Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Page 13

  "Wait!" I yelled. "Let me save my wallet!"

  "To hell with your wallet!" they hollered back in unison, all of them grinning with delight.

  They swung me higher and higher and the launch became imminent.

  "Let me save my shoes! I just polished my shoes this morning."

  "To hell with your shoes!"

  "I have money in my wallet!" I was getting desperate.

  The swinging immediately stopped.

  "He has money in his wallet," Nicholson repeated.

  "Grab his wallet, protect his money!" somebody else said.

  Groping hands whipped out my wallet, while a kindly benefactor ripped off my shoes. Around me, I could hear the sounds of other men yelling, followed by the noise of numerous bodies hitting the ocean. I grabbed the arm of one of my tormentors in the hope of taking him with me, but my grip was immediately broken. Vicelike claws encircled my arms and legs, and the swinging began again.

  On the count of three, the men launched me far out into the waters of Pearl Harbor. Spiraling around and around, I somersaulted through the air. My head hit the water first, my sailor hat floating behind me like a strange white Frisbee and my neatly pressed uniform ruined forever. I bubbled back up to the surface and lifted my head out of the water to see the crew watching the show from the edge of the Viperfish's deck. I grabbed my hat before it sank out of sight and swam back with the others to the boat, where several men helped us onto the deck. Standing in front of the crew and dripping salt water from my oil-stained uniform, I enthusiastically shook everybody's hand and felt the crew's camaraderie and acceptance.

  Throwing a newly qualified man overboard, a tradition as old as the dolphins, is an important part of the Submarine Service. In a perverse manner, it signifies the respect from men who, in the years ahead, would depend on the new man's skills when machinery failed and his actions could determine the fate of the crew.

  I have been told of occasions when submarine crews refused to throw newly qualified men overboard, although I never did see this occur while I was on board the Viperfish. That action is the most visible rejection that a potential submariner can receive. It is reserved for the rare man who is felt to be unworthy of the dolphins, even though he received all of the necessary signatures on his qualifications card. The rest of the crew members do not consider him to be a shipmate, and their rejection can be compared to an unseen scarlet letter. The usual result is that the man finally transfers off the boat.

  I called my parents that night to tell them about achieving my dolphins and the unusual ceremony to mark the event. To my surprise, they spoke in somber tones as they congratulated me. Then, they informed me about disruptions among the family in California that were acting to fragment it. The cause was the Vietnam War, they said, and the issue was creating a turmoil that was distressing everyone. My sister's husband, Brad, a man who had served in the Navy many years before and who had encouraged me to join the service, had now become an antiwar activist. He was polarized on the subject, my parents said, and he could not even talk about Vietnam without becoming enraged. They encouraged me not to mention the war if I talked to him in the future. My little brother, Gerry, they continued, was finishing high school and had no interest in joining the Navy or becoming a part of any military service.

  "But South Vietnam is depending on us!" I said, feeling an anger that surprised me. "We promised them, we can't just back out now!"

  "Just don't bring up the subject around Brad," my father said. "You're in the service and you represent the war in a lot of their minds, especially those who are protesting. Don't bring up the subject, and don't try to discuss it if Brad brings it up."

  "The protesters are all smoking pot, or bananas, or whatever they can find! I didn't start the war-"

  "I know that, but it doesn't matter!'

  "It doesn't matter? It's the truth!"

  "It's hard to tell where the truth is, these days. The whole damn country seems to be falling apart. There's a lot of men dying in Vietnam-"

  "And we can't let them die in vain! Haven't you ever heard of the domino theory?"

  I was the hawk, my Mom and Dad were neutral, my sister's husband would tear me apart if I brought up the subject, and my brother considered military service to be undesirable. I thanked them for bringing me up to date about my family and hung up, feeling a sense of hopelessness about the entire subject. Walking back to the Viperfish, I wondered again about our mission, and I worried about how much longer the Vietnam War would last.

  8. Minor failures, major losses

  In California, the hallucinogenic effect of smoking dried banana peels was found to produce a mild "trip," and students at the University of California at Berkeley held mass banana "smokeouts." As interest in another hallucinogenic drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), increased across the country, scientists reported the first evidence of drug-induced chromosomal changes suspected to cause mental retardation in the children of pregnant women who used LSD. After failing to register as a narcotics violator, Dr. Timothy Leary, former Harvard University professor and founder of the LSD religious cult, was arrested by U.S. Customs officials while promoting his beliefs on the use of LSD. New York City's Bellevue Hospital reported the admission of more than 130 LSD users, many suffering from profound terror, uncontrolled violence, and attempted homicide or suicide. A member of California's Neuropsychiatric Institute informed the American College Health Association in Washington, D.C., that 30 percent of the students in certain high schools had become established users of LSD.

  In the Soviet Union, in spite of the numerous problems of radiation, detection, and maintenance of operational capability, the eventual success of the Echo II SSGN testing program established the guided missile submarine in the position of a third order of battle (behind the ballistic missile SSBN Hotel class and the converted Golf and Zulu ballistic missile submarines). When the testing was concluded and the vessels were finally ready for duty, the Soviet crews prepared for prolonged voyages and the fulfillment of their missions in the Pacific Ocean.

