Читать книгу Spy Sub - Roger C. Dunham - Страница 13
ОглавлениеDURING THE FIRST HALF of the 1960s, the Soviet Union built twenty-nine deadly submarines designed to perform one specific function: deliver high explosives and nuclear warheads from launching platforms at sea. Built in the Severodvinsk and Komsomolsk shipyards, these submarines were deployed to improve the Soviet’s ability to counter the perceived threat from Western strike carriers while simultaneously threatening American naval bases, such as shipyards, operational bases, airfields, and supply depots.
As Soviet submarines left their home port of Vladivostok, the microphones of the SOSUS array tracked them across the Sea of Japan and through the choke points at the Kuril Islands. As the SSGN submarines carrying guided missiles patrolled across the Pacific Ocean in the direction of the Hawaiian Islands and the West Coast of the United States, the Soviet Union stepped up its pattern of saber rattling and threats to compete with “sharp swords” for international military supremacy.
By summer 1966, Soviet anger at the involvement of the United States in the Vietnam conflict increased as B-52 bombers from the U.S. Strategic Air Command began bombing enemy forces in Southeast Asia. Thousands of Americans were drafted into military service, and many participated in ground combat activities, in which U.S. Ranger battalions fought the Vietcong in actions that resulted in large numbers of casualties on both sides. The U.S. Navy became more directly involved in the combat as jets from the USS Enterprise and USS Hancock bombed North Vietnamese targets, including a variety of boats carrying supplies for the Vietcong.
The American public became increasingly aroused at the mounting U.S. casualties, and new antiwar activities began to spread throughout the United States.
WITH THE VIPERFISH FLOATING alongside the pier at Pearl Harbor, qualifications on her systems began to assume a brisk pace. Overhauled equipment, now reassembled, was working; electronic panels with their array of lights and meters were energized; and piping diagrams could be followed until the systems were thoroughly memorized.
The scientists working with our Special Project became known by the crew as scientists on board (SOBs). Although they were not in the Navy, there was a pecking order of sorts, including a senior SOB named Lt. Gerry Short, who seemed to direct the others. Because Lieutenant Short was not strictly a civilian, being attached to some branch of an Air Force Intelligence group, nobody was quite sure how to deal with him. We didn’t salute him. He didn’t wear an Air Force uniform. He didn’t tell any stories about flying airplanes, and none of us ever did figure out why our Special Project required somebody from the Air Force.
Three of the crew on board the Viperfish worked with the Special Project. Lean and quiet Lt. Al Dobkin and the ship’s photographer, a perky man named Robbie Teague, were assigned to work with the civilians under the capable but taciturn Comdr. John Spiegel. All three men remained as secretive about the Special Project as everyone else who called the Viperfish hangar their home. The whole collection of civilians, the two naval officers, the Air Force officer, and the enlisted Navy photographer stayed in the hangar area of the submarine most of the time, as they had when we were in dry dock, and seldom mingled with the rest of us.
At mealtime, the SOBs and other Special Project men wandered into the crew’s dining area when the food was served. They ate quietly without joining in the ribald humor that characterized our dining experience. When they finished eating, they silently glided back to the hangar. The entire group seemed to be scientific engineering types, with interests selectively focused on their project.
In fact, I learned later that the remoteness of the non-Navy SOBs resulted from a degree of intimidation at being in such a foreign environment and surrounded by more than a hundred submariners. Also, their movements on board were constrained because they were physically bound by the security regulations that held them to the limits of their work with the Fish. Although they did not show much visible excitement for these reasons, I came to learn that they were proud to be serving with the Viperfish crew and they readily trusted us to bring them back from the submerged explorations that lay ahead.
As the qualifications work became more intense and the size of our crew expanded, Marc Birken reported on board the Viperfish. Marc was a veteran of the Polaris submarine USS Daniel Boone and a lover of sports cars and “steaming” (blowing off steam on liberty). He was aching to finish his obligation in the Navy as quickly as possible so that he could return to civilian life and teach in the trade schools of Ohio. Marc was a fun-loving man who viewed the submarine world with a “hang loose, baby” attitude. He was in love with his TR-3 convertible sports car, which regularly squealed him around Waikiki. One of the nukes, he was an electrician by training and his dolphins were the pride of his life.
