Ben E. King - Stand By Me

Nothing Was Ever As Important

For Misty

There is a record player in my memory that I did not own for very long. I found it in an antique store in Ellicott City, Maryland, a town built on a hillside that floods every few years like it and the Patapsco River are mortal enemies, and I hauled that thing into my classroom at the Defense Information School because I thought it would be a good teaching prop, a way to talk to young Sailors how media used to sound before it sounded like everything sounds now. I played Stand By Me one morning before class started, the Ben E. King version, off the soundtrack to the Rob Reiner film of the same name, and Misty Flynn walked into the room while it was playing. Neither one of us said anything. We just let it play. I was sitting at my desk. She sat on the steps leading up to the lectern. At the time, we’d known each other for 9 or maybe 10 years, and what’s fucking wild is that a decade into knowing someone, you learn there are conversations that don’t need words, and that was one of them.

Misty retired on August 14, 2026, after 31 years in the United States Navy, and I have been trying for days to figure out how to write about it without turning her into a plaque. She would hate that. She is not a plaque. She is a woman from Duluth, Minnesota, who became Master Chief Petty Officer Flynn, who deployed half a dozen times, who raised two kids through two divorces, who beat breast cancer and finished a master’s degree while she was doing it while she was finishing chemotherapy, and who somehow, in the middle of all of that, was still leading, guiding, and mentoring Sailors.

We met August 10, 2003, aboard USS Enterprise (CVN 65), the Big E. It was my second sea tour and her first. I had cut my teeth in the Deck Department of the USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) and become a quartermaster, which is Navy for navigator. I had changed ratings and become a journalist, and in the process, gotten demoted for a night of poor thought and worse execution. I wore that demotion like it was a personality trait rather than a consequence. I was cocky in the specific way that only a twenty-something with something to prove and nothing to back it up can be cocky.

During our time together on the Enterprise, I made regular deposits into what I think of now as my Good Sailor account (I may have stolen that from her). Truly exceptional work and the occasional flash of leadership promise, and then about once a quarter I would withdraw the whole balance and spend it on a new catastrophe of my own design. Sometimes that catastrophe earned me a trip in front of a Disciplinary Review Board and the Executive Officer. Once it earned me a subpoena to testify as a defense witness in a Maryland courtroom. Sometimes I got in trouble for things I did not technically do, though if I am being honest with you, and I am trying very hard to be honest with you in this one, that was usually just the universe collecting on things for which I had not been caught.

Misty saw all of this, the way senior enlisted Sailors seem to develop a sonar for young troublemakers, and instead of writing me off, she sat with me. We spent long hours on that ship talking about the things that terrified us, the things we dreamed about, the careers we hoped to have, and the people we hoped to become. I understood her, and she understood me, in a way that is hard to replicate with anyone you meet in an office building. There is something about standing the watch together, about being tired and nervous and far from home in the same steel hull, that compresses the normal timeline of friendship into something faster and truer. She made Chief while we served together on the Enterprise, which is one of the great milestones in Navy enlisted life, a genuine transformation of identity, and then she transferred off the Big E to the Naval Academy. I got to know her kids during our time on the Enterprise, and I adored them, enough that a few years later she trusted me to babysit, to teach her youngest how to throw a baseball, to help her oldest with schoolwork that was well beyond what I remembered from my own education. That kind of trust does not come from a performance evaluation. It comes from years of watching someone show up.

I bounced around after that, still cocky, still impulsive, a bastard child of the fleet eager to impress anyone who would look at me twice. We reconnected at the Defense Information School, me Petty Officer First Class Thompson, her a Senior Chief Petty Officer Trent (or whichever last name she used at the time) with a reputation that was, by every honest account, wildly better than mine. She had earned hers. I also earned mine.

By the middle of summer 2012, my wheels had come off. Mentally, emotionally, alcoholically, I was in a place I can revisit now because I’m incapable of revisiting it any way but honestly, and I will not pretend it did not happen, because pretending is how people stay stuck there. I was suicidal, and Misty smelled it on me the way you can smell rain before it falls, the way you know the answer to something before you are ready to say it out loud. She convened another Disciplinary Review Board with six other people I respect and admire, and in that room I finally broke, and the walls I had spent years building came down with me. I spent the next two months in a pair of mental health facilities trying to figure out how to keep living. When I came home, Misty and her kids were waiting for me at the airport. Not one member of my own family was there. I’m going to sit in that sentence for a moment, because it is the whole essay in miniature.

