The scientists working with our Special Project became known by the crew as scientists on board (SOBs). Although they were not in the Navy, there was a pecking order of sorts, including a senior SOB named Lt. Gerry Short, who seemed to direct the others. Because Lieutenant Short was not strictly a civilian, being attached to some branch of an Air Force Intelligence group, nobody was quite sure how to deal with him. We didn't salute him. He didn't wear an Air Force uniform. He didn't tell any stories about flying airplanes, and none of us ever did figure out why our Special Project required somebody from the Air Force.
Three of the crew on board the Viperfish worked with the Special Project. Lean and quiet Lt. Al Dobkin and the ship's photographer, a perky man named Robbie Teague, were assigned to work with the civilians under the capable but taciturn Comdr. John Spiegel. All three men remained as secretive about the Special Project as everyone else who called the Viperfish hangar their home. The whole collection of civilians, the two naval officers, the Air Force officer, and the enlisted Navy photographer stayed in the hangar area of the submarine most of the time, as they had when we were in dry dock, and seldom mingled with the rest of us.
At mealtime, the SOBs and other Special Project men wandered into the crew's dining area when the food was served. They ate quietly without joining in the ribald humor that characterized our dining experience. When they finished eating, they silently glided back to the hangar. The entire group seemed to be scientific engineering types, with interests selectively focused on their project.
In fact, I learned later that the remoteness of the non-Navy SOBs resulted from a degree of intimidation at being in such a foreign environment and surrounded by more than a hundred submariners. Also, their movements on board were constrained because they were physically bound by the security regulations that held them to the limits of their work with the Fish. Although they did not show much visible excitement for these reasons, I came to learn that they were proud to be serving with the Viperfish crew and they readily trusted us to bring them back from the submerged explorations that lay ahead.
As the qualifications work became more intense and the size of our crew expanded, Marc Birken reported on board the Viperfish. Marc was a veteran of the Polaris submarine USS Daniel Boone and a lover of sports cars and "steaming" (blowing off steam on lib- erty). He was aching to finish his obligation in the Navy as quickly as possible so that he could return to civilian life and teach in the trade schools of Ohio. Marc was a fun-loving man who viewed the submarine world with a "hang loose, baby" attitude. He was in love with his TR-3 convertible sports car, which regularly squealed him around Waikiki. One of the nukes, he was an electrician by training and his dolphins were the pride of his life.
The first time he passed by the reactor operator area and noticed Bruce Rossi's characteristic tense face and mean looks, he glanced sideways toward me and struggled to avoid the grin that was his trademark. We quickly became friends, and he regularly chastised me for worrying about Bruce and having too serious an attitude.
The days passed quickly at the submarine base. Working my way through one system after another, I moved beyond any threat of placement on the dink list. When confinement among the men and machinery of the Viperfish, day after day, became too oppressive, the sweet call of liberty in Waikiki beckoned seductively from the east. The process of going on liberty and steaming was widely regarded as the solution to an oppressed mind.
For us, steaming consisted of a high-speed departure from the Viperfish to the barracks, a hot shower with plenty of soap to wash off the unique odors of a submarine, the donning of civvies (civilian clothes) to disguise our military origin, and the jumping into a Cadillac taxi to roar off to Waikiki. We found that the best way to start the steaming process was at the Fort DeRussy Army Base, near the Hilton Hawaiian Village, where decent bourbon could be purchased for about thirty cents per drink. After we had consumed a proper amount of beverage, the stage was set to continue our steaming at the night spots of Waikiki.
Meeting women in Waikiki was not difficult. The surplus of dancing establishments scattered throughout the area was perfect for military men on liberty, and Marc delighted in establishing a relationship with any woman who looked even slightly interesting. On our third or fourth night of steaming, he taught me a remarkably successful way to solidify an emerging relationship with a young lady. The process started with mai tais, moonlight, and sweet Hawaiian music. It was further stimulated by Marc's gracious manner toward the ladies, mixed with his disarming sense of humor.
