Last Updated on May 23, 2026 by admin
The USS Carl Vinson came back to North Island in mid-May after a seven-month deployment.
There is a kind of photograph that gets taken at every homecoming — sailors in dress whites coming down the gangway, families on the pier with hand-lettered signs, children in their best dresses sprinting the last fifty feet.
The photograph that ran on the Navy Region Southwest social media page on Wednesday afternoon does not contain a child.
It contains a small gray cat in a soft-sided carrier, on a folding camp chair, on the pier, being held very steadily by a woman in a sun hat who is married to a hospital corpsman second class named Lin Sanchez.
Pico is two years old. She is, by every account, the corpsman’s cat — adopted from the San Diego Humane Society in 2024, three months before the Carl Vinson sailed. Pico has not, in her lifetime, met the corpsman’s husband for longer than fourteen days at a stretch.
The husband — the man in the sun hat is his sister; he was driving up from the parking structure — arrived at the camp chair at approximately ten-eleven a.m. He was in his Type III service uniform. He squatted down to the carrier with his right knee on the asphalt.
The cat did not, in the carrier, do anything dramatic.
The cat looked at him for approximately three seconds.
Then she put her right front paw, very deliberately, against the mesh — against, specifically, his left thumb — and kept it there.
He did not move it for a minute and a half.
The photograph is on the corpsman’s social media page now. The caption reads only: Came home to my wife. Came home to my cat.
The cat is in a kitchen in Coronado now. The carrier is in the closet. The corpsman is unpacking.
Pico is, again, on the kitchen counter, which is normally not allowed. The corpsman has not, this week, mentioned it.