When she was growing up in New Jersey, Sherry Lynne White had a couple of ambitions. First, she wanted to serve in the U.S. Navy, like her father and her cousins; second, she wanted to pose for Playboy, like the beautiful women in her dad's copies of the magazine. And now she's done both--which has caused quite a stir on a naval base in Hawaii, where female sailors aren't supposed to pose for the most popular men's magazine available in the base store. "It's OK for men to look at, but it's not OK for the women to pose in," says Naval Information Systems Technician Second Class (that's computer whiz to us civilians) Sherry, who first heard that her superiors were displeased when Playboy ran a photo of her in February's Grapevine. "They gave me the Junior Sailor of the Year award that day, and two hours later they gave me a letter of instruction [a nonpunitive censure] for appearing in Grapevine. And they asked me to contact Playboy and ask them not to print any more pictures of me." She contacted us, all right--not to end her association with the magazine but to turn up the heat on a modeling and acting career that began a couple of years ago, when she began to work hard at getting in shape and found that she enjoyed bikini contests and calendar modeling. Since then, she's made appearances on Baywatch Hawaii and in a Navy commercial directed by Spike Lee. Now Sherry, who after eight years on duty is leaving the service in October (maybe sooner, depending on the fallout from this pictorial), is ready to pursue her new career. "I used to be a tomboy," she says, "and when I first got into the Navy, I loved blood and guts. But by the end of my fourth year, I turned into a girl somehow. I don't know what happened, but I'm going to go with it."