  Keiko flew back for a few days on Oahu before the Viperfish left for sea to begin the final deep-sea testing of the Fish and the Special Project system. Her father had reluctantly agreed to our marriage, scheduled for June 1968, and she told me of the disruptions on the campus at USC caused by the antiwar protesters, who were now burning their draft cards and yelling, "Hell no, we won't go!"

  The two of us had some quiet time together, and Keiko came to the pier with the relatives of the crew to watch us leave for our prolonged patrol. I was already depressed about our separation. For Keiko to watch me go, in many ways, intensified the ordeal of leaving her.

  We cleared the Pearl Harbor channel, dropped deep below the surface, and proceeded to the waters off the west coast of the island of Hawaii. The men in the hangar space, working vigorously to prepare our system for its test, checked the tiny high-strength wires welded together to form the cable, measured various test signals provided by the Fish, and tried to make everything work properly. We slowed to all ahead one-third at a depth of three hundred feet and lowered the Fish toward the bottom, nearly fifteen thousand feet below.

  We assumed the usual condition of seemingly motionless existence, our little world of men and machinery moving back and forth over the various peaks, valleys, and plateaus at the bottom of the ocean as we gathered data from the Fish. After a week of testing the system, we rolled the cable back onto the spool just before the sonar operator reported that his BQS-4 sonar system had detected a nearby surface craft.

  "Hammerclaw! Hammerclaw!" the underwater telephone voice from the ship blasted into the control center. This was the call sign designated for the Viperfish.

  Captain Harris grabbed the microphone near the control center and called back a response. He informed the ship that the submarine code-named Hammerclaw was, in fact, nearby. We eased up to periscope depth; the captain and Lt. Comdr. Duane Ryack, the executive officer (XO), raised the two periscopes,
and we waited for the beginning of the choreographed action, created weeks in advance of our rendezvous.

  The plan was quite simple. The surface ship would bring a target with a characteristic shape into our vicinity and prepare to drop it to the bottom near the island of Hawaii. Because the shape could give away the nature of our future mission, it was classified top secret and enclosed in a huge sealed box on the deck of the vessel. A crane on the ship would lower the box into the water. When the bottom of the box was pulled away, the mystery object would disappear into the depths before the ship's crew had a chance to see it. We would search the bottom of the ocean with our Fish after the ship departed the area and, hopefully, identify the object's location and appearance.

  Perhaps the plan was too simple. We continued to cruise slowly at a depth of sixty-five feet, as Captain Harris and the XO watched the ship through our periscopes and called out her every move to us.

  "They have raised the box off the side of the ship and it is now being lowered to the water," Captain Harris called. He clicked the periscope to higher power and narrowed his eyes. "The box is now in the water, the release is imminent."

  A few moments passed, and Commander Ryack called out from the port periscope, "They have released the object and they are lifting the box off the water."

  One of the officers suddenly exclaimed, "Oh, my God!" as the other shouted, "I cannot believe this…the target is floating."

  They stared at each other as a voice from the ship's radiotelephone boomed into our control center.

  "Now, Hammerclaw, Hammerclaw! There will be a delay in the dropping of the target. Repeat, delay."

  The problem was the density of the object. Whoever had prepared it had neglected to determine whether the density of the thing was greater than the density of the ocean water it was to displace. Unfortunately for the secrecy of the entire operation, the object was too light to sink. The shape that nobody was supposed to see was floating at the side of the ship while the crane operators, deckhands, and everybody else stared at it.

  After the thing had been fully observed by everyone on the ship, her crew hauled it back to the deck and set about furiously wrapping it with heavy chains and even a couple of anchors for added weight. When the object was finally covered with enough junk to sink a battleship, they shoved the entire mess overboard and it immediately sank out of sight. We heard a sad "Farewell to Hammerclaw" over our underwater telephone as the ship turned away and prepared to take on board a naval intelligence team, scrambled to the area on an intercept vessel to address the massive breach of security. The word later filtered down to us that every man on the ship was interrogated in an intensive debriefing process during the Navy's struggle to negate security leaks that could compromise our mission.

  We lowered the Fish thousands of feet out of the Viperfish and began searching the bottom again. Locked in our motionless world once again, we stood watches, ate our meals, watched movies, occasionally showered, and wondered what the shape could be.

  Several of the crew and I were sitting in the dining area when photographer Robbie Teague walked in with a handful of 8 x 10 glossy black-and-white photos and an excited but secretive expression on his face. All of us liked Robbie; he was a small fellow with a quiet and pleasant manner. He conscientiously worked to generate the highest-quality pictures that our equipment could produce.

  "What do you have there, Robbie?" Sandy Gallivan asked, look- ing at the photographs.

  "Interesting pictures?" I chimed in.

  "Dirty pictures from Tijuana?" Birken asked, with raised eyebrows and a grin.

  Robbie laid the pictures on the table and we all gathered around.

  "We have found our target!" he said, his voice charged with excitement. "The guys in the hangar are pretty excited."

  As we looked at the pictures, Gallivan asked the obvious question.

