Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Page 14

  Our engine-room loudspeakers carried Captain Harris's voice: "This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill!"

  The Viperfish, angling steeply upward as we thundered to the surface, finally broke through and immediately began to roll heavily in the turbulent ocean. The temperature in the engine room quickly climbed to more than 100 degrees, and our uniforms became drenched in sweat.

  "Starting up, again, sir!" I called out, as I flipped more switches and turned the levers controlling the reactor.

  "Moving to battery power, sir!" Svedlow called out as he slammed open more circuit breakers throughout the engine room.

  As the fission level began to climb, we heard Rossi hollering from the passageway that nothing was wrong, that all instruments showed normal reactor operations.

  The alarms suddenly fired again, with red lights pulsating all over the panel.

  "We're down again, sir!" I yelled.

  "What the hell is this?" Pintard roared, his eyes darting back and forth from my panel to Svedlow's panel in search of clues.

  Before I could even think about trying to start the reactor again, numerous changes within the pressurized-water reactor system showed that I was rapidly losing all control of the reactor.

  "She's shutting down more, sir!" I called out.

  "Goddamnit, she's shutting all the way down!" Pintard hollered.

  I grabbed my levers and tried to stop the accelerating shut-down. I hollered "Mr. Pintard!" and, standing in front of the panel, pointed speechless at the rapidly changing indicators. At that moment, I clearly had no control of the systems that determine the reactor fission levels.

  Although I had once thought I would never be required to take the next action, I reached over to the panel and grabbed the large steel protective guard enclosing the biggest switch on the board.

  "Permission to SCRAM the plant, sir!" I yelled as loudly as possible, and Pintard immediately hollered back, "SCRAM the god-damn plant!"

  I clutched the black switch under the guard. With a quick flip of my wrist, I snapped the switch to the right, which caused the circuits controlling the power levels of the nuclear reactor to initiate a total and complete emergency shutdown.

  "The plant is scrammed and we are totally shut down, sir!"

  "Very well, Dunham," Pintard answered, grabbing his engine room microphone. "Now, the reactor is scrammed, the reactor is scrammed!" he announced.

  For the next ten hours, we rolled around on the surface, the hangar containing the remnants of our lost Fish system and the engine room holding the broken electronics that controlled our reactor. The Viperfish seemed to be falling apart in spite of our best efforts to make everything work properly.

  Rossi and the other men in the Reactor Control Division tore through the circuit drawers with voltmeters and flashlights. They dripped sweat into the circuits and pored over pages of schematics as they tried to find the source of the problem. Most of this time, Captain Harris sat on the steps of the steaming upper-level engine room and watched his men struggling to find out why the Viperfish no longer had a functioning nuclear reactor.

  After several hours of testing and intense thinking, Rossi finally found the problem. A diode, a tiny piece of electronic equipment, worth about forty-nine cents in any Radio Shack store, had burned out. As its internal electron-controlling capability failed, intermittently at first and finally permanently, the cascade of erroneous electronic messages caused the shutdown of circuits in a manner that left no clue. This flawed diode was the sole reason for the strange reactor shutdowns that had brought us to the surface.

  Rossi tore the offending piece of electronic junk out of its soldered connection and replaced it with a new one. A half hour later, the reactor worked perfectly. The prolonged start-up went smoothly, no red lights flashed, no alarms blared, and the machinist mates below the maneuvering room experienced no further dousing of coffee. The turbines were soon screaming, and we were churning up the Pacific. The captain took the Viperfish down to two hundred feet. The air-conditioning systems were turned on, and cool air blew once again. We finished our trip back to Pearl without further problems.

  Keiko had returned to Los Angeles to continue with her studies, so nobody was waiting on the pier for me. I had no time to feel lonely, however, because another group of visitors, the "NR boys from Admiral Rickover," awaited all of us who worked in the nuclear field. We were scheduled to take a Nuclear Reactor (NR) Board examination soon after our return, a regular occurrence on all nuclear submarines of the U.S. Navy. The directive for the examination came from the man in charge of naval nuclear propulsion operations, the man we called the Great White Father.

