Veterans Day Story

I remember my first “Northern Run” aboard SSN-708 USS Minneapolis-St.Paul. I believe we left around October of 1993. My daughter’s were 1 & 1/2 and 4 months old. I was about to turn 21 and thanking God I got assigned to a ship that only did 3 month tours. The ship had recently done a bunch of “Med Runs” and was one of the few Submarines that had special weapons aboard it during the first gulf war. Some of the guys on the ship still lamented the security they had to go through to get the things on and off the ship. They said 6 months was brutal especially if you have family.

Off we went. But before we left land about a week or so prior the Ombudsman and Chief’s wives handed out “care” type packages to wives of the crew. In the pack it had various things in it that helped first time wives, mothers and girlfriends cope with the absence. In it there was also 3 strips of paper that had 30 boxes on each. That was the only way a loved one could communicate with a crewmember. 30 words or less.  That was it.  The wives were advised not to send bad news that would worry the husbands if there was nothing that could be done about it.  They suggested that you send about 1 a month but there was no gaurantee though that the men would get any of the transmissions.  If the boat was in a safe enough location to deploy the 300 foot antenna out of the ships sail while patrolling at 3kph then at the end of the transmission from Norfolk sometimes the notes from loved ones would be recieved.  

If you didn’t know a submarine has 18 hour days. Not 24. You stand a 6 hour watch and have 12 hours “off” to sleep, study to a true submariner, eat, shower, and do the actual job you are the boat to do. Their are several times to not want to have the 12am – 6am watch, or aka “midwatch”. One is when the clocks go back an hour for fall. I was fortunate enough to only have it happen to me one time in the 4 falls I was underway. ( I think they send you underway just so you have to fucking watch the Quatermaster set the clock back an hour when it goes to 3am.) It is truly awful to watch the QM4, unlatch the clock, and turn the dial all the way back to the 2am hour you just willed yourself past with the nastiest 6 ounces of coffee ever.

If you want to know how men perfect the fine art of learning how to complain then you need to be underway a submarine during the midwatch of either the night the clocks get set back or the mornings that you are running fire drills.

To be continued later tonight…

The thing about standing a 6 hour watch from 12 am to 6am was that it was your second watch of the day.  Some days you got lucky and didn’t do any firedrills, weapons drills, fuel spills, reactor drills, battlestations, have to catch up on the college course you were taking, have to take over part of a watch for someone to fix something, do your real work for too long that you couldn’t get sleep etc. etc.  So you might get lucky and get 4 hours of sleep prior to taking your watch.

When you had the midwatch, you’d be lucky if you could hit the rack for a “straight 6” (6am to 12pm) and no surpise drills would be called.  Most likely though your chief or First Class Petty Officer had some work for you to do when you got off your watch that HAD to be done NOW.  So, you’d have your breakfast, in my case a ham and mushroom eggbeaters omelette and then head down to the supply shop and dig for parts all over the ship.

It is hard to believe where the storage bins are on a Nuclear Submarine, but they are all over the ship.  Many of the bins are in the Engine Room.  So, me, SK3 Donviti would get my parts list, head to the back of the boat.  Past the galley and through the engine room door.  A door that weighed about 1000 lbs is my guess and hurt like hell when you didn’t shoot yourself through it properly thus hitting your head on the hatch opening.  It didn’t matter how many times I went through that god damned hatch, at least once a run I nailed it good.  Especially when I was carrying a zinc oxide back or something heavy that required a considerable amount of strenght and balance to carry through withough injuring yourself.

Back you go through the hatch.  I would usually run my finger along of the wall that seperated the crew from the nuclear rods.  I think it was about 6 or 7 paces long then into the opening of the engine room where steam pipes and 3000lb hydraulic lines twisted in turned through 200 feet of the boat.  Atop those steam pipes some of which were 18 inches around easily, the parts bins were located.  Boy there was nothing like crawling on your belly over and under pipes that were cooling a nuclear reactor to get a 5 inch rubber O-Ring for the MM5 you couldn’t fucking stand.

