Lieutenant Walter Wallace Brenckmann, since September 1962 the Torpedo Officer and Assistant Missiles Officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Blue crew clambered out of the forward hatch onto the clammy black pressure casing of the submarine. It was always a little weird coming on deck for the first time after two or three months shut up in an environment where the farthest horizon was the next bulkhead. Notwithstanding, unless a man was prone to claustrophobia a nuclear submarine was a comfortable enough living space, albeit constricted and changeless. True, one could not run about, or jump up and down without risking a serious head injury and from time to time even the old hands barked a shin or an elbow on a piece of projecting equipment but such were the acknowledged ‘joys’ of life beneath the ocean waves. Otherwise, life on a nuclear submarine was a breeze in comparison with life on the old diesel-electric boats, or even normal sea service on anything but the biggest carriers. Two hundred feet underwater there was no sea motion, the food was regular, good — just as in prison a submariner found himself taking an inordinate interest in the quality and quantity of his chow — and every man onboard knew he was a member of the US Navy’s most exclusive, elite club. No man in the Navy trained so thoroughly as a submariner. No man in the Navy relied so intensely, every minute of every day, on the man next to him doing his job right every single time. The brotherhood of the submarine service was unique. For that reason Walter Brenckmann was invariably a little equivocal about this odd interregnum at the end of each ‘deterrent cruise’ before the formal handover from the Blue to the Gold crew officially commenced.
Walter Brenckmann eyed the long low silhouette of the USS Sam Houston lying inboard of his boat. The Skipper had mentioned that the other SSBN had grounded accidentally a week ago, delaying her next deployment. In a day or two she would be towed up to Vallejo, and dry docked so that she could be inspected from stem to stern. In the meantime the commanding officer of Submarine Squadron 15 wanted the USS Theodore Roosevelt ‘turned around’ and back on patrol inside seven days rather than the normal ten day rotation. Sometime tonight the ten officers and one hundred other ranks of the Gold crew would descend on the boat and the three-day formal handover would begin. Everything had to be accounted for, signed off and over, before the captain of the Gold crew accepted the boat from his Blue skipper counterpart. The USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Torpedo Officer had heard of one occasion when the handover had taken six days, mainly on account of the respective captains detesting each other’s guts. That was not likely to happen in the next seventy-two hours; the boat’s two commanding officers were old Annapolis — the US Navy Academy — classmates and lifelong friends. Not that either man was likely to cut corners or overlook deficiencies because that was not the way of the Submarine Service. Basically, when a man plied his trade deep beneath the ocean good enough was the mortal foe of better.
Walter Brenckmann looked around as the Chief of the Boat; Master Chief Petty Officer Ronald Erickson hauled himself out of the hatch and straightened his back as if he had been hunched over a barrel for the last eleven weeks. The ‘Bosun’ had scared the life out of Walter when he first came onboard the boat. Not so much because the man’s formidable reputation came before him but because he was a real old time torpedo man. Ron Erickson had been on the USS Wahoo when her skipper had fired his last remaining fish ‘down the throat’ of a charging Japanese destroyer. The Wahoo’s skipper had remained at periscope depth with his periscope up ‘nice and high out of the water’ just to bait the trap for the oncoming enemy warship.
Walter used to suspect that the World War Two generation were a completely different kind of men from him and his contemporaries. He had mentioned this once to the Bosun, who had quickly put him right.
‘No, those were just different times, Mr Brenckmann,’ the older man had said with a twinkle in his eyes.
Now the boat’s senior non-commissioned officer stood beside him, sniffing the air and peering into the fog still obscuring Alcatraz and the San Francisco skyline.
“You going back to Boston this time, Mr Brenckmann?” The older man inquired gruffly.
