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

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 families 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.