This excerpt is from Robert D. Kaplan's book Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground, to be published by Random House in September.
I sat astride the sail of the USS Houston (SSN-713), a Los Angeles-class fast attack nuclear submarine, as it left Pearl Harbor in Hawaii en route westward across the Central Pacific to Guam. I was a journalist embed, alone amongst a crew of 147: 130 enlistees and 17 officers. It was the spring of 2005.
The moment I climbed below I passed from a world of exhilarating traveler's sensations to one of digital abstractions, from a world of vivid blue tropical seas to a purgatory of dead florescent lighting, prison-gray electronic monitoring panels and switching devices, endless entrails of seafoam green ducts and cables, and blinking red LED (light emitting diode) numbers. The weather on a sub was always the same, "69 degrees and florescent," in the words of one chief petty officer. The Formica paneling of the wardroom and some of the peeways [passageways] was the closest thing to aesthetic luxury.
"Yeah," eyeing the Industrial Age gray and seafoam green, one Sailor remarked, "Martha Stewart sure as hell didn't do the interior decorating on this boat." "What's a sub like?" another Sailor asked rhetorically, looking up at the continuous spaghetti of pipes and cables in the most dismal, mealy shades. "It's like being stuck in the boiler room of your high school for several weeks."
On the mess deck, Sailors were already studying for boards and other qualification tests: settling in for two weeks at sea. I noticed red and yellow signs here and there, reminders to wear dosimeters beyond a certain point along a peeway. The Navy was careful to the extreme regarding the protection of Sailors from radiation. Between its submarines and aircraft carriers, the Navy operated many dozens of nuclear reactors for decades—about twice the number of nuclear power plants active in the United States, and without incident.
Into Her Element
The control room, now functioning as the bridge, was a B-52 cockpit writ large—clunky gray, World War II-like consoles that often masked the latest and greatest technology. The helmsman controlled the rudder and fairwater planes. Seated beside him to his left was the "outboard," the equivalent of a co-pilot, who managed the stern planes. Beside him was the chief of the watch, who handled communications throughout the boat, as well as the amount of water pumped into the ballast tanks. Behind all three sat "the dive," or diving officer of the watch, who had overall responsibility for the boat's movement in the water. The goal was RAMOD: reach and maintain ordered depth. That depth was determined by the conning officer, in consultation with the quartermaster, or navigator. Given that the weaponeers and sonar techs also sat nearby, the control room was the pulsing heart of the sub.
Final preparations were in progress for descent, which included retrieving the rigging on the sail, testing the hydraulics and ventilation systems, and bringing down one of the periscopes. The Houston's speed had slowed considerably in the moments prior to leaving the surface, and the boat was rolling about to a much greater extent than a destroyer does in similar seas. I thought I might become seasick: subs are designed for underwater stability, but they can be notoriously unstable platforms on the surface.
"Dive! Dive!" came the command. We descended 35 feet at a five-degree angle, at which point the second periscope was lowered. I heard the hissing of water through one of the sound sensors. Then, increasing the angle to 15 degrees, so that my body leaned forward, we descended another 400 feet. The rolling ceased and my oncoming seasickness immediately subsided as we crossed beneath the wave action. There had been only the faintest feeling of falling—like in a slow elevator. All was now quiet and calm. "It's good to go deep," someone said, just above a whisper.
Speed was increased to 24 knots. That necessitated restraining the fairwater planes and steering by the smaller stern planes only. This was a safety measure: if the fairwater planes shifted precipitously to a steep angle while the boat was moving at full bell or faster, they could quickly bring the sub down to crush depth.
Fact Meets Fiction
Almost 4,000 miles underwater to Guam, I thought. It was an amazing prospect, and yet utterly routine given the history of this mode of travel. "The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. . . . It is a spacious wilderness," says Captain Nemo, the commander of the submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne's 1869 visionary epic Vingt Mille Lieues Sous Les Mers.1 The first U.S. nuclear-powered submarine, the Nautilus (SSN-571), was named after Verne's imaginary ship, which in the novel reaches the South Pole, even as its American namesake would drive under the North Pole in 1958. Verne's story, which only a fool would confuse with one for adolescents, establishes the fundamental tenet of life aboard a submarine: that the boat is a "holy ark," whose cramped space encompasses all of human progress. Inside are victuals, security, calm, and—at least on Verne's Nautilus—a library of humanity's 12,000 greatest books; while outside are only the black and crushing depths, the equivalent of interstellar space.2
In fact, every U.S. submarine boasts a prodigious library—of technical manuals. They were everywhere on the boat and constantly referred to. Even as a destroyer in a mechanical emergency could call in expert technicians by helicopter from a nearby carrier, a submarine crew was on its own deep beneath the surface so that these thick manuals were veritable bibles.
