Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Read online

  After using the commode, I began the sequence of valve operations to flush it. Opening the first valve allowed one to see the sloshing fluids in the dark recesses in the tank. I immediately discovered that it was necessary to avoid breathing the concentrated odors of methane, hydrogen, and other explosive gases bubbling forth from below. I then turned the other valves behind the commode in exactly the correct sequence as I had been taught, and seawater finally flushed through the bowl for a thorough washing-out operation.

  Before I had time to reflect on my success at flushing, Larry Kanen entered the room with a rush and began scurrying around, sealing drain valves in the sinks, showers, and decking.

  "What are you doing, Larry?" I asked.

  "Gonna blow the head, Roger!" he announced with remarkable enthusiasm.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was obvious that he was intent on completing his job as quickly as possible.

  "Do I have time to rinse my hands?"

  "Better hurry! Gotta blow the head, right away!"

  Kanen finished his work, sealing every valve in the head. A few seconds later, a hissing, gurgling sound began to emerge from the drains as he turned a compressed-air valve to blow high-pressure air into the sanitary tank, some of which leaked up from, around the valves and back into the head. As the pressure in the tank increased, the contents of the tank blasted out into the ocean.

  The odor filling the head from the bubbling drains was intense. Fighting back a gagging feeling, I returned to my rack and yanked the curtain across the opening. When I took a couple of deep breaths, I discovered that the escape was short-lived. Fifty feet in front of my rack was a vent line designed to relieve the pressure remaining in the tank after the flushing. For the next fifteen minutes, as Kanen vented the tank, the hissing gas that smelled like a nightmare concoction of rotting eggs filled our sleeping area. It penetrated the entire compartment-our bunks, our hair, our nostrils, and everything we owned.

  We spent two more weeks in the waters west of Oahu to practice diving down to the level of our test depth and climbing back to the surface again. With radical movements of the rudder and control planes, the captain performed various "angles and dangles" that placed the Viperfish every conceivable position that a submarine could manage. We tested each piece of equipment for any flawed circuits or machinery that could endanger our lives or limit the success of our mission. The sonarmen adjusted their controls as they listened to the strange sounds of whales moving through the ocean, the torpedomen and fire control technicians calibrated their equipment, and the nukes shut down and started up their turbogenerators and the nuclear reactor. The newer men on the ship became better acquainted with the veterans, and we all learned the essentials of living, training, and working together in the claustrophobic quarters of the Viperfish.

  In the hangar compartment, the Special Project engineers, strolling around, looked down from time to time into the huge hole that penetrated the decking. Commander Spiegel and Lieutenant Dobkin worked with the civilians and photographer Robbie Teague to ensure that the Fish equipment worked properly. They weren't hostile to the rest of us; they were just private.

  If one of the regular crew came by, they lowered their voices. They nodded to the crewman and said, "Hi." The crewman nodded back and said, "Hi," and that was the end of the conversation. If any of us lingered, a heavy silence descended over the hangar until the outsider left the immediate area.

  On one occasion, while I was struggling to learn a particularly difficult system in the hangar, I asked Lieutenant Dobkin a question relating to their work. The question was apparently too sensitive because his response amounted to a lecture on the nature of the "silent service."

  "Submarines are the silent service because we remain silent about these kinds of things," he said, his eyes staring straight at me before finally turning away to join his civilian associates. I felt a flash of anger and mentally debated why our Special Project wasn't like any other part of our submarine-everything else we worked with was also a part of the silent service. I returned to my qualifications work with silent service philosophies moving through my mind. Finally resolving the problem, I decided that the Special Project was, simply enough, top secret and therefore different from everything else we did that was just secret. Years later, I would discover that the Special Project was, in fact, compartmentalized top secret; not even an individual with a top secret clearance could learn the details of our mission.

  Six days before we returned to Pearl Harbor, the word spread through the boat that we would be starting torpedo-firing exercises. This was exactly what I had been waiting for since the day I volunteered for submarine duty. Shooting torpedoes was a fundamental operation of submarines, an essence of sorts. It provided for the boat's survival and established her effectiveness as a military machine. After several hours had passed with no further information about the exercise, I climbed into my rack and began fading off to sleep.

