Tommy Cox again was moved to write, this time coming up with "The Ballad of Whitey Mack":
Cox's lyrics were right on target. It really was Blind Man's Bluff, a game far more dangerous than mere hide-and-spy operations. Mack's success marked the beginning of a new mission for the submarine force. From here on out, the fleet would be focused on tailing Soviet ballistic missile submarines at sea. U.S. attack submarines were sud denly elevated to critical participants in the nation's strategic nuclear defense. And they would lead the greatest sea hunt in maritime history. For now, as he drove Lapon back to Norfolk, Mack was basking in the glory that was finally his. Messages of congratulations flooded the radio channels.
Months later, Lapon would receive the highest award ever given to submarines, the Presidential Unit Citation. Whitey Mack would win a Distinguished Service Medal, the highest personal honor the Navy awarded its officers in peacetime.
But it was one of the messages sent out when Lapon was still on her way home that pleased Mack more than any other accolade. It wasn't addressed to Mack or to his crew. Instead, this message was sent out to every other submarine out on operations in the Atlantic: "Get out of the way. Whitey's coming through." The order was clear. Everyone was to make way and give the Lapon a clear track home.
When Mack heard that, he slapped his fist in his hand, shook his head and said: "Eat your heart out, suckers. Whitey's coming through."
Seven — "Here She Comes…"
Whitey Mack had set the new standard, one that other commanders were itching to match-indeed, itching to beat. Trailing Soviet missile subs was fast becoming the Navy's most critical mission, though not all of the men leading these dangerous hunts were as skilled as Mack, or as lucky.
At least two subs put the United States on the verge of nuclear alert when they radioed that the Yankees they were following had opened their missile doors and seemed ready to launch. In both cases, the U.S. subs quickly radioed again to say that the Soviets were engaged in simple drills.
Within months of Lapon's feat, there were also several collisions between American subs and Soviet subs, accidents that threatened U.S.-Soviet moves toward detente. When the USS Gato (SSN-615) slammed into an old Soviet Hotel-class missile sub in November 1969, Sergei Georgievich Gorshkov, the longtime commander in chief of the Soviet Navy, sent warships into the Barents in search of the intruder. He was hoping to find proof that Gato had been sunk. Gorshkov wasn't a bloodthirsty man, but the collision came just two days before arms control talks were scheduled to begin in Helsinki, Finland. It stunned him that President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, could proffer arms negotiations as though they were simple handshakes, while letting their submarines invade Soviet waters.
Evidence of Gato's steel corpse would have given Gorshkov one knockout of a handshake to proffer back. But his forces never did find Gato, which had hightailed it out of there, weapons armed and ready. At the orders of the Atlantic Fleet commanders, Gato's captain pre pared false mission reports showing that his boat had broken off her patrol two days before the accident.
Close calls, especially those that stopped short of major incident, were almost always omitted when Navy intelligence officers went to brief Nixon and his aides. Thus, there was no pressure on the submarine force to curtail its brazen operations, even after two more minor collisions in 1970, one in the Barents and one in the Mediterranean.
There was, however, a third accident that year, one that was so violent and so severe that the Navy had no choice but to immediately tell top Pentagon officials and Nixon.
It happened in late June. The USS Tautog (SSN-639) was heading for waters filled with Soviet traffic outside of Petropavlovsk, the big missile sub base on the Kamchatka Peninsula in the northern Pacific. Little rattled Tautog's thirty-nine-year-old captain, Commander Buele G. Balderston, who had already overcome childhood rheumatic fever to grow to a 6'4" all-American in swimming and track. He had studied desert scorpions at the University of Nebraska and then enlisted in the Navy during the Korean War, where he was promptly assigned responsibility for the disposal of unexploded ordnance left over from World War II. Ultimately he switched to diesel submarines because he and his wife Irene both thought the job would be safer. He had later thought of giving up the filthy, cramped life of a diesel submariner to study medicine, but before he could apply to medical school, Rickover tapped him for the nuclear sub force. Balderston decided that maybe it was a sign, that maybe he was destined to remain on submarines. He believed that, even after all of his illusions of safety were shattered with Scorpion's loss. He had been the engineer officer during her construction, and after her disappearance, accident investigators trying to unravel the mystery frequently called him away from Tautog.
On Tautog, Balderston was known as much for his idiosyncrasies as anything else. This man who could drink any of his crew under the table during port stops was also something of a health nut. He drank Sanka in lieu of the full-powered brew that kept most of the crew fueled, and he demanded that his sub be stocked with copious supplies of chopped walnuts-he ate them after every meal, save breakfast, because they were full of lecithin. He also had a peculiar dexterity: he could raise his large, gray, bushy eyebrows one at a time. Right or left, it didn't seem to matter, both could make the singular crawl up the side of his face. It was a talent he used for emphasis. When crew members scrambled answers during qualifying exams, an eyebrow would levitate. When a mistake was especially stupid, one of those great brows would leap. One young seaman was especially unnerved by the gesture and could never deliver a message to his commander without stuttering as soon as Balderston sent a brow on its ascent.
For the crew, those brows were almost as memorable as the ingenuity Balderston displayed during their first mission together in the summer of 1969-a mission that earned their sub the nickname "The Terrible T."
They were sent to monitor a test of a new Soviet cruise missile from start to finish. Unlike the Yankees' ballistic missiles, cruise missiles posed little threat to U.S. shores. But these smaller weapons could destroy a massive U.S. aircraft carrier from as far as 250 nautical miles away, and carriers were still one of the primary platforms being used for U.S. bombing missions over Vietnam. Indeed, Echo II submarines-each toting eight cruise missiles that could hold either nuclear or conventional warheads-had been spotted trailing U.S. aircraft carriers near Southeast Asia. If the Soviets got directly involved in the war there, Naval Intelligence would need to know as much as possible about the missiles and the subs that carried them. And it was Balderston's job to learn how many missiles the Soviets could fire in rapid succession, to capture electronic pulses that might indicate trajectories, and to grab communications that might help to assess weaknesses. He would also try to snap photographs of the launches so analysts back home could measure the flames as the missile shot skyward and maybe figure out what type of propellant the Soviets were using.
Brazenly, Balderston led his sub through the Soviets' sonar net and right beneath a group of Soviet ships and a submarine, keeping Tautog hidden, hovering at just 70 feet below the surface. Most of the time, the tips of Tautog's intercept antennas and periscope barely broached the waves. The scope's small, cup-shaped eye was so low in the water that every third wave washed over. Balderston took to counting, "One, two, under; one, two, under; one, two, under….