Grunt (27 page)

Neither the
Tang
nor the
Squalus
could get enough bubble. The first order of business for a sub on the floor of the sea is to alert potential rescuers. Then, as now, each submarine compartment is equipped with mini launch tubes for flares, smoke signals, location buoys. On World War II–era subs, the location buoy was a sort of floating phone booth in the middle of the ocean. “Submarine Sunk Here,” read the sign on the
Squalus
buoy. “Telephone Inside.” It was like a
New Yorker
cartoon that didn’t quite make sense. There needed to be a third line: “No,
really
.” A length of cable connected the buoy to the downed sub. When a rescue vessel arrived, its crew would haul the thing aboard and reach inside for the phone. Peter Maas recounts this moment in his book
.
The rescue vessel’s commanding officer, Warren Wilkin, takes the receiver and opens with a breezy “What’s your trouble?” Like he’d pulled up alongside a car on the side of the road with its hood propped open.

The commanding officer of the
Squalus
—here, too, seemingly unflurried in the face of catastrophe—comes back with a chipper “Hello, Wilkie.” Whereupon a swell lifts Wilkin’s boat and snaps the cable, leaving all further communications to be hammered out in Morse code on the hull of the sub.

Technology has of course advanced since the 1940s. The modern location buoy, SEPIRB (Submarine Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), sends a coded message via satellite with the sub’s ID and whereabouts to the closest rescue coordination center. The buoys are still launched through the little tube, though, and ideally that tube hasn’t been welded shut, as it was on some cold war–era subs—to keep the buoy from launching accidently and revealing the sub’s position to the Soviet subs upon which it was spying. Before a location buoy is launched, someone takes a grease pencil and writes all over it, as much detail as there’s room for: damage to the sub (and crew), air quality on board, etc.

What happens next depends on how dire the situation is. Inside every US sub is a fat, white three-ring binder labeled “Disabled Submarine Survival Guide,” and in the front of that is a stay-or-go diagram: a decision tree of yes-or-no questions. Is the flooding contained? Are all fires out? If so, if the situation is stable, the answer will likely be Stay. Wait for the rescue vehicle. In water less than 600 feet deep, it may be possible to get out of a sunken sub and make one’s way to the surface—Hello, Wilkie!—however, for reasons we’ll shortly get to, this is a last resort.

A US sub is stocked with enough oxygen-generating and carbon dioxide–subtracting capability to last at least a week without power: a week of what Clarke calls “bottom survivability.” By
bottom
he means the ocean floor, but the British accent, to my ear, anyhow, tilts it toward the naughty meaning. Which kind of fits: bottom as in, “your ass,” will it be saved? Seven days is meant to be the outside limit of how long it should take for help to arrive. Fifteen countries and NATO have submarine rescue systems—deep submergence vehicles with decompression capabilities—but they differ in how deep they’re able to go. None is designed to function deeper than 2,000 feet; then again, neither are most submarines. (Modern US submarine “crush depths” are classified
*
information, but educated speculation puts them in the neighborhood of a half-mile down.)

Clarke adds that there may be well more than seven days of supplies. “Because you’re probably dealing with a proportion of the crew.” It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. He was saying that the oxygen will probably hold out longer than a week, because some of the crew won’t be using any. Aboard the
Squalus
, twenty-six men drowned in the first few minutes of the disaster, entombed in the flooding compartment when the watertight doors closed.

The least of anyone’s worries is starvation. Subs leave port stocked with full provisions, much of it in cans—so many cans, in fact, that they may overflow the storeroom on the smaller class of subs, with the result that entire passageways, in the early weeks of an underway, are cobblestoned by cans. Water may be a concern, if the desalination unit isn’t functioning. The
Disabled Submarine Survival Guide
includes unflinching water conservation strategies. “Minimize water closet ops following bowel movements to one minimal flushing cycle . . . every three uses.” To control odors, the
Guide
recommends covering the mess with the powder used by the galley crew to mix the “bug juice.” The high acidity of the drink is pointed out, leading one to assume that that’s why it’s used for this, though it’s also possible it’s an editorial comment on bug juice.
†

And then you wait. The men of the
Squalus
huddled disconsolately on the torpedo room floor, eating canned pineapple. It is notable that neither crew,
Squalus
nor
Tang
, exhibited panic. Aboard the
Tang
, the commanding officer wrote in his report, “No one was hysterical or disorderly at any time. . . . Toward the last, conversation seemed to be mostly about their families and loved ones.” One of the last messages tapped out by the crew on the hull of the sub
S-4
, accidently rammed and sunk in 1927, was “Please hurry.” The laborious and time-consuming inclusion of “please” breaks my heart. It’s so Navy: courteous and respectful to the end.

The crew of the
Squalus
were as lucky as they were unlucky; the Navy’s first submarine rescue chamber had just been completed and tested. The
Squalus
was its maiden rescue. Thirty-three survivors rode it to the surface. The chamber was a modified diving bell. As with an inverted drinking glass lowered into water, the pressure of the air trapped inside keeps the water outside. A diver accompanied the bell to position its opening over the lip of one of the submarine’s hatches and bolt it in place. The sub’s hatch could now be opened, and small groups of crew helped into the chamber.