  Admiral Rickover was widely regarded as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy." Most of us, however, considered him less impressive than did the general public. We were in awe of the man, not so much because of his many accomplishments during the early development of the nuclear Navy but as a result of the raw fear that he engendered in the men working in this field. Our engineering officers often related stories of their interviews with Rickover. They said that he threw chairs across the room, screamed orders not to talk when an airplane was flying overhead, seated the interviewees in unstable chairs, and exhibited enough strange actions to fill a book. Each engineering officer had a different set of stories to tell-the Viperfish's file of interview stories was voluminous. Although they were a source of entertainment during our long patrols, the stories conveyed to us a sense of instability. Further, many of the men on board the Viperfish felt that Rickover had a disturbing tendency to destroy brilliant naval careers without remorse.

  His defenders struggled to justify this seemingly irrational behavior as the admiral's way of prevailing against dissenting opinions, as well as a means of creating stress in order to test the worth of prospective engineers and commanding officers. Although there might have been some element of truth here, we felt that other methods would have been more effective and less destructive to the careers of men who suffered at his hands. When the admiral's substantial political power base was unable to prevent Secretary of the Navy John Lehman from retiring him in the early 1980s, a large number of men whose naval careers had been damaged or terminated felt some measure of satisfaction that his reign was finally over.

  For those of us responsible for the Viperfish's nuclear propulsion system, however, there was the immediate need to pass Admiral Rickover's NR examination. The men sent by Rickover were lean, crisp, and very bright, and I knew that they would ask every conceivable detailed question about our operation of the nuclear plant. There would be no sliding by; as Bruce Rossi warned us, we should answer their questions briskly and present an appearance of having substantial knowledge.

  The three examiners took us, one at a time, into a small conference room in a quiet corner of the submarine base. I was called first and seated on the far side of a large wooden table holding a stack of the Viperfish's reactor plant manuals, while the examiners stared at me in a manner that stimulated raw fear.

  "You are Petty Officer Second Class Roger C. Dunham, right?" the leanest and most intense of them finally asked after an indeterminate period of time.

  "Yes, sir," I answered, bracing myself for the first question.

  "You are one of the Viperfish's nuclear reactor operators, right?"

  "Yes, sir."

  The officer folded his hands on the table in front of him and stared at me again.

  "Good," he said, his face showing a glint of eagerness as he moved in for the kill. "Tell us what your immediate action would be if the reactor's electronic shutdown banks generated an emergency condition from the activation of the CR-389 circuit, causing a sudden loss of reactor power."

  I stared at the man, his words tumbling through my brain, while I tried to remember anything on the Viperfish that resembled a CR circuit. Taking a deep breath, I considered a variety of responses and finally said, "Sir, would you please repeat the question?"

  The man glanced at his NR colleagues and stared back
at me as though I were the most stupid human being he had ever seen.

  "I said, tell us what your immediate action would be if the reactor's electronic shutdown banks generated an emergency condition from the activation of the CR-389 circuit, causing sudden loss of power. Can you do that for us?"

  Rivers of sweat began to flow from my armpits as I realized I didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about. I had never even heard of a CR circuit or anything like it. I had been spending most of the past six months studying shutdowns, dreaming shutdowns, experiencing shutdowns, and his question rang no bells. Three pairs of eyes glared at me from across the table.

  "I believe, sir," I said, struggling to sound intelligent, "that the CR-389 circuit is an anomalous system installed since I last reviewed the reactor plant manuals, and whatever its intended action may have been at the time of its installation, it is not now operational on the Viperfish."