The first time he passed by the reactor operator area and noticed Bruce Rossi’s characteristic tense face and mean looks, he glanced sideways toward me and struggled to avoid the grin that was his trademark. We quickly became friends, and he regularly chastised me for worrying about Bruce and having too serious an attitude.
The days passed quickly at the submarine base. Working my way through one system after another, I moved beyond any threat of placement on the dink list. When confinement among the men and machinery of the Viperfish, day after day, became too oppressive, the sweet call of liberty in Waikiki beckoned seductively from the east. The process of going on liberty and steaming was widely regarded as the solution to an oppressed mind.
For us, steaming consisted of a high-speed departure from the Viperfish to the barracks, a hot shower with plenty of soap to wash off the unique odors of a submarine, the donning of civvies (civilian clothes) to disguise our military origin, and the jumping into a Cadillac taxi to roar off to Waikiki. We found that the best way to start the steaming process was at the Fort DeRussy Army Base, near the Hilton Hawaiian Village, where decent bourbon could be purchased for about thirty cents per drink. After we had consumed a proper amount of beverage, the stage was set to continue our steaming at the night spots of Waikiki.
Meeting women in Waikiki was not difficult. The surplus of dancing establishments scattered throughout the area was perfect for military men on liberty, and Marc delighted in establishing a relationship with any woman who looked even slightly interesting. On our third or fourth night of steaming, he taught me a remarkably successful way to solidify an emerging relationship with a young lady. The process started with mai tais, moonlight, and sweet Hawaiian music. It was further stimulated by Marc’s gracious manner toward the ladies, mixed with his disarming sense of humor.
After several dances with an attractive woman, he leaned forward and drew her close to him. Before she knew what was coming, he innocently asked “The Question”: “How would you like a tour aboard a nuclear submarine?”
This invariably resulted in a backward movement as the woman stared at him wide-eyed, blinked several times, and finally asked, “A nuclear submarine? Tonight? Are you serious? Are you in the Navy?”
He smiled and told her that he would be happy to give her a tour of his ship if she would find such a tour interesting. “It is a beautiful submarine,” he said, with just the right smile and proper blend of innocence and enthusiasm. “It is called the Viperfish and it is an excellent warship, one of the best in the Navy. It has a nice periscope, the control room has some beautiful lights, and you would be quite safe, being on a military base and all.”
The predictable result became an often-repeated routine. She smiled, having never heard such an offer from any man she had known back in Kansas City or wherever she was from, and her eyes lit up with the excitement of it all. Because the women of Waikiki rarely traveled alone, she usually asked if her girlfriend could come with her. “Of course,” Marc said magnanimously, as he waved in my direction and beckoned for me to join them.
When the Viperfish topside watch saw our group meandering down the dark pier at 0100, we could hear the distant muttering of something relating to Jesus Christ.
After a knowing look or two and a polite salute to welcome the ladies on board, the watch greeted us and cleared the way for our late-night tour. A half hour later, after hearing the excited “ooh’s” and “ah’s” of our female companions, Marc and I felt like heroes for the rest of the night.
All the fun came to an end the morning the captain gathered us together on the pier in front of the Viperfish and told us that we were going to sea in two days. We would leave at 0800 hours, he told us, and conduct our sea trials. The purpose of the exercise, he said in his soft voice, was to test the integrity and capabilities of our submarine. It would be an envelope study of sorts, a test of our underwater limits. Although this was not a Special Project operation, the outcome of the sea trials would help to determine the success of future activities; the sea trials test was, therefore, extremely important to our mission. Once it was established that we could perform submerged activities safely and effectively, we would be ready to proceed to our West Coast shakedown cruise and, finally, to start testing the Fish.
