The dispatcher tried to tell me something positive but I just hung up the phone. We didn’t have much time.
“All right everyone start digging. We’re building snow caves.”
The kid, shaking, asks,
“Have you ever done that?”
I reassured him by saying,
“Oh ya, I took a wilderness survival class in high school. We did all this stuff!”
The kid seems satisfied and starts digging.
Little did he know and I wasn’t about to volunteer that I about froze to death in that high school snow cave 4,000 feet lower and in much warmer weather!
Also, I wasn’t about to share this either:
I nearly died when I was eighteen and fell down the mountain in this very spot!
All I could do was be a good example for some stressed out kids. I started digging with my hands as none of us had a shovel.
After just about one minute at this elevation and not being acclimated I was exhausted.
I look at my hands and they’re bleeding.
As I sat back into the snow and ice, I give a deep and long sigh.
I’d be happy right now knowing we are going to make it off this cold rock, alive. A nice warm Christmas dinner at Denny’s would be a plus.
Two things I hate most in this world:
Being cold and wet.
Looks like I’m gonna be both.
And, as luck would have it, on my iPhone Dust in the Wind by Kansas[4] starts to play.
USS Alaska (SSBN 732) — Arctic Ocean
Tom Watson’s Diary
Four days ’til Christmas
It was just another ordinary day.
Ordinary, if you consider waking up at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean aboard a ballistic missile submarine.
My name: Tom Watson. I’m chief communication’s officer, CCO, aboard the USS Alaska (SSBN 732) but this is my off time, for another hour anyway.
On Ballistic missile submarines working the All Systems Silent (Affectionately nicknamed: ASS duty) no one was doing anything right now.
In the old days, ASS duty was when a sonar officer heard something which sounded like a sub in the water and about the only thing everyone was allowed to do was sit on their ass until the sound was positively identified! Today, we basically watch computers. The computers “listen” for anomalies and we then have to determine if the anomaly is a potential threat or is something else.
Aside from ASS duty and a fool for a commander, I love my job.
Silence is a submarine’s best weapon. For if no one knows you’re there you can destroy the enemy before they even know what hit them!
And the Arctic is a great place to hide.
Under the ice of the North Pole it’s constantly noisy here. Ice creaks and groans as it calves and breaks. It’s almost impossible to hear anything.
Hence, computers do most of the listening.
We’ve programmed the computer systems to listen for specific submarine signatures so we can tell what’s around us.
However, if our computers have no record of that signature then all bets are off and it comes down to a competent sonar technician to recognize the anomaly (More about “competent” later).
The United States and Russian subs are becoming more and more aggressive in searching for and following each other around. So, silence aboard a sub is both our first line for both offense and defense.
Effective and secure communication is a close second. That’s my new job. My old job was a sonar technician but I really didn’t like the hours and hours of boredom.
Submarines have several ways to communicate. One way was ELF (Extremely Low Frequency). ELF is the only known wavelength that can penetrate deep into the earth and through sea ice. The drawbacks to ELF are:
1). It’s only one-way communication and
2). The antennas and equipment are massive, hence, very expensive.
Only the U.S., Russia and, now India, have built ELF systems.
The Russian antennas are actually thirty-seven miles long!
Technically, they are not antennas at all but only feed lines as the Earth itself is the antenna! Hence, only one-way communication: Navy ops centers can talk to us but we used to not be able to talk back to them.
However, we’ve been secretly testing a newer two-way system for some time now. The Navy laid cable and has near bottom, fixed locations under Arctic ice for hydro-acoustic communication that cannot be pinged even if you’re sitting next to it. You’d never know it’s there!
The beauty of this system is: So long as your boat is snug against the magnetic hub, and has the proper equipment, all sound is suppressed. This was critical as enemy subs are listening and, if they hear anything, they could pick up your location and potentially kill you.
ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) now requires all Arctic communications to travel through this new encrypted system to a HAARP Station in Gakona, Alaska. The U.S. Navy would re-encrypt and send communication to specialized HAARP satellites that would beam them down to ASWOC or any other military facility as needed.
Very few people were aware of the entire ‘Top Secret’ HAARP system. The primary reason for such exotic communications secrecy was to find out what the Russians were really doing in the Arctic without letting them know we we’re here and listening.
I’m one of the few who were briefed on how the entire HAARP system communicated. However, I haven’t been much use to anyone these days.
My last breakup was really difficult.
I swore I’d never date someone in the Navy again.
She was the Lieutenant commander of this very submarine, Jennifer Tavana and the love of my life.
At age thirty-two, she retired from the Navy!
She not only was the first woman to command a U.S. submarine but she also made it to that command in the shortest time of any peacetime commander.
Jennifer retired for me.
I told her not to.
But she’s a very strong-headed woman.
One of us had to leave the ship and even though the discharge finished her distinguished naval career, Commander Tavana did it for me.
I’m sorry Jen. I miss you so much.
I looked at her picture that I kept hiding on the bottom of the bunk above me.
The green light goes on.
Our ASSes are cleared to move around again.
I just sat there staring at her and listening to great breakup song: “So Very Hard to Go” by Tower of Power.[5]
So, I’m sitting here feeling sorry for myself and staring at this gorgeous creature and wondering what she’s doing. I heard she joined the FBI and was stationed in Juneau, Alaska.
How ironic, I thought.
At least she’s still “in” Alaska!
I wonder what she’s doing right now?
Jen and I had a professional relationship aboard ship but off the ship things got really hot.
Wow!
I will never forget those shore leave nights.
Unfortunately, I got drunk one night and started bragging about my exploits.
When Navy brass found out about us, we were confronted.
She chose to leave the Navy rather than have me reassigned to another ship or forced out of the Navy.
In light of the way I feel about two idiots on board the Alaska, that might not have been such a bad idea.
The green all clear light had popped off for a couple of minutes now and so I finally drug my sorry “ASS” out of my Ohio class submarine bunk.
The USS Alaska is a SSBN Boomer equivalent to the Russian Typhoon TK-20.
As I made my way to the conn I finally stopped thinking about Jen and began thinking about our mission:
Monitor if Russia had gone ahead with their promise of building ten airfields in the Arctic. Russia’s Federal Agency for Special Construction (Spetsstroy) had promised some time ago to begin building military facilities on six islands. Then everything went dark. No subs, ships, planes, nothing for five years now.
4
5