We were now sailing north of the Nautilus's course in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Whereas Captain Nemo had taken his boat south from Hawaii to French Polynesia, and then west through Oceania to the Torres Strait between Australia and New Guinea, we were to end up due north of that longitudinal point, in the Mariana Island chain.
Again I was struck by how every inch of space counted. The hospital corpsman shared his cubby hole office with launchers for sonar buoys and torpedo counter-measures, in addition to the usual, dense jungle of pipes and cables reaching down to his nose. The lone exercise bike was squeezed between fuse boxes, temperature gauges, and sonar transmitters. Technical manuals were fitted into shallow wall recesses for quick retrieval. Hundreds of cans of food lay in storage spaces that also served as benches in the crew's mess, where the cooks, whenever they were not preparing a meal, were on their hands and knees scrubbing every nook and cranny. With 150 men stomping in and out of the mess, and no outside air for weeks sometimes, cleaning was an interminable necessity.3
Such 18-hour-a-day drudgery, absent the sensation of day or night, allowed me the privilege of being with people whose pride depended on not needing to rest, and who seemed born to such an existence. Their escape consisted of smoking or dipping tobacco aft, watching a movie, playing cribbage, or mainly just engaging in bull sessions.
Heartland at Sea
The U.S. Navy, as I had learned on the USS Benfold (DDG-65), an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer on which I had embedded the month before, constituted a veritable childhood map of the interior continent, as so many enlisted Sailors hailed from the great land sea of the Middle West and Great Plains, with its corn, soy bean, and wheat fields, which engendered boyhood dreams of the blue ocean. Senior Chief Machinist's Mate Jeff Meinheit of Auburn, Nebraska, was a typical bald and bulky Navy senior chief, with a moustache and a simply splendid disposition. He and the nine Sailors under him were responsible for fixing everything on the boat that was not part of the nuclear power plant: from the esoteric equipment that converted hydrogen to water vapor and scrubbed carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, to mundane devices like the laundry machine and clothes dryer. Senior Chief Meinheit ruled over a multi-level maze of screaming boilers, generators, pumps, and valves, negotiated by narrow deck plates that were more like catwalks. "Pretty much anything with a pipe on this boat belongs to me," he said.
Because something was always broken, the labor was unrelenting. Senior Chief Meinheit's dad had been in the Army, his sister in the Air Force, and his uncles in the Marine Corps. The only way to deny that the volunteer American military was not a caste was to avoid the life stories of the enlisted men and women in it. Meinheit was full of details: how a week's worth of emergency oxygen was stored in pressurized banks fore and aft; how the amine used to scrub the air of carbon dioxide was odorless inside the boat, but as soon as you left the submarine and were back in your home, you discovered that all of your clothes reeked of the chemical. One more chore for the wives of submariners.
Senior Chief Electronics Technician Gordon Boese of Richey, Montana—another farm boy from the Great Plains, with a mug of coffee perpetually in his hand—had 14 years on submarines, including many months above the Arctic Circle as a radioman, and under the North Pole. "I was 23, married, no great job, and always interested in military service. I met the Navy recruiter and then sold the wife on it. The population of this submarine is more than half of that of my hometown. The sub force has really broadened my horizons."
One chief hailed from Cape Girardeau, Missouri—Rush Limbaugh's hometown, he told me with pride. He hoped to return there after reaching the 20-year mark in the sub fleet. Another senior enlisted man had a step-dad who had served in the Army Air Corps on Tinian in the Marianas when they brought in Fat Man and Little Boy, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Tolerance in a Small World
Electronics Technician Second Class Kyle Marshall Limb of Vernal, Utah, was an enlistee with whom I became acquainted at the start of the voyage. At 23, he was the same age as the Houston. Enthusiastic to the point of giddiness sometimes, with an innocent voice, he, too, had relatives in other branches of the military and had joined the Navy both to better his social station, and also, he told me, as a response to 9/11. "All of us are a little kooky living in this 3-D math world," Limb went on. "Not only are we packed together underwater, but because it's hard to send e-mail we lose touch with the outside world to a greater degree than other Sailors."
