Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Page 11

"Jesus, I'm gonna die!" another exuberant voice called out.

  "Make it go forward, slowly!" Nicholson hollered from the other side of the dining area.

  "I'm working on it, I'm working on it," Kanen said, his voice harassed. "Hang on a second, you bunch of horny bastards."

  The shower water began flowing in the correct direction again, and we all leaned forward for a closer look. Kanen moved the film slowly, one frame at a time as we waited and waited. After about five long minutes, we saw the shower door begin to open in slow motion and all of us prepared to savor the moment.

  The actress moved halfway out of the shower before we discovered that she was actually clothed in some kind of flesh-colored towel that couldn't be visualized at normal projector speed.

  "She has a towel on!" Richard Daniels exclaimed with disappointment.

  "They cheated us!" several others moaned.

  The frustration could not have been more complete. Kanen chose that moment to slow the movement of the film, finally freezing her in the center of the screen for us to enjoy watching whatever we could see. Suddenly, without warning, the center of the towel began turning a brown-black color from the heat of the projector light. Like a torch, the projector burned a hole right through the image.

  "You're burning up the movie!" somebody yelled as we watched the meltdown of our actress.

  "Dammit, Kanen, you just fried the lady!" another voice called out, while Kanen cursed and struggled to move the picture ahead at normal speed.

  "Sorry, I was doing the best I could," Kanen said. Groups of men left the room in disgust-cursing Hollywood for faked nudity, cursing Kanen for melting the best part of the movie, and cursing the fact that this was the only theater in our submerged town. About half of us remained in our seats and hoped for other scenes that could be supplemented by our imagination. We also felt a little guilty. When the movie was watched by other submariners in other oceans, the most exciting scene would not only be fake, but it would be vaporized.

  I returned to my rack later that night and slept peacefully until the next watch in front of the reactor control panel. Free of nightmares, my dreams were filled with beautiful naked women jumping in and out of showers, my sleep was peaceful, and the long process of reaching for dolphins continued without pause.

  As we moved closer to Oahu, the training watches in front of the reactor panel continued generating additional disasters that gradually, to my amazement, began to seem almost routine. As I sat in the chair before the wall of meters, red lights, and alarms, it gradually dawned on me that only a limited number of conditions could snarl the system. One engine room, one reactor-how many things could possibly go wrong? Only so many red lights and only a specific number of alarms could blast out warnings of new havoc and destruction. Once each red light or row of red lights had flashed, once the buzzing and screaming alarms had sounded, and once I had shut down the reactor and brought it back on line over and over again, there was not much left to happen. Although I still bolted to my feet when red lights and alarms announced an emerging disaster and still felt the rush of adrenaline and pounding of my heart when the lights in the engine room abruptly went out or the circuit breakers flashed their electrical arcs, my actions started to become more automatic and much less stressful.

  A further boost to my increasing confidence occurred during the final days of the training cruise. Randy Nicholson, who always stood behind me in the maneuvering area, actually began to treat me like someone approaching an equal, rather than like a trainee. He encouraged me, rather than directed me, as we plotted courses of action in response to the system failures Rossi and others were throwing at us, and increasingly showed approval of my work. I began to feel the reactor system. It was in my mind-all the individual pieces of machinery interrelating and working together — and I began actually to like the work I was doing.

  I also discovered that teamwork was as essential to successful operation of the reactor system as it was to so many other activities throughout the Viperfish. In the cramped maneuvering room, sitting next to the trainee electrician learning to control his monster of a panel, I learned the strengths and weaknesses of the men around me. Two electricians, the stoic Donald Svedlow and the quiet Brian Lane, watched the electrical panel during the training activities as I watched mine, each of us waiting for the next disaster. If I lost the reactor for any reason, the power for the steam turning their turbogenerators would disappear rapidly; if they lost electricity for any reason, my reactor would not work properly. I gave them power for their electricity, they gave me electricity to control my power-we depended on each other. We learned to synchronize our activities, to warn each other if anything we were doing would clobber whatever the other was doing, and to understand that symbiosis was the essence of submarine duty.