After several dances with an attractive woman, he leaned forward and drew her close to him. Before she knew what was coming, he innocently asked "The Question": "How would you like a tour aboard a nuclear submarine?"
This invariably resulted in a backward movement as the woman stared at him wide-eyed, blinked several times, and finally asked, "A nuclear submarine? Tonight? Are you serious? Are you in the Navy?"
He smiled and told her that he would be happy to give her a tour of his ship if she would find such a tour interesting. "It is a beautiful submarine," he said, with just the right smile and proper blend of innocence and enthusiasm. "It is called the Viperfish and it is an excellent warship, one of the best in the Navy. It has a nice periscope, the control room has some beautiful lights, and you would be quite safe, being on a military base and all."
The predictable result became an often-repeated routine. She smiled, having never heard such an offer from any man she had known back in Kansas City or wherever she was from, and her eyes lit up with the excitement of it all. Because the women of Waikiki rarely traveled alone, she usually asked if her girlfriend could come with her. "Of course," Marc said magnanimously, as he waved in my direction and beckoned for me to join them.
When the Viperfish topside watch saw our group meandering down the dark pier at 0100, we could hear the distant muttering of something relating to Jesus Christ.
After a knowing look or two and a polite salute to welcome the ladies on board, the watch greeted us and cleared the way for our late-night tour. A half hour later, after hearing the excited "ooh's" and "ah's" of our female companions, Marc and I felt like heroes for the rest of the night.
All the fun came to an end the morning the captain gathered us together on the pier in front of the Viperfish and told us that we were going to sea in two days. We would leave at 0800 hours, he told us, and conduct our sea trials. The purpose of the exercise, he said in his soft voice, was to test the integrity and capabilities of our submarine. It would be an envelope study of sorts, a test of our underwater limits. Although this was not a Special Project operation, the outcome of the sea trials would help to determine the success of future activities; the sea trials test was, therefore, extremely important to our mission. Once it was established that we could perform submerged activities safely and effectively, we would be ready to proceed to our West Coast shakedown cruise and, finally, to start testing the Fish.
After we completed the morning muster on the pier, I climbed down the engine-room hatch and started studying the next system on the qualifications list. My work was abruptly interrupted by Chief Paul Mathews's voice bellowing throughout the boat over the loudspeaker system.
"All men lay topside to 'sally ship'!"
Puzzled, I looked up from by book. "Do what to the ship?" I asked nobody in particular.
Bruce Rossi started climbing up the engine-room ladder to the topside deck. "Sally ship, Dunham," he barked in my direction. "Important for the calculation of metacentric height of which the center of buoyancy is a part. Get up there."
With Chief Mathews giving directions from his position in front of the submarine sail, about thirty of us lined up in a long row at the port side of the ship and crowded as close to the edge of the deck as possible. The chief looked at his wristwatch, waited a few seconds, and then hollered at the top of his lungs, "Move to the starboard side!"
We promptly rushed across the deck to the opposite side of the Viperfish. A few seco
nds later, the chief hollered again.
"Port side!"
We leaped to the port side.
"Starboard side!"
Feeling foolish, I moved with the rest of the men.
"Port!"
"Starboard!"
"Port!"
"Starboard!"
Scurrying back and forth, we paused for about six or seven seconds on each side before the next order. Gradually, I became aware of a rolling movement of the submarine's deck, like the movement of a rowboat with too much weight on one side, accompanied by the tilting of the periscopes sticking out of the sail. As we continued with the exercise, the rolling increased by larger and larger increments and some of the men had to grab the restraining cable at the deck's edge for balance. When the deck began to show a prominent sloping with each roll, the chief finally thanked us and ordered, "Secure from 'sally ship' exercise."
Remarkably, nobody said much of anything as the crew nonchalantly dispersed from the bizarre activity and returned to their various tasks. It wasn't clear to me how one should even ask Paul about the meaning of the event — "Did the sally go well, Chief?" Pushing aside my typical feeling of nearly total ignorance, I wandered toward him.
