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

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. All 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