A underwater black hole
We now went into a period that kind of becomes a big blur for me. We went into some segment of our schedule that was taken up entirely with sea trials and shake down cruises. Now that we were sea worthy again, all we did was test things: systems evaluations, reactor certifications and operating approvals from this or that agency, weapon’s testing and training. It seems we were either coming in or going out for short 3 or 4 day trips. It was during one of these trips, that we also transited from Newport News to Charleston, our home port.
One over-riding concern preoccupied me continuously throughout these short trips. I was brutally severed from my beloved bunk. Not only was I in exile from her, I was homeless, more specifically I had no place to sleep. When we went out for 3 or 4 days, it was to test out, and to certify, the operational status of the many new additions and modifications made to the submarine during overhaul and refit. Dozens of these repairs and modifications had been made throughout the ship. A new sonar component might have been replaced or installed anew months ago. Like anything reassembled, it would have to be tested under actual conditions — and to do that, all the essential planners, designers, technicians and workmen had to be aboard.
We would head out to sea for 3 or 4 days with an underwater complement which was 2 or 3 times normal. Instead of 140 men, we might have 350 crammed in. They had priority and they took over our bunks (my most worshipped possession, my most faithless lover). I had nowhere to sleep. The alternatives open to me were not inviting. A place might be found in crews quarters for a ‘hot bunk’, where 2 or 3 men share the same bunk but sleep in different shifts. I tried that once but I did not find it conducive to sleep. After that first night in a hot bunk, no matter my desperation, I never went back.
The Doc took the examining table and although in theory I outranked him and could take it for myself, I felt he deserved it. I ended up with a couple of blankets and spent some uncomfortable nights on the floor, at the base of a Poseidon missile. I have always been a mild man, and the irony of finding myself bedded down beside umpteen megatons of death might fire up my dramatic imagination of Armageddon but it did little to relieve the reality of any soreness or stiffness after 8 hours of discomfort. It would be overkill to compare these short trips with the black hole of Calcutta, but after 3 or 4 days enduring the crowds in the passageways, at mess, and trying to sleep where-ever, the normal tightness of submarine life seemed downright roomy by comparison.
I guess they had me well busy during this time. I imagine they were introducing me to the tedium of standing watches as a Diving Officer. Maybe they were even letting me sit on the chair and practice repeating orders back to the conn. All I can remember was the constant worrying I did about where I was going to sleep when I finally had a chance. Please forgive an obscene misuse of the holocaust but I could imagine myself as a camp inmate, preoccupied and tortured not with hunger, but with where to sleep. What time during my 24-hour-cycled day would I have the best luck of securing a temporary roost, somewhere.
By this time, I had an excellent sense of how to navigate the boat. Nowhere in the aft engineering spaces would I find an adequate place to sack out. In general it was too noisy and too cramped with machinery, and the deck generally consisted of iron grates and corrugated metal plates. The few choice spots available were already claimed by the engineering crewmen. If you didn’t want a hot bunk, there was nothing forward; there were simply too many people, too much motion. Only in Sherwood Forrest was there the possibility for finding a relatively quiet spot. A further selling point was that the floor was covered with linoleum and there was only an average of one or two large protruding nuts or bolts every square yard or so.
Places I found myself avoiding.
At this point, I have not spoken much about the reactor. Having no nautical or engineering background, if I thought of it at all, I more or less assumed the reactor would be positioned on the submarine as far back as possible, like the outboard motor on a powerboat. That would lessen the chance of exposing the crew, (living mostly in the forward part of the boat), to high doses of radiation. But a reactor with its thick lead shielding is heavy, and a submarine not only has to be buoyant, but must maintain a level buoyancy. Putting the reactor in the rear would drag it toward the bottom, stern first. Thus the reactor was located at a point about 40% the boat’s width, toward the rear.
