Chapter 2

Adventures in sub school, Assignment: Daniel Boone, Aboard the Daniel Boone for the first time

Adventures in sub school

In early July 1970, I reported for duty at the ‘sub school’ in New London, Connecticut. There I spent 2 weeks in a crash course designed for incoming submarine medical officers, learning how the Navy worked — uniforms, ranks, traditions, etc. We were also  given instructions on some technical details of submarining, special medical problems, sanitary issues in the galley, monitoring the crew’s exposure to radiation, nuclear power, and military strategy in the atomic age. In general I found the lectures and movies interesting, if a bit thin, often barely scratching the surface.

There were only a few hours not spent in a classroom. Once, we were taken to a large special building which had a pressure chamber in the basement. We had to show that we could handle the pressure equivalent of being under water at 50 feet. Every submarine has a small compartment with an escape hatch. This hatch (or exit to the sea) would be impossible to open unless the inside air pressure was brought up to equal the water pressure outside. (Try pulling up a stopper from a sink containing 2 inches of water.) This test simulated an escape from a flooding submarine, lying on the bottom, 50 feet down. The problem was your middle ear. Your Eustachian tubes connected your middle ear with your throat. Unless you could keep this tube open, thereby equalizing the pressures, you ran the risk of damaging your middle ear. (You get this same air pressure effect in your ears when landing in an airplane, but 50 feet underwater has many times the pressure difference.) If you couldn’t keep these tubes open and patent, at worst, you ran the risk of rupturing your ear drum; at best, you got a condition called an “ear squeeze”, with pain, swelling and capillary bleeding into the middle ear.

We were given instructions on how to keep the tubes open: by yawning, by holding your nose and swallowing, by opening and closing your mouth, (looking like a large goldfish) — or doing all these things more or less simultaneously.

About 10 of us were escorted into a little room, built like a large metal capsule. The room was locked and sealed and the valves were opened. As the pressure began to rise in the chamber, the instructor would call out the equivalent depth of water: 5 feet, 10 feet, 15 feet, etc. I was not able to equalize my left ear, but my agitated signals of distress were ignored. At 30 feet, I was already screaming in pain. When we finally “came up”, theoretically, I had washed out, but nothing came of it and everything was ignored.

Much later I relayed my pressure chamber story to a doctor who made a career in the Navy. He told me, “They didn’t care whether you passed the test or not. The whole thing was ridiculous. The chance of escape from a flooding nuclear submarine was zero. No one could get out deeper than 100 feet and nuclear subs always operated at 200 feet and lower. If you ask me, it was just another opportunity to be sadistic and torture some newly minted medical officers.” Indeed, when I was actually on patrol under water, I learned the (more or less) official escape instructions in case of flooding: sit down, bend forward, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye. My ear squeeze was for naught.

The regular Navy — officers and enlisted alike — had a strange ambivalent attitude to Navy doctors. (We were never affectionately called “Doc”. That title was reserved solely for the Corpsman, and rightly so, for our Corpsman did almost all the medical work while underway at sea. Universally, we were known across the fleet as the “quack”.) It probably didn’t help that we were a cocky lot coming into the Navy. I know I was. The typical submarine officer had struggled to attain his rank and privileges. That reward only came with sacrifice, effort and hard work, the product of long years. We were a bunch of landlubbers who walked out of civilian life and 2 weeks later, Shazam!, we were Lieutenants with two bars on our collar. No wonder they resented us. 

Assignment: Daniel Boone

Like my other classmates at sub school, I waited for my assignment to my particular submarine: would I be located in the Atlantic, the East Coast and Scotland; or the Pacific, the West Coast and Hawaii? For me, it was to be the Atlantic. I was assigned to the blue crew of the Daniel Boone, leaving dry dock in Newport News, Virginia, after 2 years of construction. It had been completely overhauled, refitted with a new reactor and updated from Polaris into a new submarine class called Poseidon. I was very pleased. My submarine, my home for the upcoming year would be like a new penny, all clean and shiny. I would be stationed at its home port, Charleston, South Carolina.