After we completed the morning muster on the pier, I climbed down the engine-room hatch and started studying the next system on the qualifications list. My work was abruptly interrupted by Chief Paul Mathews’s voice bellowing throughout the boat over the loudspeaker system.
“All men lay topside to ‘sally ship’!”
Puzzled, I looked up from by book. “Do what to the ship?” I asked nobody in particular.
Bruce Rossi started climbing up the engine-room ladder to the topside deck. “Sally ship, Dunham,” he barked in my direction. “Important for the calculation of metacentric height of which the center of buoyancy is a part. Get up there.”
With Chief Mathews giving directions from his position in front of the submarine sail, about thirty of us lined up in a long row at the port side of the ship and crowded as close to the edge of the deck as possible. The chief looked at his wristwatch, waited a few seconds, and then hollered at the top of his lungs, “Move to the starboard side!”
We promptly rushed across the deck to the opposite side of the Viperfish. A few seconds later, the chief hollered again.
“Port side!”
We leaped to the port side.
“Starboard side!”
Feeling foolish, I moved with the rest of the men.
“Port!”
“Starboard!”
“Port!”
“Starboard!”
Scurrying back and forth, we paused for about six or seven seconds on each side before the next order. Gradually, I became aware of a rolling movement of the submarine’s deck, like the movement of a rowboat with too much weight on one side, accompanied by the tilting of the periscopes sticking out of the sail. As we continued with the exercise, the rolling increased by larger and larger increments and some of the men had to grab the restraining cable at the deck’s edge for balance. When the deck began to show a prominent sloping with each roll, the chief finally thanked us and ordered, “Secure from ‘sally ship’ exercise.”
Remarkably, nobody said much of anything as the crew nonchalantly dispersed from the bizarre activity and returned to their various tasks. It wasn’t clear to me how one should even ask Paul about the meaning of the event-“Did the sally go well, Chief?” Pushing aside my typical feeling of nearly total ignorance, I wandered toward him.
“It relates to the center of buoyancy, Dunham,” Paul told me even before I asked. “The rolling provides data for calculating the metacentric height, important for determining the stability of the Viperfish-if we roll far enough to both sides, sufficient data are generated and the design engineers are happy. After our shipyard overhaul, several of the weights inside the boat have shifted to new positions, changing the center of buoyancy. When we surface out there,” he pointed in the direction of the Pacific Ocean, “these factors can affect our stability. If the weight distribution is wrong, if the center of buoyancy has shifted too far down, it is possible for the first wave that hits us to roll us completely over. This kind of thing would lead to considerable crew discomfort and a probable immediate sinking.”
I stared at the man, my mind trying to comprehend such a disaster. Considerable crew discomfort if the Viperfish rolled over?
He smiled brightly. “Therefore, it’s the kind of thing we like to check out.”
I returned to my qualifications work with a new worry. It would enter my mind every time we surfaced, as I waited to see if that first wave to slam against the side of the submarine would cause considerable crew discomfort.
The next day, the pier alongside the Viperfish was filled with activity. We loaded an endless supply of spare parts, crates of food, fuel oil for our diesel engine, and everything else each man on the boat could think of to sustain his existence at sea. The whole process reminded me of the packing adventures my family used to have before a camping trip. Rushing back and forth around the house, my mother gathered whatever she thought we might need for our trip to the forest or the beach. On a camping trip, however, we could count on certain basic elements essential to existence-oxygen, fresh air, maps, gas stations, warmth, and plenty of room to roam about.
On board the submerged Viperfish, we would be working to survive in an environment hostile to human life. We had to make our own air by producing oxygen and “scrubbing” (removing) away the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. To cool the excessive reactor-generated heat, we needed powerful air-conditioning systems; on the other hand, we had to provide warmth to the forward areas of the boat that became chilled from the cold waters around us. We had to navigate under the ocean where there were no stars or sky, create fresh water from the brine of the sea, and carefully monitor our uranium fuel reserves because no reactor refueling services were available on the high seas. For those of the crew who enjoyed hiking about, nothing could be done to accommodate them in the constrained spaces and cramped quarters. There was almost no room to roam-that was a daily fact of submarine life.