Getting a half dozen or dozen parts located all over the ship was a treat.  Getting parts in the engine room while seemingly difficult was actually easier than getting the parts that were stored in bins in people’s racks.  God, there was nothign worse than having to wake up the RM1 at 3am for a part that was in the bin were his rack was.  Especially if you were and E-3 trying to get qualified and needed him to teach you about his job and how it pertains to the overall function of a Submarines mission.

Being completely exhausted day after day with no contact from a loved one is what is the worst part of being underway.  You have no idea what is going on back home.  You have 2 children that are at their cutest ages and you are missing out on Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years, your birthday and on and on and on.

Every time the ship would go to periscope depth or we deployed the antenna as a junior crewman you would ask the chief standing watch with you if they thought we would be able to get messages from home this time.  “Chief, what do you think?  This time?  God I hope I get a message this time, I miss my kids.  I can’t wait to ge home and make love to my wife…..”  On and on the scenarios would go.

Eventually you get to the halfway point of a run and start counting down.  You start dreaming about when you get to have a glass of milk.  A real egg, a real piece of ham, piece of cheese, fresh air, real water, buffalo wings, blue crabs, cheese steak, on and on and on it went until you were finally ready to come home.  You were at your witts end.  You are completely exhausted and so tired of the day to day bullshit you are ready to cry or kill someone.  You are lucky to have had a straight 6 hours sleep  at any point during the run.  The only time you got more than that was when you pulled into port.

The best thing about being on a submarine was that when you pulled into port you got to stay in a hotel room.  GOD DAMN BABY!  A real freaking bed!  Holy shit.  I remember staying at a hotel in Tromso Norway in October.  It was awesome, the shame of it was though, it was on the beginning of the run.  Only 3 weeks in and we are heading back under the sea for 60 days straight. 

Day in and day out, 6 hour watches, 2x’s a day, no sleep, interrupted sleep, lay down for 20 minutes, BOOM, BANG, ALARM BELL, FIRE ALARM, HALF ASLEEP…WTF IS THAT! 

Fire in the Engine Room, Fire in the engine room.  A collective moan in the bunk area, a bunch of kids all fall out of their racks throw on their jumpsuits, grab there facemasks and head for the hoses.  PRESSURIZE AFT HOSES!  PRESSURIZE FORWARD HOSES! 

HOSES PRESSURIZED!

FIRE IS CONTAINED IN THE BILGE OF ENGINE ROOM

FIRE IS OUT IN BILGE

DEPRESSURIZE HOSES

Roll up the hoses, clean up the water, put away the facemasks, take off the hazmat suits, turn out the lights got to bed for another 20 minutes

WARP, WARPPPPP, WARRRRRPPPPPPP

FUEL SPILL IN THE ENGINE ROOM, FUEL SPILL IN THE ENGINE ROOM!

It get’s to the point where you are fucking wishing for just a fire drill.  They only take 45 minutes from start to finish.  Holy shit though, the hazmat spills, fuel spills and anything else take like 90 minutes.  It is brutal and tiring and even worse if you aren’t a qualified submariner you are basically a walking piece of shit that is constantly reminded of being a walking, useless, air breathing useless body on the boat that can basically be the sole reason all 110 people  on the crew will die.

You see, it isn’t bad enough you are junior crewmember on board, but double the fact that you are now a NUB (non useful body) everything you do is under a microscope that much more.  You aren’t a part of the boat until you can walk around with your dolphins.  The dolphins take about 1 year to get.  You need to learn each and every system on the submarine.  From the Pottable water system to how the trash compactor operates.  Every system on the ship if not properly used can basically lead to sinking the fucking thing and killing everyone.  Disgracing the Navy, your country, your family, the crew’s families and anyone else they can tell you, you’d disgrace.

Here we are now, maybe 15 days left.  Counting down till we see our loved  ones. counting down the seconds until we get that BJ we have been pulling our puds to for the past 74 days.  Still not getting shit for sleep.  Not eating real food.  If you are lucky you may be getting meat that didn’t get freezer burned or go bad when the compresser to the fridge went down the first week you were under way.

