At the time, Lane and I had been standing our watches together in the engine room. Sitting side by side at our control panels, we controlled the machinery that provided propulsion power and electricity to the Viperfish. He was as depressed as the rest of us, but he started to develop a strangeness, beyond my experience or knowledge, that seemed to eclipse what the rest of us were feeling. We were all a little strange in many ways after being at sea, mostly submerged, for two months. I couldn't concentrate on French lessons or anything else; I was continually tense and irritable, neither of which was a part of my usual character; and I felt like I was just trudging along in doing my job-standing watch and sleeping, standing watch and sleeping some more. I didn't care much about the evening movie, and I was just working with the rest of the crew to get us back to Pearl Harbor. There, we would be able to blow off steam and forget about failed missions, the capture of intelligence vessels on the high seas, and the Vietnam-inspired disruptions of our society.
Starting the mid-watch that night, I took details from Richard Daniels about the condition of the nuclear reactor, logged the initial data on my reactor log sheet, and finally sat in the chair in front of the control panel. All routine, this watch was the same as all the others. Next to me, Lane took his watch from Svedlow, performed a similar function with the electrical equipment, logged his data, and watched his panel that controlled circuit breakers and other electrical systems. Behind me, Lieutenant Pintard and Chief Linaweaver paced back and forth as they watched over us and the engine room.
"Hey, bruddah, how's it going?" I hollered over the noise to Lane. I just wanted to open the door to any thoughts he might have about the nuclear system, our mission, or life in general. The four-hour watch ahead seemed like a very long time.
When he turned to me, he looked strange. I was about ready to tell him to knock it off, that he was giving me the creeps, when I noticed his hands were shaking. He said, "You can't get to me."
There it was again. Wrong comment, wrong context, simply the wrong thing to say.
"Nobody's trying to get to you, Brian," I said, watching the meters that monitored our nuclear reactor. "I just asked what's happening. Looking forward to seeing the wife and kids?"
He smiled and another strange look, an almost spacey look, came my way. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck beginning to rise.
"You guys can't get to me," Lane said.
I decided that the man was becoming too stressed out, so I turned my attention back to the reactor panel. Watching the meters and logging the data, I occasionally thought about how good it would be to see Keiko again.
Speaking to nobody in general, Lane began to babble in long sentences that didn't connect well. As he talked, I watched my panel, thought some more about Keiko, and wondered how soon channel fever would set in as we moved closer to the Islands.
Lane kept talking for another hour, until both Pintard and I implored him to be quiet. He was getting on our nerves, we said, and he wasn't saying anything all that profound anyway. Each time we said anything to him, he got that strange look in his eyes again and told us, "You can't get to me."
Finally, Chief Linaweaver had had enough.
"Lane, I'm ordering you to be quiet," he said tersely.
The strange look followed, the small smile of knowing a tiny secret appeared, and again he said, "You can't get to me."
At that moment, my friend, Sandy Gallivan, standing watch in the control center, squeaked a call through on the engine-room telephone to tell me about overhearing that there would be a flooding drill within the next five minutes. Of all the drills we hated the most, the flooding drill headed the list.
We were always aware that the Viperfish cruised above a defined crush depth, that our lives depended on preventing any inadvertent movement to that depth, and that flooding was the one event that could quickly take us to the crush depth. Because of that fear, we worked very hard not to think about it. Flooding drills, even on the rare occasions when we knew they were only drills, brought this awareness to the surface of our thinking and triggered the collection of fears that was part of the psychological territory of the Submarine Service.
Lane began to talk again, and the shaking of his hands became intense.
"Lane, for Christ's sake," I began with exasperation, "will you stop-"
At that instant, the roaring of incoming water drowned out all other noises.
Lieutenant Pintard jumped to his feet and grabbed his microphone as the loudspeaker above our head began blasting Billy Elstner's voice from the lower-level engine room into the maneuvering room.
"Flooding! Flooding! Lower-level engine room!"
Pintard hollered orders to isolate the leak. I stood up to concentrate on my reactor panel and watch for anything that could shut us down.
"Losing vacuum in the starboard condenser!" Elstner hollered, followed immediately by half the lights in the engine room shutting off and more alarms going off. The men in the control center instantly announced, "Surface, surface, surface!" and the Viperfish angled steeply upward. I glanced down the passageway and, with a shock that hit me like a physical blow, saw Lane running from the maneuvering area. His empty chair was swinging back and forth in front of the electrical control panel.
Immediately, without orders from Lieutenant Pintard and without comment from anyone in the area, one of our electricians, a big red-haired man named Tom Braniff, who was stand- ing watch at the steam plant control panel, bolted from his watch station at the throttles and took over the electrical control panel.
As a couple of machinist mates chased Lane across the engine room, another jumped into the throttleman's position and answered the bell driving us up to the surface. Braniff began flipping switches across the complex panel, cross-connecting electrical circuits, and bringing life to our electrical system as the machinist mates shut down the leak. My reactor never twitched once throughout the entire process.
The machinist mates caught up with Lane near the watertight door at the forward section of the engine room just as Chief O'Dell announced on the loudspeakers, "Secure from flooding drill." Lane was shaking badly. He was trying to talk, telling them that nothing could get to him, nothing would be too much for him to tolerate. They took him to Captain Harris's stateroom and called for Doc Baldridge. Lane was relieved of his duties, and the corpsman started him on mild sedatives to calm him down for the remainder of the trip to Pearl Harbor.
The stress of our mission, compounded by the negative presures from our fractured society, must have pushed Lane to the edge, I guessed. He must have known that he was becoming impaired long before the rest of his shipmates, who knew little about such things, could help him to seek treatment. Following a pattern that any of us might have pursued, he continued to try to perform his duties. He stood his watches even when the pressured speech pattern of the impending breakdown gave testimony to the problems lying below the surface. When the paranoia generated his wall of defense, preventing anything around him from "getting" to him, he was able to stretch himself to continue his work a little longer until he could return home to his wife and children and find comfort for his tortured soul. Brian Lane gave it his best shot. He tried with every coping mechanism that he had available not to allow his inner turmoil to stop him from fulfilling his assignment before the electrical control panel.