  The captain's voice suddenly blared over the loudspeaker system: "Now, man battle stations torpedo! Man battle stations torpedo!"

  I popped my eyes open, leaped to the deck, and ran at top speed down the narrow passageway in the direction of the engine room. At the same time, the other men jumped out of their racks and raced toward their battle stations. Everybody dodged each other in a state of high-speed, controlled movement to reach their assigned positions in the Viperfish. I ducked under the sharp-edged valves in the tunnel over the reactor and climbed through the watertight door opening to the engine room and my battle station: the turbine throttle wheels that Jim and I had controlled when we left Pearl Harbor. Jim was nowhere to be seen, and so I placed my hands on both wheels and waited for the excitement to begin.

  In the control center, two hundred feet in front of the throttles, the captain looked through the periscope, spotted the torpedo recovery ship that had arrived from Pearl Harbor to help us, and ordered the exercise to begin. Several junior officers, working on their torpedo qualifications, moved through the established routine and prepared to fire our torpedoes from the hangar compartment in the bow.

  While they performed their work, I sat stiffly upright in front of the large rubberized engine-room throttles and wondered when something would happen. Surrounded by the other men in the engine room, all of whom were also waiting for something to happen, I was unaware of the frenzied activity in the control center as the torpedo fire control technicians, torpedomen, and officers tracked and plotted the shoot. Half an hour later, I turned to ask the engineering officer when we were going to fire the first torpedo. At that instant, I felt a slight shudder of the Viperfish's hull and heard the distant "whooshing" of a missile being launched into the ocean.

  That was all there was to the shot. I stood up, gripped the throttle wheels, and waited expectantly for the control center to order sudden changes in our speed. Remarkably, the bell indicator remained silent, and there were no further orders. None of us did anything except stare at our control panels as the captain announced over the speaker system, "Now, surface, surface, surface."

  With the usual amount of gurgling sounds, we broke the surface. After the first of an endless number of huge waves hit the side of the Viperfish, we began aimlessly wandering around searching for the torpedo we had just fired. It was designed to run a specific distance before running out of fuel and floating to the surface, where it could be recovered and fired again-a sort of Navy recycling system. The torpedo was also programmed to release a brilliant yellow dye to make it easier to spot. The captain and officers who had fired the shot searched through their binoculars from their vantage point at the top of the sail, sixty-five feet above the water. The two lookouts in the back of the cockpit scanned the whitecaps in the opposite direction with their binoculars. Somewhere near the horizon, the crew of the heaving torpedo recovery ship also scanned the ocean for any trace of the torpedo.

  In the maneuvering area of the engine room, we began to feel like we were dying. I knew there was going to be
a major problem, after the first twenty minutes on the surface, when I sensed the beginning stages of a sickening pain in the center of my abdomen. I looked down at the black coffee splashing over the top of my cup and felt a surge of nausea, immediately followed by a sweating attack of vertigo. Our rounded hull, designed for submerged operations, did little to diminish the effects of the powerful waves. Each time we rolled thirty degrees to the left or right, we instantly came up and rolled almost as far in the other direction.

  The waves continued to batter against us with increasing force. As we rolled violently back and forth, pungent oil fumes from the bilge water permeated the hot and humid air around us. My throat constricted from the gagging odor of the fumes and my eyes blurred, but I tightened my sweaty fists around the throttle wheels.

  Randy Nicholson, his face pale and showing stress, sat behind me and watched the reactor control panel pitching up and down in front of him. Next to him was the powerful frame of Donald Svedlow, a longtime veteran of the Submarine Service, who also looked like he wanted to be anywhere but on the surface of the ocean. Our sweating engineering officer, Lt. (jg) Douglas Katz, paced a fixed pattern in the corner of the maneuvering area. His skin was a sickly green color, and his tortured eyes repeatedly gazed across the engine room as though he were searching for the horizon.

