Today’s subs run on modern technology, but when something goes wrong, the tools sailors turn to may date back to the days of wooden sailing ships. One of the sailors we’re watching uses a simple marlin. Beginning an inch below the hole, he winds a length of thin rope tightly around the pipe, choking the leak one wrap-around at a time. The “pine plug” is just a wood cone, an object more commonly seen in building block sets or geometry classrooms. The tip of the cone is hammered into the hole as far as it will go. As the pine absorbs water, which pine does more greedily than most woods, the cone expands, becoming a snugger fit and a more effective plug.
“Horn,” Hough says over his shoulder. The man at the console blasts an air horn to make the students look up from what they’re doing. Hough grabs a sign (TWO HANDS ON HAMMER) and points at the young man whose hammer and plug the water stream has batted away like a kitten with a yarn ball, or Godzilla with a kitten. This happens nine out of ten times, Hough says; they lose the plug, the hammer, or both. It wastes time when there isn’t any to be wasted. And is dangerous. Ninety pounds per square inch (psi) turns a geometry class learning aid into a “pointed missile hazard.” The sailor retrieves the cone, which is bobbing on the water a few feet behind him. “One good thing about pine,” says Hough. “It does float.”
A hammer does not. “That’s why we tell ’em: hammer of opportunity.” If you lose the hammer, grab what’s at hand. This goes equally for plugs. When al-Qaeda blew a 40-by-60 foot hole in the hull of the USS Cole, the crew stuffed it with anything they could find. “Mattresses, wood, mooring line, sneakers…,” Hough says soberly. “Wrapped it up and shoved it in the hole.” It took three days, but they got the flooding under control.
I had met Hough earlier in his office, which he shares with two other men. A jar of Smucker’s Goober Grape stood out for the stripey, colorful whimsy it brought to the ill green-beige that someone, at some point, decided to paint the US military. Hough is rangy and pale-complected. He has an appealing overbite that, as he speaks, causes his incisors to touch down on his lower lip like children jumping on a bed. He was raised in a region of the country where people use “them” as an indicator rather than “those.” But Hough is nobody’s goober. He can take apart a steam turbine faster than most people can put a name to it.
Everything else in today’s leak-stopping arsenal is classed as a patch. The term is apt, but misleadingly unintimidating. This isn’t like patching a pair of pants. It’s like patching a riot hose while the water’s still on. You can’t come down on the rupture from above. The patch has to be slid over it from the side, like a blanket over a trash-can fire, and then cinched tight.
Hough watches a pair of sailors fail to secure a medium-sized patch called a strongback. The strapping they’re using is designed to hold up to water pressure as high as 6,000 psi. “So, for water at 90 psi to be leaking out, that’s a very bad job they’ve done.” The red plastic sign Hough would like to hold up does not exist: UNFUCK YOURSELVES.
Hough is tough on his students because the Wet Trainer is a kiddie pool compared to the reality it represents. Here was the situation on the USS Squalus, 50 feet down, after a 31-inch air-induction valve failed to close on a test dive in 1939. “The sea had found its way into the maze of pipes that ran the length of the Squalus. In the control room, jets of salt water sprayed from a dozen different places.” I’m quoting Peter Maas’s account of the sinking in The Terrible Hours. “The men worked frantically… seizing hold of whatever they could to stay upright.” And then the lights went out.
And this is from the submarine patrol report of the final patrol of the USS Tang, October 24, 1944, the day one of her own torpedoes broached the sea’s surface, curved sharply left, and blew a hole in her stern: “The Tang sank by the stern much as you would drop a pendulum suspended in a horizontal position.” A Lieutenant Lawrence Savadkin described the scene: “With the sudden downward angle of the boat, men and loose gear were bumping and falling by me with the rush of water.” The sub school Wet Trainer doesn’t tilt, but the one at the Officer Training Command in Rhode Island, nicknamed the USS Buttercup, does. (Apparently quite dramatically. “You never save the Buttercup,” Hough says.) With the understated monotone that comes of hindsight and report-writing, Savadkin concluded, “Confusion was great at this time.”
In extreme scenarios like these, the crew skips patches and plugs and heads to the watertight doors. Separating the three or four watertight compartments of a submarine are great, thick round hatches that, in appearance and penetrability, fall someplace between the door of a bank vault and that of a front-loading washing machine. Everything behind the door may fill, but the flooding stops there. Depending on how much sea has been taken on, an “emergency blow” may be ordered. A blast of pressurized air empties the submarine’s ballast tanks like a Heimlich maneuver on a purpling guest. The hope is that this lightening and hollowing of the stricken vessel will counter the weight of the floodwater and float it to the surface.
“If you can’t get enough bubble, you’re going down.” This from Jerry Lamb, technical director at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory (NSMRL), a few buildings over from the Damage Control Trainer. I’ve left behind Alan Hough and his sopping sailors to meet with Lamb and one of his counterparts from the UK’s Royal Navy, Surgeon Commander John Clarke. Both are well versed in the sequel to damage controclass="underline" submarine escape and rescue.
Lamb pours me coffee, and Clarke goes off to find milk. He’s back a minute later, squinting at the date stamp. “Jan 20. Should be okay.”
“What year?” Jerry Lamb is a droll, upbeat soul, his essential good cheer yellowed but slightly by two and a half decades with the Navy. The Navy: smart people, dumb bureaucracy. Meetings, paperwork, conferences. A moment ago I heard Lamb refer to something called the “missile defense luncheon.” I pictured doilies under water pitchers and PowerPoints of incoming warheads. Who could eat?
Neither the Tang nor the Squalus could get enough bubble. The first order of business for a sub on the floor of the sea is to alert potential rescuers. Then, as now, each submarine compartment is equipped with mini launch tubes for flares, smoke signals, location buoys. On World War II–era subs, the location buoy was a sort of floating phone booth in the middle of the ocean. “Submarine Sunk Here,” read the sign on the Squalus buoy. “Telephone Inside.” It was like a New Yorker cartoon that didn’t quite make sense. There needed to be a third line: “No, really.” A length of cable connected the buoy to the downed sub. When a rescue vessel arrived, its crew would haul the thing aboard and reach inside for the phone. Peter Maas recounts this moment in his book. The rescue vessel’s commanding officer, Warren Wilkin, takes the receiver and opens with a breezy “What’s your trouble?” Like he’d pulled up alongside a car on the side of the road with its hood propped open.
The commanding officer of the Squalus—here, too, seemingly unflurried in the face of catastrophe—comes back with a chipper “Hello, Wilkie.” Whereupon a swell lifts Wilkin’s boat and snaps the cable, leaving all further communications to be hammered out in Morse code on the hull of the sub.