  Most important, I had trust in the other men. When Svedlow found his electrical meters going wild and the submarine plunging into darkness, he showed a cool, analytical capability to decide what was going wrong and what could be done to resolve the problem. Often, he didn't even stand up like I always did when everybody was trying to yell above the screaming alarms. He just flipped his switches in the proper sequence, watched the battery come to life, synchronized high-voltage electrical circuits, and slammed circuit breakers open and shut in the right sequence to resolve the problems. Frequently, when he was finished with the awesome display of his efficiency, he leaned back in his chair, made an obtuse joke about something totally unrelated to the Viperfish's operations, and calmly gazed over the rows of meters under his control.

  Lane had a different style. Quiet most of the time, he rarely said more than a few words about anything, including the electrical control panel and his wife and children in Honolulu. From time to time, a slow smile crossed his generally passive face, and he always flipped the electrical switches with somewhat less authority than Svedlow. He was a serious man. Nothing seemed to faze him, and he rarely joined in the back-and-forth humor that most of us relied on to keep our sense of perspective. The guy didn't cuss or even chew tobacco, and he didn't carouse or drink much alcohol during our ports of call.

  As I moved into the position of running the reactor, the unique personalities among the crew became better known to me. Rossi scared all of us; Chief Jack Morris (one of the veteran electricians) seemed jittery but essentially competent; Lane was the most stable, never reacting much or affected by anything; and Svedlow demonstrated raw capability and authority that impressed everybody.

  One hundred miles east of Oahu, we surfaced onto a glassy-smooth, warm ocean and discovered a shark wedged in our superstructure. From the top of the sail, one of the topside watches spotted the dark gray creature flopping around on the deck with one of its fins inside an opening. Larry Kanen volunteered to climb out the door in the side of the sail and free the creature. While keeping his distance from the rows of impressive and amply displayed teeth, he gingerly leveraged it free, with a long steel pole. By the time the shark slid off the Viperfish and swam away from us, we were ready to dive again and proceed to Pearl Harbor. Nobody thought of taking a picture of the event, but we speculated that it was probably one of the rare times in the history of submarine operations that a full-sized shark had been briefly taken into captivity by a trolling superstructure.

  During the final miles of our submerged voyage from San Francisco, I became aware of my changing perspective about the niceties, the small amenities, that I had always taken for granted before living on the Viperfish. Such food substances as milk and fresh vegetables became increasingly less important when they became unavailable after leaving port. Genuine milk (different from the white powdered variety that tasted unlike any milk I had ever consumed) disappeared first, followed by fresh vegetables and fruit. Meals then consisted of canned, frozen, and prepared food retrieved by the cooks from our refrigerators and mammoth dry-storage compartments for each meal. The fruit stored weeks before in my bunk locker was long gone, and the galley had none to replace it.

  Shower
s no longer seemed as necessary. We all had some degree of body odor, and nobody much cared whether or not someone else smelled good. On top of that basic fact, the physical act of taking a submarine shower is not an event to relish. First, the individual takes off all his clothes in the cold head and finds a convenient place to hang the towel. Next, before his feet turn blue on the frigid steel decking (moist with the contents of various drains that bubbled out when the sanitary tank was last blown), he jumps into the metal stall. Ignoring the clusters of men who are taking care of their toilet needs in the crowded stalls around him, he stands naked and freezing below the shower head. With a bar of soap in hand, he bravely turns on the water.

  A blast of ice water hits him in the face. Clean water on the Viperfish does not come cheaply; every drop is precious. After a quick wetting down, he immediately turns off the water before somebody slaps the side of the stall and yells, "Hey, quit wasting water! Haven't you ever heard of a submarine shower?" Chilled to the bone, he lathers himself and then turns the shower on for a speedy final blast of water (that is finally beginning to warm up) to wash off the soap.

