Sailors stand watch on the bridge of the guided-missile cruiser USS Antietam in the Sea of Japan, July 5, 2018. (William McCann/U.S. Navy photo)
YOKOSUKA NAVAL BASE, Japan — USS Antietam sailors’ advancement exams that had gone missing while en route to a Florida grading center were found Friday in western Tokyo, the Navy said.
Navy Fleet Mail Center Yokohama sent sailors to Yokota Air Base on Friday morning to search for the missing packages of completed exams, Capt. George Kessler, the guided-missile cruiser’s commander, said in a statement.
Kessler first told sailors Wednesday the exams had gone missing in the mail on the way to Naval Education Training Professional Development Center in Florida for processing. They had been received at the Camp Walker Post Office in South Korea and on Thursday were tracked on a flight from Osan Air Base to Yokota.
That’s where sailors ultimately found the packages Friday. They were then given to the Fleet Mail Center’s mail clerks to be sent by express mail to Florida on Saturday, Kessler said in the statement.
The shipment is expected to arrive at the grading center on Wednesday, but Kessler told sailors he would “get the tracking information to verify that once it departs Yokohama.”
“Moving forward, we will work with NETPDC to determine the timeline for grading and publishing the results of your Fall Advancement Exams,” he told sailors in the statement.
The Navy advancement exam is made up of 175 questions – 150 of which relate to the exam-taker’s rating and another 25 regarding professional military knowledge.
If the tests had not been found, sailors would have had to take another advancement exam in the spring, Kessler said in a post on the Antietam’s official Facebook page.
Kessler said in his Friday statement that his command would “continue to update [Antietam sailors] on the way forward as exams arrive in Florida.”
