About five minutes later, with no warning, the captain suddenly hollered "Back emergency! Back emergency!" over the loudspeaker, his normally soft voice replaced by an urgent call for action. Instantly behind us, Bruce Rossi was watching us and monitoring every move as Jim and I bolted to our feet and struggled to crank the "ahead" throttles shut before turning the smaller wheel that reversed the direction of the screws. To make matters more difficult, a loud "reverse direction" alarm built into the steam control system began blaring a warning about throttle conflicts as Rossi bellowed, "Hurry, hurry, hurry!"
Jim and I were both sweating and hyperventilating by the time the turbines began their characteristic high-pitched screams in the reverse (backing) direction. We struggled to stop the Viperfish and back her away from whatever freighter or other threat was before us.
I loudly announced to the engineering officer that we were now answering the back-emergency bell at the same moment that the captain's voice, more relaxed this time, came over the loudspeakers: "All stop. All ahead one third."
From the sound of the captain's voice, it was apparent that the imminent danger had passed. Jim and I lightened our tight grip on our throttle wheels as we took our seats and answered the new bell. Both of us were sure that our quick reactions had saved the boat.
Marc strolled down the passageway at about that time. His grin was bigger than usual. "I was just up in the control center," he said. "Nice job you guys did answering that bell so fast."
"Thanks, Marc," I said, appreciating his recognition of our prompt reaction. "Did you get a look at what we almost hit?"
His smile faded. "Almost hit? We almost hit something?"
"Isn't that what the back-emergency bell was for?" I asked, starting to feel uncomfortable.
"That is what it can be for, but the captain just wanted to demonstrate to one of the junior officers on the bridge how quickly the Viperfish can stop. The training of the newer officers is one of his top priorities, and probably one of his greatest challenges. Unfortunately, this boat has a weird envelope of performance, and training is a formidable task."
"Oh. So it was a drill kind of a thing. Did we stop fast?"
"You guys answered the bell fast, and we started churning the water real nice, but it took us damn near forever to slow down. This thing don't wanna stop, no matter how fast you answer bells."
"We're too big," I speculated, thinking about the appearance of the Viperfish in dry dock.
"We are much too big for a decent submarine," he mumbled and wandered off to other tasks.
Feeling dumb, Jim and I clutched the throttles as we waited for the next "emergency."
Obviously, it would be difficult for us to figure out what was going on elsewhere in the submarine. Inside the engine-room hull, where there were no windows and no information about depth or speed, it was easy to visualize the worst possible disaster at the slightest provocation: The back-emergency bell became a terrible impending collision; the blast of an alarm from the steam panel, a major steam leak; the alarm horns over the reactor panel, an unsafe nuclear reactor condition or something even worse. This phenomenon, we were to discover, was especially a problem during intense activities when several alarms were shrieking, men were shouting, and turbines were screaming. This was the curse of working in the engine room. We spent an inordinate amount of time wondering just exactly what was happening elsewhere in the boat.
The Viperfish finally reached the ocean, as evidenced by the pitching and rolling of her hull. Cruising on the surface, she had moved several miles away from Oahu when a voice on the loudspeaker tersely announced the dive.
"Dive, dive!" were the only words called out by the chief of the watch at the ballast control panel. We heard no Klaxon noises or other horns, and there was nothing to suggest that this dive, the first since the Viperfish's refit, was anything other than a routine event. It was the first submarine dive of my life, however, and I had already identified thousands of mechanical components that could potentially sink us if they failed while we were submerged. Everything about the dive was significant to me.
Idle conversation throughout the Viperfish immediately came to a halt. The men, intensifying their concentration on the systems in front of them, watched for anything that could increase the dangers to 120 men moving beneath the sea. Outside the pressure hull, large valves trapping the ballast air that gave us positive buoyancy suddenly flew open, quickly venting the outside tanks. The tanks began to fill with water, which caused the boat to develop negative buoyancy and become heavier. The massive bulk of the Viperfish rapidly settled down into the water, the bow angling downward as the two planesmen, who sat side by side at the diving station, pressed forward on their wheels controlling the diving planes. All sensations of movement from wave activity came to a halt. Abruptly, we felt frozen in space as the bulk of the superstructure and sail dropped below the surface of the ocean.
Sandy Gallivan, chief of the watch at the ballast control panel, opened the ballast tank vent valves. He flipped switches to start and stop pumps in the bowels of the submarine, thus controlling the transfer of water and fine-tuning the boat's buoyancy and balance. In the engine room, Randy Nicholson adjusted the reactor controls to maintain adequate steam energy for the propulsion turbines. Donald Svedlow, sitting next to him, controlled the electrical systems. Diving required tightly coordinated choreography of machinery and highly trained men. From one end of the boat to the other, the men were working, watching, thinking, and continuously seeking optimal performance from the equipment under their control.
