Chapter 3
Welcome to my narrow home, A mental tour with a typical ‘exciting’ day, A Medical Officer on a submarine?, A break in the routine: the submarine drill
Welcome to my narrow home
The Daniel Boone was launched in 1963. I joined her after her first overhaul in 1970. I read on the Internet that after 30 years service and 75 strategic deterrent patrols, like everything else in God’s existence, she reached the end of her useful life. In the autumn of 1993, she entered a shipyard in Bangor, Washington and was turned into scrap metal. Prior to being reduced to scrap, she had gone through 4 or 5 overhauls, during which she was refueled with a new reactor.
When I came aboard the submarine, she had returned to dry dock for repairs to the bow, following the collision at sea a few months before. Her nuclear reactor had been replaced during the prior year, and I could still detect a ripple of stress that lingered in the ship’s crew. A submarine’s reactor has a life expectancy of 5 or 6 years. Replacing it is delicate and complicated. To extract the highly radioactive core, the boat’s pressure hull had to be opened and the entire reactor removed. After the reactor was replaced, the pressure hull had to be carefully resealed, and every weld had to be checked, rechecked and signed off on, both visually and with x-rays. Although this work took months and could only be performed by highly specialized workmen in dry dock out of water, the submarine’s crew continued to live on board. They had their own construction tasks to carry out. Besides, they needed to look over the shoulder of the shipyard workers. They knew their lives were always on the line. At 900 feet under water, there was no room for error and any earlier sloppy work could now be fatal.
I came aboard as part of the blue crew, which consisted of 143 men, 13 officers and 130 enlisted. We lived together inside a hollow metal cylinder. Our livable space was about 300 feet long (approximately a football field), with a maximal width (and height) of about 30 feet. Having lived for 2 years in New York, I could compare its dimensions to a subway. I reckoned that when we went on patrol, I would be spending 10 weeks underwater in a windowless space, 6 or 7 (IRT-size) cars long and about 3-1/2 cars wide. One difference was that (except for the bow and stern areas) the submarine had 3 levels, each connected with steep narrow stairways, which the Navy called “ladders”. The other difference was besides people, the space had to accommodate a nuclear reactor, a propulsion system, diesel engines, batteries, missiles, torpedos, miles of pipes, electrical cables, and hydraulics, as well as everything 143 men would need to stay alive 400 feet below the ocean for at least 10 weeks. It was likely to be crowded.
A mental tour with a typical ‘exciting’ day
I could probably find diagrams showing the interior layout of the boat and listing every feature that might be found in nuclear submarines. I could be holding a blueprint, leading you around and pointing out spaces, “Sonar Room”, “Crews Mess”, “Forward Engineering”, etc. I could, but I will not. This tour is being led by my memory, which after 50 years, narrows the space considerably. In fact, I could lead you around with my eyes closed. You really didn’t need much vision aboard the submarine. While on my 10 weeks patrol, I fell into a routine. Time became a function of my body’s position in space. I would wake up, get out of my bunk, step into the passageway, turn right, turn right again, step into the ward room, have breakfast, step back into passageway, turn left, walk 20 feet into the control room. If the sun was up and it was day above on the ocean’s surface, then the control room was brightly lit. If it was night above, the control room was ‘rigged for red’ (like a photographer’s dark room). That was your only indication under water whether it was day or night.
As I came into the control room from the passageway from the wardroom, I would turn right and take my position at my “watch station”. I stood watches as a “diving officer” behind two helmsmen, sitting side by side, one controlling the port planes and one the starboard. These planes were like the wing flaps on an airplane. Each helmsman controlled a joystick that actually maneuvered the submarine.