  My dungaree shirt turned a dark blue from sweat as I fought the nausea. I began repeatedly swallowing and belching, and there was a ringing sound in my ears. I prayed for them to find the torpedo, and then I prayed for them to forget the torpedo. Finally, I cursed all torpedoes as I visualized helicopters flying in to lift me off the boat.

  Glancing at the men around me, I wondered who was going to lose it first. The sloshing of coffee from my cup onto the decking created curious miniature rivers moving in opposite directions in response to the roll of the boat. I began to eye the tall metal trash can clamped next to the throttle wheels, and I wondered how I could quickly utilize it without attracting everybody's attention. It seemed reasonable that throwing up should be a private thing, but there was no way to leave my battle station to seek the relative isolation of the head. I thought about the civilians in the hangar compartment and grimaced at the thought of their breakfasts being lost into the huge hole in the center of their Special Project area.

  Forty-five minutes into the search for the wayward torpedo, Lieutenant Katz cleared his throat a couple of times and left the area. He mumbled something about checking out the vacuum in one of our condensers.

  "He's gonna puke," Svedlow grumbled after Katz's staggering form was out of sight. "He's gonna put his head into the bilge and he's gonna search for Ralph O'Roark."

  "We're all gonna puke, bruddah," Nicholson said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "It's just a matter of time."

  "Goddamn forward pukes and their goddamn forward puke torpedoes," Svedlow growled, followed by the longest belching sound I had ever heard.

  "The forward pukes are gonna make us puke," Nicholson said, grimly. "I'll pay for the goddamn torpedo myself. Just dive this thing and send me the bill."

  Incredibly, Svedlow then pulled out a pack of cigars from his shirt pocket and asked if anybody wanted a smoke. Nicholson grabbed one, and soon the entire maneuvering area of the engine room carried a layer of pale cigar smoke mixing with the odors of diesel oil fumes and sweat. The psychology of cigar smoke at a time of end-stage nausea was not clear to me, but it appeared to be a well-established practice.

  My mouth became dry, and a terrible taste began to emerge from the back of my throat. I turned to Svedlow, "Got an extra cigar?" I asked.

  As the smoke became thicker, we all heard the upper engine-room watch shouting in the direction of our starboard condenser. I looked down the passageway, where the watchstander, a burly machinist mate with an evil grin on his face, was leaning over the hole in the deck leading to the bilge below.

  "He ain't down there, sir!" he hollered at the top of his lungs.

  The machinist mate waited a moment and his grin became bigger. "Ralph O'Roark ain't down there, Mr. Katz!"

  The distant voice of an anguished engineering officer, floating into the thick air around us, shouted something appropriately obscene to the machinist mate. The prolonged vomiting sounds of "O'Roark!" then carried up to us, as a group of men from various corners of the upper-level engine room quickly gathered around the hole.

  "He ain't down there, sir!" they shouted in unison.

  We continued searching for the lost torpedo for another fifteen minutes as hundreds of waves battered the hull. Puffing my cigar furiously, I tried to concentrate on peaceful green pastures, a walk in the woods, clouds in the sky, anything besides throwing up.

  It was hopeless.

  Like a malignant epidemic spreading through the boat, the condition of terminal vomiting finally struck everyone in the maneuvering area, including myself. By the time the captain gave up on finding the torpedo and we dove into the quiet waters below, almost the entire crew had been informed that Ralph O'Roark, the venerable ghost of American submarine bilges, was not and would never be "down there."

  We steamed up the Pearl Harbor channel a few days later, after confirming that the Viperfish was operational. My qualifications, progressing rapidly, were almost to the halfway mark. The maze of propulsion systems in the engine room became easier to learn when the equipment was in one piece. The captain was satisfied, the Fish was ready for future testing, and the Viperfish didn't have any leaks.

