From uniform to unforgettable: The story of Navy Veteran Mayumi Kimura

Mayumi Kimura didn’t have a plan. She just kept saying yes.

There’s a green fish shirt somewhere out there. It’s ugly, scratchy, the kind of thing you wore because the job required it and not because you had a choice. For Kimura, that shirt changed everything.

She was 18, working a hostess stand at a restaurant in San Jose, Calif., with the weight of her own future resting on her shoulders. She’d already dropped out of high school, spent two years away from traditional school, and eventually graduated through an alternative program she credits as her lifesaver. But graduating didn’t mean she had a plan. It just meant she had a diploma and a polyester uniform. Looking out at the restaurant floor that night, she thought, “This is going to be my life.”

And then she decided it wasn’t.

The girl who needed a plan

Kimura grew up in the Bay Area, in a household where military service wasn’t part of the family culture. Her parents were from Japan. She didn’t know anyone who had served. She had no recruiter she’d been eyeing, no older sibling who’d gone before her. She heard someone mention it was a good idea. That was enough.

She tried the Air Force first, but they weren’t available when she went looking. The Navy was there, “standing out like, ‘Hey girl, what you doing?'” She said yes. At 18, without knowing what she was walking into, she signed up.

She was supposed to report to boot camp in December 2001. Then 9/11 happened. Three weeks later, the military recalled everyone. Kimura officially joined the Navy on Sept. 27th, 2001.

“A lot of people say, wow, that’s amazing, that’s great,” she shared. “But I don’t know what the world looked like pre-9/11 in terms of the military. That’s just my reality.”

The sailor who paid real costs

Kimura became an operations specialist, working radar systems and managing the operational flow of whatever platform she was assigned to. Her service took her from counter-drug interdiction operations off the coast of South America to the USS Blue Ridge, the Seventh Fleet flagship out of Yokosuka, Japan, where she lived and worked for three years, rotating through patrols and humanitarian operations across the Pacific.

And then, as she put it plainly, the thing that happens to some young women on ships with lopsided gender ratios happened to her. She got pregnant.

She found out in 2005, while stationed in Japan and unmarried. The Navy transferred her to Travis Air Force Base in Northern California so she could be near family for her daughter’s birth. Once the baby was born, Kimura had just four months as non-deployable. On what felt like the exact day her daughter turned four months old, she was assigned to the USS Bonhomme Richard and sent on a seven-month deployment to the Persian Gulf. She left her daughter with her parents.

“I try to remind people: I was a mother for four months. And gone for seven,” she recalled. “And I come back, being a youngish mother who didn’t quite understand what that meant. My daughter spent most of her life with my parents; [yet,] I come back and go, she’s mine, come back to me now.’”

For her, it’s not self-pity. It’s honesty. She grabbed her daughter from the only home her daughter had known and announced herself as her mother. That disruption rippled through both of their lives in ways she is still processing decades later.

The Persian Gulf deployment itself was, in her words, uneventful for Navy personnel in the traditional sense. Until it wasn’t. She shared meals with Marines whose faces she would never forget and later found out some of those Marines didn’t make it back alive.

Kimura left the Navy and landed in San Diego in 2007, right at the edge of the housing bubble collapse, and tried to find civilian work in a job market that didn’t know how to read her résumé. She sat through TAPS, the military’s transition program, absorbing nothing because her brain, like every separating service member’s brain, was already somewhere else, already dreaming of freedom. She navigated being a mother again. Full of rage. Didn’t want to be around anyone.

“I think that’s actually normal,” she said now, half laughing. She’s not sure it was all PTSD. She thinks some of it was just the reality of shifting from a world of extreme structure and purpose into civilian life while being alone, young, angry and unrecognized. “Maybe someone should have said: For the next two years, you are going to be full of rage and uncertainty. And you’d move through it.”

So, she moved through it.

The woman who built something from it

She went back to school, got her bachelor’s in psychology, and stumbled into hospice work, where she watched social workers walk into the angriest rooms and leave everyone saying thank you so much. “I wanted to know what that magic was,” she though. So, she pursued a Master of Social Work, became a Licensed Clinical Social Worker (LCSW), and worked across inpatient psychiatry, mobile crisis response and community mental health. She had no intention of working with Veterans. But no matter where she went, she’d hear there was a Veteran nearby and couldn’t stop herself from asking them: “Do you know about your benefits? Why aren’t you connected?”

Kimura recognized her calling when she learned about HUMV, the Housing Unit for Military Veterans, a treatment program inside a Massachusetts jail and house of correction. She applied for a case manager role, got it and, when the director left, stepped into leadership. She built individual therapy, PTSD treatment, service dogs, trauma-informed yoga, and art therapy into a program for men who had served their country and ended up incarcerated. For her, and them, it was a powerful experience.

After HUMV, Kimura was asked to join a Vet Center, where she further specialized in PTSD related to combat and military sexual trauma (MST), as well as grief counseling for Gold Star Families. When COVID hit, she left the Vet Center and launched her own private practice. She expected Veterans to come flooding in. Instead, she got calls from a variety of minority groups who had heard that a therapist who understood “the otherness” was available. “They taught us wrong. Turns out, Asians actually do want therapy,” she recalled.

She leaned into it. She built her practice entirely around representation, hiring providers from the communities they served. The model was intentional; not because representation is better than any other care, but because for the person standing on the sidelines thinking “Nobody will understand me,” seeing someone like themselves behind the desk was the thing that got them through the door. That was the whole point. Get them through the door. Her practice grew. Then it grew more. She had found something real.

California came calling again

She’d made her way back home and started a new practice serving Veterans, military families and first responders. To fund it, she did what a lot of Veteran entrepreneurs do: She competed for it. She entered a business pitch competition.

“I almost threw up on myself, and I came in last place,” she shared. However, someone in the audience heard what she was saying and told her about an opening at California Department of Veterans Affairs (CalVet). She applied and got the job. She packed up her partner and four children and moved to Sacramento.

And she kept saying yes.

Today, Kimura serves as the deputy secretary for Women Veteran Affairs for CalVet, representing the second-largest (and fastest-growing) women Veteran population in the nation. Her message to anyone standing in the way is simple: Integrate us or get out of the way. Which means a real reckoning with MST, healthcare that accounts for conditions tied to military service, opportunities for career advancement, support for families, and actual access to the care, services and benefits women Veterans have earned.What propels her, again and again, isn’t rescue; it’s connection, information and access.

That distinction matters to her. Women Veterans don’t all need saving, as many are thriving. But thriving doesn’t mean you have everything you need.

“Some of us are living the best versions of ourselves but may not know that certain conditions and experiences may be linked to our military service,” she explained. Women Veterans, for instance, experience perimenopause up to 10 years earlier than their civilian counterparts. Others are quietly struggling, unsure what services or benefits they’re even entitled to. “Women Veterans span a wide spectrum of needs and experiences.”

She knows this not just as a policy matter, but as a personal one.

She was an NCO. She has neck pain. She gets migraines. She’s been a single mother, a small business owner, a grieving witness to loss. Her military story, she’s the first to say, isn’t dramatic. But she still carries things that are tied to her service, even if she didn’t always have the language or the space to say so.

That’s exactly her point.

“A woman Veteran in my role saying out loud—’My neck hurts. Is this menopause? I feel out of place sometimes’—maybe that’s enough to help someone feel less alone.”

It is.