George angrily grabbed his briefcase and headed for the door.
Chapter 6
George left the house at 0530 hours, walked down the driveway in the pre-dawn darkness to the 290-horsepower, Nighthawk Black, Acura RL, opened the driver’s door, and settled into the fine leather seats. Each time he sat down in his one major extravagance, he became a little more encouraged about life. He drove just a few blocks to the home of Commander Robert Sewell, better known as “Buffalo Bob” or simply “Buffalo.” Several other members of the staff lived in George’s neighborhood, and it was his week to drive the carpool to the naval base. The carpool was their little way of helping to reduce congestion and pollution in the Tidewater Area. It also gave them a chance to talk outside the office or to just read the paper and relax a little. Buffalo served as the administrative officer on the SUBLANT staff, in charge of all the “bull” as he liked to say. George and Buffalo had a lot in common, and George always stopped at Buffalo’s house first so they could share the front seat.
As he entered the driveway of the house Buffalo rented with two other naval officers, George reflected on the sacrifices they had all made to prevent a nuclear attack on America. Because of the long patrols and periods away from home, his own marriage and dreams of a family had gone down the tubes, as had Buffalo’s and the guys’ who shared the house with him.
Is there a point to strategic deterrence any more? “What a waste,” said George. “What a waste.”
George sounded two short blasts of the horn and within a minute Buffalo emerged, briefcase in one hand and a large travel mug full of hot coffee in the other. At six-foot two, Buffalo was tall by submarine standards. In fact, he towered somewhat over George at five-foot nine-and-a-half. Although not particularly muscular, Buffalo kept himself in pretty good shape. He and George worked out at the navy base gym at least twice a week and jogged around the base on alternate days. On Friday evenings after work, when the members of the SUBLANT staff visited the Officers’ Club bar, the women they met there always seemed to favor Buffalo’s tall, slender physique and wavy brown locks over George’s short, stocky build and short-cropped reddish-blond hair. It was like an attractiveness contest between a young Ronald Reagan and John McCain. The women went for Reagan every time!
George watched the pretty boy on the SUBLANT staff approach the car.
Buffalo threw himself into the front passenger’s seat, closed the door, and wearily let out a long moan.
George laughed and said, “Let’s go strap on the boar hog.” The reference, of course, was to the old saying about being “as useless as teats on a boar hog.”
Buffalo moaned again and said, “Well, you’re sure in a good mood today.”
“Sorry, I get this way every time I drink out of that darn Annapolis coffee mug.”
“Well, you do it every day, so you must enjoy feeling like crap.”
“It’s not that. It’s just that I take a lot of pride in the contribution the Annapolis made and the contribution the whole submarine force made to protecting America and keeping the world at peace for many years. Then a bunch of politicians decide my boat is to blame for the destruction of Washington DC. It pisses me off!”
“I know, George. Long deployments at sea are tough, both on the individual crewmembers and on their families. It’s a shame your good crew had to have that albatross unfairly hung around their necks.”
“You know, I still remember a speech that I heard the commanding officer of a boomer give to some of his crew when I was a midshipman. He told them they had to think about the greater mission they were performing. He said something like, ‘If you’re in this for the money, or the experience, or to get promoted, it won’t be worth it. It’s much too hard. The hours are too long; the work is too demanding; the quarters are too close. You’re crammed into a little cylinder under the water for sixty days at a time, cut off from the world and out of communication with your wife, your children, your family, and friends. You’ve got no personal space and no personal time. You can’t even meet someone in a passageway without having to turn sideways and squeeze by. If you have a medical crisis, tough! You’re going to have to trust your life to our corpsman!’”
“Hey, that’s no joke!” Buffalo interjected. “We had a guy come down with appendicitis on one of my patrols, and the corpsman could only pump him full of antibiotics and hope the appendix didn’t burst before we got home!”
“Did he make it?”
“Yeah. Saved the guy’s life, I guess. So what else did that CO have to say to his crew?”
“Well, I think the critical part was when he said, ‘You’re constantly drilling and preparing for emergencies, and you’re always preparing to do the unthinkable — launch nuclear ballistic missiles, which will kill millions of people. When you finally get home, your reward for doing a good job is that you get to do it again! There has to be more to it than that. You have to feel you’re making a greater contribution to peace and to mankind through your dedication and your sacrifice.’” George paused and glanced at Buffalo. “Fifteen or twenty years ago, it made a lot of sense.”
“Yeah, during the Cold War it made a lot of sense,” Buffalo responded. “Our strategic assets provided the U.S. with a convincing deterrent force when there was an identifiable enemy we could hit in a retaliatory strike.”
“But the terrorist strike on Washington DC changed all that,” George continued. “The strike made us impotent and worthless. Now, all of the great power of the United States of America, all of its ICBMs, all of its long-range strategic bombers, and all of its ballistic missile submarines are useless. You can’t use those to strike back at terrorists!”
“Teats on a boar hog,” responded Buffalo, mimicking George.
“With terrorists hiding in dispersed countries around the world, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction is dead. If terrorists hit us with a nuclear, biological, or chemical weapon of mass destruction, we can’t strike back. Like you said, there’s no identifiable target.”
“Teats on a boar hog,” Buffalo repeated. “You’re preaching to the choir, you know.”
George continued unabated, “The U.S. is a lumbering giant — unable to change its course, unable to adapt its strategy to changing circumstances. We continue to deploy our boomers. Our crews continue to endure the separation and sacrifices of sixty-day submerged patrols. For what? Who are we deterring? We’re certainly not deterring the terrorists — they’ve shown us that.”
“Teats on a boar hog,” said Buffalo, hoping his repetitive responses would finally shut George up, but it took their arrival at their next stop to do that.
The third and final member of their carpool, Commander Lannis Wayne, served as the intelligence officer on the SUBLANT staff. George really didn’t like Lannis, and their opinions differed on almost everything. But there wasn’t really any polite way to exclude him from the carpool. Lannis lived just a few blocks away from Buffalo.