The captain scanned the ocean surface through the starboard periscope. He ordered the diving officer to have the planesmen maintain periscope depth and zero angle, in order to leave nothing above the surface of the water but the small tubes and lenses of the two periscopes.
"Now, attention all hands!" the captain called through the IMC loudspeakers, "The ship is at periscope depth. All hands check for leaks!"
The captain was directing everyone on board-the enlisted men and officers, the scientists in the bow compartment, and the few civilian shipyard technicians along for the sea trials-to search for any seawater leaks that could suddenly flood the boat and kill us all. This extremely serious business precluded the joking and light banter among crew members that usually occurred during their routine tasks of running the boat. There was nothing routine about searching for flaws in the dry dock modifications, during which so many pressure boundaries had been opened and welded shut again.
The entire process was simultaneously intense and inspiring. There was a powerful awareness of being surrounded by the dark pressures of our submerged existence. We could almost feel the suffocating enclosure of the ocean as we committed ourselves to the experience of moving below its surface.
With flashlights in hand, we peered into every dark recess; studied each cluster of pipes filled with seawater; and scrutinized every valve, pipe flange, and pressure hull fitting. We waved our lights toward the oily waters of the bilge to look for rising levels and studied the curved steel on the inside of the pressure hull as we searched for tiny telltale streams of salt water. We listened carefully for the hissing sounds of hidden high-pressure leaks that could expand and rupture the hull when we moved deeper into the ocean. The USS Viperfish was our declared sanctuary from the outside forces of nature, and we would allow no violations of her integrity.
During the next five hours, we moved deeper into the ocean in 100-foot increments. At each level of our descent, we searched for leaks. As the pressure around us increased, a parallel force in our minds began to develop, a psychological pressure further riveting our attention on the job before us.
When the captain called over the loudspeaker, "Rig ship for deep submergence," we were ready to take the final step of easing our boat into the deepest and darkest corner of our submergence envelope, where the extreme pressures of the Pacific Ocean could further threaten our world inside the Viperfish.
The doors between the compartm
ents were now locked and dogged tightly shut, isolating the crew into small pockets of men throughout the submarine[3].
I moved slowly up and down the engine room passageways as I examined the clusters of seawater pipes around me and checked for anything that looked abnormal. If flooding occurred from a broken pipe-a sudden disaster of roaring high-pressure water at that depth-none of us in the engine room would survive. Instant death would be certain. All of us had known of this risk when we volunteered for submarine duty. The remainder of the crew might have a chance of survival if the boat was able to surface quickly enough, if the reactor stayed operational long enough, and if the design of the Viperfish allowed for sufficient buoyancy.
Another dark fact from my qualifications work emerged. Should flooding occur in the huge Special Project compartment and high-pressure seawater flooded the cavernous hangar space in the front third of the ship, the weight of the water would certainly take all of us straight to the bottom. The Soviet Navy had already lost a submarine in this manner, years before, when the hangar space in a Whisky twin-cylinder missile submarine flooded. To make a bad situation worse, the Special Project hangar compartment was the one space in the Viperfish with a huge hole penetrating the bottom of the hull.
I directed my flashlight toward the clusters of pipes carrying seawater to the propulsion systems and wondered how long the reactor could provide useful power if one of the pipes ruptured and the engine room was lost. The loss of the USS Thresher was in the background of our consciousness, always suppressed, yet always present. The details of her sinking in 1963 had never been fully clarified by the Navy Department. Presumably, she was lost, with 129 men on board, because of an engine-room leak, and her engineering problems were quickly compounded by the SCRAM of her reactor and ice clogging in the high-pressure blowing system, which prevented her from surfacing[4].
That was the year I had joined the Navy. Hopefully, after three years, the engineers responsible for the design parameters of U.S. submarines had modified the Viperfish under the safety provisions of the SUBSAFE program (a comprehensive retrofit program developed to prevent another such disaster).
We finally reached our test depth, the deepest allowed for the Viperfish, and we studied our seawater pipes. We would never intentionally move below this depth. The performance envelope of the Viperfish was not designed for deeper penetration or greater pressures. There was only one defined level below that point-the depth associated with the end of a submarine's life, the crush depth, from which nobody returns. When a submarine moves through this final pressure limit, sonar systems for hundreds of miles around pick up the strange sounds of bursting pipes and collapsing bulkheads, the curious staccato of the dying submarine's screams, like the rapid popping of popcorn, as the vessel implodes upon herself and plunges to the ocean floor.
Captain Gillon finally announced that the Viperfish was free of leaks at our test depth. We planed up, blew the water out of our ballast tanks, and thundered up to the surface, where 120 men began to breathe easily again.
4. Drills and more drills
Throughout the second half of 1966, the Vietnam conflict continued to escalate, and record numbers of aircraft missions were flown against enemy targets north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda criticized President Lyndon B. Johnson's peace overtures and blasted the United States for its armed interference in the internal affairs of foreign countries. The Soviet Defense Ministry newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda reported that increasing numbers of Russian military experts were training North Vietnamese antiaircraft missile crews to improve the firepower of their weapons against the Americans. At the same time, Soviet Deputy Premier Vladimir Novikov pledged increased economic and military assistance to Hanoi.
