Spy Sub. Roger C. Dunham
you?”
Marc grinned again. “It would have been better if he had, or if he had just beat the hell out of me because, God knows, I deserved it. But he decided to conduct a special training session in the forward torpedo room.”
“What did he train you to do?”
“He trained me to move garbage weights from the starboard side of the ship to the port side. Then he trained me to move them back to the starboard side without dropping them. And then back to the port side, and then the starboard side. For two hours, he sat there staring at me with death in his eyes as I moved hundreds of garbage weights back and forth across the boat.”
Marc then took me to the galley and showed me the small but incredibly heavy cast-iron weights used to sink the garbage ejected from the submarine. They came in tiny boxes, all stacked in cupboards near the garbage disposal unit. Each box of these devices weighed about twenty-five pounds.
That afternoon, Marc and I were assigned to join with the crew and load a couple thousand more weights. It took about fifty men to complete the job, a miserable and sweating process in the tropical sun. We transferred the boxes from a truck alongside the pier and handed them, one at a time, across the brow (gangway), over the deck, through the control-room hatch, down the ladder, into the galley, and finally into the storage locker. When we finished the task, I was sure that our center of buoyancy had shifted another ten feet. I began to worry again about our rolling over when that first wave nailed us after surfacing.
That evening was the last time available for liberty before going to sea. I planned to write a quick letter to my parents before joining Marc for a final steaming session in Waikiki. By then, I had everything necessary for the voyage packed into the tiny spaces available for personal items, and I was ready to go to sea. My fresh dungaree clothing had been stashed around the oranges and books in my bunk locker, and I was ahead of schedule with my qualifications work. A few liberty hours would clear my head for the submerged voyage.
I had just finished the last page of my letter and was preparing to depart to the barracks for the usual quick shower and a change to civvies when Bruce Rossi caught me.
“Dunham,” he said, his voice characteristically tough, “I want you to help Petty Officer Nicholson with the reactor start-up tomorrow morning.”
He didn’t wait for an answer as he turned away and stomped in the direction of the engine room. I had already learned that a “start-up of the reactor” was considerably different from something like turning a key, which energizes most other kinds of engines. The process did not occur quickly nor could it be done casually. A reactor start-up was intense. It required long hours of painstaking checking and double-checking the calibration and accuracy of virtually every single electronic instrument in the engine room. The reactor could be started by one man, but, considering the complexity, it was easier done by two, even if one of the men was a trainee like me. Every single word on page after page of instructions in the start-up manual had to be followed, with religious-like adherence, in order to satisfy the general policy of “verbatim compliance.”
If one deviated by so much as a word from the written instructions, the baggy pants of Rear Adm. Hyman G. Rickover, the Navy’s director of nuclear propulsion, would appear on the horizon as another naval career crashed and burned.
The process was scheduled to begin in the engine room at midnight. A cold brew at Fort DeRussy was out of the question, as was a late-night Viperfish tour with adventuresome ladies. On start-up night, there would be no steaming, no drinking, no nocturnal adventures, no nothing but intense preparation while the rest of the crew slept. I had already come to know the mustached smiling face of Randy Nicholson, one of the three qualified reactor operators who had helped me with qualifications. At midnight, I strolled into the engine room and greeted Petty Officer Nicholson. We began the process to start up the reactor and worked through the night.
At exactly 0800 the next morning, the captain ordered the first backing bell (a pointer device in the engine room that showed the desired throttle speed) to move us away from Pearl Harbor’s submarine pier. Again, Jim McGinn and I were sitting side by side in the engine room in front of the steam plant control panel’s large rubber-coated throttle wheels to control steam to the propulsion turbines. We felt, as much as heard, the grinding sound of another camel being thrashed outside our pressure hull. Because the requirements of the steam plant control panel job were limited to opening or closing the propulsion turbine throttles on command, there was little we could do wrong. Nearby, the electrical operator and reactor operator sat in front of their panels to observe closely everything relating to electrical power and nuclear power, respectively. The engineering officer paced back and forth behind them, his eyes roaming across their panels, watching each meter, studying fluctuations in voltage and neutron levels, with the intent of keeping all of the vital systems in the engine room operating properly. The Viperfish was going to sea, and everybody was doing their jobs to ensure that nothing went wrong.
About five minutes later, with no warning, the captain suddenly hollered “Back emergency! Back emergency!” over the loudspeaker, his normally soft voice replaced by an urgent call for action. Instantly behind us, Bruce Rossi was watching us and monitoring every move as Jim and I bolted to our feet and struggled to crank the “ahead” throttles shut before turning the smaller wheel that reversed the direction of the screws. To make matters more difficult, a loud “reverse direction” alarm built into the steam control system began blaring a warning about throttle conflicts as Rossi bellowed, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!”
Jim and I were both sweating and hyperventilating by the time the turbines began their characteristic high-pitched screams in the reverse (backing) direction. We struggled to stop the Viperfish and back her away from whatever freighter or other threat was before us.
I loudly announced to the engineering officer that we were now answering the back-emergency bell at the same moment that the captain’s voice, more relaxed this time, came over the loudspeakers: “All stop. All ahead one third.”
From the sound of the captain’s voice, it was apparent that the imminent danger had passed. Jim and I lightened our tight grip on our throttle wheels as we took our seats and answered the new bell. Both of us were sure that our quick reactions had saved the boat.
Marc strolled down the passageway at about that time. His grin was bigger than usual. “I was just up in the control center,” he said. “Nice job you guys did answering that bell so fast.”
“Thanks, Marc,” I said, appreciating his recognition of our prompt reaction. “Did you get a look at what we almost hit?”
His smile faded. “Almost hit? We almost hit something?”
“Isn’t that what the back-emergency bell was for?” I asked, starting to feel uncomfortable.
“That is what it can be for, but the captain just wanted to demonstrate to one of the junior officers on the bridge how quickly the Viperfish can stop. The training of the newer officers is one of his top priorities, and probably one of his greatest challenges. Unfortunately, this boat has a weird envelope of performance, and training is a formidable task.”
“Oh. So it was a drill kind of a thing. Did we stop fast?”
“You guys answered the bell fast, and we started churning the water real nice, but it took us damn near forever to slow down. This thing don’t wanna stop, no matter how fast you answer bells.”
“We’re too big,” I speculated, thinking about the appearance of the Viperfish in dry dock.
“We are much too big for a decent submarine,” he mumbled and wandered off to other tasks.
Feeling dumb, Jim and I clutched the throttles as we waited for the next “emergency.”
Obviously, it would be difficult for us to figure out what was going on elsewhere in the submarine. Inside the engine-room hull, where there were no windows and no information about depth or speed, it was easy to visualize the worst possible disaster at the slightest provocation: The back-emergency bell became a terrible impending collision; the blast of an alarm from the