I had just finished storing a pocketbook, a box of cigars, and four fresh oranges inside the bunk locker beneath my rack when Marc Birken walked up to the crew’s berthing area.
“Aloha, bruddah,” he said to me, grinning widely and relishing his newly acquired Hawaiian dialect. “What’s happening?”
I pointed to the oranges. “Fresh fruit for the long trip, in case we run out.”
He looked at my oranges. “We’re only going to be gone for a week or two,” he said.
“Or three, or four-”
“Two weeks, or even three weeks, that’s nothing! Wait until we go out for two months or even longer. Did I ever tell you about the time I dropped a garbage weight when the Boone was on one of our two-month Polaris patrols?”
I closed my bunk locker and pulled the curtain across the opening of my tiny home. “What’s a garbage weight?” I asked.
His eyes lit up and his face became animated as he savored the memory of his story. “It was terrible! The thing made a hell of a noise! We were on station and rigged for quiet operations, no noise tolerated. When I saw the damn thing falling toward the deck, I tried to catch it. I tried to kick my shoe under it to break the fall. I tried everything I could, but it just slammed onto the steel plate like a damn sledge hammer that probably reverberated sound energy for thousands of miles across the ocean. I just about freaked out-it made a noise that almost blew the earphones off our sonarmen.”
“Marc, what’s a garbage weight?”
“And so,” he clapped his hands together in front of me, “bam! The result was just like that! The instant the thing hit the metal, the captain was out of his stateroom, down the passageway, down the ladder, into the galley, and into my face.”
“Holy Christ, the captain came to the galley? What did you tell him?”
“I told him I wanted to shoot myself. I told him the damn garbage weight weighed five tons, and it slipped from my hand. I told him I was sorry.”
“Did he court-martial you?”
Marc grinned again. “It would have been better if he had, or if he had just beat the hell out of me because, God knows, I deserved it. But he decided to conduct a special training session in the forward torpedo room.”
“What did he train you to do?”
“He trained me to move garbage weights from the starboard side of the ship to the port side. Then he trained me to move them back to the starboard side without dropping them. And then back to the port side, and then the starboard side. For two hours, he sat there staring at me with death in his eyes as I moved hundreds of garbage weights back and forth across the boat.”
Marc then took me to the galley and showed me the small but incredibly heavy cast-iron weights used to sink the garbage ejected from the submarine. They came in tiny boxes, all stacked in cupboards near the garbage disposal unit. Each box of these devices weighed about twenty-five pounds.
That afternoon, Marc and I were assigned to join with the crew and load a couple thousand more weights. It took about fifty men to complete the job, a miserable and sweating process in the tropical sun. We transferred the boxes from a truck alongside the pier and handed them, one at a time, across the brow (gangway), over the deck, through the control-room hatch, down the ladder, into the galley, and finally into the storage locker. When we finished the task, I was sure that our center of buoyancy had shifted another ten feet. I began to worry again about our rolling over when that first wave nailed us after surfacing.
That evening was the last time available for liberty before going to sea. I planned to write a quick letter to my parents before joining Marc for a final steaming session in Waikiki. By then, I had everything necessary for the voyage packed into the tiny spaces available for personal items, and I was ready to go to sea. My fresh dungaree clothing had been stashed around the oranges and books in my bunk locker, and I was ahead of schedule with my qualifications work. A few liberty hours would clear my head for the submerged voyage.
I had just finished the last page of my letter and was preparing to depart to the barracks for the usual quick shower and a change to civvies when Bruce Rossi caught me.
“Dunham,” he said, his voice characteristically tough, “I want you to help Petty Officer Nicholson with the reactor start-up tomorrow morning.”
