Along the way, in Ft. Lauderdale, the submarine picks up a Tribune reporter and photographer for a rare look at a sub`s daily routine. The embark was not without restrictions. Photographs had to be screened before publication to ensure they contained no classified material. The nuclear reactor area, essentially the back half of the sub, was off-limits, as were, except for a brief peek, the sonar and radio rooms. And an escort officer, a Navy journalist, sat in on many of the interviews.
Submarines are a secretive world. Sailors routinely walk around clutching tomes marked ”confidential” or folders marked ”secret.” Everyone on board carries a ”secret” security clearance; 35 hold ”top secret.” The whole operation is testimony to the destructive power of loose lips.
Security has only gotten tighter in the wake of the Walker spy case. John Walker Jr. was at one point a submariner, and U.S. defense officials have said that from him and his cohorts the Soviets learned, among other things, a great deal about how U.S. subs track their Soviet counterparts.
The sailors speak of Walker with scorn; he has, after all, jeopardized not only national security but their lives. Long, the radioman, says that the men in his department have not failed to note the irony in the fact that one colleague`s name is Walker and their chief petty officer is Spies.
The sub`s speed and maximum depth are classified information, although the Navy will say the Chicago can do in excess of 20 knots and dive deeper than 400 feet. Jane`s Fighting Ships puts the figures at 30-plus knots and 1,475 feet. That`s 21 feet deeper than the Sears Tower is tall.
Huffman, the navigator, also serves as the sub`s security officer. He says the Chicago has never had a problem with, for instance, a sailor shooting his mouth off in a bar: ”We really drill it into people that you just don`t talk about it.”
Yet the sailors are proud of their ship, and it is only natural to want to show it off. ”Unfortunately, most of the things submarines do, you can`t talk about,” says Patrick Cuff, a 24-year-old electronics technician.
Tandy recalls fondly a May visit to the Chicago by members of the Center for Naval Analysis, which analyzes Navy operations. With their high-level security clearance, ”anything they could ask, you could answer,” he says.
”It was really neat.”
Although it is commonplace for the men to brag about whose job is most important, most all of them admit how much they depend on each other. If the
”nukes” didn`t keep the reactor running, the sub wouldn`t move. If the fire-control technicians didn`t do their job, it couldn`t attack or defend itself. And so on.
But in a sense the sonarmen are perhaps the most crucial. Without them, the sub doesn`t see and it doesn`t hear. Throughout the voyage, every single
”contact” made by sonar is tracked until it disappears, and it is identified, if possible. Most of the time, it`s possible.
”A sonarman`s ears are one of the best weapons we`ve got,” says Szemborski. The sonar technicians wear headphones as they monitor video display screens that display pictures of what is heard at different sound frequencies.
”You can identify anything,” says T.C. Wetherill, a Colorado native who, at 22, is the leading petty officer in the department. ”It`s common sense.”
”Dolphins,” Wetherill says, ”they cry, they click. They sound exactly like Flipper.” Sperm whales are called a ”carpenter fish” because they make a sound like a hammer striking wood. A blue whale is called a ”boing,” also for onomatopoeic reasons. Anything natural is known as a ”biologic.”
Surface ships are fairly simple to tell apart by the sound of their propellers, he says. Merchant ships, for instance, ”sound like poor maintenance. They`re just real noisy, trashy sounding.” Warships, on the other hand, ”sound real clean. It`s like, I guess, listening to a Porsche compared to listening to a VW Bug that`s millions of years old.”
And submarines? ”The biggest thing about a submarine is you don`t hear a whole lot. They`re designed to be quiet, and they are.”
Known as ping jockeys, the 15 or so sonar technicians have it good, says Wetherill. The time goes by quickly, and you`ve got the officer of the deck taking cues from you.
It can, however, seem a bit strange at times. ”If you were at home, you wouldn`t sit there and watch your TV screen with static on it for six hours at a whack, but out here we do,” he says.
As is typical the first day out of port, all is fairly quiet on board. No drills have been scheduled, and the control room is calm.
Located on the upper deck beneath the sail, this 18-by-20-foot room is the sub`s brain. Szemborski is not, for the most part, a stickler for strict, yessir-nosir military protocol, but he insists on a formal atmosphere in the control room.