Petty Officer Limb, raised as a Mormon, was the lay leader of the "eclectic services" on the Houston, offered every Sunday morning along with Protestant and Catholic worship. Eclecticism was essentially a "neo-pagan" movement, he explained, which combined elements of old Norse religions, and Druidic, Wiccan, and other covens. Sometimes Buddhists—and what Limb called "solitary practitioners"—took part. I had heard stories about neo-paganism among Marines in Iraq and enlisted Sailors on the Benfold, but this submarine was the first place where I encountered it directly. Limb told me that he had to persist with his superiors to get it officially sanctioned: a wise decision on the part of the Navy, since only seven Sailors attended in any case, and this way it did not become some subversive, underground youth faction. It was a matter of being tolerant, without being indulgent. "We don't sacrifice animals or pray to the devil," Limb said. "I've never touched drugs. We stand in a circle and sprinkle salt water, and ask for blessings from the physical elements. Our moral basis is, do as you will, as long as ye harm none."
The very compression of this far more intense, squeezed-together version of the bobbing and swaying universe of the destroyer Benfold made it frightening in its tyrannical possibilities, had iron-fisted discipline not been so total that it barely needed to be asserted—or implied even. It was just there: the discipline of a true elite, in which the lowliest of enlisted men could take great pride.
Do Not Disappoint
The personal security I felt among these 147 young males thrown together in the primordial deep allotted me the luxury of ruminating on its opposite: the mini-universe of men behaving like beasts, with the strong and less-intimidated preying upon the weaker and more intimidated, in a finely stratified hierarchy of bullies on a small ship in the mid-Pacific. That is the world of Jack London's The Sea Wolf—the story of an independently wealthy and bookish scholar captured by a seal-hunting schooner, on which he is both terrorized and, finally, at the age of 35, brought to manhood by a captain "so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature."4 There is a swift, deeply etched quality to London's characters in the story that might make them seem stark and exaggerated, and thus unsophisticated by the usual literary standards. But if you spent enough time in close quarters with vigorous young men—unrefined by the wider cosmopolitan world, like many on this submarine—you would realize that London was merely being realistic: that he had seen far more of the world than those who relegated him to the realm of the merely "self-taught."
The discipline that did not even need to be asserted had much to do with the COB (pronounced "cobb"), the chief of the boat, Command Master Chief Scott Weaver of Fernandina Beach, Florida, near the Georgia state line. At 50, Weaver had been in the Navy since 1979, almost the whole time on submarines, much of it spent in the North Atlantic tracking the boomers and other Soviet subs. In the entire world of the Navy, chiefs of the boat had an especial allure, more so even than master chiefs on surface ships. Truly, COB Weaver's authority was more subtle than that of the master chief on the Benfold. Whereas the latter loomed over you, the former was more like that of a parent or high school teacher whom you did not want to disappoint—or test. The COB had gray hair and round wire-rimmed glasses. The impression he made was trim and neat, not burly. He was an avid backpacker in the Olympic and Cascade ranges (for decades Washington state had been a major submarine hub). The mountain air was the antidote he had chosen to a quarter-century underwater.
"My grandfather was a Sailor on a Navy cruiser and my dad an Army Ranger. But my grandfather was a better storyteller. I was enthralled by his tales about riding out typhoons, even if they were exaggerated.5 And I was named after him, so I joined the Navy and became a sonar tech." The COB gave out the family death messages, knew whose crew members' wives were in the hospital, set the smoking and liberty policy, set the watch bills, was responsible for cleanliness on board ("heads and beds"), and was on the noise reduction and other technical committees—all in addition to the two hours of daily paperwork he had. He napped rather than slept. Like all master chiefs and sergeant-majors, COB Weaver had pet-peeves: he would not tolerate Sailors who went about unshaven, or with their hands in their pockets.