He didn’t wait for an answer as he turned away and stomped in the direction of the engine room. I had already learned that a “start-up of the reactor” was considerably different from something like turning a key, which energizes most other kinds of engines. The process did not occur quickly nor could it be done casually. A reactor start-up was intense. It required long hours of painstaking checking and double-checking the calibration and accuracy of virtually every single electronic instrument in the engine room. The reactor could be started by one man, but, considering the complexity, it was easier done by two, even if one of the men was a trainee like me. Every single word on page after page of instructions in the start-up manual had to be followed, with religious-like adherence, in order to satisfy the general policy of “verbatim compliance.”
If one deviated by so much as a word from the written instructions, the baggy pants of Rear Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the Navy’s director of nuclear propulsion, would appear on the horizon as another naval career crashed and burned.
The process was scheduled to begin in the engine room at midnight. A cold brew at Fort DeRussy was out of the question, as was a late-night Viperfish tour with adventuresome ladies. On start-up night, there would be no steaming, no drinking, no nocturnal adventures, no nothing but intense preparation while the rest of the crew slept. I had already come to know the mustached smiling face of Randy Nicholson, one of the three qualified reactor operators who had helped me with qualifications. At midnight, I strolled into the engine room and greeted Petty Officer Nicholson. We began the process to start up the reactor and worked through the night.
At exactly 0800 the next morning, the captain ordered the first backing bell (a pointer device in the engine room that showed the desired throttle speed) to move us away from Pearl Harbor’s submarine pier. Again, Jim McGinn and I were sitting side by side in the engine room in front of the steam plant control panel’s large rubber-coated throttle wheels to control steam to the propulsion turbines. We felt, as much as heard, the grinding sound of another camel being thrashed outside our pressure hull. Because the requirements of the steam plant control panel job were limited to opening or closing the propulsion turbine throttles on command, there was little we could do wrong. Nearby, the electrical operator and reactor operator sat in front of their panels to observe closely everything relating to electrical power and nuclear power, respectively. The engineering officer paced back and forth behind them, his eyes roaming across their panels, watching each meter, studying fluctuations in voltage and neutron levels, with the intent of keeping all of the vital systems in the engine room operating properly. The Viperfish was going to sea, and everybody was doing their jobs to ensure that nothing went wrong.
About five minutes later, with no warning, the captain suddenly hollered “Back emergency! Back emergency!” over the loudspeaker, his normally soft voice replaced by an urgent call for action. Instantly behind us, Bruce Rossi was watching us and monitoring every move as Jim and I bolted to our feet and struggled to crank the “ahead” throttles shut before turning the smaller wheel that reversed the direction of the screws. To make matters more difficult, a loud “reverse direction” alarm built into the steam control system began blaring a warning about throttle conflicts as Rossi bellowed, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
Jim and I were both sweating and hyperventilating by the time the turbines began their characteristic high-pitched screams in the reverse (backing) direction. We struggled to stop the Viperfish and back her away from whatever freighter or other threat was before us.
I loudly announced to the engineering officer that we were now answering the back-emergency bell at the same moment that the captain’s voice, more relaxed this time, came over the loudspeakers: “All stop. All ahead one third.”
From the sound of the captain’s voice, it was apparent that the imminent danger had passed. Jim and I lightened our tight grip on our throttle wheels as we took our seats and answered the new bell. Both of us were sure that our quick reactions had saved the boat.
Marc strolled down the passageway at about that time. His grin was bigger than usual. “I was just up in the control center,” he said. “Nice job you guys did answering that bell so fast.”
“Thanks, Marc,” I said, appreciating his recognition of our prompt reaction. “Did you get a look at what we almost hit?”
His smile faded. “Almost hit? We almost hit something?”
“Isn’t that what the back-emergency bell was for?” I asked, starting to feel uncomfortable.
“That is what it can be for, but the captain just wanted to demonstrate to one of the junior officers on the bridge how quickly the Viperfish can stop. The training of the newer officers is one of his top priorities, and probably one of his greatest challenges. Unfortunately, this boat has a weird envelope of performance, and training is a formidable task.”
“Oh. So it was a drill kind of a thing. Did we stop fast?”
“You guys answered the bell fast, and we started churning the water real nice, but it took us damn near forever to slow down. This thing don’t wanna stop, no matter how fast you answer bells.”