  If my answer was wrong, I was dead. The Viperfish would be zapped of its newest reactor operator. I would be sent to Adak, Alaska, where the frozen tundra and the Rat Islands accumulated destroyed careers, and Keiko and I would freeze to death. It did not enter my mind that these men might not know what they were talking about-they were officers, they were trained in nuclear engineering, and they were sent by the Great White Father. They designed nuclear plants and invented complex questions based on their detailed knowledge.

  They had to know the answers.

  None of these considerations made CR circuits any more apparent to me. As I watched them confer, I hoped that they would turn in my direction and say that they had "the right circuit but, sorry, Petty Officer Dunham, the wrong name." One of them casually flipped open one of the reactor plant manuals and the other two studied the pages before them in silence. They conferred again, slapped the book shut, and then looked at me.

  "Petty Officer Dunham, would you please describe the emergency reactor shutdown system on the USS Viperfish?"

  CR circuits no longer on the table, I took off like somebody had ignited my afterburners. I told them about the circuits, I described what would happen inside the reactor as the result of different signals, I told them about forty-nine-cent diodes that could jeopardize the mission of a multimillion dollar submarine, and I provided heaping servings of fission flux talk that brought smiles to their faces.

  When I finished, I mentioned that I had not heard of the CR-389 circuit but I would be happy to learn everything about it, if they would like to share the information with me.

  The lean one, the most intense one, showed just a trace of uncertainty as he asked, "Your nuclear plant is an S5W reactor, right?"

  Stunned, I stared back at him. Almost all of the submarines in the U.S. fleet carried the S5W reactor. British submarines carried it, and our government had even offered the French an S5W reactor.

  But the Viperfish was different.

  "Actually, sir," I said politely, "we have the S3W plant on the Viperfish. It is a weird system, and it has some technology that is a little out of date, but it does do the job."

  The interview came to a rapid close a few minutes later, following a couple of final cursory questions. I thanked them and left. They remained in the room with our reactor plant manuals as they studied and puzzled over what the Viperfish was all about, including its strange S3W reactor. We were later told that we did well on the exam, and Admiral Rickover indicated to Captain Harris that his crew of nuclear-trained men were a credit to his submarine. The other men and I speculated over cold brews at Fort DeRussy later that night what the response of the Great White Father would be if we were to send the Pentagon a letter suggesting that his NR boys also undergo a board exam.

  We loaded a new Fish, jammed with the same electronics as the one lying somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific, and headed back to sea for a final series of tests. All of us felt certain that, somewhere in the back rooms of the Pentagon, a decision had been made not to try to find our lost Fish. There would have been no way to recover it, and there was little value in knowing where the device, with its miles of cable, had come to rest.

  When we flooded one week later, the depth of the ocean was about three times the crush depth of the Viperfish.

  The flooding resulted from yet another broken system, this one located at the top of the snorkel mast. Because our submarine was without fresh air for prolonged periods of time, the air was regularly contaminated by smoke from cigarettes, pipes, and cigars, as well as gases from record-setting belches and fumes from the sanitary tanks and other significant sources. All of this mandated an occasional cleansing of the atmosphere. Beyond surfacing and pumping in fresh air from our open hatches, the only other way to accomplish this was to raise a pipe, called the snorkel mast, above the ocean surface and suck in fresh air with a huge air pump. This air then circulated throughout the boat, a freshening process that seemed to clear our minds and improve morale.

  Because ocean waves vary in height, a valve-closure system was introduced on the USS Darter (SS 576) in 1957 to shut the opening to the intake pipe if water from a wave flowed over the snorkel. The system worked well most of the time, although we regularly experienced fluctuations in eardrum pressure whenever the valve shut and the air pump created a vacuum. We became proficient at grabbing our noses and blowing to equalize the pressure in our inner ears when this occurred. Anybody failing to take this action was at risk of a ruptured eardrum.