”Yeah, we`re a military organization,” explains Gorman, ”but we`re not leading a bunch of mindless masses. . . . I`m reluctant to say we`re
`informal,` but we`re not pretentious. We`re not pompous. The authority is clearly there, and you can use it when you have to, but generally you can tell people in a civil way what needs to be done, and they`ll march off and do it.”
”Give them enough rope so that they can`t hang themselves,” adds Szemborski.
In the center of the control room is a raised platform (still known as the ”conn,” from back in the days when submarines had conning towers) where the two periscopes are and where the officer of the deck stands. Behind him, one over each shoulder, are navigation tables.
Along the room`s right side glows an array of computer screens used to track target ships, as well as the panel of buttons and keyholes with which the sub`s arsenal can be launched. One screen displays a compilation of intelligence reports that provide a big picture of the sea around the submarine and what sorts of vessels are in it.
Forward and to the right is a screen that shows what the sonar operators are seeing in their curtained-off room just off the control room. When the sub is at periscope depth-on a routine mission such as this one, it goes there frequently to receive satellite transmissions and bring fresh air on board-a small television broadcasts the periscope picture, usually nothing more exciting than gently cresting water or a distant tanker.
To the left sit the two men who actually steer the sub, the helmsman and planesman. Using airplanelike controls-open steering wheels on rods that move forward and back-they control the sub`s depth, course and angle, noted on a variety of gauges on a wall in front of them.
The variety and mass of machinery give the room an intimidating air, but if all is working well, it functions in a manner that seems almost humdrum. In a typical request, the chief of the watch might seek ”permission to compact trash,” and the officer of the deck might respond, ”Compact trash.”
Establishing a routine is, in a sense, the entire goal of the submarine. Much of the voyage will be spent simulating crises so that the crew`s response, if any of them should occur, will be as smooth as possible.
A couple of mornings, a power loss in the reactor is faked and fixed. On others, there is flooding or a fire. Those who don`t scurry to the fire scene wearing oxygen masks and trailing a fire hose scurry instead to pull on masks and connect them to one of the emergency oxygen trees; then they stand around trying to talk to one another, sounding and looking like nephews of Darth Vader. After each drill, division heads and leading petty officers review the successes and failures with their men.
One drill in particular gets the blood racing. On an otherwise uneventful Sunday afternoon, the stern planes ”fail,” sending the Chicago into a precipitous plunge. They fail again and again as the underwater ethic of perfection through practice comes into play. It is officially called a jam-dive drill, but the crew more descriptively calls it ”angles and
dangles.”
”Sir, the stern planes are stuck on full dive,” reports the diving officer.
”Very well,” says the officer of the deck. ”Jam dive! Jam dive!”
And the submarine falls off a cliff, pitching forward and down at a steep angle. The engine is ordered to reverse. The helmsman twists the rudder and the forward planes, trying to bring the sub level again while losing as little depth as possible. And the men not directly involved in regaining control of the sub take pleasure in tracking the angles achieved and hoping for steeper ones. It is a bit like an amusement-park ride.
”It gets very interesting trying to move around at angles like this,”
says Lt. Sean Sullivan, the sub`s engineer and, for this watch, officer of the deck.
Indeed. In an earlier jam-dive drill, machinist`s mate Scott Shelley was standing in the mess hall when the drills began. Shelley lost his footing on some soapy water and pitched forward. He didn`t stop sliding until he had zoomed some 30 feet down a passageway. He says he spent a day in bed recuperating.
Today`s angles are comparatively mild, says radioman Long. The same set of drills that sent Shelley flying left a number of sailors clutching at the ceiling, their legs no longer touching the floor, he says.
Szemborski says the loss of stern planes is an unlikely occurrence, but you never know: ”In your car, you usually don`t practice what you do if you get low oil pressure. In a submarine we do because it`s a long way to the next gas station.”
Flint Brown, a 22-year-old quartermaster from Oregon, is asked if the constant drilling wears him down, as some of the men have been heard to grumble. ”Everybody hates to be wakened up out of a sound sleep, but you`ve got to know what you`re doing,” he says. ”You always treat every drill as a real casualty.”