“We’re too big,” I speculated, thinking about the appearance of the Viperfish in dry dock.
“We are much too big for a decent submarine,” he mumbled and wandered off to other tasks.
Feeling dumb, Jim and I clutched the throttles as we waited for the next “emergency.”
Obviously, it would be difficult for us to figure out what was going on elsewhere in the submarine. Inside the engine-room hull, where there were no windows and no information about depth or speed, it was easy to visualize the worst possible disaster at the slightest provocation: The back-emergency bell became a terrible impending collision; the blast of an alarm from the steam panel, a major steam leak; the alarm horns over the reactor panel, an unsafe nuclear reactor condition or something even worse. This phenomenon, we were to discover, was especially a problem during intense activities when several alarms were shrieking, men were shouting, and turbines were screaming. This was the curse of working in the engine room. We spent an inordinate amount of time wondering just exactly what was happening elsewhere in the boat.
The Viperfish finally reached the ocean, as evidenced by the pitching and rolling of her hull. Cruising on the surface, she had moved several miles away from Oahu when a voice on the loudspeaker tersely announced the dive.
“Dive, dive!” were the only words called out by the chief of the watch at the ballast control panel. We heard no Klaxon noises or other horns, and there was nothing to suggest that this dive, the first since the Viperfish’s refit, was anything other than a routine event. It was the first submarine dive of my life, however, and I had already identified thousands of mechanical components that could potentially sink us if they failed while we were submerged. Everything about the dive was significant to me.
Idle conversation throughout the Viperfish immediately came to a halt. The men, intensifying their concentration on the systems in front of them, watched for anything that could increase the dangers to 120 men moving beneath the sea. Outside the pressure hull, large valves trapping the ballast air that gave us positive buoyancy suddenly flew open, quickly venting the outside tanks. The tanks began to fill with water, which caused the boat to develop negative buoyancy and become heavier. The massive bulk of the Viperfish rapidly settled down into the water, the bow angling downward as the two planesmen, who sat side by side at the diving station, pressed forward on their wheels controlling the diving planes. All sensations of movement from wave activity came to a halt. Abruptly, we felt frozen in space as the bulk of the superstructure and sail dropped below the surface of the ocean.
Sandy Gallivan, chief of the watch at the ballast control panel, opened the ballast tank vent valves. He flipped switches to start and stop pumps in the bowels of the submarine, thus controlling the transfer of water and fine-tuning the boat’s buoyancy and balance. In the engine room, Randy Nicholson adjusted the reactor controls to maintain adequate steam energy for the propulsion turbines. Donald Svedlow, sitting next to him, controlled the electrical systems. Diving required tightly coordinated choreography of machinery and highly trained men. From one end of the boat to the other, the men were working, watching, thinking, and continuously seeking optimal performance from the equipment under their control.
The captain scanned the ocean surface through the starboard periscope. He ordered the diving officer to have the planesmen maintain periscope depth and zero angle, in order to leave nothing above the surface of the water but the small tubes and lenses of the two periscopes.
“Now, attention all hands!” the captain called through the 1MC loudspeakers, “The ship is at periscope depth. All hands check for leaks!”
The captain was directing everyone on board-the enlisted men and officers, the scientists in the bow compartment, and the few civilian shipyard technicians along for the sea trials-to search for any seawater leaks that could suddenly flood the boat and kill us all. This extremely serious business precluded the joking and light banter among crew members that usually occurred during their routine tasks of running the boat. There was nothing routine about searching for flaws in the dry dock modifications, during which so many pressure boundaries had been opened and welded shut again.
The entire process was simultaneously intense and inspiring. There was a powerful awareness of being surrounded by the dark pressures of our submerged existence. We could almost feel the suffocating enclosure of the ocean as we committed ourselves to the experience of moving below its surface.