Misty had set into motion the gears that would save my life. Not metaphorically. Not in the way people mean when they say a good boss changed their career trajectory. Literally, actually, with an airport pickup and a Disciplinary Review Board and years of phone calls, saved my life.

After that, I blew my security clearance and had to change career fields again, which in the Navy is its own small death, a forced reckoning with who you thought you were going to be. Misty got on the phone and started making calls, one after another, fighting for a career that by most sensible measures should have been over. And she saved it. Again. We sat in her car on the way to an important meeting or some such, and we needed coffee. As we waited for the coffee to arrive, Journey arrived on the radio, sent by whatever spectral force governs these transmissions from Satellite Heart, and we laughed hard together.

Side note: don’t stop believing. No, seriously. Don’t.

Stand By Me is not a complicated song, and I think that is exactly why it has outlived almost everything recorded around it. Ben E. King’s voice on that record sounds like it is coming from somewhere just slightly holier than the rest of the radio, almost ethereal, carrying a melody built entirely around one plain, devastating idea - that the world can go dark, the mountains can literally crumble into the sea, and none of it will matter as long as somebody stands by you. It is a song about the hand that reaches into the darkness for you, and about the will to keep going that hand makes possible. It speaks for the joy we are capable of giving each other and the disappointment we are capable of causing each other, sometimes in the very same relationship, sometimes in the very same year, month, or day. Misty and I have both. I disappointed her more times than I have an accurate ledger for (though, I suspect and trust her accounting is more accurate than mine), and the collective weight of those particular failures still sits somewhere in my chest in a way I do not think I will ever fully articulate, no matter how many essays I write trying to get at it. I actually wonder about it in the wee small hours and during trips to the grocery.

She stood by me anyway, when nearly any rational human being would have jettisoned me. She stood by hundreds of Sailors over 31 years, probably thousands if you count every classroom, every division, every young troublemaker who reminded her of somebody she used to know. At my own retirement ceremony, she was my guest speaker. At hers, a cantankerous beast named Master Chief Bill Houlihan, a mutual mentor of ours, stood up for her. The city of San Diego declared August 14, 2026, Misty Flynn Day, no exaggeration, and her hometown of Duluth did the same, with a mayor who happens to be a commander in the Naval Reserve signing the proclamation himself. Read this shit carefully and let it wash over your mind: She finished a master’s degree while finishing breast cancer chemotherapy while still leading Sailors who needed her. If you want to talk about toughness, that is the whole conversation, right fucking there, no further citations required.

In her final message to the people who knew her best, Misty did not ask us to remember her rank or her awards or the ships she served on. She asked us to stand by our people, win, lose, or otherwise. That is the entire philosophy, distilled to the simplest language, and it happens to be the same philosophy Ben E. King was singing about in 1961 in under three minutes with a doo wop bassline underneath it. You do not always need to say anything. You do not need the right words at the right moment. You need to be there, quiet and vigilant, when somebody else’s mountains start to crumble.

Mine crumbled more than once. Misty stood there anyway. I am forever in her debt, and I suspect I am not the only Sailor who could say that sentence and mean every word of it.

If you want to hear and see her discuss this, and you still have Facebook, you can watch this. I defy you to keep your emotions in check.

I keep coming back to that antique shop in Ellicott City, or rather the classroom at DINFOS where the record player finally landed, because it is the closest thing I have to a thesis statement for this whole relationship. Two people who had already been through a decade of ships and deployments and one very bad summer, sitting in front of a machine that was already an antique when I bought it, listening to a song that was older than both of us, and neither one of us needing to explain why it mattered. Some friendships require constant maintenance, a running commentary on what everything means. Ours never did. She already knew what the song was saying, because she had been living it out loud for years by that point, long before I understood what I was a part of. I just happened to be lucky enough to be in the room.