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

fantasize about-the actress.

When she walked across the screen, she was as beautiful as we remembered, her sweet body looking gorgeous as she moved from one scene to the next. Each time she appeared, conversations among the men hushed as each of us mentally placed ourselves into the movie.

At about the middle of the film, during a bathing scene that showed the actress washing herself from behind an opaque shower door, we all struggled to imagine the details of what we were unable to see. To our delight, she was suddenly called from the shower to answer the telephone, and we were treated to a flash of the naked woman moving at high speed before the camera.

'Stop the movie!' at least five voices hollered in unison as Larry Kanen grabbed the controls of the projector.

'Back it up!'

'Bring her back!'

'Reverse the projector!'

Back up the film, Kanen!'

In a few seconds, Kanen finally found the reverse switch and we were all treated to the scene played backward, the actress flashing before the camera again as she backed into the shower, with water flowing up from the drain into the shower head.

'Look at that body!' one of the machinist mates said.

'Jesus, I'm gonna die!' another exuberant voice called out.

'Make it go forward, slowly!' Nicholson hollered from the other side of the dining area.

'I'm working on it, I'm working on it,' Kanen said, his voice harassed. 'Hang on a second, you bunch of horny bastards.'

The shower water began flowing in the correct direction again, and we all leaned forward for a closer look. Kanen moved the film slowly, one frame at a time as we waited and waited. After about five long minutes, we saw the shower door begin to open in slow motion and all of us prepared to savor the moment.

The actress moved halfway out of the shower before we discovered that she was actually clothed in some kind of flesh-colored towel that couldn't be visualized at normal projector speed.

'She has a towel on!' Richard Daniels exclaimed with disappointment.

'They cheated us!' several others moaned.

The frustration could not have been more complete. Kanen chose that moment to slow the movement of the film, finally freezing her in the center of the screen for us to enjoy watching whatever we could see. Suddenly, without warning, the center of the towel began turning a brown-black color from the heat of the projector light. Like a torch, the projector burned a hole right through the image.

'You're burning up the movie!' somebody yelled as we watched the meltdown of our actress.

'Dammit, Kanen, you just fried the lady!' another voice called out, while Kanen cursed and struggled to move the picture ahead at normal speed.

'Sorry, I was doing the best I could,' Kanen said. Groups of men left the room in disgust-cursing Hollywood for faked nudity, cursing Kanen for melting the best part of the movie, and cursing the fact that this was the only theater in our submerged town. About half of us remained in our seats and hoped for other scenes that could be supplemented by our imagination. We also felt a little guilty. When the movie was watched by other submariners in other oceans, the most exciting scene would not only be fake, but it would be vaporized.

I returned to my rack later that night and slept peacefully until the next watch in front of the reactor control panel. Free of nightmares, my dreams were filled with beautiful naked women jumping in and out of showers, my sleep was peaceful, and the long process of reaching for dolphins continued without pause.

As we moved closer to Oahu, the training watches in front of the reactor panel continued generating additional disasters that gradually, to my amazement, began to seem almost routine. As I sat in the chair before the wall of meters, red lights, and alarms, it gradually dawned on me that only a limited number of conditions could snarl the system. One engine room, one reactor-how many things could possibly go wrong? Only so many red lights and only a specific number of alarms could blast out warnings of new havoc and destruction. Once each red light or row of red lights had flashed, once the buzzing and screaming alarms had sounded, and once I had shut down the reactor and brought it back on line over and over again, there was not much left to happen. Although I still bolted to my feet when red lights and alarms announced an emerging disaster and still felt the rush of adrenaline and pounding of my heart when the lights in the engine room abruptly went out or the circuit breakers flashed their electrical arcs, my actions started to become more automatic and much less stressful.

A further boost to my increasing confidence occurred during the final days of the training cruise. Randy Nicholson, who always stood behind me in the maneuvering area, actually began to treat me like someone approaching an equal, rather than like a trainee. He encouraged me, rather than directed me, as we plotted courses of action in response to the system failures Rossi and others were throwing at us, and increasingly showed approval of my work. I began to feel the reactor system. It was in my mind-all the individual pieces of machinery interrelating and working together — and I began actually to like the work I was doing.

I also discovered that teamwork was as essential to successful operation of the reactor system as it was to so many other activities throughout the Viperfish. In the cramped maneuvering room, sitting next to the trainee electrician learning to control his monster of a panel, I learned the strengths and weaknesses of the men around me. Two electricians, the stoic Donald Svedlow and the quiet Brian Lane, watched the electrical panel during the training activities as I watched mine, each of us waiting for the next disaster. If I lost the reactor for any reason, the power for the steam turning their turbogenerators would disappear rapidly; if they lost electricity for any reason, my reactor would not work properly. I gave them power for their electricity, they gave me electricity to control my power-we depended on each other. We learned to synchronize our activities, to warn each other if anything we were doing would clobber whatever the other was doing, and to understand that symbiosis was the essence of submarine duty.

Most important, I had trust in the other men. When Svedlow found his electrical meters going wild and the submarine plunging into darkness, he showed a cool, analytical capability to decide what was going wrong and what could be done to resolve the problem. Often, he didn't even stand up like I always did when everybody was trying to yell above the screaming alarms. He just flipped his switches in the proper sequence, watched the battery come to life, synchronized high-voltage electrical circuits, and slammed circuit breakers open and shut in the right sequence to resolve the problems. Frequently, when he was finished with the awesome display of his efficiency, he leaned back in his chair, made an obtuse joke about something totally unrelated to the Viperfish's operations, and calmly gazed over the rows of meters under his control.

Lane had a different style. Quiet most of the time, he rarely said more than a few words about anything, including the electrical control panel and his wife and children in Honolulu. From time to time, a slow smile crossed his generally passive face, and he always flipped the electrical switches with somewhat less authority than Svedlow. He was a serious man. Nothing seemed to faze him, and he rarely joined in the back-and-forth humor that most of us relied on to keep our sense of perspective. The guy didn't cuss or even chew tobacco, and he didn't carouse or drink much alcohol during our ports of call.

As I moved into the position of running the reactor, the unique personalities among the crew became better known to me. Rossi scared all of us; Chief Jack Morris (one of the veteran electricians) seemed jittery but essentially competent; Lane was the most stable, never reacting much or affected by anything; and Svedlow demonstrated raw capability and authority that impressed everybody.

One hundred miles east of Oahu, we surfaced onto a glassy-smooth, warm ocean and discovered a shark wedged in our superstructure. From the top of the sail, one of the topside watches spotted the dark gray creature flopping around on the deck with one of its fins inside an opening. Larry Kanen volunteered to climb out the door in the side of the sail and free the creature. While keeping his distance from the rows of impressive and amply displayed teeth, he gingerly leveraged it free, with a long steel pole. By the time the shark slid off the Viperfish and swam away from us, we were ready to dive again and proceed to Pearl Harbor. Nobody thought of taking a picture of the event, but we speculated that it was probably one of the rare times in the history of submarine operations that a full-sized shark had been briefly taken into captivity by a trolling superstructure.

During the final miles of our submerged voyage from San Francisco, I became aware of my changing