On a brilliant August morning on a waterway west of Seattle off Puget Sound, I find myself deep inside the USS Ohio, the oldest (18 years) of the nation’s Trident submarines. The Ohio is armed with two dozen long-range nuclear missiles, each capable of killing millions of people. Together the 18 Tridents make up the sea leg of America’s “strategic triad” — our sea, air, and land-based nuclear defenses.
I’m on a six-hour ceremonial cruise about 60 feet under the surface of Hook Canal with three dozen other civilians and the Ohio’s 154-man crew. We’ll spend our time romping about this ship, whose cramped, windowless, perpetually bright interior was itself a state secret until the end of the Cold War. We’ll listen to tapes of whale song recorded by the guys in the sonar room, fire off “water slugs” from the torpedo compartments, and look through the periscope. We’ll enrich the coffers of the Pentagon by promiscuously purchasing USS Ohio mugs and caps.
And in a few hours the submarine will surface and we visitors will stand in the daylight on its topside — the length of two football fields. We’ll climb aboard a tug and watch as the Ohio again sinks below the water — there to stay, somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, in a location known only to its captain, until October.
But for now, I’m shooting the breeze with five of the chief petty officers, the senior enlisted men on the boat, in their makeshift lounge, the “goat locker.” While the captain and the officers tend to the mission, the chiefs go about the minute-to-minute business of making the boat go, manning the weapons and the engines. They are the hands-on guys, all of them self-made, having risen through the ranks. And they have the quiet assurance and private amusement of people who know how to do what they do better than anybody else on earth.
“Two months is a long time to be cooped up together,” I say. “What do you do if two of your men get into a fight?” (There are no women on submarines in the U.S. Navy.)
“You break it up,” one of the chiefs says. “You get between them, tell your guy to cool down while somebody else says the same thing to the other guy.”
“It doesn’t happen very often,” another says. “When people get less than six hours’ sleep, they start to be grouchy. Like before an inspection, or if we’re on alert.”
“How do you keep up morale?”
“Well,” says the master chief in charge of the nuclear reactor, “food is real important.”
“We put a lot of stock in food,” the weapons chief says. “The only way you can keep track of what time it is after a while is by the meal.”
“Really?” I say, like an idiot. “Why is that?”
“No sun, no moon, always the same light,” says the sonar chief.
“Can you call home?” I ask.
“Everybody can get eight messages from their family per mission. Fifty words each. Man, that means a lot. You get one, it’s a real morale booster.”
The sonar chief’s wife is sitting with us. I ask her what the messages are like. “I wouldn’t say something like, ‘I had an accident with the car,’ because he’d just worry.”
I ask them what they like and dislike when it comes to the depiction of their way of life in the media.
“What bugs me is that old thing, that we’re warmongers,” the sonar chief says. “God knows I hope I never have to do my job.”
The other chiefs nod and murmur their assent. “Knock wood,” one of them says.
“But we’re ready to do what we trained to do,” the master chief says.
“It’s ridiculous sometimes, like in Crimson Tide,” says the weapons chief. “There’s people running down four flights of stairs in fire gear. Did you see stairs like that? You’d fall on your ass. And Gene Hackman and Denzel Washington fighting over one key. It doesn’t take one key to launch. You couldn’t do it.”
“You know the only movie that really captures what life is like on a sub?” says the sonar chief. “No kidding — Down Periscope, with Kelsey Grammer. I mean, it’s stupid and all, but it’s really right about how goofy it can get down here.”
“Talking about movies, every boat has a different movie it gets obsessed with,” says the master chief. “What was it the last time we went out? With the ack-ack-ack?”
“Mars Attacks!,” says the sonar chief.
“Oh man! People musta watched that thing a hundred times.”
“Ack-ack-ack,” says the master chief, imitating the Martians in the movie.
“How do your kids cope with it when you leave?” I ask, barely noticing the pre-teen girl sitting in the corner. Almost in a whisper, her tone martini-dry, she says, “It’s like a vacation.”
“That’s my daughter, folks!” her dad says with a grin. “Give her a hand!”
She grins right back.
JOHN PODHORETZ
