Playing Fair and Being Kind

Once in a while I get to relate my experiences from my Navy days. I’ve a lot of stories. I spent twenty three years in the canoe club, many years on submarines at sea. I enjoyed my time at sea and under water. I realize it takes a special person to tolerate those conditions. I also realize these attributes are not so remarkable to diminish in any way the attributes of others. They are just different; not better.

One question that always gets me out of bed, so to speak, is the one about what happens when someone “goes bonkers” or “flips out” while the submarine is at sea and under water. That is a good one. I’m sure many would like to know the answer. I know the answer to some degree. After all, each incident is unique of course. Here is my answer for my own unique experience. It takes some telling so you will have to get a cup of coffee or something similar and find a comfortable position.

This story takes place in 1964 or so. Just when I was a young buck; around 25 years old. I have no photos of our crew from those days. Just images in my mind. I’ll try to relate them as best as I can. Here is a diagram of the submarine that is featured in the story. Most of the story takes place in the compartment near the top in the middle labeled Navigation Room.

The story is a true story. The names have not been changed. There are no innocents to protect.

 

HERBIE WAS A LIGHTWEIGHT

This is a submarine story. Well, maybe not. It may be a story about poor parenting or about survival or about being stubborn. Definitely it is a story about being born. It may be necessary to tell it backwards for simplicity.

My parents were the most unhappy couple I’ve ever met. They argued daily. Loudly. Door slamming loud. Air choking loud. No corner of any room in the house was removed enough to get away from them loud. Then tea would be made in the afternoon and they would share it, at the same table. Each day was a violent thunderstorm of parental, marital dysfunction. It was S&M fully clothed.

We lived in the Field’s Corner neighborhood of Dorchester. That ought to be enough description to explain a myriad of stressors for any child in development. My parents gave me life when they were both in their forties. Since I was the youngest child and this violent behavior was a late marriage phase of their development I experienced it the most of all five children. My next older sibling is nearly three years older. I had little interaction with my family, that is if you don’t count the violent thunderstorms accompanied by spanking, slapping, and beatings. I was raised to expect the worst and hope for nothing better. I could be insulted, violated in several ways, and neglected in the most elegant fashion and never blink an eye. I was a tough little shit with a poker face. Life was not a picnic for me, it was more like a food fight without the food.

That is the background for my personality and training as an individual. I was raised by smokey fire and dirty water. Little could surprise me and I could maintain an outward calm even though I was screaming inside. This brings me to an event that played out on board a nuclear submarine on patrol in the north Atlantic during the 60’s.

The USS Sam Houston was a fleet ballistic missile (FBM) submarine of the Cold War era, that period from the 40’s to the 90’s during which the two super powers faced off and used proxy wars to establish policies and intentions. The Houston was one of a half dozen FBM’s operational during the time of this event involving a shipmate named Herbie. Herbie and I had completed a couple of extended underwater patrols together. The patrols were of two month duration and were normally uneventful. Patrols were of prime importance in the grand scheme of keeping the other super power under stress. We had a good thing going in that our submarines were exceptionally quiet and the crews well trained and selected to withstand the conditions under which these patrols were conducted. Conditions included but were not limited to long hours of tedium and brief moments of terror. In addition there were the occasional hostile and non-hostile warships on guard searching with intentions to destroy us.*

These were the circumstances under which our submarines maintained launch reference points and kept assigned targets within striking range. The submarine crew tasked with missile maintenance and the crew tasked with keeping the navigation systems were constantly under pressure to do their jobs with various distractions and changing conditions. Herbie and I were members of the navigation crew. There were six of us standing watches in pairs to keep an arrangement of three watch sections. Two men stood watch while the other four were either eating and sleeping or performing corrective maintenance on our equipage. The watches could be exhausting over a two month period because along with the tedium there were many days of equipment malfunctions. Our instrumentation was all new technology and much of it was marginally operational at sea under patrol conditions. Our navigation crew should have been increased in numbers to eight or nine men in order to perform properly but during those early days these types of details were still being sorted out. This was a major factor in how I needed to deal with Herbie.

Before we left on patrol the whole crew of one hundred and twenty men and officers spent about a month repairing or modifying our systems as well as loading provisions and stores. During this maintenance period there were also the needs of the crew to finish communicating with home and making last minute arrangements for taking care of the families to ensure they would have as easy a time as possible while we were deployed. It was during this phase that Herbie learned from his wife that his mother had died and that he was left with fifteen thousand dollars and the family farm in his home state of Arkansas. For a young man and his wife from a farm in Arkansas this was a major payday. Major enough to cook up a scheme so he would not have to go on patrol and perhaps get a discharge from the Navy. Of course that would not be cool or patriotic and most of all that would not be a good shipmate to the rest of us.

Herbie and his wife cooked up a story where the facts of his mother’s passing and the new wealth would be kept secret. They concocted a scenario wherein Herbie was worried that his wife was cheating on him and he needed to be allowed to go home in order to save the marriage. He had been visiting the Chaplain on the tender daily, sometimes twice a day to convince that kindly gentleman that he was going nuts with worry. I was on to Herbie and his wife. Two things; I knew Herbie and his wife Cherry very well. We were friends and neighbors, spent time together while in port at home. Secondly, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes that easily. My childhood conditions established in me a filter for insincerity. I smelled this one a mile away. I was a veteran of game playing and emotional torture. Herbie was messing with the wrong man. To me Herbie was a lightweight.