To get to the back of the boat, you went through Sherwood Forest and passed through water tight doors into an auxiliary engineering space, which held the fresh water desalinator, oxygen generator, and other life support machinery. Then you went through the reactor compartment, and from there into the main engineering spaces, which contained the gleaming reactor control panel, with its gauges, switches and displays set in regular straight geometric lines. It looked like a reactor control panel that you might see in the sleek brochure of a land based power company, only shrunken in size. The rear engineering spaces were hot and noisy, and packed with all manner of machinery: the snorkeled emergency diesel engines, steam generators, turbines, heat exchangers and the massive gearing of the propeller shaft. Everything seemed to be sheathed in thick blankets of asbestos. I sometimes needed to go there but otherwise I tended to avoid it.
If I did need to go there, I would have to pass through the reactor compartment, and to do that, I would have to transit the reactor tunnel. This was a small walkway between the two watertight doors. It did not run the center of the boat but was positioned more to starboard. It was a narrow passageway but two people could squeeze by one another. The tunnel was lined with thick walls. There was a thick plexiglass window behind which lay some nondescript walls of metal tanks, connected with grey metal pipes with some glass tubes protruding as fluid level gauges. (This last description of what lay inside the reactor vessel was perhaps overwhelmingly from my imagination alone, rather than my memory per se. I did not spend a lot of time in the reactor compartment tunnel. No one did. This was where you would receive your highest dose of radiation.)
I think it’s important to examine the issue of radiation and put it into context. A nuclear reactor was radioactive and walking through the reactor compartment would expose you to that radioactivity. I don’t remember the numbers, but it was significant, equivalent to some number of dental X-rays per year. Maybe it was 10, 20, or 50 extra dental X-rays per year. You would want to avoid that situation, but even at worst it wasn’t going to fry you — and these doses were calculated as if you lived in the tunnel 24/7.
So there was no doubt that you were going to get some extra radiation if you served on a nuclear submarine. However, even that fact had to be balanced by being underwater, which largely protected you from cosmic rays. From the point of view of damage to your body, cosmic rays were going to be as dangerous, if not more so, then radiation from the reactor.
Bottom line: I was convinced that being on a nuclear submarine was safe for anyone, but particularly for me, as I did not work in the aft part of the ship. But even for those crew man assigned to the most hazardous jobs, the amounts of radiation they received was rather miniscule. I should know, for I was responsible (as Medical Officer) for measuring their doses. Here, however, ‘responsibility’ has to be in quotes, like my responsibility maintaining bearing and depth while Diving Officer. The man who really did the work was, of course, my corpsman, the Doc. I signed his reports.
Every man aboard the submarine wore a radiation dose monitor. It was a simple device containing a piece of film, (postage stamp size), encased in a square metal frame, a little larger than the working face of an average wrist watch. I don’t even remember where I wore it. I would guess it was positioned somewhere on my ‘poopie suit’ (an adult onesie that we wore as uniforms). At some point (probably near the patrol end), the Doc would develop the film, (which darkened with radiation), and would interpret and record all the results. (We never saw any numbers that concerned us.)
Because they might be going into the reactor compartment more often, a few engineering types also wore pocket dosimeters, clipped to their breast pocket like an extra pen. Peering in, at one end of the dosimeter, you saw a small bubble next to a number. I could never figure out how they worked. But the Doc could read it, and then reset it to zero. He checked these dosimeters carefully and often. I think he took seriously his personal responsibility to insure his crew mate’s safety. Even here, however, the worst was also something of rather low concern, like receiving an extra dental or half a routine chest X-ray in a year. These cumulative doses were recorded for each crew member to be certain they remained under a proscribed safe level. Although it was possible, and may have happened very early in the Navy’s nuclear program, I never heard of anyone who had “burnt out” and was prohibited from serving on the boat.
So, even though I was convinced that serving on a submarine, from a radiation standpoint, was for me completely safe, I still found I did not want to hang around the tunnel. If I had to, I went in and came out without much delay. I wouldn’t be standing there, peering into a window and trying to memorize what lay behind.