On my perch behind the helmsman I was looking forward. On a yacht, I would be watching the horizon over the bow of the ship. But on the submarine I was looking at the backs of the helmsman’s heads, and the dials and gauges in front. To my right was more gauges. To the left of my perch was a board of complicated valves and switches running the length of the control room. Because this board controlled the scattered tanks, for and aft, it controlled the submarine’s buoyancy. Buoyancy was theoretically my bailiwick, since it impacted on depth, which was definitely the responsibility of the diving officer. But everyone knew I was green and would remain so. While I was on watch, they always stationed an experienced chief petty officer a few feet away, a navy “lifer”, who knew the board’s operation and had a feel for how it worked. Occasionally, he would look at me and say, “Uh, I think we should pump 1000 gallons from the aft septic tank to the bow tank. We are getting a little heavy in the rear.” I would then repeat what he said right back to him as an order. Yeah, I know, it was ridiculous, but ‘Thank the Lord!’.
The entire purpose for a missile carrying submarine on a long patrol was to remain invisible and undetected. Any maneuver, involving turning or changing depth, created a degree of turbulence in the water. Turbulence can create sound that might make us detectable by sonar. Therefore we kept all maneuvers to an absolute minimum. We would creep along underwater, traveling a straight-line course, until some hours later, we would slowly turn back 180 degrees and repeat. That was our mission, and that’s what we did for weeks at a time, moving quietly, same speed, same course, same depth.
The role of the diving officer, (my role during my watch), was to repeat the orders of the ‘conn’ (the officer in charge). Typically it would be something like “helm, come right 10 degrees”. I would repeat the order, adding an “aye”, “come right 10 degrees, aye,” (I was nothing but a fast learner!), and double check that the orders were carried out correctly. Double check meant looking at a gauge; there was nothing else to see. Since we mostly travelled quietly in a straight line, I was just staring at a gauge whose numbers never moved. Many hours later, my watch would end and I would return to my bunk. My bunk, the wardroom, and my watch station, were like the corners of a triangle. Between these three points, none requiring more than 50 steps to reach, I spent 99% of my time. I wouldn’t come across the term that truly described the experience until many years later: ‘Wash, Rinse, Repeat’.
I have already given a little description of my stateroom when I checked in with the XO on the first day. My stateroom was one of four which opened onto a little corridor; turn left to the bathroom and showers or turn right twice and come to the wardroom.
The wardroom was where we, as officers, went for every meal. It was where we congregated. It was our meeting place, our entertainment venue, whether movie or board games or cards or just sitting around and chatting. From the entrance to the right lay a large table easily able to seat 14, and to the left were two nautical couches facing each other with a coffee table in between. By submarine standards, it was roomy and plush.
Of the three points, the only one that mattered was my stateroom, more specifically my bunk. By the third day, or the third washing cycle, that was where I wanted to be. (Like every sailer, my bunk became my chief solace, my supreme comfort, my beacon.)
A Medical Officer on a submarine?
“Wait a minute”, you must be thinking, “aren’t you the Medical Officer?” Where is the submarine’s medical office and what about your medical duties? Indeed, that did occupy me for part of the remaining 1% of my time. To get to the medical office from my watch station, I would head aft, out of the control room and perhaps through some engineering space (I can’t exactly remember). I would go through a watertight door, (bending down and stepping over and through), and into “Sherwood Forest”. This was the largest and longest compartment of the submarine and held the 16 missile tubes we carried. (Each tube held a Poseidon missile with potentially 10 nuclear warheads, or hydrogen bombs, each capable of being targeted independently. It was Armageddon. It was the end of the world. It was for real.)
I would walk down the center aisle between the lines of tubes and at the 2nd or 3rd turn right, and be in front of the “Medical Office,” laying against the submarine’s hull. The medical office was really just a long shallow closet, holding an examining table/desk, some drawers underneath and cabinets overhead. (On the submarine, every conceivable nook and cranny was used for storage.) My ‘Doc’ ran the place efficiently and rarely needed my input.
We were looking after the medical needs of 140 recently-examined healthy young men at their peak. It was ridiculous. In time, though taking a few naval years to filter up to the decision makers, the medical officer was pulled off the entire submarine fleet. The Doc was enough.
A break in the routine: the submarine drill
I passed 99% of my time in small adjacent areas of the boat, where I could be sleeping, eating, watching a movie or standing my watch of supreme spirit-killing boredom. However, there was a place on the submarine (during the other 1%) where you might find me, even more likely than the medical office. That would be in the ‘crews mess’.
