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

calibrated their equipment, and the nukes shut down and started up their turbogenerators and the nuclear reactor. The newer men on the ship became better acquainted with the veterans, and we all learned the essentials of living, training, and working together in the claustrophobic quarters of the Viperfish.

In the hangar compartment, the Special Project engineers, strolling around, looked down from time to time into the huge hole that penetrated the decking. Commander Spiegel and Lieutenant Dobkin worked with the civilians and photographer Robbie Teague to ensure that the Fish equipment worked properly. They weren't hostile to the rest of us; they were just private.

If one of the regular crew came by, they lowered their voices. They nodded to the crewman and said, 'Hi.' The crewman nodded back and said, 'Hi,' and that was the end of the conversation. If any of us lingered, a heavy silence descended over the hangar until the outsider left the immediate area.

On one occasion, while I was struggling to learn a particularly difficult system in the hangar, I asked Lieutenant Dobkin a question relating to their work. The question was apparently too sensitive because his response amounted to a lecture on the nature of the 'silent service.'

'Submarines are the silent service because we remain silent about these kinds of things,' he said, his eyes staring straight at me before finally turning away to join his civilian associates. I felt a flash of anger and mentally debated why our Special Project wasn't like any other part of our submarine-everything else we worked with was also a part of the silent service. I returned to my qualifications work with silent service philosophies moving through my mind. Finally resolving the problem, I decided that the Special Project was, simply enough, top secret and therefore different from everything else we did that was just secret. Years later, I would discover that the Special Project was, in fact, compartmentalized top secret; not even an individual with a top secret clearance could learn the details of our mission.

Six days before we returned to Pearl Harbor, the word spread through the boat that we would be starting torpedo-firing exercises. This was exactly what I had been waiting for since the day I volunteered for submarine duty. Shooting torpedoes was a fundamental operation of submarines, an essence of sorts. It provided for the boat's survival and established her effectiveness as a military machine. After several hours had passed with no further information about the exercise, I climbed into my rack and began fading off to sleep.

The captain's voice suddenly blared over the loudspeaker system: 'Now, man battle stations torpedo! Man battle stations torpedo!'

I popped my eyes open, leaped to the deck, and ran at top speed down the narrow passageway in the direction of the engine room. At the same time, the other men jumped out of their racks and raced toward their battle stations. Everybody dodged each other in a state of high-speed, controlled movement to reach their assigned positions in the Viperfish. I ducked under the sharp-edged valves in the tunnel over the reactor and climbed through the watertight door opening to the engine room and my battle station: the turbine throttle wheels that Jim and I had controlled when we left Pearl Harbor. Jim was nowhere to be seen, and so I placed my hands on both wheels and waited for the excitement to begin.

In the control center, two hundred feet in front of the throttles, the captain looked through the periscope, spotted the torpedo recovery ship that had arrived from Pearl Harbor to help us, and ordered the exercise to begin. Several junior officers, working on their torpedo qualifications, moved through the established routine and prepared to fire our torpedoes from the hangar compartment in the bow.

While they performed their work, I sat stiffly upright in front of the large rubberized engine-room throttles and wondered when something would happen. Surrounded by the other men in the engine room, all of whom were also waiting for something to happen, I was unaware of the frenzied activity in the control center as the torpedo fire control technicians, torpedomen, and officers tracked and plotted the shoot. Half an hour later, I turned to ask the engineering officer when we were going to fire the first torpedo. At that instant, I felt a slight shudder of the Viperfish's hull and heard the distant 'whooshing' of a missile being launched into the ocean.

That was all there was to the shot. I stood up, gripped the throttle wheels, and waited expectantly for the control center to order sudden changes in our speed. Remarkably, the bell indicator remained silent, and there were no further orders. None of us did anything except stare at our control panels as the captain announced over the speaker system, 'Now, surface, surface, surface.'