At the time I received my submarine assignment. I did not know that before noon on May 28, two months prior, the Boone had collided with a Philippine merchant ship during a high-speed surface run, off Cape Henry, Virginia. (Indeed no one knew publicly because of secrecy and national security.) The submarine sustained damage to her bow and torpedo tubes and returned to the shipyard. The net effect was that on July 24, 1970, I boarded the USS Daniel Boone SSBN 629, and was logged in as the Medical Officer. However, rather than being tethered alongside a Charleston pier, the Boone was again sitting in dry dock in Newport News, Virginia.

For me personally, there was another more pronounced consequence. Everything that was scheduled was pushed back for four months. Since I was only to be aboard the Boone for one year of sea duty, it meant that I would have only a single 10-week undersea patrol, rather than the expected two patrols. That was a real break for me. I knew intuitively that while the first patrol might be enlivened with a sense of new adventure, nothing was likely to leaven the boring drudgery of the second. Happily, I never stuck around long enough to actually test my hypothesis. Within a few weeks after surfacing outside of Holy Loch, Scotland, following my first and only patrol, I was formally detached from the Boone and on my way to Orlando to start my second year in the Navy. (I will get to that a little later.)

Aboard the Daniel Boone for the first time

So after 2 weeks of ‘New Medical Officer sub school’, (or as I now call it, ‘sub school for Dummies’), I left New London and drove down to Newport News. I had little idea what “dry dock” meant. I walked into the shipyard and was directed to a location. Arriving there I saw my submarine for the first time. The Daniel Boone lay completely out of water, high and dry on its supports. This first encounter was memorable. She appeared before me, suspended in the air, looking like a massive gray metal tube on stilts. It was rather startling, unexpected. It was like your blind date greeting you at her door in the nude. Never again would I see the Boone naked and out of water.

The submarine was mammoth with a perfectly rounded bow in front, followed by the ‘sail’ (containing the periscopes) and ending with a mammoth propeller (or screw) at the stern. Between the sail and the screw, the mid section of the submarine was long and leveled off to a flat surface. On the surface were 2 parallel lines of 8 hatches, each hatch covering one of 16 missile tubes. It was imposing. I was pretty impressed.  

I left my perch on the pier and walked across a rickety little gangway. Rather than seeing dark oily water beneath me as I might have expected, I looked down 3 or 4 stories to the concrete floor below. I grabbed hold of the hand-rails and walked gingerly onto the deck of the submarine. Once the men working on deck realized I was  reporting in as the new quack, I was relieved of my duffel bag, ushered through the hatch and down the ladder to the control room. I was introduced to the blue crew’s XO, or executive officer, the second in command after the captain, and the man who actually ran the ship administratively. He would be my boss. On that first day aboard the Boone, my XO struck me as austere and unfriendly, the sort of man who the Navy called a “hard ass”. (This was a term I would only learn later.) Approximately a year later, when I took leave of him on my last day, he still embodied that term. It always described him accurately.

After meeting the XO, I followed a crew member from the control room down a passageway for about 20 feet and I was dropped off to my “stateroom”, where my duffel bag had been placed. For the next 3 months I would share a tiny “stateroom” with two other officers, 5 feet by 8 feet, much smaller than your typical walk-in closet. The stateroom contained a small sink, a mirror, and a set of small drawers. (It is easy to overuse small when describing things in a submarine. I’ll try to omit it from here on.) Along the bulkhead (or wall) were 3 bunk beds, stacked up and looking like a large metal chest of drawers, with a little curtain for privacy, a reading light and fan for extra ventilation. The choice of which bunk was decided by rank. Since I was the highest ranking in the stateroom, the senior officer, I took the middle bunk. Being the easiest to maneuver in and out of, it was prime real estate. I had been told in sub school to choose the middle bunk. That bit of advice was probably the only lesson that had any practical value.

Like the life my patient on the psych ward had described, I began a strange existence aboard my submarine. My schedule was how he described it; 3 months living aboard the submarine and 3 months living somewhere on shore. I never got the total of 6 months freely roaming the world, like I had hoped for and dreamed, but I was able to do some traveling on my Uncle Sam’s dime, and I did have quite a bit of free time. How I wrangled that, I will tell in a future chapter.

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