Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

by Roger C. Dunham

  The people of Washington were good to sailors, I discovered the next day. I left the Viperfish on a sight-seeing liberty excursion and, wearing my Navy blues and sailor hat, hitchhiked from Bremerton halfway to Portland and then back north again into Seattle. Cars almost crashed into each other as their drivers eagerly pulled over to help me reach my destination.

  One driver, a rustic fellow in an old jalopy, elaborately introduced me to his daughter in the backseat as soon as I climbed in the front and shut the door. Feeling like some kind of celebrity, I turned and smiled at the attractive girl. My enthusiasm immediately waned, however, when I discovered that her mother, a large and muscular woman with a mean look, was sitting next to her like a bulldog guard. On close inspection, I realized that the girl was only about fourteen years old. She was chewing on a massive wad of bubble gum and, for the next ten minutes, babbled nonstop. As she rambled on, occasionally blowing monster bubbles that popped with a crack, I mentally changed my destination to the next convenient spot for pulling over. I jumped out of the car and thanked them for their kindness. They waved and rumbled off down the road-the father erratically steering the clunker, the mother flexing her muscles and guarding the daughter, and the pixie girl herself talking and chewing, and chewing and talking, all the while picking globs of pink gum from her hair.

  I reached a Seattle enlisted man's club late in the day, ate dinner, and gathered together with some of the Viperfish crew who had also discovered the place. We danced with a few of the local ladies (none of whom chewed gum), and, assisted by several cans of cold Olympia beer, blew off steam late into the night before riding the final ferryboat back to Bremerton and the Viperfish.

  During the next week, we performed more tests in the waters near Bremerton and prepared the Viperfish to interact safely with other American submarines in the Pacific Fleet. There wasn't much for me to do except continue with qualifications, stand my watch in front of the throttle wheels, and listen to the stories of my shipmates' exploits in Seattle, each tale becoming more incredible with the passage of time. When we left Puget Sound and sailed in the direction of San Francisco a week later, Marc Birken and I sat in the engine room and hollered our stories back and forth over the whine of the turbines.

  "God, she was beautiful!" Marc said, his face lighting up with enthusiasm.

  "What was the best part of her, bruddah?" I yelled back.

  "Her lips!"

  "Her lips?"

  "They were fantastic! They were strangely shaped, like nothing I've seen or felt before. They were hot, they…"

  He paused and looked at me. "But what about the gal you met?" he asked. "Didn't you say she was young and beautiful?"

  "Ah yes. She was not just beautiful, she was spectacular! In the back of a farmer's car, of all places, the finest young lady in all of Washington."

  "Where was the farmer?"

  "He introduced us! Can you believe that?"

  "And you did it with him watching? Right there, in the backseat of his car?"

  "Of course, he wasn't watching! He was with his…uh wife, checking out his crops. I'd say she was about nineteen, and we had the car to ourselves!"

  Marc grinned, his mind racing. "Silent and sweet, huh?"

  "Sweet for sure. Silent? Nope, she talked every minute!"

  "I love the talkers," Marc interjected. "My girl, strange lips and all, talked just the right amount, talked and kissed, and she said things I never heard before!"

  And so the conversations went, buzzing back and forth across the Viperfish, stories upon stories, expanding and making us all seem almost superhuman until nobody was quite sure what to believe.

  Passing by the coast of Oregon at periscope depth, we took "periscope liberty" and lined up the scope's cross hairs on the beautiful and rugged coastline on our port side. The scenery took on a surreal quality as the Viperfish drifted along at eight knots and our antennae delivered the musical sounds of a coastal radio station into the speakers of the control center. By the end of the day, when we had dropped our periscopes, dived three hundred feet, and aligned our SINS for San Francisco Bay, the stories of conquests faded back into our imaginations where most of them had originated in the first place.

