If they had any worries about their son traveling around the ocean in a submarine, they didn't say much about it and I gave them as much reassurance as I could. They showed me a National Geographic magazine article about the USS Skate pushing up through the ice of the North Pole in 1959. We all looked at the pictures together, while I explained how safe I was during our submerged operations.
Dinner was somewhat of a somber affair. We discussed the expanding Vietnam War; the disruptions in our society because of the war; and the emerging involvement of my younger brother, who was still in high school, with the antiwar movement.
Unfortunately, the family's sleep was interrupted that night by my terror-filled screams during a nightmare about jagged spears of ice pushing through the Viperfish pressure hull during patrol under the North Pole.
"It was just a dream," I told them as they rushed into my room. "There is nothing to worry about. We have the best men in the Navy serving on board the Viperfish, it is the best ship in the Navy, we're not going under any ice, and we're not going to do anything that could be risky. We are a safe submarine and everything will be fine."
The next day, when they questioned me about the future of the Viperfish in the months and years ahead, all I could say was that we would be at sea; there could be no further answers until our mission was finished and maybe not even then. I could see the fear and worry in their eyes, especially in my mother's, as the cab arrived and I waved good-by. Their concerns were directed as much toward the unknown dangers in their son's future as to the obvious hazards already present. This torment was known to the families of servicemen everywhere. For my parents, it would not end until we surfaced the final time, when my duty on board the Viperfish reached a successful conclusion.
Before returning to the Viperfish from the Oakland airport, I requested that the cab driver take me to a student bookstore near the University of California at Berkeley. I needed some books for the chemistry and French college-prep correspondence courses that I had started. Several years before, I had been at the university to watch a Cal-Navy game, and I recalled that the students had been an active, albeit interesting, group of people. I should have taken a clue from the cabby, a wiry little man with a twitching mustache, when he turned to face me after we pulled up to the bookstore.
"Are you sure you want to go in there?" he asked, his mustache quivering.
I assumed he was worried about my disappearing without paying the fare. "I'll leave my bag here," I told him, "I'll be back in about five minutes."
He looked at me as if I were crazy. "Okay, sailor, it's your choice," he finally said, shrugging his shoulders and turning away.
Puzzled, I climbed out of the cab and joined the throngs of students moving into the store. I was wearing my standard "Class A" Navy uniform, silk black tie in a perfect square knot, shoes shined beneath my bell-bottom dark-blue pants, and white Navy hat properly in place. After finding the textbooks and carrying them to the cashier, I first noticed the looks of hostility from the long-haired students standing in line.
I pulled out my wallet and heard the rumble of obscenities, moving just into earshot. There was no doubt about the object of their scorn. Passing back and forth like a rising caldera of contempt, the words demonstrated the strong sentiments of the students' anger. Their comments were clearly directed at what I represented-the military, the Navy, the men involved with the killing in Southeast Asia.
The student clerk who took my money stared with hostility. Ignoring my outstretched palm, he slowly dropped my change on the counter in a gesture of open defiance.
I gave him a word of thanks that was ignored and gathered my books for a rapid exit. The antagonism followed me from the store. The students stopped to stare at my short hair and clean-shaven face, a palpable fury from a population of people hating the government that didn't listen and the war that wouldn't stop.
I wanted to say that they were wrong, that I was just a guy trying to become qualified on a submarine from Hawaii, that I didn't use weapons against anyone, and that I was even working full time to defend their right to dissent. I didn't start any war in Vietnam, I don't deserve your scorn.
The cab driver, accelerating to get me away from Berkeley toward the freeway, moved in and out of traffic in a determined effort to clear the area as quickly as possible. I looked out the window at the groups of long-haired students milling around on the sidewalks of University Avenue. As I felt my own anger at their rejection of everything I believed in, a fire truck, with red lights revolving and siren screaming, sped past us in the opposite direction, toward the university. It was towing a trailer marked "bomb-disposal."
The remainder of the ride back to Vallejo and Mare Island was one of silent gloom. The sentiment against the expanding Vietnam War had reached a level where rational debate was disappearing into a whirlpool of student anger and protest. Minds were becoming polarized, radical factions were forming, and open discussion was becoming impossible.
Within the confines of the Viperfish, we had our answer to the issue. We believed in the military solution to Vietnam as strongly as the students believed in their peaceful solution. We trusted and believed in the sincerity of our national leaders, although the reasons for continuing the battle were changing from defending a country and preventing the "domino effect" to not letting those who had already been killed in battle to have done so in vain. As we observed the riots, civil disobedience, and lawlessness of the protesters, we stopped listening to their rhetoric.
What I could not understand that day, and what none of us on the Viperfish could understand during the months that followed, was why everybody in the military should be objects of such scorn. None of us made the government's policy on Vietnam-not the soldiers in Southeast Asia and not the sailors on the Viperfish. Our crew became victims of this protest, but American soldiers in Vietnam became double victims. Not only were they ordered to Vietnam to fight, but they were spat upon for being American soldiers.
Our morale began to drop as a result of the protests and so much dissent from those who apparently were doing nothing for their country. The crew responded to student contempt by generating our own contempt for "the hippies and the freaks" who seemed, each time we saw or heard a news report, to be taking over the society that we were defending.
6. Non-qual puke
The long-haired Berkeley student was an athlete, lean and well conditioned, and he threw his projectile with precision.
The instant the rock struck the leg of the officer in the front line of advancing deputy sheriffs, the student turned and ran up Durant Avenue to escape. The officer had seen the stone coming and felt the pain of its impact. He immediately broke ranks and took up the chase, his helmet bouncing against his head and forty pounds of guns, ammunition, shield, and bullet-proof vest clattering against his body. He was obese and quickly became fatigued. From the towering structures of the Unit One dorms near College Avenue, hundreds of students hollered a barrage of insults at the officer as they watched the chase move up the street. The athlete moved like a rabbit, while the officer fell farther behind, gasping for air as he struggled beneath his heavy load of equipment.
At that moment, a young freshman engineering student walked up the quiet sidewalk on the north side of College Avenue in the direction of the university. Unaware of the chase progressing in his direction and ignoring the noise from Durant Avenue, he carried a full load of books on subjects relating to his science major. He walked quickly, with his head down and his mind deep in thought.