The Sub Suck
"Embrace the suck" was an American military cliché that I had been hearing for years. It meant: accept the extreme bodily discomfort demanded of operational deployments, whether in a theater of actual war, or in a rigorous training environment that simulated war. The suck wasn't only the dust, the filth, the insects, the heat, and the cold, but also the smaller things like the absence of decent beds or chairs, or tables on which to unfold maps and eat meals. On a submarine—"a sealed people tube," as Sailors called it—the suck was the extreme absence of space, of forever rubbing up against other male bodies in narrow peeways. It meant maneuvering your way into your rack without banging your head against the one above you; sharing a tiny toilet and shower among a large number of other officers or Sailors; stepping gingerly between things piled on the floor, because there was no other place for them. The first night on board was rough, but as the nights accumulated my sense of scale adjusted, and the once-tiny stateroom and peeways became, as on the destroyer, gradually of normal dimensions.
Due to the relatively short length of the journey, I had only a mild taste of the suck of submarine existence. Take the four-month-long undersea voyages—without once coming near the surface to ventilate the air—experienced by Chief Culinary Specialist Otis Hines of Calion, Arkansas. The fabled Sturgeon-class spy sub USS Parche (SSN-683) had earned six Navy Unit Citations and one Presidential Unit Citation while Chief Hines was on board between 1995 and 2002. He had to plan the meals and, more importantly, store food for 120 days underway. Stacks of canned goods had covered the peeways, including the floors between the racks in berthing, he told me. With the floors raised, crewmen's heads were closer to the already-low ceilings, and soon the ceiling bolts were filthy with tiny pieces of hair and bloody skin from all the minor scalp injuries. "It got worse when we started working our way down through the cans, and Sailors started stumbling all over the place." The eggs and potatoes were packed in the bilges, while coffee hung in canvas bags from the ceiling. Standing up straight anywhere was next to impossible. "I've spent 18 years in the sub force doing stuff that no one would even think or have any idea about," Chief Hines told me with a smile.
No Permission Slips Required
Over the next two weeks, I observed non-stop exercises, especially fire drills. Just as every Marine is a rifleman; every Sailor is a fireman. For fire is the greatest danger on board, especially in combat.
It occurred to me that the submarine offered the best example of how the American military might employ technology to circumvent the need for diplomatic permission slips and foreign basing rights prior to the insertion of forces: by gathering intelligence and killing bad guys without the media or a host nation even knowing about it. Together with Marine and Army Special Forces training missions of Third-World militaries, such hardware was helping to ease a paramount security problem of the early 21st century: how to meld the political reality in distant regions of the world without the need for cumbersome, large-scale interventions as in Afghanistan and Iraq; interventions that, because of the big footprint they created, required the approval of a global media establishment to be successful. And of all the big-footprint hardware in the U.S. military arsenal (tanks, B-52s, carriers, destroyers) only the sub was completely invisible.
The more powerful the media, the greater the benefit from being able to operate unseen. The height of the anti-war protest movement in the late 1960s was also a time of particularly aggressive American submarine infiltration of Soviet waters, which at the time elicited nary a headline. Because submarines were absent from the media radar to a more significant extent than the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency, they might—for example—allow a liberal president, publicly committed to multilateralism, to conduct a compensatory, unilateral foreign policy behind the scenes. The sub was where the true intentions of a nation were revealed.
Mr. Kaplan, author of Imperial Grunts (Random House, 2005), is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the U.S. Naval Academy.
1. Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas [trans.] (New York: Oxford University Press, [1869] 1998), translated by William Butcher, p. 68. None of the early, most popular English versions of Verne's classic novel—including the title—had been fully translated. Further citations will use the singular, more familiar, title. back to article
2. Twenty Thousand Leagues, p. 161, and Butcher's Introduction, p. xxii, in which he refers to the interpretation of Verne by the French scholar Roland Barthes. back to article
3. The cooks—the true heroes of submarine existence—also did the officers' laundry. back to article
4. Jack London, The Sea Wolf (New York: The Century Company, 1904 [Bantam edition, 1960]), p. 68. back to article
5. Because Sailors had a habit of telling sea stories whenever they congregated to unravel strands of old line, telling a sea story came to be known as "spinning a yarn." back to article
Just as every Marine is a rifleman; every Sailor is a fireman.