You can't drink alcohol, and you can smoke only in the area near the twelve-cylinder Firbank Morris diesel auxiliary engine, called the "Rocker Crusher." The diesel engine acts as backup to the nuclear power plant, the "Pot-Belly Stove."
If you're a crewman, you sleep as little as six feet away from the twenty-four Trident nuclear missiles that fill the center third of the ship, stored in tubes that run from the bilge up through all four decks. Outside the bunk rooms, the missile tubes are painted shades of orange, lighter orange toward the bow and darker toward the stern, to help crewmen with their depth perception in the hundred-foot-long compartment. Mounted on the missile tubes are lockers full of video movies and candy for sale by the Rec Club.
You're surrounded by colored pipes and valves. Purple means refrigerant. Blue, fresh water. Green, seawater. Orange, hydraulic fluid. Brown, carbon dioxide. White, steam. Tan, low-pressure air.
According to Hanlon, Smith, and Gold Crew chief of boat Ken Biller, depth perception is not a problem despite the fact that you'll never focus your eyes farther than the length of the center missile compartment. According to a crewman drinking coffee on the mess deck, your first day back in the sunshine you squint and wear sunglasses, and the Navy recommends you not drive a car for your first two days ashore because of possible problems with depth perception.
Mounted on a couple missile tubes are brass plaques to mark the time and place a missile was fired. On tube number five, a plaque marks the DASO launch on December 18, 1997, at 1500 hours. Blue Crew fired the missile.
"Once in a while," Gold Crew Lieutenant Smith says, "a boat is lucky enough to shoot its missile."
Gold Crew has never fired one.
There are no windows or portholes or cameras mounted outside the hull. Except for the sonar, you are blind in the event you're ever attacked by a…
"… by a giant squid?" Lieutenant Smith says, completing the thought with raised eyebrows. "So far, that hasn't happened."
"We did hit a whale once," says Gold Crew machinist first mate Cedric Daniels. "Well, there are stories about it."
Unexplained bumps against the hull have been explained as whales. On the sonar, deep under water, you can listen to the calls of whales and dolphins and porpoises. The clicking racket made by schools of shrimp. These are noises the crew calls "biologicals."
You go to sea with 720 pounds of coffee, 150 gallons of boxed milk, 900 dozen large eggs, 6,000 pounds of flour, 1,200 pounds of sugar, 700 pounds of butter, 3,500 pounds of potatoes. This is all packed in "food modules," lockers measuring five by five by six and a half feet tall, filled in warehouses ashore and lowered into the ship through a hatch. You go with 600 movie videos, 13 torpedoes, 150 crewmen, 15 officers, and 165 "halfway boxes."
Before departure, the family of each man on board gives Chief of Boat Ken Biller a shoe-box-sized package, and on the night that marks the halfway point in the patrol, called Halfway Night, Biller distributes the boxes. Smith's wife sends photos and beef jerky and a toy motorcycle to remind him of his own bike onshore. Greg Stone gets a pillowcase printed with a photograph of his wife, Kelley. Biller's wife sends pictures of his dog and his gun collection.
Also on Halfway Night, you can bid for an officer as they're auctioned off. The money goes to the Rec Fund, and the auctioned officers work the next watch for the winning bidders.
Another Halfway Night tradition is auctioning pies. Each winning bidder gets to call the man of his choice to a chair in front of the whole crew and smacks the guy with the pie.
Everybody on board calls Supply Officer Smith «Chop» because the gold insignia on his collar, which are supposed to look like oak leaves, look more like pork chops. Chief of Boat Keller is called "Cob." Chief Executive Officer Hanlon is called "XO." A member of the original crew, like Mess Management Specialist Lonnie Becker, is a "plank owner." You don't watch a movie, you "burn a flick." A door is a hatch. A hat, a "cover." A missile, a "boomer." In the new and politically corrected Navy, the dark-blue coveralls crewmen wear while on patrol are no longer called "poopie suits." Crewmen who serve on the mess deck are no longer "mess cranks." Sauerbraten is not "donkey dick." Ravioli isn't "pillows of death." Creamed chipped beef on toast isn't "shit on a shingle." Corned beef is not "baboon ass."
Not officially. But still you hear it.
Hamburgers and cheeseburgers are still "sliders." Patties of chicken meat are still "chicken wheels." Bunks are «racks» because of the racks that held hammocks on sailing ships. A bathroom is still a "head," named after the holes in the bow of those ships. Two holes for the crew, one for the officers, cut in the heaving, wave-washed deck above the keel.
As XO Hanlon says. "Those guys, they didn't need toilet paper."
Another landmark night during patrol is "Jefe Café." Pronounced hef-AY, and Spanish for "Boss's Café," on this night the officers cook for the crew. They turn off the lights on the mess deck and wait on the crewmen with chemical glow sticks on the tables instead of candles. There's even a maître d'.
For religion, there are "lay leaders," crewmen who can lead Protestant or Catholic services. At Christmas, sailors string lights in their bunk rooms and put up small folding foil trees. They decorate the officers' dining room, the Ward Room, with snowflakes and garlands.
When you go to sea aboard the USS Louisiana, this is your life. Crewmen live on an eighteen-hour cycle. Six hours per watch. Six hours' sleep. And six hours off watch, when you can relax, exercise, and study PC-based correspondence courses toward an associate's degree. Every week or so, you sleep an eight-hour "equalizer." The average age of crewmen is twenty-eight. From your bunkroom, you go to the head in your shorts or a towel. Otherwise, most sailors wear their coveralls.
Officers live on a twenty-four-hour cycle. You do not salute officers while on patrol.
"After we're locked in the tube," says Lieutenant Smith, "this is our family, and that's the way we treat them."
Smith points out the framed Pledge of Service on the mess deck wall and says, "A guy can have a great day, but if he comes through here to eat and the service is lousy, the food is lousy, the plates aren't hot, if we don't provide him with that at-home atmosphere, we can ruin his whole day."
Your last few days on patrol, everybody gets "channel fever." You don't want to sleep. You just want to get home. At this point, there are always movies going, with pizza and snacks out around the clock.
On shore, the wives and significant others are raffling off the "first kiss." All the money from the pies and auctions and raffles goes toward the crew party to celebrate coming home.
And the day the USS Louisiana arrives home, the families will be on the pier with signs and banners. The commanding officer is always the first ashore, to greet the commodore, but after that…
The winner of the raffle is announced and that man and that woman, in front of everyone, they kiss. And everyone else cheers.
POSTSCRIPT: The photographer for this piece, Amy Eckert, jumped through a lot of government hoops to make it happen for Nest magazine. She warned me that, since Nest was a «design» magazine, the Navy brass seemed worried it had a homosexual reading audience and the piece would be a big exposé about homo activity in a submarine setting.