  I was off watch and sound asleep in my rack when the snorkel system failed. We were submerged at periscope depth, with the top of our snorkel mast stuck out of the ocean as the pump circulated air through the vents. A wave lifted over the top of the snorkel and broke off a metallic indicator device at the top of the valve just before the valve slammed shut. The broken piece of metal was immediately wedged inside the seat of the valve, which resulted in an opening that allowed seawater to be sucked rapidly into the Viperfish. As the weight of the water (more than two thousand pounds in the main induction pipe alone) added to the weight of the boat, we immediately dropped farther under the surface and continued to suck in more seawater, which, of course, made us heavier and dropped us even deeper.

  The first indication that I had of a problem was the blast of cold ocean water spraying against the right side of my head and covering my pillow, mattress, and blanket. My eyes flew open. Bolting upright, I smashed my head into the underside of the rack above me and heard Chief Mathews announce, "Surface, surface, surface!" over the boat's loudspeaker system. As I leaped out of my rack, the bow began pointing steeply upward and I could hear the roaring noise from the blowing of our ballast tanks.

  Captain Harris was urgently awakened by Commander Ryack, who tapped him on the shoulder.

  "Captain," Ryack said, "we're having a bit of a problem in the control room." As the captain swung his feet to the deck and stood up, he noticed that he was ankle deep in water.

  We quickly surfaced. As the top of the snorkel cleared the surface of the ocean, water stopped pouring out of our ventilation vents. The ballast control operator's quick corrective action of turning off the main induction pump after seeing it fill with water (visualized through a tiny window called the bulls-eye, designed for this purpose) probably saved the Viperfish from sinking. At the very least, he saved a prolonged period of shipyard repairs.

  So, we had another cleanup operation, this one involving the washing and drying of electronic equipment that, unfortunately, was lying in the vicinity of the ventilation vents. The radiomen were especially upset by the damage to their delicate receivers, several of which received considerable saltwater contamination.

  I pulled out my pillow and blankets to air dry them, and several other men repaired damage to personal items, such as books and pictures, stored in their racks. I tucked clean sheets around my mattress and then turned my attention to the battery well under the crew's berthing passageway. I was aware of saltwater and electrochemical conversions, the patterns of chlorine gas generation, and the deadly effects of the gas on living tissue.
As I walked toward the hole leading to the battery, I noted that, fortunately, the area was dry in spite of the flooding, but I wondered about the consequences of a few thousand gallons of seawater pouring into the battery well should a more substantial event occur. I also wondered how quickly 120 men could escape a submarine filling with chlorine gas.

  The failures of machinery on the Viperfish affected our psyches far more than our substance. Although Captain Harris's calm style of leadership rallied us to have faith in our future, we did not accomplish this without some collective soul searching. The unpredictable, random nature of the failures and the potentials for disaster from such tiny malfunctions created special concerns. If a couple of small wires on a cable could cost us weeks of work and the loss of a Fish worth millions of dollars, if a tiny diode could shut down a powerful nuclear reactor and stop a submarine, and if an indicator device no bigger than a finger could cause a serious flood within the internal spaces of the Viperfish, what would happen if something of real significance went wrong?

  Again and again, it came down to the spirit, the training, and the quality of the crew that made the difference. Machinery fails, and anything as complex as an operational nuclear submarine can have many failures. When wires break, diodes burn out, and water floods into the boat, the reactions of the crew, borne by training and spirit, determine the outcome. As we completed the final preparations for our secret mission, it was my hope that the remarkable quality of the Viperfish crew would allow us to prevail during the months ahead, no matter what dangers awaited us beneath the sea.

  9. The domain of the Golden Dragon

  The first six months of 1968 brought armed conflict and disaster to ships and submarines around the world. In January, the Soviet Union protested the dropping of eight time-bombs by "American jets" on the Soviet freighter Pereslavl-Zalessky in Haiphong Harbor, North Vietnam, that reportedly damaged the ship's engine room. Within a day of this event, bombs from U.S. military planes struck the Chinese Communist ship Hongqi-158 in the North Vietnamese port of Cam Pha. Several crewmen were wounded, and the vessel was seriously damaged.