  He jumps out of the stall and dries off before pneumonia bacteria can begin their assault on his freezing body. Finally, just before one of the galley crew comes in and hollers, "Everybody out, I'm gonna blow the head!" he flees in the direction of his rack.

  The briefest of fantasies probably flirts with his mind: What would it be like to take a real shower, just one long steaming hot shower, at home?

  Washing hands before eating was another ritual that faded as we grabbed food before or after standing watch. Working in the engine room, or almost anywhere else throughout the Viperfish, resulted in a substantial accumulation of black grease on hands that gripped pipes, turned valves, and flipped switches. The grease was always there-an unwelcome companion, but one that was ignored because of its constant presence. If it was not convenient to wash our hands, we gave them a quick wipe against our dungarees before sitting down to eat. This token effort removed the largest clumps of foreign matter that might actually affect the taste of the food.

  After leaving the morning watch on the reactor control panel that last day before reaching Pearl Harbor, I discovered we were having sandwiches, make-your-own style, with fresh-baked bread. Each crew member sliced the bread for his own sandwiches. By the time I reached the table, the loaf on the cutting board was about half gone. The remaining half was considerably darker than the other loaves around it. Closer inspection revealed that a layer of grease had accumulated from the many hands gripping the loaf.

  I hesitated briefly, but soon I was sitting with the other men and wolfing down my sandwich. The bread slid easily down my throat, and the greasy grime did not seem to affect the taste to any significant degree.

  Sitting next to me at the table was one of our larger nuke shipmates, a man relatively new to the Viperfish, who was known as Baby Bobbie. Immediately, I noticed his distinctly strong body odor. Everybody smelled bad, but Baby Bobbie, for some reason, always smelled worse. In fact, he smelled so bad that most of us habitually sat as far away as possible when we found ourselves in his presence. I took another bite of my sandwich and eased a couple of inches away from the man. Of course, I could always disguise his odor by lighting a cigar-a good cloud of cigar smoke always seemed to make any odor acceptable.

  That evening, Lt. Comdr. Gerry Young, the Viperfish's engineer, walked me through the engine room, and asked me hundreds of questions about the many pieces of machinery. He seemed happy with my answers and signed off my engineering qualifications card. He then referred me to the captain.

  As the commanding officer, Stuart Gillon held the ultimate authority to grant me the privilege of controlling the nuclear reactor on his submarine. Everything that happened on board, whether or not Captain Gillon was directly involved, was his final and absolute responsibility. It was important to him to pay care- ful attention to the knowledge of the men certified as "qualified." For that reason, I expected an extraordinarily difficult examination about the fine points of reactor operations and the minutiae of the control systems.

  He brought me into his office and politely asked me to sit down across from the tiny table attached to the bulkhead. To my immense surprise, we talked philosophy for the next half hour. Speaking in his characteristic soft voice, he encouraged me to remain at the peak of my knowledge about nuclear operations and educated me about the various antinuclear protests working to disrupt operations involving nuclear machinery.

  "Some of these people are fanatic about their beliefs," he said, describing various protest movements around the United States. "They are looking for anything they can find that incriminates nuclear power, no matter how far from reason their claims may be. A safe nuclear operating program on the Viperfish will help protect the Navy from the claims of these activists."

  We talked about the sinking of the Thresher and discussed reasons for serving on board submarines. He finally dismissed me with an announcement that there was soon going to be a change in command on board the Viperfish. Comdr. Thomas Harris would assume the position of the boat's commanding officer, he said, and would lead the Viperfish into the challenges of the mission awaiting us.

  At the conclusion of the meeting, I was designated an official reactor operator of the USS Viperfish, a title that allowed me the pleasure of standing regular unsupervised watches in front of the reactor panel. No ceremony and not much in the way of congratulations took place. Rather, a simple notation was added to my service record that I was a qualified Viperfish reactor operator and I could now stand watches. Unfortunately, I still had another six months of work on the remaining components of the Viperfish before I could achieve the coveted position of being qualified in submarines. Until that distant day of glory arrived, I was still just a non-qual puke who could, incidentally, now run the reactor.

