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

again.

Speaking to nobody in general, Lane began to babble in long sentences that didn't connect well. As he talked, I watched my panel, thought some more about Keiko, and wondered how soon channel fever would set in as we moved closer to the Islands.

Lane kept talking for another hour, until both Pintard and I implored him to be quiet. He was getting on our nerves, we said, and he wasn't saying anything all that profound anyway. Each time we said anything to him, he got that strange look in his eyes again and told us, 'You can't get to me.'

Finally, Chief Linaweaver had had enough.

'Lane, I'm ordering you to be quiet,' he said tersely.

The strange look followed, the small smile of knowing a tiny secret appeared, and again he said, 'You can't get to me.'

At that moment, my friend, Sandy Gallivan, standing watch in the control center, squeaked a call through on the engine-room telephone to tell me about overhearing that there would be a flooding drill within the next five minutes. Of all the drills we hated the most, the flooding drill headed the list.

We were always aware that the Viperfish cruised above a defined crush depth, that our lives depended on preventing any inadvertent movement to that depth, and that flooding was the one event that could quickly take us to the crush depth. Because of that fear, we worked very hard not to think about it. Flooding drills, even on the rare occasions when we knew they were only drills, brought this awareness to the surface of our thinking and triggered the collection of fears that was part of the psychological territory of the Submarine Service.

Lane began to talk again, and the shaking of his hands became intense.

'Lane, for Christ's sake,' I began with exasperation, 'will you stop-'

At that instant, the roaring of incoming water drowned out all other noises.

Lieutenant Pintard jumped to his feet and grabbed his microphone as the loudspeaker above our head began blasting Billy Elstner's voice from the lower-level engine room into the maneuvering room.

'Flooding! Flooding! Lower-level engine room!'

Pintard hollered orders to isolate the leak. I stood up to concentrate on my reactor panel and watch for anything that could shut us down.

'Losing vacuum in the starboard condenser!' Elstner hollered, followed immediately by half the lights in the engine room shutting off and more alarms going off. The men in the control center instantly announced, 'Surface, surface, surface!' and the Viperfish angled steeply upward. I glanced down the passageway and, with a shock that hit me like a physical blow, saw Lane running from the maneuvering area. His empty chair was swinging back and forth in front of the electrical control panel.

Immediately, without orders from Lieutenant Pintard and without comment from anyone in the area, one of our electricians, a big red-haired man named Tom Braniff, who was stand- ing watch at the steam plant control panel, bolted from his watch station at the throttles and took over the electrical control panel.

As a couple of machinist mates chased Lane across the engine room, another jumped into the throttleman's position and answered the bell driving us up to the surface. Braniff began flipping switches across the complex panel, cross-connecting electrical circuits, and bringing life to our electrical system as the machinist mates shut down the leak. My reactor never twitched once throughout the entire process.

The machinist mates caught up with Lane near the watertight door at the forward section of the engine room just as Chief O'Dell announced on the loudspeakers, 'Secure from flooding drill.' Lane was shaking badly. He was trying to talk, telling them that nothing could get to him, nothing would be too much for him to tolerate. They took him to Captain Harris's stateroom and called for Doc Baldridge. Lane was relieved of his duties, and the corpsman started him on mild sedatives to calm him down for the remainder of the trip to Pearl Harbor.

The stress of our mission, compounded by the negative presures from our fractured society, must have pushed Lane to the edge, I guessed. He must have known that he was becoming impaired long before the rest of his shipmates, who knew little about such things, could help him to seek treatment. Following a pattern that any of us might have pursued, he continued to try to perform his duties. He stood his watches even when the pressured speech pattern of the impending breakdown gave testimony to the problems lying below the surface. When the paranoia generated his wall of defense, preventing anything around him from 'getting' to him, he was able to stretch himself to continue his work a little longer until he could return home to his wife and children and find comfort for his tortured soul. Brian Lane gave it his best shot. He tried with every coping mechanism that he had available not to allow his inner turmoil to stop him from fulfilling his assignment before the electrical control panel.

The final days of our run to Pearl Harbor pushed us further to the point of becoming intolerant of anything and everything. With Chief Mathews still recovering from his near tragedy and Brian Lane walking back and forth with a half-smile and glassy eyes, we were all beginning to trudge to our watch stations. News bulletins told of more disciplinary actions against the men of the nuclear Navy by Admiral Rickover, more riots by students against our military, and expanding, drug use throughout society. The world seemed to be falling apart.

The last news bulletin that I read before deciding to read them no more included an order 'from the top' that no longer would qualified submariners be thrown overboard. This tradition had been determined to be too dangerous.

So, when Baby Bobbie's body odor finally 'got' to everybody on the Viperfish, several men took corrective action by thoroughly saturating his sheets with talcum powder. The next time the man swung himself into his rack, a huge cloud of powder puffed into the air. This led to an instant fury that carried all the way to the chief petty officers' desks. Soon thereafter, we received a new directive-a direct order not to coat sheets with talcum powder, no matter how bad anyone might smell.

The attack of channel fever was especially intense. Most of us stayed awake for two days before arriving at Pearl. We finally surfaced several miles off Oahu and stationed the maneuvering watch. Leaving the nightmare of the Soviet sector behind us, we glided up the warm channel waters toward the submarine base. The traditional flowered lei was placed around our sail, and a boat delivered an admiral and a team of hospital corpsmen and doctors to our boat. As the admiral inspected the Viperfish, the medical personnel examined Mathews and Davidson. They took Lane into protective custody for ambulance transportation to Tripler Army Hospital, the first step in the process of ending his career in the Submarine Service. He would eventually receive a medical discharge from the Navy.

Our mission failure was symbolized by the absence of the broom tied to the top of our periscope. The broom represented a 'clean sweep of the enemy to the bottom of the ocean'-a symbolic message of a successful mission, a declaration of victory that had been used since the days of U-boats and conventional submarines. Without the broom, the approaching Navy brass would know of the Viperfish's failure before we even tied up to the pier.

Keiko was finishing her master's degree and preparing for our wedding in Los Angeles, so Marc Birken and I again faced the row of colorful and beautiful people with nobody waiting for us. I walked toward the brow to leave the boat and was stopped by an enlisted man in charge of distributing mail.

'You are Petty Officer Dunham, right?' the man, a pimply-faced, short fellow with a whining voice, asked.

'That's right,' I answered tersely.

'Good,' the man said. 'I'm supposed to hand deliver this to you from the Honolulu Police Department, and I need you to sign here.' He handed me an envelope covered with official police markings, and I signed the receipt for the delivery. 'And, this brick is for you, too,' he said, tossing me a stack of sixty-two letters from Keiko, one for every day I was gone.

I opened the Honolulu Police Department envelope and discovered a warrant for my arrest. I had failed to answer their directions to fix my defective front windshield, the warrant said, and if I did not turn myself in they would come and get me.

Shortly after Chief O'Dell announced that Paul Mathews was 'non-volunteering' from submarine duty, I discovered that somebody had stolen the speed-shifting gearbox from my '55 Chevy while we were at sea. Feeling a mind-numbing anger begin to emerge, I wandered into the submarine barracks and tried to figure out how to get a couple of drinks in Waikiki without a car and without the risk of being arrested.

Marc, sitting on his rack, was waiting for me. He looked serious.