Today is the anniversary of the the commissioning of the USS Nautilus. She was commissioned on September 30, 1954.
Now, I was stationed at the submarine base in Groton back in 1989. I spent about a year there and never once went to tour this historic ship. I can't think of a good reason why I never went to tour it. I guess the idea of going to look at another submarine while I had time off never appealed to me at the time, what with another submarine consuming nearly every waking hour of my life. Besides, my first boat, the USS Shark (SSN-591), was commissioned in 1961, so how different could it have been?
I do remember seeing the Nautilus many times. I remember one stretch of a few weeks where we were used as a training platform to prepare sea-returnee officers to moor a submarine. We would repeatedly get underway, go out into the Thames River, do a few donuts in the water near the Nautilus, and then come back and bump the pier, change officers, and do it all over again.
This might sound like a pretty good deal, what with not having to stay out at sea overnight, but think about how much it sucks to come in at about 4 am every single day to start up the reactor, getting underway and mooring over and over until about 1600, then shutting down after we brought shore power on. Those made for some long and miserable days.
It also had a few scary moments. I seem to remember parting a line on one trip, damaging a kleat on another occasion becuase of an improperly fastened line, and breaking some timber on the pier another time when we came in a little too fast. Think Driver's Education on Steroids. It was made even scarier for the topside line handlers. There just wasn't much room to move around on deck.
In fairness, the ship handling characteristics of the Shark probably weren't very similar to the newer classes of submarines that most of these guys probably did their first tour on, and I am sure we had many uneventful moorings, but I only seem to remember the ones that scared the heck out of me.
Now, I was stationed at the submarine base in Groton back in 1989. I spent about a year there and never once went to tour this historic ship. I can't think of a good reason why I never went to tour it. I guess the idea of going to look at another submarine while I had time off never appealed to me at the time, what with another submarine consuming nearly every waking hour of my life. Besides, my first boat, the USS Shark (SSN-591), was commissioned in 1961, so how different could it have been?
I do remember seeing the Nautilus many times. I remember one stretch of a few weeks where we were used as a training platform to prepare sea-returnee officers to moor a submarine. We would repeatedly get underway, go out into the Thames River, do a few donuts in the water near the Nautilus, and then come back and bump the pier, change officers, and do it all over again.
This might sound like a pretty good deal, what with not having to stay out at sea overnight, but think about how much it sucks to come in at about 4 am every single day to start up the reactor, getting underway and mooring over and over until about 1600, then shutting down after we brought shore power on. Those made for some long and miserable days.
It also had a few scary moments. I seem to remember parting a line on one trip, damaging a kleat on another occasion becuase of an improperly fastened line, and breaking some timber on the pier another time when we came in a little too fast. Think Driver's Education on Steroids. It was made even scarier for the topside line handlers. There just wasn't much room to move around on deck.
In fairness, the ship handling characteristics of the Shark probably weren't very similar to the newer classes of submarines that most of these guys probably did their first tour on, and I am sure we had many uneventful moorings, but I only seem to remember the ones that scared the heck out of me.
What kind of stories do the rest of you have about unpleasant jobs (unclassified, of course) that your boat was assigned to do while you were in the Navy?
2 comments:
I was on the sub they built along with the Nautilus. The one with two screws and a liquid sodium reactor, that never really worked right. Even with a new conventional reactor, jury rigged in, half the time, the NUCs couldn't keep the reactor critical and when it was critical, the generators and peripheral systems were trying to explode, they were the finest collection of propeller beanied, Poindexters in the fleet. Our A gang were like a swarm of filthy, profane spiders spinning a web of EB Green around the ships ancient, leaking, plumbing and ducting.
When we weren't dead in the water, with propulsion failure, we always had to transit quietly, which meant <8KTs and often very quietly, which meant <4Kts. Our progress was glacially slow. Even when everything was working, it never worked very good and you could smell the anxiety in the air, as we all wondered what malfunction would befall us next.
We specialized in long, covert deployments. because of structural mods, we had no functional GDU. What trash and slops we couldn't grind and blow out, got compacted. The most corruptible went in the freezer. The rest got stacked in the storeroom or in any spare space available. Depending on where you were and the vagaries of the ventilation system, the stench could be toxic.
We had a recorded, voice alarm system. It malfunctioned constantly. Just as you would get to sleep, a couple hours before your next watch started, you would likely be awakened by a sexy, husky, female voice, saying things like, Fire, Fire, in the Reactor Compartment or Flooding, Flooding in the After Auxillary Machinery Space. Always a high point of the day and on the 575, likely to be true.
We went to sea with a crew of 150, half of them useless, "special" riders, on a boat designed for a crew of 87. When we were not on watch or responding to emergencies, we were restricted to our racks. If somebody was already in the rack, you could sit in crews mess, with orders to breath slow, which we did, while chain smoking. Rarely, they would lift water restrictions for a few hours and allow showers. Mostly, we were too gummy to even care. There wasn't even usually a wait. During one 89 day submergence, I got 3. Nobody ever washed clothes. Few shaved. Cigarettes ran out, soap never did.
I don't think I would have wanted to spend 20 at it but I was young. I loved it. It was like living out the plot of a post apocalyptic science fiction novel. The crew was closer than family, with the exception of the goat locker and wardroom. Fuckin' khaki scum. We trusted each other. Those we couldn't trust, we kept out of trouble. Prob'ly after 30 years, it seems better than it was. If I was young again, I'd do it again.
The worst times I had were when I was separated from my shipmates. I spent some periods TAD to various shore establishments and I felt like an orphan in a strange land.
One hot Summer night, several years ago, I was picking up shifts working house supervisor, graveyards, at a poorly run, sparsely funded, community hospital. I had shrouded up a DB, from the knife and gun club, that had been languishing on a gurney since long before my shift and was wheeling it down to the basement morgue. The morgue was next to the machinery spaces and also adjacent to the loading dock, where the rotting garbage in the kitchen dumpsters was. There, in the dark, in the noise of the screaming generators and thumping compressors, in the oppressive heat, with the smell of death, shit, rot and burnt hydraulic oil in my nostrils, I had a great feeling of nostalgia and longing. I felt like I had come home. I guess it was one of those flashback things. You can take a boy out of a submarine but you can never take the submarine out of boy.
Sounds like a lovely place to live. I have definitely learned over the last few years that it is better to say "I used to work on a submarine" than it is to say "I work on a submarine."
I don't regret my time in the submarine service at all, but I am happy that I have finished that chapter of my life.
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