  A couple of days later, the dark gray hull of the Viperfish emerged from the wall of fog stretching like a curtain across San Francisco Bay from Mount Tamalpais to Point Lobos. As we cruised across the wind-whipped waters below the Golden Gate Bridge, Captain Gillon allowed those of us not on watch to climb topside to view the spectacular scenery of the bay area. We mingled back and forth behind the bat-cave hump and looked up at the tourists on the bridge who were watching us.

  We appeared, I am sure, to be one of the strangest collection of people ever seen on board any military vessel entering the bay. Doc Baldridge wore a straw hat with FREEDOM across the hatband, while most of the men strolling in front of the sail wore the dark-blue lintless "faboomer suits" or the standard Navy dungaree uniforms. The civilians wore various items of clothing that showed little indication of any military connection or their significance on board the Viperfish.

  Looking around at the tourists on boats passing by, I had a perverse sense of pride in our general appearance of disorder. Contrasting with surface Navy vessels that enter heavily populated harbors with enlisted men standing like statues along the boundaries of their ship, we were a definite contrast. Nobody on our deck stood the right distance from anyone or anything — we just wandered around on the superstructure as we looked at the sights and avoided falling into the bay. In spite of our apparent disorganization, we had a strong sense of pride in our boat and in ourselves. We felt it unnecessary to convince anybody of our capabilities; the substance of the Viperfish crew counted, not the show. We were submariners, by God, and if people looking at us didn't like the way we looked, we really didn't care.

  We passed between Alcatraz Island and Angel Island, made a left turn toward San Pablo Bay, and finally tied up at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard near Vallejo. Because I was on schedule with the qualifications program, Bruce Rossi actually gave me a couple of days away from the boat during scheduled repair work on the Viperfish's nuclear instrumentation.

  I caught the first cab to Oakland International Airport and quickly picked up a standby ticket for a flight to Burbank. An hour later, I was home in Glendale where, unannounced, I rang our doorbell and surprised my parents for a weekend visit.

  If they had any worries about their son traveling around the ocean in a submarine, they didn't say much about it and I gave them as much reassurance as I could. They showed me a National Geographic magazine article about the USS Skate pushing up through the ice of the North Pole in 1959. We all looked at the pictures together, while I explained how safe I was during our submerged operations.

  Dinner was somewhat of a somber affair. We discussed the expanding Vietnam War; the disruptions in our society because of the war; and the emerging involvement of my younger brother, who was still in high school, with the antiwar movement.

  Unfortunately, the family's sleep was interrupted that night by my terror-filled screams during a nightmare about jagged spears of ice pushing through the Viperfish pressure hull during patrol under the North Pole.

  "It was just a dream," I told them as they rushed into my room. "There is nothing to worry about. We have the best men in the Navy serving on board the Viperfish, it is the best ship in the Navy, we're not going under any ice, and we're not going to do anything that could be risky. We are a safe submarine and everything will be fine."

  The next day, when they questioned me about the future of the Viperfish in the months and years ahead, all I could say was that we would be at sea; there could be no further answers until our mission was finished and maybe not even then. I could see the fear and worry in their eyes, especially in my mother's, as the cab arrived and I waved good-by. Their concerns were directed as much toward the unknown dangers in their son's future as to the obvious hazards already present. This torment was known to the fa
milies of servicemen everywhere. For my parents, it would not end until we surfaced the final time, when my duty on board the Viperfish reached a successful conclusion.

  Before returning to the Viperfish from the Oakland airport, I requested that the cab driver take me to a student bookstore near the University of California at Berkeley. I needed some books for the chemistry and French college-prep correspondence courses that I had started. Several years before, I had been at the university to watch a Cal-Navy game, and I recalled that the students had been an active, albeit interesting, group of people. I should have taken a clue from the cabby, a wiry little man with a twitching mustache, when he turned to face me after we pulled up to the bookstore.

  "Are you sure you want to go in there?" he asked, his mustache quivering.

  I assumed he was worried about my disappearing without paying the fare. "I'll leave my bag here," I told him, "I'll be back in about five minutes."