On 6 September 1966, Pfc James A. Johnson, Jr., received a dishonorable discharge and was sentenced to five years at hard labor for refusing to go to Vietnam; on 29 September, the U.S. Military Assistance Command in Saigon reported United States combat fatalities in Vietnam had reached 5,302. The Institute of Strategic Studies reported in London that the Soviet Union had surrounded Moscow and Leningrad with antiballistic missile defenses, while increasing its number of medium bombers to 1,200 (compared with the U.S. total of 222). At the same time, the institute reported, Communist China was developing a ballistic missile delivery system for nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, Soviet submarines from Vladivostok patrolled their assigned sectors in the Pacific Ocean. Some of them sought contact with ships from other countries, but others, lying silently in wait, constituted a submerged threat for the launching of ballistic and cruise missiles at targets in the United States. The sounds of cavitation (loud noises of collapsing air bubbles spinning off high-speed screws) carried into the water around the nuclear and conventional submarines as they left port and pushed their propulsion systems to 100 percent power. Upon reaching their maximum speeds in the Sea of Japan, their characteristic acoustic signatures moved through the high-pressure waters that dropped three miles below each vessel and finally reached the listening microphones of the U.S. SOSUS array. Thousands of miles away, DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) communications specialists patiently listened to the sounds of moving Soviet submarines as vector equipment identified coordinates that could provide potentially useful information for the United States.
Life on a submarine stretches the boundaries of human behavior. Psychologists have long studied the reactions of people to the presence of surrounding humanity in the cities of our society. They define an individual's "private zone" as a few feet of space around that person; regular encroachment on the private zone by others can annoy the individual and perhaps result in irrational behavior. Such violations of privacy can be tolerated for short intervals, such as within a crowded bus or an elevator, but when the time is extended beyond an hour or two, behavior and performance can suffer accordingly. Encroachment on individuals' private zones often is used as an explanation for hostile and antisocial acts within crowded apartment buildings of our inner cities. The only practical solution might be to escape frequently to open spaces where the mind can regain a normal perspective, but this is usually impossible.
To understand the feeling of living enclosed within the Viperfish, one can visualize 120 men confined to a small house with four big rooms, several smaller rooms, and no telephone or television. The windows are blackened and sealed shut, the doors are bolted with multiple padlocks, and no communication is allowed with anyone outside the house. No women are allowed within the house, and there are only memories of the pleasures from prior relationships. The men have no way to determine if it is day or night outside, and it quickly becomes apparent that the time of day really does not matter. Everyone inside the house is aware that forces of nature can suddenly destroy the house without warning and that forces generated by other clusters of men living within the neighborhood can also result in abrupt destruction.
Movies are shown and good meals are served, but the men know that no doors or windows to the outside world will be opened for a period lasting up to two months. The house has a mission, the men are told, but the nature of the mission is never revealed to any but those who have been appointed to head the household. The performance of tasks within this house is done not just because of the military imperative, but because every single man confined within believes in the mission, whatever it might be. From the driving force of this belief comes the possibility of success and the probability of survival during the long days of confinement. In our case, the house was called the USS Viperfish.
In the middle of the first night on board the boat, as we were steaming at a depth of about three hundred feet, I learned about "blowing the head."
It is not easy to flush anything into the outside ocean from a deeply submerged vessel. Because the external water pressure at three hundred feet is in the range of 150 pounds per square inch, a pressure greater than this must be generated to propel waste products out of the submarine. Even the most efficient toilet can
produce no more than a few ounces of pressure to expel waste. Any flushing attempt would result in a geyser of high-pressure seawater blasting into the head, immediately flooding the entire compartment, and potentially sinking the submarine.
The Viperfish head, therefore, was designed with a septic tank (called the sanitary tank) of great strength. Located directly under the rows of toilets and showers, the tank acted as a storage place for waste products until it was convenient to empty it. Because the tank was normally maintained at atmospheric pressure, the commodes (toilets), showers, and sinks could easily empty into the device.
None of these technical considerations was in my mind when I awakened in the middle of my first night at sea with a compelling need to use the facility. Dim lights, always on in the head (sailors' term for bathroom), day and night, illuminated the solid steel interior. Everything was made of steel-the deck (floor), the showers, the mirrors, and the commode, including its ice-cold seat. The head was generally a spooky place, always too dark, and always smelling bad no matter how vigorously the men worked to keep it clean.
Dressed only in my skivvies (undershorts-nobody wore pajamas to bed), I swung out of my rack and hiked barefoot down the dim red-lit corridors to the head. The cold steel of the deck and commode seat jolted me awake.
Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Page 5