Adds companion Paul Szot, 24, an electronics technician, ”The one time you don`t treat it as a real casualty, it`s gonna be all over. There`s not too many things on here where you get a second chance.”
Saturday, the officers make pizza. Each week, different sections of the boat take turns giving the cooks a night off, and tonight, the officers are filling in. As the pizza they prepared bakes in the galley, half a dozen sailors gather in the mess and trade stories about who did what with whom in Ft. Lauderdale.
The crew`s mess in the Chicago seats 24 for a meal. The largest public space on board, it pulls duty also as classroom, theater, briefing room, living room and rumpus room.
Upstairs, Huffman is officer of the deck, pushing the sub at close to top speed. Downstairs in the torpedo room, a few men try to sleep in the 12 temporary bunks set up beneath a row of torpedoes. There is a shortage of permanent beds on board, and each extra one keeps three men from having to
”hot rack,” a much-disliked system under which three people share two bunks-at different times, of course.
Two sailors sit beneath the tails of two torpedoes, listening to heavy metal on their Walkmans and reading a book called ”Petty Officer
Indoctrination Course” for an upcoming exam. Back upstairs, in a small office off a main hallway, Cuff punches information on some of the ship`s 413 new video movies, on loan from Navy Broadcasting Services, into a computer catalogue he is creating. Interconnected TVs in the crew`s mess, the ward room and the chief petty officer`s lounge can show the films, generally allowed nights and Sunday afternoons. There are also stereos in each room.
To go with the pizza, the officers prepare popcorn and balloons and put on ice a few cases of Moussy, a nonalcoholic beer that an officer calls ”the best beer we`ve ever had on the Chicago.” Alcohol is not permitted, leaving cigarettes as the leading vice.
”Cap`n, you want a beer?” asks a sailor.
”No,” he responds, ”I`m driving.”
Lt. John Caccivio, a second-generation submariner who`ll soon transfer to a cushy Navy job greeting foreign dignitaries in Washington, serves a slice of pizza to a sailor, and it rolls off his spatula. ”Now you know why I`m an engineer and not a pizza technician,” he says.
The pizza is a hit, and a few officers stay in the galley well into the night, scrubbing pans. ”It really didn`t matter what kind of beer,” says Long. ”We were still partying.”
A snapshot of the mess after dinner: Four men play double-deck pinochle. Another four play Risk. One, listening to his Walkman, peruses a Playboy, appearing actually to read the articles. A Naval Academy midshipman, one of six doing his required summer cruise on the Chicago, reads a manual detailing the main storage battery and systems. Another sailor studies so that he can pass a test that will qualify him to stand sentry duty. The movie selected for later in the evening is ”Dirty Dancing.”
It is commonly known among submariners that there are two types of ships: submarines and targets. When the Chicago encounters a warship, no matter its alleged allegiance, the sub just may pretend to hunt it down, just for practice. For the battle-stations drill this afternoon, though, the targets are figments of a computer`s imagination.
”Man battle stations,” comes the call; 26 pings sound. ”Man battle stations.” Men pour into the control room.
”This is the captain. I have the conn.”
”Conn, sonar,” comes the voice from the sonar room. ”Hold a new sonar contact. . . . Sierra Four bearing two-zero-four is making nine-zero rpm on two four-bladed screws.”
”Steady course three-zero-zero,” says the captain. ”Attention to the fire-control parties. We have two contacts: Sierra One, which is a submarine; Sierra Four, which is a surface ship. Contact of interest right now is Sierra One, the submarine. Track Sierra One. Carry on.”
There are now 26 men in the control room, each with a job to do. Some attempt to ”solve” the targets` course and speed by computer. Others work the solution by hand. Some supervise; some merely talk on the phone.
After a solution is reached, the captain calls out, ”Firing point procedures: Sierra One, Tube 4, Mark 48 torpedo.”
”Weapon ready. Sixty-eight percent fuel remaining.”
”Match sonar bearings and shoot,” Szemborski orders.
”Standby.”
”Shoot.”
”Fire.”
