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

'I'll save the ship, sir,' I said, not having a clue as to where his line of speculation was leading.

'Right, that is correct. Very good.' I adjusted my ear protectors in the hope that his voice would blend in with the turbogenerators.

'However, Dunham,' he continued, 'you will save the reactor if I tell you to save the reactor.'

With that, Lieutenant Sanders had reached his goal. Even though I might want to save the ship, he, as an officer, would force me to do something contrary to training and common sense. It was a power thing. What I should have said at that point was something like, 'The choice is yours, sir, because you are the EOOW.'

I felt a flash of irritation at the whole line of questioning, so I blurted out, 'No, sir, I would not save the reactor.'

He stopped pacing the deck and stood directly behind my chair. 'You would save the reactor if I told you to,' he said forcefully.

My irritation rose. I jotted a couple of numbers from the reactor panel onto my clipboard. 'No, sir. I would save the ship, but I would not save the reactor.'

His voice climbed an octave. 'You would save the reactor if I told you to!'

'No, sir.'

I noticed Brian sinking down into his chair. He was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

The lieutenant became livid. 'You would if I told you to!' he yelled, bits of sputum flying in all directions.

'No, sir,' I answered politely. 'I would not be inclined to save the reactor, sir.'

He began to hyperventilate. A couple of enlisted men standing near the maneuvering area quickly walked away, probably searching for a place to hide. I gnashed my teeth, grabbed the reactor clipboard, and noted some additional information in my logbook as Sanders finally sat down, his face red with anger. I put the clipboard down and wondered if I was going to be court-martialed for refusing a hypothetical order. From my perspective, the entire issue was the result of everybody being annoyed about everything, the failure of our search mission, and the effects of nearly two months of submerged duty. But, for Sanders, it was personal, an enlisted man's insolence, and something, by God, that was going to be taken to Lieutenant Pintard immediately after the watch.

Ten minutes after I finished the watch, Pintard took me to the hangar compartment, now quiet, and spoke like a father to an errant son, 'Dunham, Dunham, Dunham…'

'Well, he was a bit out of line, sir,' I said.

Pintard smiled. 'Lieutenant Sanders is an excellent officer, and next time just tell him what he wants to hear.'

'Hypothetical orders-'

He raised his hands to stop me. 'If Mr. Sanders wants you to save a mermaid swimming to the moon, just tell him you will do everything possible to save the bitch, okay? This is a submarine, but there is a military structure that needs to be followed.'

I agreed, and that was the end of the issue; however, a new phrase, 'You will if I tell you to!' entered the lexicon of the Viperfish's crew. It was repeated a hundred times during the days ahead, usually within earshot of Lieutenant Sanders and always in the tone of an authoritarian out of control. If somebody said, 'I'm really not sure I'd want to swim in the Ala Moana harbor,' the immediate, reflexive response would be a hollered, 'You would if I told you to!'

Because there is no way that any man on a submarine can escape the 'pinging' (verbal barbed wire) of the crew, an early lesson of submarine life, for an officer and enlisted man alike, is that there is a price to pay for being obnoxious. The barrage of pinging from the entire crew can become incessant; when somebody with an inappropriate attitude is trapped with the crew, this can eat him alive. Wherever he walks, from bow to stern, other crewmen (officer and enlisted) are everywhere. They sleep above and below him; they sit at his table; they eat meals and watch movies with him; they use the head and take showers next to him.

If the word is out that he has brought any form of grief to one of the crew, retribution follows-a dig here or there, a phrase, anything that conveys displeasure-and it will not let up.

Two months is a long time, and there is nowhere to hide. Officers are as much at risk as enlisted men. From the cook serving protein-enriched cereal-'doing the best I can'-to the chief ordering his man to 'find it for yourself,' to the officer who orders 'you'll do it if I tell you to,' they will find no mercy from the crew. The pinging continues without pause until enough time goes by that everybody finally forgets the issue or until some redeeming act from the accused brings forgiveness and peace.

Two days later, when I passed by the radio shack, one of the crew angrily handed me an official Navy bulletin recently transmitted to the Viperfish. The bulletins were passed around the boat on rare occasions and served as a kind of Navy-oriented newspaper. After climbing into my rack and pulling the curtain, I turned on the light and scanned the front page. Anything would be more interesting than French lessons.

The first story reported the tale of an enlisted Navy man who was found guilty of using LSD. The LSD had caused him no problems except for prolonged staring sessions, and he seemed to do fine except for repeated, unpredictable flashbacks. On one such flashback, the man apparently thought he was an orange; the accompanying editorial warned of the dangers to nuclear reactor operators who think they are becoming fruit.

Because I never used drugs and didn't know of anybody on the Viperfish with any kind of a drug habit, I moved to the second article. This one was written by the captain of a nuclear submarine somewhere in the world who had purged most of the nukes on his ship for various reasons that seemed to have little merit. The article pointed out, however, that Adm. Hyman G. Rickover was quite satisfied with the action, was happy with the action, and the editorial warned us to stay on our toes, or we too might be at risk for a purge. As I remembered the NR Board debacle and began to feel gloomy at the thought of a Mao Tse-tung purification on board our submarine, I became aware of the Viperfish sliding into a steep and sustained down-angle.

I have never liked the feeling of our boat pointing her bow toward the bottom of the ocean. In most cases, a down-angle is a transient process carrying little risk. The helmsmen push forward on their Republic Aviation control wheels, and the entire vessel rotates forward into a downward slide. The duration of the down-angle affects the psyche of the entire crew. The steeper the down-angle, the greater the anxiety, until it becomes a waiting game — waiting for the down-angle to stop and for the submarine to level out. Depending on speed and buoyancy factors, a submarine can point down for only so long before something dramatic happens.

Outside the control station, the men had no information about the depth of the submarine during down-angle maneuvers, and no announcement indicated how much deeper the Viperfish was going. It was like being a passenger in a diving airliner that had no windows, with predictable results on the enclosed humans: a fine sweat covering the skin, a hand tightening its grip on the side of the chair, and irritation demonstrated by spontaneous small movements of annoyance.

When is the dive going to stop? How far down are we going to go?

Other thoughts, private thoughts, moved through the minds of the men riding the submarine down, thoughts about test depth and crush depth, thoughts about pressures at the bottom of the ocean, and sobering thoughts about survival. It was essential, we all knew, that the destination depth not fall below the ship's maximum test depth. In a steep dive, the time it takes to pass through the test depth and reach the crush depth is a matter of only a few seconds.

In submarine school, we had been told that submarines in the American fleet will often take steep down- angles under many operational scenarios. It happens all the time, it is normal. 'The conning station knows what it is doing, it will not overstress the ship,' we had been told. There is no need for panic, everything is under control.

Fine, but how long does the dive continue, and at what point would it be appropriate to start wondering about our depth?

I ripped aside the curtain of my rack. Looking up and down the passageway, I checked for anything that seemed unusual. The boat was definitely pointed in a steeply downward direction, and there was no indication that we were going to level out or move into an up-angle at any time in the near future. The off-watch crew was scattered throughout the berthing area, arms and legs protruding into the dark passageways, mouths rumbling out a symphony of snores. Several of the men began stirring restlessly as the down-angle increased a couple of degrees and the submarine seemed to accelerate her dive.

I swung out of my rack, pulled on my dungarees, and hiked up to the Viperfish's diving station to investigate.

At 0300 the control center was only dimly lit by glowing red pinpoints of light on the electronic panels-the