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

Marty gathered up the bowls, his face distressed, as he reflected on the ruins of the morning meal. 'I'm sorry, fellas. They must have broken into the grain. I cooked the cereal but I guess I didn't get it hot enough. Damn little buggers shoulda died.'

We all stared at the man, speechless.

Finally, one of the men stood up and handed Marty his bowl.

'Even dead worms don't belong in the cereal.'

'I'm doing the best I can,' Marty said, wiping down the tables, as a couple of the other galley crewmen joined him to clean up the mess covering most of the tables.

From that day on, the phrase, 'I'm doing the best I can,' became synonymous with the ever-increasing numbers of important things going wrong in spite of the best intentions.

The search continued for another two weeks, until even the normally enthusiastic civilians in the hangar became discouraged. Robbie didn't bring any more pictures to us, and the men throughout the Viperfish stopped speculating about the object of our search. A feeling of profound frustration and gloom descended on everybody. The explosions outside our hull were similar to Chinese water-drop torture; each one wasn't that loud but added together, day after day, the noise created a mental state of continuous uneasiness.

As our second month under water began, I found myself slowly feeling more and more claustrophobic. None of us had seen any sunlight or sky since the day we left Pearl Harbor. After each four-hour watch, the dilemma of nowhere to go and nothing to do became a problem. I had passed the time by completing French lessons and reading a couple of books during the first month at sea, but now I found myself becoming restless after reading just one or two pages-it was getting increasingly difficult to concentrate. My French lessons were becoming much more of a challenge, and it took all the effort I had just to sit down and concentrate on trying to understand bits and parts of the language.

The final blow came shortly after I started working on the last paragraph of a full page of carefully typed French. The typing of my correspondence course work had taken most of my free time during the preceding several days. Moving from one word to the next, I struggled to avoid mistakes, looked up each incomprehensible French idiom, penned in the proper accent marks, and corrected the inevitable errors that slipped through in spite of it all As I endeavored to clarify the spelling of a particularly strange French word in the last part of the final paragraph, a large hydraulic valve above me abruptly cycled with a loud whoosh. A thick glob of grease dropped from the valve directly onto the part of my typewritten page sticking out of the typewriter.

I stared at the oil as it slithered down the single-spaced sentences. Watching the typewriter ink smear as the oil diluted the letters, I felt my head begin to pound. I ripped the page from the typewriter, shredded the paper into the tiniest pieces I could manage, and cursed France and everybody in Europe. Then, I steamed down to the crew's dining area to watch another half hour of Regulus missiles crashing down runways on a deserted atoll in the middle of nowhere.

After almost seven weeks of fruitless searching with the background noises of sonobuoy explosions echoing up and down Soviet thermocline tunnels, Captain Harris finally decided to bring in the Fish and head back to Hawaii. We began the prolonged process of reeling several miles of cable into the Viperfish. Cruising back and forth with our Fish out-a mother ship with her very long and delicate umbilical cord-was not an exercise that made us feel particularly useful, especially so because we had failed to find anything worthwhile. Most of us looked forward to stowing the miserable device and reconverting the boat into a more maneuverable non-Fish towing vessel. We hoped that we could now at least try to function like the military ship we were sup- posed to be.

During the hours of reeling in the Fish, a powerful storm began to build in the waters stretching across the North Pacific. We were at a depth of three hundred feet, where surface wave activity should not affect us more than 90 percent of the time; on that day, we entered the 10 percent portion where rules didn't apply. It was a slow-roll type of movement, nothing that would make us think about hunting for Ralph O'Roark but enough to let us know that nature was stirring up the surface. The noises of sonobuoys stopped at the beginning of the storm, and everybody began to feel better as the huge spool outside our pressure hull continued to reel in the Fish. Finally, to our great relief, the civilians stowed the Fish in a corner of the hangar and the captain ordered the Viperfish to pick up speed and begin clearing out of the Soviet sector.

I relieved Richard Daniels from his reactor watch shortly after we began to accelerate in the direction of Pearl. We had to shout to be heard above the whining of the propulsion turbines and reduction gears, which were thirty feet away from the maneuvering area. I gathered the information from Richard about the reactor, now running at full capacity, and pulled up a seat in front of the control panel. Brian Lane sat next to me, manning his complex electrical control panel. To my surprise and in contrast to his silence of the past several weeks, he now became more talkative.

'We're running low on fuel,' I said, as I gathered data from the meters filling the panel in front of me. There is no fuel gauge, per se, to pinpoint when the nuclear reactor requires a new uranium core, but data from multiple operational sources leave no doubt about the remaining fuel.

Brian turned and smiled at me. 'Enough to get back?' His smile faded. 'Right?'

Enough to get back,' I reassured him. 'If my calculations are correct.'

'No gas stations out here-'

'No uranium stations,' I corrected.

'No shore-power cables to hook up to the battery.'

'Nope, gotta rely on the reactor. Lucky for the forward pukes that they have the nukes to get them back.'

'Thank God.'

Lane then turned in his chair and looked at me. His eyes seemed to stare through me, but he smiled in a way that was strangely out of sync with the general mood throughout the submarine.

'You can't get to me,' he said in a matter-of-fact tone. I watched him as he turned back to his panel and began scanning his meters.

The phrase was a familiar submariner idiom. 'You can't get to me' speaks the essence of being a submariner. It is a statement that says, even in the cramped quarters and continuous press of close human contact, even when there are worms in the cereal and detonations in the ocean, nothing is allowed to get under the skin. 'You can't get to me' said it all: nothing bothers me, I am a professional, and there is no way anything that is said or done will be a problem for me.

Lane said it at the wrong time, however. He watched his panel while I looked at mine, our ears enclosed by the plastic sound guards that shut out the screaming machinery around us. After noting more data on my log sheet, I glanced sideways at the man and wondered why my friend and shipmate had said something so far out of proper context. I finally dismissed the matter with the speculation that he must have misunderstood-the shrill noise of turbines drowning out what I had said.

About that time, when I was feeling about as grouchy as almost everybody else, the EOOW decided to quiz me. A tall man, Lt. George Sanders was moving up through the ranks of nuclear-trained officers, but he had an officer-elitist attitude. His trace of an 'I am better than you' approach contrasted sharply with the leadership capabilities and personalities of the other submarine officers who fostered our respect by earning, rather than demanding, it. He got on my nerves as he paced back and forth behind Lane and me when we were on watch, and I was never quite sure what he was going to say next.

On this watch, he was irritating me more than usual. So, when the quiz began, I clenched my teeth, crossed my arms across my chest, and stared at the reactor panel.

'Okay, Dunham,' he said from behind me, 'you're cruising along at four hundred feet.'

Consistent with the range of appropriate responses of an enlisted man to an officer, I respectfully answered, 'Yes, sir.'

'Okay. Now, the ship begins to sink.'

'Yes, sir, the ship sinks.' This would not be difficult, I thought, just a matter of the ship sinking.

'Begins to sink!' he shrieked. 'You now have two choices. You can save the reactor or you can save the ship.'

'Yes, sir.' I was sure I would have more choices than two.

His voice became icy. 'Well, Dunham, what are you going to do?'