  That night, we surfaced several miles off Pearl Harbor. Because I was off watch and had nothing to do, I wandered up to the control center and requested permission to "lay to the bridge." I scrambled up the ladder out of the vessel and then continued to climb another sixty-five feet up to the cockpit at the top of the sail. The two lookouts and the OOD, the nuclear-trained Lieutenant Katz, were standing in the cramped space and looking out at the world around them.

  It was a night to empower the soul. The bow of the Viperfish hissed through the glassy black waters, a florescent glow enriching the white foam on either side of her. The sea was calm, there was no pitching or rolling, and we seemed to be gliding across a carpet of black velvet. The moonless sky was filled with a spray of stars. Thirty degrees off our port bow, near the horizon, the distant lights of Honolulu summoned us to her promised pleasures. It was almost a surrealistic spectacle, the magic and the beauty further enhanced by the weeks of confinement within the Viperfish.

  "Got channel fever, Dunham?" Lieutenant Katz finally asked.

  "Channel fever, sir?" I vaguely remembered somebody telling me about the condition, a common affliction at the end of a patrol.

  "Channel fever," one of the lookouts repeated. "Can't go to sleep, can't slow down, can't think, can't do anything of value."

  "You'll feel it more when we've been out longer," Katz said. "A month or two out here and you won't be able to sleep for days before we reach the channel."

  "It's like overdosing on about twenty cups of coffee," the look-out said, putting the binoculars to his eyes and studying the distant lights of Honolulu. "It's a chompin' at the bit to get off the boat."

  "Haven't had any problem, yet," I said, confidently. "Always able to sleep when the time is available."

  After a few more minutes of stars, lights, and florescence, I thanked the three men and left them with their treasure as the Viperfish continued to glide across the waters off Oahu. I stood the mid-watch (midnight to 0400) at the reactor panel and later climbed into my rack for some sleep before we entered Pearl Harbor.

  For the next four hours, I lay in my tiny dark enclosure and st
ared at the aluminum sheet metal four inches away from my face. Unable to sleep, I was feeling the excitement in the air and sensing the tone and enthusiasm of the conversations up and down the passageway of the crew's berthing area. The entire crew of the Viperfish had channel fever, and the only cure was to enter the waters of Pearl Harbor and go ashore to blow off some steam.

  Marc Birken and I sat side by side at the throttle watch as we finally moved up the channel to the submarine base the next morning. Like a couple of excited schoolboys, we both raced up the engine room ladder to the topside deck as the lines were pulled to the pier. Blinking into the bright sunlight, I scanned the crowd of people who had been waiting for our return. Wearing colorful muumuus, wives waved to their husbands as they spotted them climbing from the hatches. Children called to their fathers. A cluster of gold-covered naval officers, in their dress whites, waited to speak with Captain Gillon and the civilian scientists.

  I had no reason to expect that anybody would be waiting for me at the pier. My family was in California, I knew almost nobody in Hawaii, and my only friends were the men on board the Viperfish. The brow, lowered to the boat, connected the pier to our topside deck, and the men began streaming across it to their loved ones.

  "Let's go hit the beach, bruddah," Marc Birken said from my side. His voice sounded different, quieter, his enthusiasm damp- ened by the same feelings that I was experiencing. Although these feelings were completely illogical, it seemed that after we had been at sea for so many weeks and accomplished all of the tasks set before us, somebody should be waiting for our return.

  I turned to Marc and nodded, "It's time to go steaming. You get your miserable shore-power cables connected, and we'll check out what's happening in Waikiki."

  Two months later, the scientists on board hoisted two top secret deep-submergence Fish into the hangar spaces of the Viperfish, and we began loading garbage weights and food stores in preparation for the tests that lay ahead. Again, there was no information provided about our upcoming mission. There were no briefings about our future, and nothing was said about where in the Pacific Ocean we were going.