With flashlights in hand, we peered into every dark recess; studied each cluster of pipes filled with seawater; and scrutinized every valve, pipe flange, and pressure hull fitting. We waved our lights toward the oily waters of the bilge to look for rising levels and studied the curved steel on the inside of the pressure hull as we searched for tiny telltale streams of salt water. We listened carefully for the hissing sounds of hidden high-pressure leaks that could expand and rupture the hull when we moved deeper into the ocean. The USS Viperfish was our declared sanctuary from the outside forces of nature, and we would allow no violations of her integrity.
During the next five hours, we moved deeper into the ocean in 100-foot increments. At each level of our descent, we searched for leaks. As the pressure around us increased, a parallel force in our minds began to develop, a psychological pressure further riveting our attention on the job before us.
When the captain called over the loudspeaker, “Rig ship for deep submergence,” we were ready to take the final step of easing our boat into the deepest and darkest corner of our submergence envelope, where the extreme pressures of the Pacific Ocean could further threaten our world inside the Viperfish.
The doors between the compartments were now locked and dogged tightly shut, isolating the crew into small pockets of men throughout the submarine* I moved slowly up and down the engine room passageways as I examined the clusters of seawater pipes around me and checked for anything that looked abnormal. If flooding occurred from a broken pipe-a sudden disaster of roaring high-pressure water at that depth-none of us in the engine room would survive. Instant death would be certain. All of us had known of this risk when we volunteered for submarine duty. The remainder of the crew might have a chance of survival if the boat was able to surface quickly enough, if the reactor stayed operational long enough, and if the design of the Viperfish allowed for sufficient buoyancy.
Another dark fact from my qualifications work emerged. Should flooding occur in the huge Special Project compartment and high-pressure seawater flooded the cavernous hangar space in the front third of the ship, the weight of the water would certainly take all of us straight to the bottom. The Soviet Navy had already lost a submarine in this manner, years before, when the hangar space in a Whisky twin-cylinder missile submarine flooded. To make a bad situation worse, the Special Project hangar compartment was the one space in the Viperfish with a huge hole penetrating the bottom of the hull.
I directed my flashlight toward the clusters of pipes carrying seawater to the propulsion systems and wondered how long the reactor could provide useful power if one of the pipes ruptured and the engine room was lost. The loss of the USS Thresher was in the background of our consciousness, always suppressed, yet always present. The details of her sinking in 1963 had never been fully clarified by the Navy Department. Presumably, she was lost, with 129 men on board, because of an engine-room leak, and her engineering problems were quickly compounded by the SCRAM* of her reactor and ice clogging in the high-pressure blowing system, which prevented her from surfacing. That was the year I had joined the Navy. Hopefully, after three years, the engineers responsible for the design parameters of U.S. submarines had modified the Viperfish under the safety provisions of the SUBSAFE program (a comprehensive retrofit program developed to prevent another such disaster).
We finally reached our test depth, the deepest allowed for the Viperfish, and we studied our seawater pipes. We would never intentionally move below this depth. The performance envelope of the Viperfish was not designed for deeper penetration or greater pressures. There was only one defined level below that point-the depth associated with the end of a submarine’s life, the crush depth, from which nobody returns. When a submarine moves through this final pressure limit, sonar systems for hundreds of miles around pick up the strange sounds of bursting pipes and collapsing bulkheads, the curious staccato of the dying submarine’s screams, like the rapid popping of popcorn, as the vessel implodes upon herself and plunges to the ocean floor.
Captain Gillon finally announced that the Viperfish was free of leaks at our test depth. We planed up, blew the water out of our ballast tanks, and thundered up to the surface, where 120 men began to breathe easily again.
* To maintain the watertight integrity of the compartments, each massive steel door between compartments has a central handle and a series of clamps that seal the door when the handle is turned. A door is “dogged” when the handle is turned, thus sealing the door.
* SCRAM refers to “safety control reactor ax man,” a term given to the man responsible for cutting the rope holding the control rods out of an experimental reactor core during a test at the University of Chicago. When the rods dropped back into the core, the reactor was shut down. Although the system for shutting down a nuclear reactor is now profoundly different, the term SCRAM, meaning a total and complete emergency shutdown, has been retained.