"It relates to the center of buoyancy, Dunham," Paul told me even before I asked. "The rolling provides data for calculating the metacentric height, important for determining the stability of the Viperfish-if we roll far enough to both sides, sufficient data are generated and the design engineers are happy. After our shipyard overhaul, several of the weights inside the boat have shifted to new positions, changing the center of buoyancy. When we surface out there," he pointed in the direction of the Pacific Ocean, "these factors can affect our stability. If the weight distribution is wrong, if the center of buoyancy has shifted too far down, it is possible for the first wave that hits us to roll us completely over. This kind of thing would lead to considerable crew discomfort and a probable immediate sinking."
I stared at the man, my mind trying to comprehend such a disaster. Considerable crew discomfort if the Viperfish rolled over?
He smiled brightly. "Therefore, it's the kind of thing we like to check out."
I returned to my qualifications work with a new worry. It would enter my mind every time we surfaced, as I waited to see if that first wave to slam against the side of the submarine would cause considerable crew discomfort.
The next day, the pier alongside the Viperfish was filled with activity. We loaded an endless supply of spare parts, crates of food, fuel oil for our diesel engine, and everything else each man on the boat could think of to sustain his existence at sea. The whole process reminded me of the packing adventures my family used to have before a camping trip. Rushing back and forth around the house, my mother gathered whatever she thought we might need for our trip to the forest or the beach. On a camping trip, however, we could count on certain basic elements essential to existence-oxygen, fresh air, maps, gas stations, warmth, and plenty of room to roam about.
On board the submerged Viperfish, we would be working to survive in an environment hostile to human life. We had to make our own air by producing oxygen and "scrubbing" (removing) away the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. To cool the excessive reactor-generated heat, we needed powerful air-conditioning systems; on the other hand, we had to provide warmth to the forward areas of the boat that became chilled from the cold waters around us. We had to navigate under the ocean where there were no stars or sky, create fresh water from the brine of the sea, and carefully monitor our uranium fuel reserves because no reactor refueling services were available on the high seas. For those of the crew who enjoyed hiking about, nothing could be done to accommodate them in the constrained spaces and cramped quarters. There was almost no room to roam-that was a daily fact of submarine life.
I had just finished storing a pocketbook, a box of cigars, and four fresh oranges inside the bunk locker beneath my rack when Marc Birken walked up to the crew's berthing area.
"Aloha, bruddah," he said to me, grinning widely and relishing his newly acquired Hawaiian dialect. "What's happening?"
I pointed to the oranges. "Fresh fruit for the long trip, in case we run out."
He looked at my oranges. "We're only going to be gone for a week or two," he said.
"Or three, or four-"
"Two weeks, or even three weeks, that's nothing! Wait until we go out for two months or even longer. Did I ever tell you about the time I dropped a garbage weight when the Boone was on one of our two-month Polaris patrols?"
I closed my bunk locker and pulled the curtain across the opening of my tiny home. "What's a garbage weight?" I asked.
His eyes lit up and his face became animated as he savored the memory of his story. "It was terrible! The thing made a hell of a noise! We were on station and rigged for quiet operations, no noise tolerated. When I saw the damn thing falling toward the deck, I tried to catch it. I tried to kick my shoe under it to break the fall. I tried everything I could, but it just slammed onto the steel plate like a damn sledge hammer that probably reverberated sound energy for thousands of miles across the ocean. I just about freaked out — it made a noise that almost blew the earphones off our sonarmen."
"Marc, what's a garbage weight?"
"And so," he clapped his hands together in front of me, "bam! The result was just like that! The instant the thing hit the metal, the captain was out of his stateroom, down the passageway, down the ladder, into the galley, and into my face."
"Holy Christ, the captain came to the galley? What did you tell him?"
"I told him I wanted to shoot myself. I told him the damn garbage weight weighed five tons, and it slipped from my hand. I told him I was sorry."
"Did he court-martial you?"
Marc grinned again. "It would have been better if he had, or if he had just beat the hell out of me because, God knows, I deserved it. But he decided to conduct a special training session in the forward torpedo room."
