Just Saying: Underwater
Many years ago, on our first trip to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum on the West Side of Manhattan, we spent a good part of a day checking out the venerable aircraft carrier, the various jets and space gear. It’s quite an impressive array of military equipment, and well worth the time.
On a subsequent trip, accompanied by our grandson, we wandered into a film focusing on the Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II, with ample coverage of the planes deliberately crashing into Navy ships. It scared the heck out of our grandson, so we skedaddled to some other venue. It turned out to be the USS Growler, a retired diesel submarine moored beside the Intrepid.
In my storied naval career back in the late 1960s, we were occasionally in ports where submarines were nearby and, given their relatively exotic naval personality, they often allowed officers and sailors of more ordinary ships, like my destroyer, to come aboard and tour the sub’s innards.
A diesel submarine of 1960s vintage looked like it was designed by a bunch of suburban dad hobbyists: wires and pipes running amok; impossible “living” spaces; everything way too small; no rhyme or reason to the layout. It seemed the most unlikely warship.
A nuclear-powered sub, on the other hand, seemed an impossibly sophisticated, sleek and fearsome war machine. Instead of the mayhem of wires and pipes, glowing panels of lights seemed to be everywhere with sharp-looking sailors and officers intently monitoring them. The reactor was intensely ominous, a bare room with the torus-shaped reactor having the space to itself, performing its dangerous magic.
Which brings us back to the USS Growler.
When I was at Officer Candidate School in Newport, R.I., in the early days we sat through a kind of indoctrination film which focused on the naval air side of the service. I left the gigantic Quonset building dying to become a carrier pilot. It seem the coolest thing to be in the world. But it was only a pipe dream for I was severely myopic and would never be allowed in a jet cockpit.
Once I got commissioned and started meeting fellow officers from all across the Navy’s departments, the next coolest thing I discovered was to be a submariner. Without exception, every submariner I met, officer and enlisted, was an interesting human being. I began thinking of becoming one myself. I never acted on the notion.
Walking through the Growler that day brought back these vivid memories, I wondered if I would have had the moxie to be a submariner. In April 1963, the nuclear submarine USS Thresher (named for a kind of shark) sank 220 miles off the coast of Cape Cod, taking all 129 aboard with her. If you were in the Navy in the 1960s, the Thresher memories were front and center. Maybe that was the reason I stayed on my destroyer.
In recent days, as the world fixated on the OceanGate Titan disaster, I found myself focusing again on my flirtation with the submariner life. The five who died in the “catastrophic implosion” aboard the Titan were doing what they loved. I would have been scared out of my wits.
As with millions of other people, I was obsessed with the oxygen levels in the submersible and the poor five who knew their deaths were imminent.
So it was a relief to know they had instantly died when it imploded and drifted downward not too far from the Titanic’s bow. Although I still think Navy submariners are still some of the coolest people, I’m glad I didn’t become one.
