I stared at the oil as it slithered down the single-spaced sentences. Watching the typewriter ink smear as the oil diluted the letters, I felt my head begin to pound. I ripped the page from the typewriter, shredded the paper into the tiniest pieces I could manage, and cursed France and everybody in Europe. Then, I steamed down to the crew's dining area to watch another half hour of Regulus missiles crashing down runways on a deserted atoll in the middle of nowhere.
After almost seven weeks of fruitless searching with the background noises of sonobuoy explosions echoing up and down Soviet thermocline tunnels, Captain Harris finally decided to bring in the Fish and head back to Hawaii. We began the prolonged process of reeling several miles of cable into the Viperfish. Cruising back and forth with our Fish out-a mother ship with her very long and delicate umbilical cord-was not an exercise that made us feel particularly useful, especially so because we had failed to find anything worthwhile. Most of us looked forward to stowing the miserable device and reconverting the boat into a more maneuverable non-Fish towing vessel. We hoped that we could now at least try to function like the military ship we were sup- posed to be.
During the hours of reeling in the Fish, a powerful storm began to build in the waters stretching across the North Pacific. We were at a depth of three hundred feet, where surface wave activity should not affect us more than 90 percent of the time; on that day, we entered the 10 percent portion where rules didn't apply. It was a slow-roll type of movement, nothing that would make us think about hunting for Ralph O'Roark but enough to let us know that nature was stirring up the surface. The noises of sonobuoys stopped at the beginning of the storm, and everybody began to feel better as the huge spool outside our pressure hull continued to reel in the Fish. Finally, to our great relief, the civilians stowed the Fish in a corner of the hangar and the captain ordered the Viperfish to pick up speed and begin clearing out of the Soviet sector.
I relieved Richard Daniels from his reactor watch shortly after we began to accelerate in the direction of Pearl. We had to shout to be heard above the whining of the propulsion turbines and reduction gears, which were thirty feet away from the maneuvering area. I gathered the information from Richard about the reactor, now running at full capacity, and pulled up a seat in front of the control panel. Brian Lane sat next to me, manning his complex electrical control panel. To my surprise and in contrast to his silence of the past several weeks, he now became more talkative.
"We're running low on fuel," I said, as I gathered data from the meters filling the panel in front of me. There is no fuel gauge, per se, to pinpoint when the nuclear reactor requires a new uranium core, but data from multiple operational sources leave no doubt about the remaining fuel.
Brian turned and smiled at me. "Enough to get back?" His smile faded. "Right?"
Enough to get back," I reassured him. "If my calculations are correct."
"No gas stations out here-"
"No uranium stations," I corrected.
"No shore-power cables to hook up to the battery."
"Nope, gotta rely on the reactor. Lucky for the forward pukes that they have the nukes to get them back."
"Thank God."
Lane then turned in his chair and looked at me. His eyes seemed to stare through me, but he smiled in a way that was strangely out of sync with the general mood throughout the submarine.
"You can't get to me," he said in a matter-of-fact tone. I watched him as he turned back to his panel and began scanning his meters.
The phrase was a familiar submariner idiom. "You can't get to me" speaks the essence of being a submariner. It is a statement that says, even in the cramped quarters and continuous press of close human contact, even when there are worms in the cereal and detonations in the ocean, nothing is allowed to get under the skin. "You can't get to me" said it alclass="underline" nothing bothers me, I am a professional, and there is no way anything that is said or done will be a problem for me.
Lane said it at the wrong time, however. He watched his panel while I looked at mine, our ears enclosed by the plastic sound guards that shut out the screaming machinery around us. After noting more data on my log sheet, I glanced sideways at the man and wondered why my friend and shipmate had said something so far out of proper context. I finally dismissed the matter with the speculation that he must have misunderstood-the shrill noise of turbines drowning out what I had said.
About that time, when I was feeling about as grouchy as almost everybody else, the EOOW decided to quiz me. A tall man, Lt. George Sanders was moving up through the ranks of nuclear-trained officers, but he had an officer-elitist attitude. His trace of an "I am better than you" approach contrasted sharply with the leadership capabilities and personalities of the other submarine officers who fostered our respect by earning, rather than demanding, it. He got on my nerves as he paced back and forth behind Lane and me when we were on watch, and I was never quite sure what he was going to say next.
On this watch, he was irritating me more than usual. So, when the quiz began, I clenched my teeth, crossed my arms across my chest, and stared at the reactor panel.
"Okay, Dunham," he said from behind me, "you're cruising along at four hundred feet."
Consistent with the range of appropriate responses of an enlisted man to an officer, I respectfully answered, "Yes, sir."
"Okay. Now, the ship begins to sink."
"Yes, sir, the ship sinks." This would not be difficult, I thought, just a matter of the ship sinking.
"Begins to sink!" he shrieked. "You now have two choices. You can save the reactor or you can save the ship."
"Yes, sir." I was sure I would have more choices than two.
His voice became icy. "Well, Dunham, what are you going to do?"
"I'll save the ship, sir," I said, not having a clue as to where his line of speculation was leading.
"Right, that is correct. Very good." I adjusted my ear protectors in the hope that his voice would blend in with the turbogenerators.
"However, Dunham," he continued, "you will save the reactor if I tell you to save the reactor."
With that, Lieutenant Sanders had reached his goal. Even though I might want to save the ship, he, as an officer, would force me to do something contrary to training and common sense. It was a power thing. What I should have said at that point was something like, "The choice is yours, sir, because you are the EOOW."
I felt a flash of irritation at the whole line of questioning, so I blurted out, "No, sir, I would not save the reactor."
He stopped pacing the deck and stood directly behind my chair. "You would save the reactor if I told you to," he said forcefully.
My irritation rose. I jotted a couple of numbers from the reactor panel onto my clipboard. "No, sir. I would save the ship, but I would not save the reactor."
His voice climbed an octave. "You would save the reactor if I told you to!"
"No, sir."
I noticed Brian sinking down into his chair. He was trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.
The lieutenant became livid. "You would if I told you to!" he yelled, bits of sputum flying in all directions.
"No, sir," I answered politely. "I would not be inclined to save the reactor, sir."
He began to hyperventilate. A couple of enlisted men standing near the maneuvering area quickly walked away, probably searching for a place to hide. I gnashed my teeth, grabbed the reactor clipboard, and noted some additional information in my logbook as Sanders finally sat down, his face red with anger. I put the clipboard down and wondered if I was going to be court-martialed for refusing a hypothetical order. From my perspective, the entire issue was the result of everybody being annoyed about everything, the failure of our search mission, and the effects of nearly two months of submerged duty. But, for Sanders, it was personal, an enlisted man's insolence, and something, by God, that was going to be taken to Lieutenant Pintard immediately after the watch.