"What did he train you to do?"
"He trained me to move garbage weights from the starboard side of the ship to the port side. Then he trained me to move them back to the starboard side without dropping them. And then back to the port side, and then the starboard side. For two hours, he sat there staring at me with death in his eyes as I moved hundreds of garbage weights back and forth across the boat."
Marc then took me to the galley and showed me the small but incredibly heavy cast-iron weights used to sink the garbage ejected from the submarine. They came in tiny boxes, all stacked in cupboards near the garbage disposal unit. Each box of these devices weighed about twenty-five pounds.
That afternoon, Marc and I were assigned to join with the crew and load a couple thousand more weights. It took about fifty men to complete the job, a miserable and sweating process in the tropical sun. We transferred the boxes from a truck alongside the pier and handed them, one at a time, across the brow (gangway), over the deck, through the control-room hatch, down the ladder, into the galley, and finally into the storage locker. When we finished the task, I was sure that our center of buoyancy had shifted another ten feet. I began to worry again about our rolling over when that first wave nailed us after surfacing.
That evening was the last time available for liberty before going to sea. I planned to write a quick letter to my parents before joining Marc for a final steaming session in Waikiki. By then, I had everything necessary for the voyage packed into the tiny spaces available for personal items, and I was ready to go to sea. My fresh dungaree clothing had been stashed around the oranges and books in my bunk locker, and I was ahead of schedule with my qualifications work. A few liberty hours would clear my head for the submerged voyage.
I had just finished the last page of my letter and was preparing to depart to the barracks for the usual quick shower and a change to civvies when Bruce Rossi caught me.
"Dunham," he said, his voice characteristically tough, "I want you to help Petty Officer Nicholson with the reactor start-up tomorrow morning.
"
He didn't wait for an answer as he turned away and stomped in the direction of the engine room. I had already learned that a "start-up of the reactor" was considerably different from something like turning a key, which energizes most other kinds of engines. The process did not occur quickly nor could it be done casually. A reactor start-up was intense. It required long hours of painstaking checking and double-checking the calibration and accuracy of virtually every single electronic instrument in the engine room. The reactor could be started by one man, but, considering the complexity, it was easier done by two, even if one of the men was a trainee like me. Every single word on page after page of instructions in the start-up manual had to be followed, with religious-like adherence, in order to satisfy the general policy of "verbatim compliance."
If one deviated by so much as a word from the written instructions, the baggy pants of Rear Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the Navy's director of nuclear propulsion, would appear on the horizon as another naval career crashed and burned.
The process was scheduled to begin in the engine room at midnight. A cold brew at Fort DeRussy was out of the question, as was a late-night Viperfish tour with adventuresome ladies. On start-up night, there would be no steaming, no drinking, no nocturnal adventures, no nothing but intense preparation while the rest of the crew slept. I had already come to know the mustached smiling face of Randy Nicholson, one of the three qualified reactor operators who had helped me with qualifications. At midnight, I strolled into the engine room and greeted Petty Officer Nicholson. We began the process to start up the reactor and worked through the night.
At exactly 0800 the next morning, the captain ordered the first backing bell (a pointer device in the engine room that showed the desired throttle speed) to move us away from Pearl Harbor's submarine pier. Again, Jim McGinn and I were sitting side by side in the engine room in front of the steam plant control panel's large rubber-coated throttle wheels to control steam to the propulsion turbines. We felt, as much as heard, the grinding sound of another camel being thrashed outside our pressure hull. Because the requirements of the steam plant control panel job were limited to opening or closing the propulsion turbine throttles on command, there was little we could do wrong. Nearby, the electrical operator and reactor operator sat in front of their panels to observe closely everything relating to electrical power and nuclear power, respectively. The engineering officer paced back and forth behind them, his eyes roaming across their panels, watching each meter, studying fluctuations in voltage and neutron levels, with the intent of keeping all of the vital systems in the engine room operating properly. The Viperfish was going to sea, and everybody was doing their jobs to ensure that nothing went wrong.
Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Page 4