  He looked at me as if I were crazy. "Okay, sailor, it's your choice," he finally said, shrugging his shoulders and turning away.

  Puzzled, I climbed out of the cab and joined the throngs of students moving into the store. I was wearing my standard "Class A" Navy uniform, silk black tie in a perfect square knot, shoes shined beneath my bell-bottom dark-blue pants, and white Navy hat properly in place. After finding the textbooks and carrying them to the cashier, I first noticed the looks of hostility from the long-haired students standing in line.

  I pulled out my wallet and heard the rumble of obscenities, moving just into earshot. There was no doubt about the object of their scorn. Passing back and forth like a rising caldera of contempt, the words demonstrated the strong sentiments of the students' anger. Their comments were clearly directed at what I represented-the military, the Navy, the men involved with the killing in Southeast Asia.

  The student clerk who took my money stared with hostility. Ignoring my outstretched palm, he slowly dropped my change on the counter in a gesture of open defiance.

  I gave him a word of thanks that was ignored and gathered my books for a rapid exit. The antagonism followed me from the store. The students stopped to stare at my short hair and clean-shaven face, a palpable fury from a population of people hating the government that didn't listen and the war that wouldn't stop.

  I wanted to say that they were wrong, that I was just a guy trying to become qualified on a submarine from Hawaii, that I didn't use weapons against anyone, and that I was even working full time to defend their right to dissent. I didn't start any war in Vietnam, I don't deserve your scorn.

  The cab driver, accelerating to get me away from Berkeley toward the freeway, moved in and out of traffic in a determined effort to clear the area as quickly as possible. I looked out the window at the groups of long-haired students milling around on the sidewalks of University Avenue. As I felt my own anger at their rejection of everything I believed in, a fire truck, with red lights revolving and siren screaming, sped past us in the opposite direction, toward the university. It was towing a trailer marked "bomb-disposal."

  The remainder of the ride back to Vallejo and Mare Island was one of silent gloom. The sentiment against the expanding Vietnam War had reached a level where rational debate was disappearing into a whirlpool of student anger and protest. Minds were becoming polarized, radical factions were forming, and open discussion was becoming impossible.

  Within the confines of the Viperfish, we had our answer to the issue. We believed in the military solution to Vietnam as strongly as the students believed in their peaceful solution. We trusted and believed in the sincerity of our national leaders, although the reasons for continuing the battle were changing from defending a country and preventing the "domino effect" to not letting those who had already been killed in battle to have done so in vain. As we observed the riots, civil disobedience, and lawlessness of the protesters, we stopped listening to their rhetoric.

  What I could not understand that day, and what none of us on the Viperfish could understand during the months that followed, was why everybody in the military should be objects of such scorn. None of us made the government's policy on Vietnam-not the soldiers in Southeast Asia and not the sailors on the Viperfish. Our crew became victims of this protest, but American soldiers in Vietnam became double victims. Not only were they ordered to Vietnam to fight, but they were spat upon for being American soldiers.

  Our morale began to drop as a result of the protests and so much dissent from those who apparently were doing nothing for their country. The crew responded to student contempt by generating our own contempt for "the hippies and the freaks" who seemed, each time we saw or heard a news report, to be taking over the society that we were defending.

  6. Non-qual puke

  The long-haired Berkeley student was an athlete, lean and well conditioned, and he threw his projectile with precision.

  The instant the rock struck the leg of the officer in the front line of advancing deputy sheriffs, the student turned and ran up Durant Avenue to escape. The officer had seen the stone coming and felt the pain of its impact. He immediately broke ranks and took up the chase, his helmet bouncing against his head and forty pounds of guns, ammunition, shield, and bullet-proof vest clattering against his body. He was obese and quickly became fatigued. From the towering structures of the Unit One dorms near College Avenue, hundreds of students hollered a barrage of insults at the officer as they watched the chase move up the street. The athlete moved like a rabbit, while the officer fell farther behind, gasping for air as he struggled beneath his heavy load of equipment.