“Yeah. I haven’t been back since January. My Pa was still in England the last I heard but it will be good to catch up with Ma.” The Navy did not overtly encourage its men to lie to their families but many men in the Submarine Service, like Walter Brenckmann, found it easier feed their loved ones a suitably anodyne ‘story’ rather than to have to constantly have to repeat the mantra: ‘I’m sorry, I really can’t talk about it’. His parents and his younger brother, Dan — he had not seen or heard from his kid brother Sam since before the war — still thought he was on the USS Scorpion, an Atlantic Fleet Skipjack class hunter killer boat. One day he might want to talk to somebody about the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s part in Armageddon during the October War; but not any time soon. This way nobody even got to ask him the questions.
“You still TO on the Scorpion back home, Mr Brenckmann?”
Walter chuckled.
“What do you think, Boats?”
The other man guffawed paternally. The Blue Crew was long overdue an extended furlough. Submariners got more leave than their comrades in the surface fleet; and compensated for it by training harder and spending much longer in classrooms and simulators preparing for and practicing every imaginable kind of accident, emergency and war fighting situation. When something went wrong three hundred feet beneath the waves a man rarely had time to think what to do next, he had to act without hesitation, and unerringly do exactly the right thing or he and his crewmates died. Nonetheless, the Blue crew was tired and jaded and the last patrol had been a patrol too far for several men. The next time the crew went to sea there would be familiar faces missing, winnowed out in ‘psych tests’ and apparently innocuous routine ‘career’ appraisal interviews. Many of the men deemed ‘unfit for immediate sea service in the foreseeable future’ would be transferred to training or technical duties ashore; the Submarine Service was notoriously thrifty with its pool of hard won experience and expertise and very parsimonious about putting its men on the beach.
“Scuttlebutt is that you might be listed for Command School by the next time Blue takes the boat out again, sir?” The older man was standing with his hands on his hips. He was a stocky, bull of a man who looked like he was carrying twenty pounds excess weight all of which was actually teak hard muscle. The Bosun was the boat’s last link to the myths and legends of the savage undersea battles of the Pacific War against the Imperial Japanese Navy, one hundred and seventy-five pounds of pure, undiluted fighting tradition, the rock upon whom any man onboard could safely lean if and when the going got tough.
“Ah,” Walter grimaced. “Scuttlebutt. Um…”
“Forget I asked, Mr Brenckmann.”
“No, no, its fine, Boats. So far as I know if I get drafted to Command School it will most likely be after the next patrol,” the USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Torpedo Officer said, concerned that the older man might have insinuated that his reticence was to do with some unspoken boundary having been crossed and keen to assure him otherwise. “I ought to be in more of a hurry than I am, I suppose?”
Master Chief Petty Officer Erickson smiled broadly. He could see ‘the kid’ commanding his own boat in ten years time, even if Lieutenant Brenckmann could not see it yet.
The younger man looked west and north across San Francisco Bay to where the outline of the Bay Bridge was emerging out of the mist, which roiled, slowly thinning across the icy water. He could never remember a time when standing on the casing of a submarine in these waters had not been anything other than a bone-chillingly frigid experience. He strained to focus on the distant misty San Francisco waterfront but his eyes failed him, for the moment too unused to long focus after the weeks at sea.
The older man suddenly spied something that displeased the eye of the senior non-commissioned officer on the boat.
“With you permission, sir,” he growled. “I have some ‘Chiefing’ to do!”
“Carry on, Boats.” The USS Theodore Roosevelt’s Torpedo Officer grudged a guarded smirk as the other man stalked off to the gangway across the two SSBNs and yelled at the two Marines guarding the companionway up to the deck of the USS Hunley. He had no idea what either of the Marines had done to upset Master Chief Petty Officer Erickson; but any notion that they did not fully deserve the noisy dressing down they were presently receiving never troubled his conscious mind. With a sigh he realised he had wool-gathered too long. The only reason he was topside was to pay a courtesy call to the torpedo workshop on the USS Hunley. Two of his Mark 37 torpedoes would fall due for a two year workshop maintenance overhaul before the Gold crew got back to Alameda. Ideally, he wanted them both rotated out of service and replaced with ‘unexpired fish’ before he handed over to his Gold crew doppelganger.