The captain, a sadist, is a drill nazi.  YOU need to be ready for battle stations.  We need to get the Squadron E.  We have been so close every year and this is the fucking year we are getting it man.  We did our jobs up North.  We tracked the right boats, got the right intel and didn’t get caught doing it.  There was no such thing as down time.  Free time was drill time.  You weren’t going to coast into port.  You needed to be ready.  Ready for a fire, a spill, a hydraulic line rupture.  Anything.   You can sleep when you are dead.  Drill, drill, drill.

15 more days man.  15 more days.  Got I was tired.  I was so fatigued that I couldn’t even stand in the chow line anymore.  I had to crouch down and bring my knees up to my chest like one of those distressed children you see in those orphanges in India.  You are willing yourself to get home, just make it a few more days man.  14 days and a wake up man.  Crying yourself to sleep at night because you never got a message from your wife the entire run.  You have no idea if your kids are alive.  If your father, mother, 93 year old mom-mom you lived with for 5 years is alive.  The mom-mom that made you breakfast, fed you as a child, came over to this country for a better life.  that said she was proud of you the week before you left.

I didn’t have a “rack” like the other crew members.  I had a mattress on the floor of the store room.  It was wedged in between the storage bins.  The mattress was too wide and didn’t fit on the floor so I had to lay on the mattress sideways for 100 days.  If I wanted to switch sides, I couldn’t roll over.  I had to sit up and then lay back down on my other shoulder.  Essentially I was sitting up every cycle of REM sleep to keep my shoulder from stining with pain.  It got to the point where I slept sitting in a chair with my head down on the desk in the storeroom.  That only happened at night though when my boss was sleeping.  Ahh glory days serving my country. 

5 more days to go till I got to sleep in my own double bed again.  I have to be able to make it. OH NO?!  What!?  You are kidding me!?.  Rumors are now circulating around the boat that we are getting extended.  WTF are you kidding me?  Really?  NO WAY.  This can’t be happening.  You are just fighting back the tears at this point you are so tired.  So sore, so mentally drained that you are walking around like a zombie.  But, the chiefs on the boat don’t look surprised at all.  They say it happens all the time.  back to 20 more days….that’s life.  What can you do.  Suck it up squid, this is what you signed up for. 

It is awful, painful and being away from family is the dull knife that keeps sticking you in the wound that hasn’t healed since the day you left port.  Thinking you are going to be home on February 3rd and not getting in until Feb 28th.  AWFUL.  I was lucky though.  I only had to stay out for a 100 days.  Other sailors would do it for 6 months and get extended.  The army would do it for 9 months. 

Now they do it for 15 months and no one says shit.  They’d report it on the news, but they don’t know what it is like.  They want to glorify it.  Make you out to be a hero and then…CLICK, the TV goes off and you forget all about the men and women going absolutely nuts out there.  They have no idea and won’t ever.  It is like being in prison and not getting visitation rights.  15 months?  Are you kidding me.  1 year and 3 months?  That is the way we treat our Soldiers and Sailors.  Pay them absolute shit, treat them like extensions of weapons all for a mission.  World Domination.  Energy Independence…all for rich white men that want to play games with human lives. That got deferrments because their father was a politician.  Because they had bad knees, because they needed to finish college?  FUCK you.  You have no idea. NONE.   

Disposable heroes.  There was never a more appropriate term.  Mettallica kept me going that first run.  Master of Puppets, pounded my brain to the point it became my form of meditation.  It calmed me. 

I hated the Navy.  I hated it with the heat of a thousand burning suns.  Being treated the way an enlisted person is treated especially an E3 is nothing I’d wish on anyone.  You are nothing but a low level piece of shit that does what he is told and shut’s the fuck up.  You don’t matter, your family doesn’t matter, your life and aspirations don’t matter.  Getting the job done, shutting the fuck up and smiling are the only requirements.  Shit, you don’t even have to smile. 

Happy Veterans Day. 

And John McCain didn’t/wouldn’t vote to raise the dollar amount of the Montgomery GI Bill for our veterans because he thought it might create an incentive to leave the military.  Hero my ass.