Submarine Life

A Sub Life

The year was 1975. I stared at the red metal wall, knowing that tons of water was on the other side, trying to get in. The wall, or “bulkhead” in navy jargon, was the pressure hull of the submarine, which was cruising several hundred feet under the ocean. The pressure hull is what separates the crew from the ocean water. Suddenly, water gushed through cracks in the bulkhead.

I yelled, “Flooding! Flooding!” I knew that briny deluge was going to sink us permanently.

I heard a voice say, “Wake up, Mike. You’re having a bad dream.” I recognized the voice as my friend and shipmate, Gary. I sat up, still half asleep.

“Flooding,” I stammered.

“Mike, there is no flooding.” He was both concerned with my mental well being and somewhat amused by my shouting. “Flooding” is not that kind of false alarm you want to raise while on board a submarine. I was in by bed, or “rack” in navy jargon, close to the center-line of the submarine. If there really had been flooding, I would have been the last person on board to know it.

My nightmare was imaginary, but the threat of flooding on board a submarine is real. The USN Thresher, a nuclear powered fast attack submarine, was lost at sea in 1963 due to flooding in their Engine Room. The Navy made a lot of improvements to their submarines due to that disaster that minimized the chance of flooding.

Minimized does not mean eliminated. When a submarine has been in the shipyard for maintenance, many of the pipes that carry ocean water or other hull penetrations may be disturbed. When the boat returns to sea and the first dive is performed, everyone on board is checking for leaks. Every nook and cranny, every dark recess hidden behind shipboard equipment is inspected with flashlights in hand.

If there are no leaks, the submarine sea trials may continue. The crew returns to port to repair anything that is broken, and then departs for the assigned patrol.

My submarine, the USS Halibut, was 360 feet long and had a crew of 150 men. That works out to about two feet of boat for every crewman. To be accurate, we had two levels, or decks, so I could argue we had four feet of boat for everyone on board. However, the four feet of boat per crewmen was jammed with equipment. Furthermore, pressure hulls are made from very tough, very strong, very expensive steel. It makes sense to build the pressure hull as compact as possible to fit everything in and still leave some room for people to work, eat, sleep, shower, and use the bathroom, or “head” in navy jargon. It is fair to say the spaces were cramped.

The only private place on the boat was our racks. Each rack was the approximate size of a coffin. It contained a six foot long padded mattress, a reading light, and a curtain to provide privacy. Our personal storage space was located under the mattress.

There are no doors on the submarines, screen doors or otherwise.  We call them hatches, and they are built of thick metal. They are designed to be water tight. Even I had to duck to pass through the hatchways. Lester, at six and half feet tall, had an excruciating time passing through these hatches. I was always bothered by my short stature…until I was assigned to the submarine.

There are no windows on the submarines. None. Nada. Never have been and never will. For one thing, if you could put a window through the pressure hull, you are most likely looking at the insides of a ballast tank. If you could see the water, you would see that it is dark. And the third and most important reason is you want the toughest material between you and all of that water, especially if the enemy is dropping depth charges near your boat.

After all, these vessels are warships.  I served in the navy during the cold war between the Soviet Union and the United States. If a shooting war did break out, the submarines would have been doing much of the shooting. This fact hit home for me when I was in the Forward Torpedo Room. The Torpedomen had hung a brass placard on a torpedo tube, stating “Warshot in Tube.”  That is, we were ready to fire an armed torpedo. According to our dark humor, we would never fire a torpedo at anyone. They might fire back.

The most distinctive facet of submarine life is the smell. Since a nuclear reactor does not require any air to work, the submarine may stay submerged for months at a time. We had machines that scrubbed carbon dioxide from the ship’s atmosphere. We had devices that generated oxygen. But unless the submarine surfaced, the air in the submarine stayed in the submarine, along with anything in the air. This smell is a combination of high school P.E. locker room, automobile repair garage, Laundromat, garbage can, cigarette smoke, and pit toilet. Fortunately, our noses acclimated to the odors and we hardly noticed the smell.

After returning from a long patrol, we would return home with our clothes reeking with the sewer pipe smell of the submarine. I don’t think any of the wives burned these clothes, but they certainly wanted to.

There was one, and only one, aroma that was highly desirable. Our baker baked fresh bread every day at about 2200 hours, or for you landlubbers, 10 p.m. He served a meal of bread and soup for the midnight meal. It was actually one of the more popular meals, served from 2300 to 0100. Breakfast was served from 0500 to 0700, lunch from 1100 to 1300, and dinner from 1700 to 1900. 

The navy tried to provide good food for the submarines crews. Sometimes we even had steak and lobster. We always left port with a lot of artificial ice cream mix for the ice cream machine. We brought ice cream cones that were quickly used up. We worked around this problem by using coffee cups to eat our ice cream. Even after I left the Navy, I would sometimes eat my ice cream in a coffee cup. My kids thought I was nuts.

What time is it? That’s actually a good question. A typical duty schedule for a crewman is six hours on watch and twelve hours to sleep, eat, study, and engage in some sort of recreation. He then goes on duty again. For example, if I was on watch from 0000 to 0600, I would eat breakfast after being relieved from duty. I could then shower and shave, go to bed, study for my qualifications, or read. If I was awake around 1200, I could eat lunch. I would have to eat dinner at about 1700 and go back on duty at 1800. Six hours later, at 2400, I would be relieved from duty and I could go eat. Twelve hours later I would be going on duty at 1200. The bottom line, what meal you eat is determined by the time. That is the only difference between sunrise, noon, sunset, and midnight. The berthing areas are kept dark so people can sleep. The duty areas, such as the Engine Room, are kept fully lit, so people can stay awake.

There were times I was on another type of duty rotation; six hours on, six hours off, twenty fours a day, seven days a week. That works out to an eighty-four hour work week. There were a few weeks I was on a much different schedule; six on, eighteen hours off. I was bored out of my mind.

Communication with the family back home was almost non-existent. We were allowed to receive and send five short printed messages to our families on each patrol. There was no mail service between ports. We could mail letters if we entered a port. For some boats, that seldom or never happened. We steamed into one port for emergency repairs once. Our mission was Top Secret, so we were instructed not to tell our families we had entered port in Adak, Alaska. This was a rare opportunity for me to actually be topside, at the top of the conning tower. That is the tall structure that sits atop all submarines. I was able to see the clear blue, but cold, waters off of this Aleutian island. I saw a dolphins and a killer whale. I later saw a bald eagle on the island.

By far, the very best thing about submarine life was returning to our home port and reuniting with our families.