Walter Brenckmann wondered if the ‘peace dividend’ cuts had bitten any deeper while the boat had been on patrol. Considered in the round the Submarine Service had got off relatively lightly while most of the surface fleet was steaming into mothballs under the Draconian cutbacks. However, the Submarine Service had not escaped the axe completely. New construction was on hold, completed boats were being towed to Naval Inactive Ship Maintenance Facilities, recruitment and training was being slashed, and sooner or later the Gold and Blue alternative crewing system would be substantially modified or abolished to reduce manpower requirements.
The SSBN fleet was the victim of its own success. Who exactly was it deterring these days? If the politicians were to be believed the October War had ended in a crushing total victory over the Soviets. If so, what was the point of the USS Theodore Roosevelt and her sisters prowling the oceans awaiting a call that was never likely to come again in his or anybody else’s lifetimes?
Walter Brenckmann’s Gold crew opposite number was two or three years his senior, a married man with a prematurely receding hairline. He was already in the Hunley’s cavernous torpedo shop when he arrived.
The men saluted casually and shook hands, swapping wan smiles.
“Good trip?” Inquired Lieutenant Thomas Lovell Clark II with an amiable southern drawl.
“A quiet trip, Tom,” Walter replied. “How have things been back on land?”
The other man shook his head and sighed.
“The President wants to put an American on the Moon by the end of the decade!” He chuckled glumly.
“Why?” Walter asked, frowning his bewilderment. He half-suspected Tom Clark was pulling his leg.
“Beats me, Walt,” confessed the other officer. “I take it you’re here about the two Mark 37s on the maintenance list?”
“I was going to request replacements ahead of the handover.”
“I’ve checked the maintenance logs on both fish,” Tom Clark shrugged. “Unless you’ve logged something new in the last eleven weeks we’ll probably keep them onboard. I’ve already flagged the issue with the Skipper. The Skipper wants a quick clean handover.”
Walter Brenckmann was not about to tell his colleague his job; even if he personally would have been uncomfortable with the idea of sailing without a full inventory of operational fish with unexpired service and certified component tags. But if Tom Clark was happy sailing with two potentially unreliable fish that was his headache. Given that no US Navy SSBN had ever fired a fish in anger it was somewhat academic; a simple matter of professional pride more than anything else.
“Things were so quiet I took time out to work on my sonar badges,” he remarked, apparently idly. He had made a lot less small talk before the war; his moderate tendency towards a less reserved loquacity was one of the small changes in him in recent months. He liked to think he was still the wholly self-contained, dead-eyed professional he had been before the war but in his heart of hearts he knew he was not. While he was in no way ashamed of his part in the cataclysm, after all, he had only been doing his duty that night in late October last year, no sane man could remain untouched, unchanged after that night and he was no longer the island that he had once believed himself to be. He liked to think he was a better man than he had been before; a man more in contact with his fellows for if he was not, who then could understand what it had been like for the Torpedo Officer and Assistant Missile Officer of a Polaris submarine flushing its birds on…
Actually, he had no idea whatsoever where the Theodore Roosevelt’s birds had flown that night, nor in all truth, did he ever want to know.
“It’s very quiet out there now,” he said thoughtfully. “Real quiet. It’s kind of eerie. There’s hardly any commercial traffic. I heard real whale song for the first time. That was really weird. We had a pod of whales following the boat for nearly forty-eight hours one time. The boat was ringing with their songs. It was the damnedest thing, Tom.”
The two men eyed one another.
The Polaris boats avoided normal shipping routes, searched out secret, hidden places in the emptiest parts of the oceans and yet until the October War there had been nowhere truly quiet, the distant rumble and roar of engines had always drowned out many of the natural ancient sounds of the seas.
“I think I’d like to hear that,” Tom Clark smiled. “Whale song, I mean.”