  "These are great pictures, Robbie, but where's the target?"

  Robbie looked surprised and then offended. "It's right there!" He pointed at the corner of the nearest picture. "It's right next to the anchor and chain you can see here in the corner!"

  "All I see is an anchor and chain," I said.

  "And mud." Birken added.

  Robbie straightened his short frame and tried to look indignant.

  "You know we can't show you the actual target, the skipper won't allow it. It's top secret!" he said. "But, we found it!"

  "Great!" Birken said as he turned to leave the area. "I'm going to hit the rack."

  "Robbie, what are we looking for?" I asked.

  He pointed at his pictures again. "The shape, the target, the thing we just-"

  "Not that, Robbie, what is the real thing? What are we getting ready for?"

  He studied Marc and me for a moment, and finally answered, "Everything is so goddamn secret that even I don't know what we're doing. And I'm part of the Special Project team. Okay, I know the shape, but I don't think this thing is the real target. I think our real target, whatever it is that we are going to be looking for out there, has yet to be defined."

  He glanced around us, ensuring that the room was empty, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "Even the civilians in the hangar don't know, if you can believe that. Even the officers in the wardroom don't know. The captain and the XO are the only ones who have a clue and sometimes I wonder if even they know the whole story. My guess is that this is a project in evolution."

  The next day, we lost the Fish. Two days later, we lost our nuclear reactor.

  The problem with the Fish was the cable and its assembly design, which brought together many strands of wire. Each wire was constructed with extraordinary tensile strength and flexibility to withstand the many flexings associated with wrapping it around the spool, but when two strands were welded together, a weak spot was generated. As the long cable was rolled around the spool, some of the strands broke, which created a snarl of wire that prevented us from pulling the Fish all the way back into the boat.

  Having an immovable long cable, extending from our belly, attached to an extremely sensitive and expensive device jammed with electronics was a disaster for the testing program. The civilians and Special Project officers grappled with the dilemma but told the rest of us nothing. Finally, they removed the cable from its attachment point on the spool, and the entire assembly, including the Fish, was dropped to the ocean floor thousands of feet below the Viperfish.

  Although there were no announcements to the rest of us, the glum demeanor of those associated with the Fish left no doubt as to the outcome of their efforts. The Viperfish had been budgeted for a total of five Fish, and we had carried two; the $55 million allowance for our backup Fish suddenly appeared to be money well spent. We turned and headed in the direction of Pearl Harbor.

  On watch two days later, I was sitting in front of the reactor control panel as we dropped down about two hundred and fifty feet and steamed along at full power. I logged in the initial set of reactor readings and then sat back in my chair to scan the meters showing everything of significance about our nuclear plant.

  Suddenly, the shrieking noise of multiple reactor alarms blasted me from my seat. As I always did when the reactor control panel turned into a maze of flashing red lights, I stood up, kicked over the coffeepot near my foot, and started hitting various switches across the panel. One of the nuclear machinist mates, Billy Elstner, sitting below us in his tight corner of the lower-level engine room, knew instantly from the rain of coffee on his head that a major problem was developing in the maneuvering room.

  "The reactor is shut down!" I hollered. Searching the flashing red lights across the panel for any clue as to what had happened, I felt certain that this was another damnable drill. Admiral Rickover's crew of "NR boys" from the Naval Reactor Division in Washington was scheduled to test our knowledge after we returned to Pearl Harbor, and I figured Captain Harris was throwing another nuclear test our way to prepare us.

  After announcing the shutdown to the control center, Lt. John Pintard, eng
ineering officer of the watch, yelled from his position behind me, "What is the cause of the shutdown?"

  "No indication, sir!" I hollered back, searching for any abnormalities. "Initiating emergency reactor start-up!"

  "Very well!" Pintard said, watching the start-up process begin.

  I began flipping switches to bring the reactor back up to power. Donald Svedlow, sitting next to me, raced his hands back and forth across his electrical panel and opened circuit breakers throughout the engine room as the steam pressure feeding his turbogenerators began to drop.

  "Rig ship for reduced power!" crackled out of the ship's loud-speakers. The crew ran around the boat and turned off power-consuming equipment to conserve energy. As the air conditioner compressors were de-energized and the cool air in the ventilation pipes became humid and warm, the engine room began to heat up.

  The reactor fission level finally started to increase as I continued the effort to restart the plant. Meanwhile, everybody scouted around the compartment and searched the engine-room electronic systems for any clue as to why the shutdown happened. Just as I brought the reactor power back into heat-producing capability again, Rossi showed up in the maneuvering room.

  "What shut us down?" Pintard asked.

  "No clue, sir," Rossi said. "The instrumentation showed no abnormality. Nothing in the-"

  He was interrupted by another blast of alarms from my panel. The reactor had shut down again.

  "Reactor shutdown, sir!" I hollered to the EOOW, as I kicked the empty coffeepot.

  I immediately initiated the emergency start-up operation, while the chief of the boat from the control center announced over the loudspeakers, "Surface! Surface! Surface!"

  "What the hell is going on?" Rossi exclaimed, as he spun around and left the maneuvering room to search our electronic systems for some indication of why we kept shutting down.