All military submariners will mourn the 14 Russian sailors who died on Monday. Operating near the Murmansk citadel of Russia’s Northern Fleet, the Russian submariners died after apparently inhaling toxic fumes.
The global submariner community is a very special one. Long an elite cadre of highly skilled sailors and daring commanders, all submariners are aware of their shared vulnerability. Operating deep below the oceans, survival can never be taken for granted. If a crew member makes a mistake, everyone has a big problem. If equipment malfunctions, everyone has a big problem. If you hit something and a hull breaches or fire ensues, everyone has a big problem. If another military detects you, the mission and crew’s lives are at immediate risk.
Risk, then, is central to the great game of submarine operations.
This was certainly the case with the Russian submarine which apparently suffered this disaster. Employed to tap or disrupt communication cables, or to get very close to enemy strongholds in order to gather critical intelligence, that Russian crew and crews like that of the USS Jimmy Carter are the elite of the elite.
Americans should be very proud of our submariners.
As Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew noted in Blind Man’s Bluff, a history of the U.S. Navy’s Cold War submarine espionage, American submariners take extraordinary risks to deliver extraordinary gains for the nation. Whether they are spying or hunting enemy ships or lurking in wait of humanity’s worst day, this work continues today.
But such great pressures (literal and figurative), such difficult operations, and such complicated equipment means risk is an omnipresent part of the game. All submariners know that when they leave port they might never come home. They know their bodies might rest eternal at the bottom of the sea, far from their families.
Thus follows the special bond between all submariners, friend or foe. These 14 Russians will be mourned.
