Just before we left Pearl Harbor, a new electrician, Brian Lane, reported on board the Viperfish. He was married and took a soft-spoken, low-key approach to the qualifications work that eventually would lead to his running the engine room's complex electrical control panel. As was the case for so many of us, this boat was Brian's first assignment after nuclear power training and submarine school. He quietly began studying the Viperfish systems under the watchful eye of Donald Svedlow and the other qualified electricians.
On a brilliantly sunny day, we steamed down the Pearl Harbor channel, rendered honors to the USS Arizona as we passed the general area of the sunken vessel, and departed Oahu. The crew shut and dogged the hatches on the topside deck, and the Viperfish moved out of the channel, past the Pearl Harbor ("Papa Hotel") demarcation point that marks the end of the channel, and into the deeper waters of the Pacific Ocean. With the announcement, "Dive! Dive!" the captain cleared the bridge; the lookouts raced down the ladder from the top of the sail and slammed the control room hatch shut as the chief of the watch hit the levers to open the ballast tank valves. Our white-foam wake lingered behind us like a long feathery trail that abruptly ended in a final swarm of bubbles as the ballast tanks filled with water and we angled down to a depth of three hundred feet below the surface. We pushed through the waters off Diamond Head on the east end of Oahu and aligned our navigation system for the Strait of Juan de Fuca at the U.S.-Canadian border-nine days and 2,500 miles away.
Feeling suspended in our submerged world hundreds of feet below the surface, which seemed much like floating to the far reaches of outer space, we were unaware of any movement to suggest that the Viperfish was, in fact, pushing her way through the ocean toward Seattle. In the engine room, we couldn't even tell if it was day or night because the bright white lights remained on continuously. All sense of direction and time became distorted as the days passed slowly and we had no sensory contact with the world around us.
For me, existence was a surrealistic process of waiting until the clock said it was quarter to twelve, at which time I assumed my watch at the steam throttles. It didn't matter if it was fifteen minutes before noon or fifteen minutes before midnight, so long as I was sitting in front of the throttles at quarter to twelve. Twice each day, I repeated the process — climbing through the tunnel, walking down the upper-level engine-room passageway, and sitting down to begin my four-hour watch. Four hours later, I left the throttles for eight hours off watch. During this time, I wandered around and worked on qualifications or climbed into my rack and went to sleep.
If a movie was showing in the crew's dining area before I went on watch, I knew it was nighttime; otherwise, it was daytime. The crew's sleeping area was darkened twenty-four hours a day, so no matter when a crewman awakened it seemed like night. To resolve any lingering uncertainties between day and night, if I really wanted to know, I could climb up to the control center and see what lights were on. White lights indicated daytime and dim red lights meant that the sun had gone down and the world above us was dark. The red lights allowed the crew's pupils to dilate so that they could see better if the boat suddenly had to surface or move up to periscope depth. For the first few days, I tried to keep track of day and night, but I finally gave up because it was of no significance.
In the middle of the first week, I was tracking down some obscure system in the engine room when the sudden thunderous roar of flooding water drowned out the whining of the turbogenerators. I was in the upper-level area of the compartment at the time. Wedged between a heat exchanger and a bank of reactor control electronics, I was trying to read the number on a valve to identify its position on my schematic. I was tightly trapped between the solid steel of heavy equipment. For the next ten seconds, I fought furiously to free myself, while my mind screamed total terror and the loudspeakers announced the obvious.
"Now, flooding, flooding, flooding! We have flooding in the engine room! Lower level, starboard!" the engineering officer hollered. The lower-level engine room, similar to a basement, was below the main engine room and accessed by ladders connecting the two levels.
"Jesus Christ!" I hollered to nobody in particular as I finally popped free from the equipment and jumped into the central engine-room passageway. A herd of running machinist mates almost knocked me over, but I joined them in an all-out sprint down the passageway. As they disappeared down a ladder toward the bilge, I ran to the compartment's watertight door and began spinning the bar that dogged the door shut to isolate the engine room from the rest of the boat.
"Main seawater system, starboard condenser!" the engineering officer announced as the roaring noise became louder. "Lower-level engine room, isolate the starboard condenser!"
"Now, all hands, we have flooding in the engine room!" the captain's voice announced from the control center. "Surface, surface, surface!"
I began climbing down the ladder into the dark areas of the lower-level engine room. My hands shook violently as I tried to grip the ladder's steel sides. The roaring intensified as several other men and I moved closer into the area of the bilge; I knew there was little time before all the valves would be underwater and the engine room would be lost.
Suddenly, half the lights throughout the submarine went out, and I could hear the distant sound of high-voltage circuit breakers popping open. The lower-level engine room became darker, and the engineer announced, "Now, we have lost the starboard turbogenerator! Lower-level engine room, report the status of the flooding!"
The Viperfish assumed a steep up-angle. The screaming sound of the turbine propulsion system was deafening as we tried to accelerate toward the surface. I jumped off the ladder and landed on the steel plates above the bilge as the engine room lights flickered. Finally, I ran aft down the steeply angled decking toward the main condenser. The passageway was completely dry.
Looking around the area, I tried to find the source of the flooding. On the outboard side of the passageway, a pipe with an open valve was blasting water straight down into the bilge. Several men were sitting next to the condenser, all with big grins on their faces, and ignoring the roar. Milling around the passageway were the machinist mates who had jumped down the ladder in front of me; they were also grinning. One of them, more sympathetic than the rest, told me that the ballast control panel operator was pumping the water overboard as fast as it came out of the pipe.
Bruce Rossi handed me the communications headset as a chief machinist mate reached down and cranked the valve shut.
"Tell the engineer we have isolated the flooding, Dunham," Bruce said.
I stared at the men as I pressed down on the microphone button. "Maneuvering, this is the lower-level engine room," I barked into the communications microphone. "We have found the leak, and we have isolated the flooding."
"Very well," someone replied. Immediately, the captain's voice broadcast over the ship's main loudspeaker system: "Now, secure from flooding drill, secure from flooding drill."
And, so, that is how I learned about submarine drills.