  As soon as Marc Birken, working with the other electricians, had pulled the huge shore power cables from the pier to the Viperfish, we both raced up to the barracks, showered, and changed into civvies for a night in Waikiki. Even though we had been at sea for less than three weeks, it was a strange feeling to be suddenly exposed to the open spaces of Honolulu with its kaleidoscope of lights and human activity. Marc and I slowly cruised up and down Kalakaua Avenue in his TR-3, and I felt the impact of the scanty swimsuits worn by the hordes of beautiful women. Even more amazing to me was the mental effect of seeing such ravishing femininity after weeks of confinement. It was a shocking kind of transition, going from the orderly life on the submarine to the females and music in the nightclubs of Honolulu.

  We made our usual bar stop at Fort DeRussy before walking to the Waikiki strip. Soon, we were making moves on the dance floor at a popular nightclub near the Ilikai Hotel. The first woman I danced with was an attractive blonde who casually whispered in my ear that she was a "WestPac widow."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," I told her sympathetically. The newspapers were filled with stories of men dying in Vietnam, many of them in the Navy and attached to the Western Pacific (WestPac) forces, and she was obviously trying to adjust to her loss. We danced for a few more minutes before I asked her if she was getting along okay.

  "Getting along okay?" She backed away and looked at me.

  "After the loss of your husband," I said, beginning to have an uncomfortable feeling.

  Her voice lost its soft tone. "I'm a WestPac widow. You don't know what that means? My husband's on patrol off Vietnam for the next five or six months."

  I stared at her as the meaning sank in. Although the music was still playing, I escorted her back to her seat without a word.

  She looked up at me, angry now, her voice becoming harsh. "I wasn't enjoying the dance anyway," she said. "Besides, you smell like diesel oil."

  Fuming, I returned to my seat and looked at the expensive pineapple shell filled with watered-down rum in front of me. I grabbed the drink and sipped the miserable mixture until our waitress stopped by and placed change on the receipt tray from the forty dollars I had handed her. Before I had a chance to reach for the tray, her long blond hair passed in front of my face and the money was suddenly gone.

  Marc caught up with me as I stormed out of the nightclub. "Hey, bruddah, you okay?" he asked.

  "I'm okay! I'm just fine! One gal's playing around on her husband. Another steals our money. These people don't care that we're working
our tails off for our country."

  "Wait a minute," Marc said. "Those are probably just a couple of losers. I'm sure we can-"

  "Besides, the gal I was dancing with told me that I smelled like diesel oil."

  He looked at me and smiled. "She said that? Really?"

  "Really."

  "Well, my girl was much more polite. She told me that I had a 'curious' smell. A mixture of something strange with something else strange. I noticed she didn't want to dance too close, either"

  "We showered," I said. "We tried to get clean."

  "We can't smell that bad. I used plenty of soap and after-shave lotion."

  We both agreed that there was little promise for a midnight tour of the Viperfish and that the entire evening had been about as much fun as blowing the sanitary tanks. Declaring a major defeat for the military, we drove back to the Enlisted Men's Club of Pearl Harbor. We found a couple of comfortable chairs, listened to some superb music, and became obliterated in the company of Old Granddad until the early morning hours.

  The next day, Captain Gillon announced that a swimming pool would be built on the topside deck of the Viperfish. After we stopped laughing, he explained the problems of rotating a gigantic submarine when she is barely moving through the water.

  Throughout our sea trials, it had been apparent that the submerged Viperfish was unable to turn efficiently in a small space at slow speed. Handling like an airplane, with the responsiveness of her control systems dependent on speed, she was sluggish and lethargic when she slowed to less than three knots. To resolve this problem, the shipyard workers built a hump on top of the original hump. The double-humped submarine looked even more bizarre than the original. The lower hump was part of the primary bat-cave structure; the new hump was simply a bow thruster, or water diverter, that had been designed to squirt jets of seawater out of either side of the hump. This gave the Viperfish a jet assist, so to speak, to improve her turns at slow speed. To force the water through the openings, a huge motor, which looked like a fat cannon, was welded to the front of the hump and aimed straight ahead.