  At that moment, a young freshman engineering student walked up the quiet sidewalk on the north side of College Avenue in the direction of the university. Unaware of the chase progressing in his direction and ignoring the noise from Durant Avenue, he carried a full load of books on subjects relating to his science major. He walked quickly, with his head down and his mind deep in thought.

  The athlete rounded the corner and, racing past the engineering student, disappeared up an alley as the deputy sheriff reached the area. The student adjusted his load of books and quickly glanced at his watch-he would be late if he didn't hurry. The only warning of danger was the brief sound of gasping before the nightstick struck the side of the young man's head. His books scattered and blood immediately rushed down his neck onto his clean shirt. He fell to his knees and heard the gasping sound of heavy breathing again as the baton, striking a second time, produced more pain and blood.

  The outrage and obscenities screamed by the students looking down from the windows of Freeborn Hall were ignored by the officer and unheard by the injured student. He finally collapsed on the asphalt and slipped into a coma.

  At this same time, in the waters of the base at Vladivostok, a special class of Soviet submarines loaded 9,000-pound N-3 Shaddock cruise missiles into their launching systems. These winged projectiles, tucked down inside the submarine hull, were designed to be carried away from the vessel by two booster rockets that were quickly jettisoned after the launch. The Shaddock was propelled by a powerful ramjet engine to a speed as high as Mach 2 (twice the speed of sound); the direction to its target was guided and corrected by the submarine's radar system, referred to as Front Piece and Front Door.

  The submarine class that carried this missile was known in the Western world as the Echo I fleet submarine. Built by the Soviet Navy to follow the November class developed in 1958 and using an identical nuclear propulsion system, the Echo I was designed with a longer hull that supported three pairs of missile-launching systems. An enlarged version of this submarine, called the Echo II, was built between 1961 and 1967; she was able to launch four pairs of missiles.

  During this time, an advanced SS-N-12 missile, weighing 11,000 pounds, was developed with an improved range of nearly three hundred miles. Programmed to follow a supersonic trajectory that hugged the ocean, this lethal missile never reached an altitude of more than 2,200 feet. It was guided by precision radar and satellite missile-targeting systems. A
ll SS-N-12 devices could be launched from the Echo II boats within twenty minutes of their surfacing and could deliver to their targets a deadly barrage of high explosives or nuclear warheads.

  RANDY NICHOLSON BROUGHT THE Viperfish nuclear reactor on line early that morning in 1967. By 0800, we had stationed the maneuvering watch and were progressing down the Napa River in the direction of San Pablo and San Francisco Bay. We passed the distant campanile tower at the University of California, Berkeley, on our port bow before we finally turned right and plowed through the whitecaps toward the Golden Gate Bridge. Jim McGinn and I sat in the back of the engine room and held the throttle wheels while we listened to the loudspeaker commands from Lieutenant Katz, who was standing watch as the OOD at the top of our sail. It was a gloomy day topside, wet and cold, and nobody ventured up to catch the freezing wind and watch the fog pass by.

  After traversing the waters below the Golden Gate Bridge and continuing into the Pacific Ocean, it came as almost a blessing for us finally to clear the bridge and submerge, down and away from the miserable day above. The men standing watch in the control center established the usual down-angle as the Viperfish descended several hundred feet into the silent water, leveled her off, and set a course for the Hawaiian Islands, three thousand miles away.

  About this time, Bruce Rossi began to intensify the pressure on me to become qualified on the nuclear control systems. Several of the nuclear-trained men, in addition to my mentor, Randy Nicholson, would be leaving the Navy shortly after we reached Pearl Harbor, and the training of their replacements was essential for the continued operation of the Viperfish.

  "Are you working on your engine-room qualifications?" Rossi asked me that first afternoon out, shortly after I left my watch station at the throttles.