In the maneuvering area of the engine room, we began to feel like we were dying. I knew there was going to be a major problem, after the first twenty minutes on the surface, when I sensed the beginning stages of a sickening pain in the center of my abdomen. I looked down at the black coffee splashing over the top of my cup and felt a surge of nausea, immediately followed by a sweating attack of vertigo. Our rounded hull, designed for submerged operations, did little to diminish the effects of the powerful waves. Each time we rolled thirty degrees to the left or right, we instantly came up and rolled almost as far in the other direction.
The waves continued to batter against us with increasing force. As we rolled violently back and forth, pungent oil fumes from the bilge water permeated the hot and humid air around us. My throat constricted from the gagging odor of the fumes and my eyes blurred, but I tightened my sweaty fists around the throttle wheels.
Randy Nicholson, his face pale and showing stress, sat behind me and watched the reactor control panel pitching up and down in front of him. Next to him was the powerful frame of Donald Svedlow, a longtime veteran of the Submarine Service, who also looked like he wanted to be anywhere but on the surface of the ocean. Our sweating engineering officer, Lt. (jg) Douglas Katz, paced a fixed pattern in the corner of the maneuvering area. His skin was a sickly green color, and his tortured eyes repeatedly gazed across the engine room as though he were searching for the horizon.
My dungaree shirt turned a dark blue from sweat as I fought the nausea. I began repeatedly swallowing and belching, and there was a ringing sound in my ears. I prayed for them to find the torpedo, and then I prayed for them to forget the torpedo. Finally, I cursed all torpedoes as I visualized helicopters flying in to lift me off the boat.
Glancing at the men around me, I wondered who was going to lose it first. The sloshing of coffee from my cup onto the decking created curious miniature rivers moving in opposite directions in response to the roll of the boat. I began to eye the tall metal trash can clamped next to the throttle wheels, and I wondered how I could quickly utilize it without attracting everybody's attention. It seemed reasonable that throwing up should be a private thing, but there was no way to leave my battle station to seek the relative isolation of the head. I thought about the civilians in the hangar compartment and grimaced at the thought of their breakfasts being lost into the huge hole in the center of their Special Project area.
Forty-five minutes into the search for the wayward torpedo, Lieutenant Katz cleared his throat a couple of times and left the area. He mumbled something about checking out the vacuum in one of our condensers.
"He's gonna puke," Svedlow grumbled after Katz's staggering form was out of sight. "He's gonna put his head into the bilge and he's gonna search for Ralph O'Roark."
"We're all gonna puke, bruddah," Nicholson said, wiping the sweat from his forehead. "It's just a matter of time."
"Goddamn forward pukes and their goddamn forward puke torpedoes," Svedlow growled, followed by the longest belching sound I had ever heard.
"The forward pukes are gonna make us puke," Nicholson said, grimly. "I'll pay for the goddamn torpedo myself. Just dive this thing and send me the bill."
Incredibly, Svedlow then pulled out a pack of cigars from his shirt pocket and asked if anybody wanted a smoke. Nicholson grabbed one, and soon the entire maneuvering area of the engine room carried a layer of pale cigar smoke mixing with the odors of diesel oil fumes and sweat. The psychology of cigar smoke at a time of end-stage nausea was not clear to me, but it appeared to be a well-established practice.
My mouth became dry, and a terrible taste began to emerge from the back of my throat. I turned to Svedlow, "Got an extra cigar?" I asked.
As the smoke became thicker, we all heard the upper engine-room watch shouting in the direction of our starboard condenser. I looked down the passageway, where the watchstander, a burly machinist mate with an evil grin on his face, was leaning over the hole in the deck leading to the bilge below.
"He ain't down there, sir!" he hollered at the top of his lungs.
The machinist mate waited a moment and his grin became bigger. "Ralph O'Roark ain't down there, Mr. Katz!"
The distant voice of an anguished engineering officer, floating into the thick air around us, shouted something appropriately obscene to the machinist mate. The prolonged vomiting sounds of "O'Roark!" then carried up to us, as a group of men from various corners of the upper-level engine room quickly gathered around the hole.
"He ain't down there, sir!" they shouted in unison.
We continued searching for the lost torpedo for another fifteen minutes as hundreds of waves battered the hull. Puffing my cigar furiously, I tried to concentrate on peaceful green pastures, a walk in the woods, clouds in the sky, anything besides throwing up.
It was hopeless.
Like a malignant epidemic spreading through the boat, the condition of terminal vomiting finally struck everyone in the maneuvering area, including myself. By the time the captain gave up on finding the torpedo and we dove into the quiet waters below, almost the entire crew had been informed that Ralph O'Roark, the venerable ghost of American submarine bilges, was not and would never be "down there."
We steamed up the Pearl Harbor channel a few days later, after confirming that the Viperfish was operational. My qualifications, progressing rapidly, were almost to the halfway mark. The maze of propulsion systems in the engine room became easier to learn when the equipment was in one piece. The captain was satisfied, the Fish was ready for future testing, and the Viperfish didn't have any leaks.
As soon as Marc Birken, working with the other electricians, had pulled the huge shore power cables from the pier to the Viperfish, we both raced up to the barracks, showered, and changed into civvies for a night in Waikiki. Even though we had been at sea for less than three weeks, it was a strange feeling to be suddenly exposed to the open spaces of Honolulu with its kaleidoscope of lights and human activity. Marc and I slowly cruised up and down Kalakaua Avenue in his TR-3, and I felt the impact of the scanty swimsuits worn by the hordes of beautiful women. Even more amazing to me was the mental effect of seeing such ravishing femininity after weeks of confinement. It was a shocking kind of transition, going from the orderly life on the submarine to the females and music in the nightclubs of Honolulu.
We made our usual bar stop at Fort DeRussy before walking to the Waikiki strip. Soon, we were making moves on the dance floor at a popular nightclub near the Ilikai Hotel. The first woman I danced with was an attractive blonde who casually whispered in my ear that she was a "WestPac widow."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I told her sympathetically. The newspapers were filled with stories of men dying in Vietnam, many of them in the Navy and attached to the Western Pacific (WestPac) forces, and she was obviously trying to adjust to her loss. We danced for a few more minutes before I asked her if she was getting along okay.
"Getting along okay?" She backed away and looked at me.
"After the loss of your husband," I said, beginning to have an uncomfortable feeling.
Her voice lost its soft tone. "I'm a WestPac widow. You don't know what that means? My husband's on patrol off Vietnam for the next five or six months."