Houston High hears from high ranking former Naval officer

HOUSTON — After decades of service including four years as assistant secretary of the U.S. Navy and three months as acting secretary, BJ Penn shared some advice his mother gave him with Houston High School students.

“Be the best that you can,” Penn said. “If you want to be a garbage collector, be the best one there is.”

Penn spoke to the students Sept. 3. He was in Alaska to go hunting and flying with his friend Floyd Shilanski whose granddaughter, Jazlynn Shilanski, is a junior at Houston High.

Penn said he joined the U.S. Navy because, more than anything, he wanted to fly planes. The Navy gave him that chance. When a student asked if it was hard being in the Navy, Penn said that indeed it was.

“The Navy did not except everyone and being a minority I had a couple strikes against me to begin with,” he said.

When he joined in 1961, Penn said, there were 10 African American pilots and only one was a combat pilot. The Navy has changed during his career — which ended with his retirement in 2009, growing to accept everyone, including women.

“It’s amazing what they can do,” he said. “They’re flying airplanes, they’re on submarines, they’re flying into space.”

Asked what the largest plane he ever flew was, he said it was a 747 he flew for Saudi Arabia after the first time he retired in the ’90s. In 2001, after the attacks of Sept. 11, he said he felt compelled to return to service.

He said he was nervous when he went in to interview to be the assistant secretary of the Navy. He didn’t need to be. He was told his reputation preceded him and President George W. Bush appointed him assistant secretary of the Navy in October of 2001.

Over the course of his time there, he said, he was involved in many operations he couldn’t say much about. He said he was intimately involved in the operation that ended in a Navy sniper shooting Somali pirates that had held an U.S. captain hostage aboard his cargo ship in 2009.

Penn told the students he also had some involvement in the operation to kill Osama Bin Laden. He didn’t offer specifics, but that he was involved at all drew the longest applause of the presentation.

Another unexplained was the story of how he got his call sign during his fighter pilot days. He said he was known as “Blood,” but would only say that it related to an incident in which he brought his plane back with blood on it.

“It scared me to death,” Penn said of that incident.

Quite possibly the best question from the crowd, or at least the one that got the most laughs, was just three words long:

“Are Transformers real?” a student asked.

“That’s classified,” Penn gamely replied.

All-in-all, he said, the Navy was good to him. It sent him to the University of Southern California and to Harvard University.

The part he liked best, he said, was the challenge of taking off and landing from aircraft carriers.

“It’s so demanding,” he said. “Your mind has to be very, very, very, very active.”

But with all those rewards came some pretty awesome responsibility. He said that when he was in command of a carrier, he was in charge of 6,000 people and their aircraft. He was in charge of their housing, their food — everything.

“That’s an awesome responsibility,” he said.

But that responsibility, he said, should not change the way you operate or your moral compass. He said that’s important for students to keep in mind.

“Some of you in here will have that responsibility,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.