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

The new sailor who did extremely well on the test, however, would be, finally, absolutely guaranteed nuclear power training (but not necessarily submarine duty). If he did all these things and was unlucky, he could be assigned to a nuclear surface ship and spend the next several years wondering where, in the long process of taking tests and signing papers, he had gone wrong. For the 3 percent of Navy enlisted men who were very lucky, the ones for whom the 'needs of the Navy' matched the desire of the individual, submarine duty would beckon.

During the nearly three years following boot camp, the Navy flew me around the country to one training program after another as I completed courses in electronics and nuclear power. The courses were as tough as anything I would later face at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Medicine; most important of all, I learned to study, I grew up, and, by the time I started submarine school beneath the dreary clouds of New London, Connecticut, I was fully prepared to become a nuclear star.

As the Viperfish moved across the Pacific in the direction of the Hawaiian Islands, I worked day and night to learn the theoretical details of the nuclear propulsion system. While a student in nuclear power school, I had thought the study of nuclear fission and the physics relating to the transfer of heat to steam generators to be relatively uncomplicated. The reactor produces heat; the heat boils the water to create steam; the steam spins a turbine to generate power; and, when the screws begin to churn, the submarine moves through the ocean! The reality of the unique system within the actual submarine was quite different, however, because of the complexities associated with controlling the system and the variances among the many submarines in the fleet. The engine room generated a tremendous amount of heat and power, and with the power came an enormous responsibility of the reactor operator to keep the nuclear genie under control. Also, the feeling of being surrounded by so much raw power, the roaring noise of steam, the screaming of turbines, the pounding of pumps, all in the setting of the vibrating hull from the rotation of the Viperfish's powerful screws, tended to focus one's concentration far more than any experience in the classroom.

The pinnacle of the engine-room qualification system was the process of learning to control the nuclear reactor. Locked out of sight under yellow lead glass windows, the reactor required precision control mechanisms to maintain a steady-state nuclear fission process that would produce the right amount of power without overheating or leaking radiation. The design of the entire system was based on extraordinary safety considerations to minimize risks to the men working in the engine room and to the environment. Even with a safe design, however, the need for safe control was continuously hammered into our minds.

The psychological pressure during this time was extreme, not only because of the timetable for qualifications and the continuous pressure from Bruce Rossi, but also because of the enormous responsibilities associated with control of the reactor. For a twenty-one-year-old man, barely three years out of boot camp, who had flunked out of college, just sitting in front of a panel that controlled millions of watts of thermal and nuclear energy driving a propulsion engine with two shafts that delivered six thousand horsepower was, in itself, a most awesome responsibility.

The seat facing the panel was in a cramped area at the back corner of the engine room. When I sat in the chair, I faced hundreds of lights, meters, control switches, and audible alarms that shrieked out various abnormal conditions when a drill was under way and everything seemed to be falling apart. The electrician in charge of all the electricity generated and used throughout the Viperfish was also seated in this area (the maneuvering room). As the reactor operator and electrician sat side by side, facing their panels, the engineering officer of the watch (EOOW) sat on the edge of his chair or paced back and forth behind them and watched all of the panels. Working to put everything together, he often hollered orders through the loudspeaker system to other men stationed around the engine room. Next to the EOOW, squeezed in the same tiny area, was yet another man, the chief of the watch, who also oversaw everything and worked to determine what might be going wrong at any given moment.

In the middle of a typical drill, when the nuclear system seemed to be self-destructing, I soon learned that everybody jumped up from their chairs and stood in front of their panels as they flipped switches and called out information to the EOOW, who, in turn, grabbed his microphone and blasted out orders over the loud-speakers. During all this time, lights throughout the engine room were going out as electrical power was lost; alarms were blasting out their shrill noises; circuit breakers were slamming open or shut; red lights were flashing; and other loudspeakers, controlled by men outside the engine room, were announcing the loss of reactor power. Although appearing to be total chaos, this was actually a tightly coordinated process of highly trained men taking action to allow for the continued production of power. The system worked quite well-most of the time.

Always in the back of my mind was the thought that, if I screw up the reactor in some unexpected manner, if I twitch a switch to the right instead of the left, or if I forget some important fact I had been trained to know, I could conceivably kill us all. It was this fear, plus the intense training always to 'make things safe' no matter what disaster might be happening, that led to my nightmare.

We were about halfway to Pearl Harbor and I had squeezed into my rack to catch a couple of hours' sleep before taking the next training reactor operator watch. Just before I went to sleep, the Viperfish surfaced and began rolling back and forth. I moved into a deep sleep and envisioned myself sitting before the reactor control panel. Plunging deeper into the dream, I watched the meters and red lights before me as the boat increasingly rolled from the impact of the waves on the hull. With each movement of the boat, the reactor control panel lifted high above my head and then dropped down far below me. Suddenly, we took a huge roll at the moment I was looking up at the reactor control panel towering above me. To my horror, the entire panel broke off its moorings and fell on top of me. It knocked me from my seat and crushed me against the floor!

For an indeterminate period of time, I found myself tightly squeezed under the massive panel as I struggled to 'make everything safe,' mostly by just trying to shut down the nuclear reactor. The panel crushed my arms and I struggled as hard as I could to reach the SCRAM switch that would shut down the plant. I cursed with the effort, I ground my teeth, I sweat furiously, I stretched my arm as far as possible in the direction of the switch, and I cursed again. Just as I accepted that I was going to die, I woke up.

Trying to orient my mind in the darkness of my rack, I discovered that I had somehow managed to turn myself all the way around, a feat that was almost physically impossible. My head was mashed against the bulkhead where my feet normally rested, my arm was trapped behind the medicine cabinet next to the sleeping area, my dungarees were drenched with sweat, and my head pounded from the clenching of my teeth.

I lay silently in the quiet dark of my rack for ten minutes and tried to assess the stress factors associated with my efforts to become a reactor operator: the lack of sleep, the confined quarters, the repetition of intense drills, Bruce Rossi hammering away about quals, the necessity to get qualified before Nicholson departed the Viperfish, the control of so much power upon which all our lives depended. Stress was taking its toll, and the nightmare seemed like a sign that it might be too much for me.

The psychological tests I had taken in submarine school were filled with strange questions about our feelings relating to the odor of a man's sweat, the feelings we would have after launching Polaris missiles, and other feelings about this and that. We had been told that there were 'no right answers, no wrong answers.' From the unplanned departure of several men from our class immediately after the test was graded, it was apparent that some answers were not right enough to suit the Navy. There was nobody on the Viperfish to counsel us about stress, and I would not have been inclined to meet with a psychiatrist if one had been on board. So, I just pulled my curtain tightly shut and thought the thing through.

After a half hour of contemplation, I finally decided that my reaction to everything so far was, in fact, appropriate to the conditions that I was experiencing. When all hell breaks loose at four hundred feet below the surface, one is supposed to react, even start shaking a little, if the reactor develops a SCRAM and the lights go out-so long as the reactions are appropriate and the problems are properly resolved. 'Builds character' was a phrase often used when we reflected on the intensity of various drills and our reactions to these challenges. I pushed the nightmare from my mind, climbed back into the engine room, and proceeded to build more character at the reactor control panel of the Viperfish.

And that was the night we burned a hole through the movie.

I took a couple of hours off after the evening meal to escape into the Hollywood drama projected against a screen on the far bulkhead of the dining area. It was a low-budget cinema with no plot to speak of, but the dining area was filled to capacity because of one beautiful actress who would provide us, we all hoped, with some memories of what women looked like. Steaming below the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by steel and men and nothing but a few pictures here and there to remind us of the females of our species, we were eager to watch-and to