All in Navy
You see that under Justine's name it says "Navy"; if I’d interviewed her a few years ago, it would have read “Air Force”. She smiles, acknowledging that "it's very rare" to change force but that, in her particular case, it made sense. "Navy command came to get me," she says, four years after she joined the Air Force. But that doesn't mean she's no longer interested in things that fly…
By the time she turns 28, Honorine will already have 10 years of professional life under her belt, enough experience to easily find work in the civilian world when her contract with the French Navy ends. Pragmatic, this bubbly young mother of a two-year-old boy, already knows that she’ll leave the institution in 2026. “In the Navy we are transferred every three years. My husband is also in the Navy, so with a child, we considered that it was preferable for one of us to leave…”
Funny, playful, jovial and dynamic, Amandine will doubtless have no trouble at all adapting to her new life this summer when she ends her 16-year career as a contract officer in the French Navy to join her military husband in the United States. So will begin a third professional life for this young mechanical engineer, who only joined the Navy in 2006 at the age of 27, "the ceiling" to sign-up as a contract officer…
Laura will never have anything to do with the French nuclear deterrent force because she holds dual French/Lebanese nationality. But apart from that her bi-nationality, which “is fairly atypical” amongst officers in the French Navy, should not hinder her career, she tells me during our WhatsApp video call a few days before she goes back to sea as captain of the Laplace hydrographic vessel…
It was the lapel pin with two dolphins on it worn by some of her crew-mates aboard her first ship that alerted Hélène to a job she'd never heard of: navy diver. A few years after first spotting them she became the first woman to successfully complete the French Navy's gruelling bomb disposal diver course and is currently one of only three female bomb disposal divers on the force…
Laure is the youngest woman I've profiled so far and also the only one whose life was changed by an eye-test! She's just 22 but behind her chatty, easy-going facade there is a very determined character who knows how to go out and get what she wants. And what she wants is to fly patrol aircraft for the French Navy…