As the time to depart on patrol approached Herbie grew more agitated and bizarre in his role playing. I watched the drama unfold and the Navigator was wrestling with the decision of whether Herbie should go with us of be granted permission to stay behind to “save his marriage”. When he consulted me I told him that I knew Herbie was falsifying the situation and that I needed him to go with us to help us stand watches. The Navigator nodded in agreement much to my relief. Herbie was not so happy as I. We spent the next two months underneath the stormy seas with a storm of our own below.

Herbie continued with his facade. In fact he was now angry with me since I pulled him aside just before we got underway and read him the riot act of telling lies about Cherry and setting up his shipmates for added stress by missing this patrol. I told him he needed to stand watches with me and I further described how it was going to be. I ordered him to stay in the after end of the Navigation Center at all time when we were on watch. I ordered him to position himself so that I could see him at all times and that he was to remain in the compartment with me and not leave without my permission. He would be allowed to leave for head runs and for coffee runs. I was setting his limits tight because that is what was necessary for his attitude. Herbie was on a short lead and I wanted him to know just how short it was.

The patrol contained a number of tense moments when Herbie made attempts to push past the limits I had set but I was on him each time. My strategy was to be firm and not try to shame him further. He tried to irritate me in many ways. His most outstanding act was to make a coffee run for the two of us and return with my coffee in the most disgustingly dirty cup he could find in the scullery. I would not bat an eyelash. I simply took a sip of the coffee and smiled at him with a pleasant “thank you”. That always made him jam his fists into the pockets of his poopy-suit.

By the time we completed the patrol he was fairly done in by his own imagination and bizarre behavior. I think he was starting to believe his own lies and this took a toll. My friend George Stratton took to coming back on watch with me to keep me company and I noticed he carried a twelve inch wrench in the back pocket of his poopy-suit. No need to ask what it was for. The last two weeks of the patrol the ship’s doctor started to show up in the Navigation Center to see how things were fairing. He was curious about Herbie’s behavior and he asked me questions to determine what his role would be in the event things took a drastic turn. Soon his answers came through a number of channels. Herbie was talking to other crew members and they began to report things to the doctor that brought about the end of Herbie’s usefulness and freedom.

This may be a good place to point out that his usefulness was considered by all of us. Herbie needed to be a member of the crew and travel with us to sea even though his limits were set closely. He could fill the requirement of responding to casualty situations and be of use to fight fires, flooding and other life threatening events. His knowledge and skills would be a necessary part of the whole crew concept. I felt that regardless of his anxiety concerning his false intentions his survival instincts would be helpful.

Perhaps this is clear enough to explain my logic in demanding his presence in the submarine during the patrol.

About seven days before we returned to Holy Loch, Scotland Herbie had convinced all concerned that he needed to be put into a super-relaxed state to protect himself and others. The doctor and corpsman injected him with a tranquilizer drug that necessitated assisting him to his rack where he lounged for the remainder of our patrol. A watch was posted by his bunk to periodically get him up to use the head and to eat something. Other than these functions Herbie was done. The ship returned to port and soon we were all back in Groton at the submarine base.

The routine for the crew was to take a month of leave right away. Herbie never got that chance. An investigation was conducted into his behavior and the facts were bared regarding his and his wife’s situations. The findings were not in Herbie’s favor. He was immediately reassigned to the fleet detailer in the Pentagon. Herbie was issued orders to report to Norfolk to pick up an oiler bound for the Mediterranean Sea. The oiler was making a six month deployment. Good luck, Herbie. I ran into Cherry at the mall in Groton a few weeks later and she ignored me. I don’t blame her. I’ve given the internet a perusal on occasion looking for Herbie. It’s been about fifty years since the events of this story. I’d like to contact Herbie to see how he is. I suspect it would be an un-fun reunion but it would satisfy something in me. I hope Herbie and Cherry enjoyed a long and happy marriage and that their life on the farm was sweet and fulfilling. I’d like to know that happened.

*Higher authority declared that the FBM submarines were to remain undetected after leaving port and commencing patrol conditions. No one except the commanding authority knew our location. The friendly warships as well as those who were hostile were never aware of our presence. There was an event where we needed to break alert on patrol in order to rendezvous with a British helicopter to remove a crew member who was suffering a brain aneurysm. We needed to travel for several days to the rendezvous point. We received a message from Submarine Forces Atlantic that USS Sellers, a United States crackerjack destroyer, was patrolling the waters north of Scotland. The Houston would have to pass the Sellers in order to reach the helicopter. We had experienced the skills of the Sellers during our construction period when during a sea trial to test our operational capabilities we were matched with them for the test. The Sellers held us down for three days during a hold-down exercise. The test was performed well enough to pass but we could not shake them and they could not get far enough away to ‘kill’ us. The strategy our skipper used to prevent the Sellers from getting the ‘kill’ was to stay underneath them matching every move they made to break away. We spent three days under the Sellers and finally the inspectors called the event a draw. Now we needed to make an end run to get past the Sellers in a real situation in which they did not know we were in the area nor would they know who we were. Our skipper quickly determined the search pattern that Sellers was using. At the proper moment he took us deep, below several thermal layers and we pushed the Houston for a speed run south toward the Hebrides and the rendezvous point. Success.

G. M. Goodwin 12 July 2016