We usually had at least one drill every 24 hours, sometimes more. In any of these drills, the entire ship’s crew had seconds to get to their station, no matter where they were or what they were doing at the time. Their station would vary, depending on the type of drill. My station was always the same no matter what the drill. I was to go to crews mess.
The reason why crews mess was chosen for me ostensibly was because the Doc and I could convert one of the tables into an operating table, with surgical packs and a surgical light stored in the overhead. We never needed to do that, (again ‘Thank the Lord!’), and I am not sure we even practiced doing so. (We certainly wouldn’t want to break open sterile supplies.) But beyond the ostensible reason, given the fact that I was useless in the ship’s emergency, it made sense to park me out of the way. (Even the Doc would usually go off during the drill to help his shipmates do this or that.) I didn’t mind. I might just stretch out on the table’s bench and wait for the announcement over the ship’s intercom that the drill was over, and perhaps hear the captain’s critique followed by his brief pep talk.
There were a number of different drills and each was proceeded by a particular sound from the klaxon. Everyone is familiar from the movies with the “Prepare to Dive” sound, “ah-oo-gah, ah-oo-gah”, and indeed that was the very same sound we used before diving or surfacing.
I don’t remember all of the drills, just the four main ones and how I reacted to each.
There was “Battle Stations, Missile”. We would come up to a shallow depth and prepare to launch our missiles underwater. ‘Missile control’ would spin up and the Captain would go through his procedures for verifying a valid command. I imagine no one of us actually believed at the time that it was for real, that we were on the verge of “World War III”. We all expected that the drill would never go to completion and it would be called off at the last moment, (as it always was), but we acted as if it was the real thing. This was our training.
“Battle Station, Torpedo” was the preeminent drill for the crew in the forward torpedo room. But everyone throughout the boat had somewhere to go and some task to prepare to undertake. Even the freshmen seamen, assigned for kitchen duty only, had to assemble at the gun room with loaded rifles, ropes and grappling hooks. Even though we might be 200 feet underwater, they would be preparing for a surface battle. It seemed to me like some vestigial holdover from the olden days of sailing ships.
The “Reactor Scram” was the main drill for engineering. A nuclear reactor was modulated by control rods running vertically through the reactor core. Pull them out to activate the reactor and let them drop down to dampen the nuclear reaction. Pull them up to step on the gas and drop them down to apply the brakes.
A nuclear reactor always acted on the principle of a “Dead Man’s switch”. If something untoward was noticed by the crew or by the automatic monitoring systems, the reactor would “Scram” and all the control rods would suddenly slam down because of gravity alone. The sudden loss of power and propulsion would automatically turn all power over to the battery, and on battery power alone, we would rise up to periscope depth, poke out a snorkel for air and start up the diesel engine for propulsion and back-up power. I think we actually had, on patrol, one or two reactor scrams for real, no drill. I’m also pretty sure that engineering solved the problem well before we reached snorkel depth and after only a few minutes we were able to resume normal reactor functioning. But I remember, for a brief period of time, everyone was on adrenaline, worried and scared. We probably were not in any real danger but the patrol would have to be scrubbed, and the captain’s (CO), and the engineering officer’s (EO), and reactor operator’s (RO) asses would be fried.
The most frightening drill for me was “Prepare for Collision”. It is the only one whose audio warning I still clearly remember. The collision alarm was imprinted. The alarm sounded like a bell from a Buddhist or Shinto temple being struck repeatedly — bong-bong-bong-bong — and continuously for many long seconds. One would think that alarm would hardly cause a rise in heart rate or blood pressure. What could you collide with, 200 feet down in the Atlantic? However, the collision alarm was also used for flooding, a submariner’s most frightening nightmare. A large sea valve malfunctioning or some ordinance lighting off somewhere could spell doom. (Indeed, that had already been shown to be the cause of losing at least one US nuclear submarine.)
Many years later, when I had a close call while sitting in a car or a bus, (I don’t remember the circumstances), just at the instant I was becoming aware of the danger, I heard the collision alarm go off in my head: bong-bong-bong-bong.