With the usual amount of gurgling sounds, we broke the surface. After the first of an endless number of huge waves hit the side of the Viperfish, we began aimlessly wandering around searching for the torpedo we had just fired. It was designed to run a specific distance before running out of fuel and floating to the surface, where it could be recovered and fired again-a sort of Navy recycling system. The torpedo was also programmed to release a brilliant yellow dye to make it easier to spot. The captain and officers who had fired the shot searched through their binoculars from their vantage point at the top of the sail, sixty-five feet above the water. The two lookouts in the back of the cockpit scanned the whitecaps in the opposite direction with their binoculars. Somewhere near the horizon, the crew of the heaving torpedo recovery ship also scanned the ocean for any trace of the torpedo.

In the maneuvering area of the engine room, we began to feel like we were dying. I knew there was going to be a major problem, after the first twenty minutes on the surface, when I sensed the beginning stages of a sickening pain in the center of my abdomen. I looked down at the black coffee splashing over the top of my cup and felt a surge of nausea, immediately followed by a sweating attack of vertigo. Our rounded hull, designed for submerged operations, did little to diminish the effects of the powerful waves. Each time we rolled thirty degrees to the left or right, we instantly came up and rolled almost as far in the other direction.

The waves continued to batter against us with increasing force. As we rolled violently back and forth, pungent oil fumes from the bilge water permeated the hot and humid air around us. My throat constricted from the gagging odor of the fumes and my eyes blurred, but I tightened my sweaty fists around the throttle wheels.

Randy Nicholson, his face pale and showing stress, sat behind me and watched the reactor control panel pitching up and down in front of him. Next to him was the powerful frame of Donald Svedlow, a longtime veteran of the Submarine Service, who also looked like he wanted to be anywhere but on the surface of the ocean. Our sweating engineering officer, Lt. (jg) Douglas Katz, paced a fixed pattern in the corner of the maneuvering area. His skin was a sickly green color, and his tortured eyes repeatedly gazed across the engine room as though he were searching for the horizon.

My dungaree shirt turned a dark blue from sweat as I fought the nausea. I began repeatedly swallowing and belching, and there was a ringing sound in my ears. I prayed for them to find the torpedo, and then I prayed for them to forget the torpedo. Finally, I cursed all torpedoes as I visualized helicopters flying in to lift me off the boat.

Glancing at the men around me, I wondered who was going to lose it first. The sloshing of coffee from my cup onto the decking created curious miniature rivers moving in opposite directions in response to the roll of the boat. I began to eye the tall metal trash can clamped next to the throttle wheels, and I wondered how I could quickly utilize it without attracting everybody's attention. It seemed reasonable that throwing up should be a private thing, but there was no way to leave my battle station to seek the relative isolation of the head. I thought about the civilians in the hangar compartment and grimaced at the thought of their breakfasts being lost into the huge hole in the center of their Special Project area.

Forty-five minutes into the search for the wayward torpedo, Lieutenant Katz cleared his throat a couple of times and left the area. He mumbled something about checking out the vacuum in one of our condensers.

'He's gonna puke,' Svedlow grumbled after Katz's staggering form was out of sight. 'He's gonna put his head into the bilge and he's gonna search for Ralph O'Roark.'

'We're all gonna puke, bruddah,' Nicholson said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. 'It's just a matter of time.'

'Goddamn forward pukes and their goddamn forward puke torpedoes,' Svedlow growled, followed by the longest belching sound I had ever heard.

'The forward pukes are gonna make us puke,' Nicholson said, grimly. 'I'll pay for the goddamn torpedo myself. Just dive this thing and send me the bill.'

Incredibly, Svedlow then pulled out a pack of cigars from his shirt pocket and asked if anybody wanted a smoke. Nicholson grabbed one, and soon the entire maneuvering area of the engine room carried a layer of pale cigar smoke mixing with the odors of diesel oil fumes and sweat. The psychology of cigar smoke at a time of end- stage nausea was not clear to me, but it appeared to be a well-established practice.