"Rig ship for reduced power!" crackled out of the ship's loud-speakers. The crew ran around the boat and turned off power-consuming equipment to conserve energy. As the air conditioner compressors were de-energized and the cool air in the ventilation pipes became humid and warm, the engine room began to heat up.
The reactor fission level finally started to increase as I continued the effort to restart the plant. Meanwhile, everybody scouted around the compartment and searched the engine-room electronic systems for any clue as to why the shutdown happened. Just as I brought the reactor power back into heat-producing capability again, Rossi showed up in the maneuvering room.
"What shut us down?" Pintard asked.
"No clue, sir," Rossi said. "The instrumentation showed no abnormality. Nothing in the-"
He was interrupted by another blast of alarms from my panel. The reactor had shut down again.
"Reactor shutdown, sir!" I hollered to the EOOW, as I kicked the empty coffeepot.
I immediately initiated the emergency start-up operation, while the chief of the boat from the control center announced over the loudspeakers, "Surface! Surface! Surface!"
"What the hell is going on?" Rossi exclaimed, as he spun around and left the maneuvering room to search our electronic systems for some indication of why we kept shutting down.
Our engine-room loudspeakers carried Captain Harris's voice: "This is not a drill! Repeat, this is not a drill!"
The Viperfish, angling steeply upward as we thundered to the surface, finally broke through and immediately began to roll heavily in the turbulent ocean. The temperature in the engine room quickly climbed to more than 100 degrees, and our uniforms became drenched in sweat.
"Starting up, again, sir!" I called out, as I flipped more switches and turned the levers controlling the reactor.
"Moving to battery power, sir!" Svedlow called out as he slammed open more circuit breakers throughout the engine room.
As the fission level began to climb, we heard Rossi hollering from the passageway that nothing was wrong, that all instruments showed normal reactor operations.
The alarms suddenly fired again, with red lights pulsating all over the panel.
"We're down again, sir!" I yelled.
"What the hell is this?" Pintard roared, his eyes darting back and forth from my panel to Svedlow's panel in search of clues.
Before I could even think about trying to start the reactor again, numerous changes within the pressurized-water reactor system showed that I was rapidly losing all control of the reactor.
"She's shutting down more, sir!" I called out.
"Goddamnit, she's shutting all the way down!" Pintard hollered.
I grabbed my levers and tried to stop the accelerating shut-down. I hollered "Mr. Pintard!" and, standing in front of the panel, pointed speechless at the rapidly changing indicators. At that moment, I clearly had no control of the systems that determine the reactor fission levels.
Although I had once thought I would never be required to take the next action, I reached over to the panel and grabbed the large steel protective guard enclosing the biggest switch on the board.
"Permission to SCRAM the plant, sir!" I yelled as loudly as possible, and Pintard immediately hollered back, "SCRAM the god-damn plant!"
I clutched the black switch under the guard. With a quick flip of my wrist, I snapped the switch to the right, which caused the circuits controlling the power levels of the nuclear reactor to initiate a total and complete emergency shutdown.
"The plant is scrammed and we are totally shut down, sir!"
"Very well, Dunham," Pintard answered, grabbing his engine room microphone. "Now, the reactor is scrammed, the reactor is scrammed!" he announced.
For the next ten hours, we rolled around on the surface, the hangar containing the remnants of our lost Fish system and the engine room holding the broken electronics that controlled our reactor. The Viperfish seemed to be falling apart in spite of our best efforts to make everything work properly.
Rossi and the other men in the Reactor Control Division tore through the circuit drawers with voltmeters and flashlights. They dripped sweat into the circuits and pored over pages of schematics as they tried to find the source of the problem. Most of this time, Captain Harris sat on the steps of the steaming upper-level engine room and watched his men struggling to find out why the Viperfish no longer had a functioning nuclear reactor.
After several hours of testing and intense thinking, Rossi finally found the problem. A diode, a tiny piece of electronic equipment, worth about forty-nine cents in any Radio Shack store, had burned out. As its internal electron-controlling capability failed, intermittently at first and finally permanently, the cascade of erroneous electronic messages caused the shutdown of circuits in a manner that left no clue. This flawed diode was the sole reason for the strange reactor shutdowns that had brought us to the surface.
Rossi tore the offending piece of electronic junk out of its soldered connection and replaced it with a new one. A half hour later, the reactor worked perfectly. The prolonged start-up went smoothly, no red lights flashed, no alarms blared, and the machinist mates below the maneuvering room experienced no further dousing of coffee. The turbines were soon screaming, and we were churning up the Pacific. The captain took the Viperfish down to two hundred feet. The air-conditioning systems were turned on, and cool air blew once again. We finished our trip back to Pearl without further problems.
Keiko had returned to Los Angeles to continue with her studies, so nobody was waiting on the pier for me. I had no time to feel lonely, however, because another group of visitors, the "NR boys from Admiral Rickover," awaited all of us who worked in the nuclear field. We were scheduled to take a Nuclear Reactor (NR) Board examination soon after our return, a regular occurrence on all nuclear submarines of the U.S. Navy. The directive for the examination came from the man in charge of naval nuclear propulsion operations, the man we called the Great White Father.
Admiral Rickover was widely regarded as the "Father of the Nuclear Navy." Most of us, however, considered him less impressive than did the general public. We were in awe of the man, not so much because of his many accomplishments during the early development of the nuclear Navy but as a result of the raw fear that he engendered in the men working in this field. Our engineering officers often related stories of their interviews with Rickover. They said that he threw chairs across the room, screamed orders not to talk when an airplane was flying overhead, seated the interviewees in unstable chairs, and exhibited enough strange actions to fill a book. Each engineering officer had a different set of stories to tell-the Viperfish's file of interview stories was voluminous. Although they were a source of entertainment during our long patrols, the stories conveyed to us a sense of instability. Further, many of the men on board the Viperfish felt that Rickover had a disturbing tendency to destroy brilliant naval careers without remorse.
His defenders struggled to justify this seemingly irrational behavior as the admiral's way of prevailing against dissenting opinions, as well as a means of creating stress in order to test the worth of prospective engineers and commanding officers. Although there might have been some element of truth here, we felt that other methods would have been more effective and less destructive to the careers of men who suffered at his hands. When the admiral's substantial political power base was unable to prevent Secretary of the Navy John Lehman from retiring him in the early 1980s, a large number of men whose naval careers had been damaged or terminated felt some measure of satisfaction that his reign was finally over.