The drills, always realistic to the extreme, forced us to react intentionally and automatically, improving our response time. The concept of "only a drill" allowed a mental dissociation from the fear that would normally accompany the ever-present possibility of a real problem. Although the initial reaction to seeing smoke billowing from the control room or hearing water roaring into the engine room might have been raw panic, the drills instilled the fastest possible response to each type of disaster without potentially fatal hesitation. Finally, the drills kept all of us from getting complacent; instead of expecting the equipment to work properly (as it usually did), we came to expect things to go wrong. In future months, when some of the Viperfish's systems did malfunction, our automatic responses learned during the drills would help to save us from disaster.
After the flooding drill, I decided that my next step should be to learn everything possible about the boat's emergency escape chamber. Before the next flooding drill or, even more important, in case of a real disaster, I should be qualified on the only system that allowed escape if we were unable to surface. The escape chamber was located in the hangar compartment, where the civilians were-the compartment with the biggest hole. Ironically, the huge hangar was the only compartment that could take on so much water (in the event of a flooding disaster) that the submarine would become too heavy to surface. If it flooded and com- pletely filled with water, there would be no way for any of us to escape.
I caught Chief Mathews as he came off watch in the control room.
"Chief, would you run me through the emergency escape chamber?" I asked.
"That flooding drill get to you, Dunham?"
"No problem," I lied. "Just thought this would be a good time to learn — it's the next system on my quals list."
He looked at my list. "It's one of the next systems. All right, let's look it over."
When we were inside the hangar, we stood below the escape chamber. It was a large, juglike steel structure attached to the overhead escape hatch that connected to the outside of the boat. A ladder extended from the passageway to an opening at the base of the chamber. Paul and I climbed up the ladder and into the chamber while he explained its operation. The interior of the chamber was crammed with valves and pipes, and it took him about fifteen minutes to explain the proper sequence of opening valves to attain pressure equal to that of the surrounding ocean. When the pressures matched, the chamber hatch could then be opened and one could escape from the Viperfish.
"Remember your free-ascent training in submarine school, Dunham?" he asked.
"Fifty feet, blow and go," I said. "I remember it well."
Successful ascent up the top half of a hundred-foot tower of water was a requirement for graduation from submarine school. Placed in the middle of the tower (through a special entry chamber that allowed access) without pressurized oxygen or other breathing equipment, the students were told to blow out the air from their lungs as they floated upward toward a tiny circle of light fifty feet above their heads. Being so deep underwater with-out air tended to focus attention on the immediate matter of survival. If anyone panicked and did not exhale air as he floated toward the circle above, a diving bell holding a bubble of air was dropped down to enclose the man's head. An instructor then blasted the student with one final minute of intense lecturing. If he panicked again, the hapless student was promptly flunked out of submarine school.
"Correct, fifty feet for the sub school students, one hundred feet for the divers. Blow and go! Excellent training for doing exactly the same thing from the Viperfish, if the opportunity ever arises." The chief pointed to an opening at the top of the escape chamber that allowed an exit from the boat. "If the boat sinks, do the right things with the valves, climb right through that hole, and you're on your way to the surface."
After we reviewed the sequence of valve operations again and discussed potential problems, the chief said that there was nothing else to learn about escaping and I was now ready to have the system checked off by one of the other crew members.
"By the way," I called out to him after leaving the chamber, "how far down would we descend, if there was flooding?"
He turned around and smiled. "If we sank to the bottom?"
"If we had a leak and sank to the bottom during our trip to Seattle."
After considering the question, he said slowly, "I just talked to the navigator. About an hour ago, we passed well south of the Mendelssohn Seamount and moved into the mid-Pacific. It's a little more shallow back there, but-"
"How shallow is the top of the Mendelssohn Seamount?"
"Oh, somewhere close to fifteen thousand feet."
I stared at the chief.
"A little less," he said, without expression. "It gets deeper during the next couple of days, dropping down to about twenty thousand feet before we finally reach the Juan de Fuca Ridge."
"Chief, our crush depth is-"
"I know all about our crush depth, Dunham. Best thing to do is not spend too much time thinking about the escape chamber"
For the first time since reporting on board the submarine, I fully realized that we could never escape the pressures waiting for us below if we became disabled and sank anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. Our craft could not survive any accidents that destroyed the lifesaving buoyancy of our submarine. There could be no safe landings, no settling on terrain spanning the harsh ocean bottom, no escape for any of us if flooding took us down. During the remainder of the trip, the Viperfish seemed to become more confining and our claustrophobia intensified as we each worked to conquer our own fears inside the steel machine that we called our home.
5. The Sea Bat and other creatures
In the northeast corner of the Sea of Japan, the city of Vladivostok stands like an amphitheater, with its center stage of Peter the Great Bay (zaliv Petra Velikogo) near the Sino-Soviet border. During the 1920s, V. I. Lenin had acknowledged the city's enormous distance from the center of the emerging Soviet Union, but he supported its obvious strategic importance as its population increased, finally exceeding 400,000 by 1965.
Although the city was an industrial center in its own right, proximity to the sea provided for its growth and sustenance and led to the building of deep-water moorings, construction of new freight warehouses during the early 1960s, and, finally, development of nuclear weapons storage and support facilities. Further, the seaport's geographic location offered the Soviet Union a gateway to the Pacific and increased the military significance of Vladivostok, as ships and submarines of the Soviet Navy traversed the Sea of Japan. The pride of the Soviet Navy by 1965, the seaport was a thriving east coast military facility because of its year-round accessibility through the Kuril Island choke points to the northeast and the Strait of Korea to the south. Connected by air and rail links directly to Moscow, Vladivostok allowed the Soviet Navy to expand its extensive Eastern Fleet and to prepare nuclear missile-carrying submarines for their journeys across the far waters of the Pacific Ocean in the direction of the United States.
Protests against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam expanded in January 1967 when government authorities revealed that, to date, nearly six hundred U.S. aircraft had been destroyed during the course of the war. On 31 January, thousands of people representing the New York-based Committee of Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam conducted a protest march before the White House in Washington, D.C., and demanded a de-escalation of the war. Approximately two hundred members of a fundamentalist Protestant group simultaneously staged a counterdemonstration in support of the war.