After using the commode, I began the sequence of valve operations to flush it. Opening the first valve allowed one to see the sloshing fluids in the dark recesses in the tank. I immediately discovered that it was necessary to avoid breathing the concentrated odors of methane, hydrogen, and other explosive gases bubbling forth from below. I then turned the other valves behind the commode in exactly the correct sequence as I had been taught, and seawater finally flushed through the bowl for a thorough washing-out operation.
Before I had time to reflect on my success at flushing, Larry Kanen entered the room with a rush and began scurrying around, sealing drain valves in the sinks, showers, and decking.
"What are you doing, Larry?" I asked.
"Gonna blow the head, Roger!" he announced with remarkable enthusiasm.
I had no idea what he was talking about, but it was obvious that he was intent on completing his job as quickly as possible.
"Do I have time to rinse my hands?"
"Better hurry! Gotta blow the head, right away!"
Kanen finished his work, sealing every valve in the head. A few seconds later, a hissing, gurgling sound began to emerge from the drains as he turned a compressed-air valve to blow high-pressure air into the sanitary tank, some of which leaked up from, around the valves and back into the head. As the pressure in the tank increased, the contents of the tank blasted out into the ocean.
The odor filling the head from the bubbling drains was intense. Fighting back a gagging feeling, I returned to my rack and yanked the curtain across the opening. When I took a couple of deep breaths, I discovered that the escape was short-lived. Fifty feet in front of my rack was a vent line designed to relieve the pressure remaining in the tank after the flushing. For the next fifteen minutes, as Kanen vented the tank, the hissing gas that smelled like a nightmare concoction of rotting eggs filled our sleeping area. It penetrated the entire compartment-our bunks, our hair, our nostrils, and everything we owned.
We spent two more weeks in the waters west of Oahu to practice diving down to the level of our test depth and climbing back to the surface again. With radical movements of the rudder and control planes, the captain performed various "angles and dangles" that placed the Viperfish every conceivable position that a submarine could manage. We tested each piece of equipment for any flawed circuits or machinery that could endanger our lives or limit the success of our mission. The sonarmen adjusted their controls as they listened to the strange sounds of whales moving through the ocean, the torpedomen and fire control technicians calibrated their equipment, and the nukes shut down and started up their turbogenerators and the nuclear reactor. The newer men on the ship became better acquainted with the veterans, and we all learned the essentials of living, training, and working together in the claustrophobic quarters of the Viperfish.
In the hangar compartment, the Special Project engineers, strolling around, looked down from time to time into the huge hole that penetrated the decking. Commander Spiegel and Lieutenant Dobkin worked with the civilians and photographer Robbie Teague to ensure that the Fish equipment worked properly. They weren't hostile to the rest of us; they were just private.
If one of the regular crew came by, they lowered their voices. They nodded to the crewman and said, "Hi." The crewman nodded back and said, "Hi," and that was the end of the conversation. If any of us lingered, a heavy silence descended over the hangar until the outsider left the immediate area.
On one occasion, while I was struggling to learn a particularly difficult system in the hangar, I asked Lieutenant Dobkin a question relating to their work. The question was apparently too sensitive because his response amounted to a lecture on the nature of the "silent service."
"Submarines are the silent service because we remain silent about these kinds of things," he said, his eyes staring straight at me before finally turning away to join his civilian associates. I felt a flash of anger and mentally debated why our Special Project wasn't like any other part of our submarine-everything else we worked with was also a part of the silent service. I returned to my qualifications work with silent service philosophies moving through my mind. Finally resolving the problem, I decided that the Special Project was, simply enough, top secret and therefore different from everything else we did that was just secret. Years later, I would discover that the Special Project was, in fact, compartmentalized top secret; not even an individual with a top secret clearance could learn the details of our mission.
Six days before we returned to Pearl Harbor, the word spread through the boat that we would be starting torpedo-firing exercises. This was exactly what I had been waiting for since the day I volunteered for submarine duty. Shooting torpedoes was a fundamental operation of submarines, an essence of sorts. It provided for the boat's survival and established her effectiveness as a military machine. After several hours had passed with no further information about the exercise, I climbed into my rack and began fading off to sleep.
The captain's voice suddenly blared over the loudspeaker system: "Now, man battle stations torpedo! Man battle stations torpedo!"
I popped my eyes open, leaped to the deck, and ran at top speed down the narrow passageway in the direction of the engine room. At the same time, the other men jumped out of their racks and raced toward their battle stations. Everybody dodged each other in a state of high-speed, controlled movement to reach their assigned positions in the Viperfish. I ducked under the sharp-edged valves in the tunnel over the reactor and climbed through the watertight door opening to the engine room and my battle station: the turbine throttle wheels that Jim and I had controlled when we left Pearl Harbor. Jim was nowhere to be seen, and so I placed my hands on both wheels and waited for the excitement to begin.
In the control center, two hundred feet in front of the throttles, the captain looked through the periscope, spotted the torpedo recovery ship that had arrived from Pearl Harbor to help us, and ordered the exercise to begin. Several junior officers, working on their torpedo qualifications, moved through the established routine and prepared to fire our torpedoes from the hangar compartment in the bow.
While they performed their work, I sat stiffly upright in front of the large rubberized engine-room throttles and wondered when something would happen. Surrounded by the other men in the engine room, all of whom were also waiting for something to happen, I was unaware of the frenzied activity in the control center as the torpedo fire control technicians, torpedomen, and officers tracked and plotted the shoot. Half an hour later, I turned to ask the engineering officer when we were going to fire the first torpedo. At that instant, I felt a slight shudder of the Viperfish's hull and heard the distant "whooshing" of a missile being launched into the ocean.
That was all there was to the shot. I stood up, gripped the throttle wheels, and waited expectantly for the control center to order sudden changes in our speed. Remarkably, the bell indicator remained silent, and there were no further orders. None of us did anything except stare at our control panels as the captain announced over the speaker system, "Now, surface, surface, surface."
With the usual amount of gurgling sounds, we broke the surface. After the first of an endless number of huge waves hit the side of the Viperfish, we began aimlessly wandering around searching for the torpedo we had just fired. It was designed to run a specific distance before running out of fuel and floating to the surface, where it could be recovered and fired again-a sort of Navy recycling system. The torpedo was also programmed to release a brilliant yellow dye to make it easier to spot. The captain and officers who had fired the shot searched through their binoculars from their vantage point at the top of the sail, sixty-five feet above the water. The two lookouts in the back of the cockpit scanned the whitecaps in the opposite direction with their binoculars. Somewhere near the horizon, the crew of the heaving torpedo recovery ship also scanned the ocean for any trace of the torpedo.