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

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.

After using the commode, I began the sequence of valve operations to flush it. Opening the first valve allowed one to see the sloshing fluids in the dark recesses in the tank. I immediately discovered that it was necessary to avoid breathing the concentrated odors of methane, hydrogen, and other explosive gases bubbling forth from below. I then turned the other valves behind the commode in exactly the correct sequence as I had been taught, and seawater finally flushed through the bowl for a thorough washing-out operation.

Before I had time to reflect on my success at flushing, Larry Kanen entered the room with a rush and began scurrying around, sealing drain valves in the sinks, showers, and decking.

'What are you doing, Larry?' I asked.

'Gonna blow the head, Roger!' he announced with remarkable enthusiasm.

I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was obvious that he was intent on completing his job as quickly as possible.

'Do I have time to rinse my hands?'

'Better hurry! Gotta blow the head, right away!'

Kanen finished his work, sealing every valve in the head. A few seconds later, a hissing, gurgling sound began to emerge from the drains as he turned a compressed-air valve to blow high-pressure air into the sanitary tank, some of which leaked up from, around the valves and back into the head. As the pressure in the tank increased, the contents of the tank blasted out into the ocean.

The odor filling the head from the bubbling drains was intense. Fighting back a gagging feeling, I returned to my rack and yanked the curtain across the opening. When I took a couple of deep breaths, I discovered that the escape was short-lived. Fifty feet in front of my rack was a vent line designed to relieve the pressure remaining in the tank after the flushing. For the next fifteen minutes, as Kanen vented the tank, the hissing gas that smelled like a nightmare concoction of rotting eggs filled our sleeping area. It penetrated the entire compartment-our bunks, our hair, our nostrils, and everything we owned.

We spent two more weeks in the waters west of Oahu to practice diving down to the level of our test depth and climbing back to the surface again. With radical movements of the rudder and control planes, the captain performed various 'angles and dangles' that placed the Viperfish every conceivable position that a submarine could manage. We tested each piece of equipment for any flawed circuits or machinery that could endanger our lives or limit the success of our mission. The sonarmen adjusted their controls as they listened to the strange sounds of whales moving through the ocean, the torpedomen and fire control technicians