'd join the Navy.” That wish is becoming a reality in a Navy without men or women - just Sailors.

• Date Taken: 10.30.2018
• Date Posted: 10.30.2018 11:30
• Story ID: 298197
• Location: PORTSMOUTH, VA, US