Prior to this, sinking was likely a death sentence. Even a few inches of water will bear down on a submarine hatch—or a car door, for that matter—with sufficient pressure that it can’t be pushed open (unless one equalizes the pressure by letting water in). On the smaller subs of the 1920s, the air would last about three days. It was one of these “iron coffins,” the S-51, that inspired Lieutenant Commander Charles “Swede” Momsen to come up with a way to get people out. Momsen’s sub had been the one that first arrived on the scene. All the crew could do was stare at the oil slick on the surface of the water, “utterly helpless,” as Momsen wrote to a friend. When the sub was salvaged, bodies of the crew were said to have been found with their fingers torn and bloodied from trying to pry open a hatch against fifteen tons of ocean.

Given that most US ballistic missile submarines today spend the bulk of their time in oceans that bottom out deeper than their crush depth, the term “iron coffin” has regained some accuracy. Crush depth is the point at which the hull succumbs to the extreme water pressure and the sub implodes. John Clarke likens it to putting a submarine inside a giant bomb. The sub shatters inward. And the crew? “If you can imagine,” Clarke says, “all the metal parts are imploding together and anything in the way would be crushed and shredded and pounded into bits.” No one saves your bottom now. On April 10, 1963, the USS
Thresher
imploded, killing all 129 men aboard. “She’s scattered all over the seafloor,” Jerry Lamb says.

In light of the deep-sea haunts of modern subs, why even bother with rescue and escape systems? Do they simply exist to, as one submariner expressed it, “give moms and dads a warm feeling”? No, no more so than airplane emergency exit slides. Because, as with airplanes, most collisions take place on arriving or departing: in port or airport, where the traffic is busiest but the plummet most survivable.

The
Tang
went down in water just 180 feet deep, but rescue was complicated by the circumstances of battle. She sank in the midst of the convoy of Japanese ships she’d spent the night torpedoing and sinking. In the end, bad air forced the crew’s hand. Smoke had built up from the burning of classified paperwork, and saltwater had reached the batteries, creating deadly chlorine gas. Disaster luncheon. You didn’t need a decision tree to know that Stay had turned into Go.

Swede Momsen invented something for this scenario, too. During World War II, subs were equipped with escape trunks and Momsen lungs. (The “lung” was a wearable air supply that, upon reaching the surface, handily converted to a flotation device). Like an airlock on a spaceship, the escape trunk allows for the equalization of pressure inside and outside. On a sub, this allows the hatch to be popped open and the lung-clad sailor set loose in the brine. The
Tang
was the first bottomed sub from which sailors escaped without the aid of a rescue bell. There were nine, four of whom subsequently drowned or disappeared. (In the surreal etiquette of war, the five survivors were plucked from the near-freezing water by their enemies—as the
Tang
’s commanding officer described them, “the burned and mutilated survivors of our own handiwork”—who then beat them and sent them to starve in a prisoner of war camp.)

What happened to the rest of the men gathered in the
Tang
’s torpedo room in their Momsen lungs? Why didn’t they escape? They weren’t sure how to do it. “A majority of the men,” reads the patrol report, “had never been properly trained in the use of the Momsen lungs or operation of the escape tank. They, therefore, didn’t have any self-confidence in their ability to escape, causing a general feeling of defeat among them. . . . After the first two attempts there were very few men left who cared to try an escape although they knew what was going to happen to them below.” They are all there in the Summary of Escapes. Torpedoman’s Mate Fluker: “Would not try after this, his second attempt.” Unnamed Ensign: “Removed in stupor from trunk; preferred not to try again.” Unnamed Machinist’s Mate: “Would not try after this, his first attempt.”

A little practice might have made the difference. “Although everyone had read how to escape,” says the report, “not one had actually went through the motions.” In 1930, at the urging of Swede Momsen, an escape training tank was commissioned for the submarine base in Groton. With the hope that every submariner would have a chance to went through the motions.

A
T 40
feet deep and 84,000 gallons, the Naval Submarine School’s Pressurized Submarine Escape Trainer holds easily as much water as a hotel swimming pool. In diameter, though, it’s closer to a Jacuzzi. It’s the sort of thing you might drop into by accident, like a manhole, because you didn’t notice it was there. Despite the aquamarine water and the echoey tile walls,
pool
isn’t the right word. This is a column of pretend ocean that exists for a single, highly nonrecreational purpose: to practice bailing out of a stricken sub.

Twenty-six sub school students stand around the water’s perimeter in identical (Navy) blue swim trunks. They are young enough that the pimples on their backs still outnumber the tattoos. In ten years it will be different. Navy boys accrue ink like sun damage. A little more every year, in every port. The first training exercise will begin in an escape trunk that feeds into the water fifteen feet down. No breathing apparatus will be worn, just a life jacket. The instructor calls it “a buoyant exhaling ascent,” a term I will tuck away for later use should I ever be called upon to write opera reviews.

Exhaling
is the word to be underscored. Faced with an ascent from deep underwater, novice swimmers are inclined to hold their breath—not just to stay alive, but to help buoy them to the surface. They may not realize that that initial lungful of air they took in will expand as they rise and the water pressure decreases. If that breath expands enough, it will burst the lung’s alveoli—the tiny sacs where an exchange of gases in the air and the blood takes place. Should this happen, air bubbles can get into the bloodstream. Air embolism. Not good. Critical care luncheon. The bubble can act like a clot, blocking blood flow and starving organs of oxygen. If the organ in question is the brain or heart, the tissue damage may be fatal. There is speculation in the
Tang
patrol report that this had been the fate of four men who made it out of the escape trunk but then disappeared: that they’d lost the mouthpieces of their Momsen lungs and hadn’t realized the consequences of holding their breath.

“It’s the Golden Rule of sub school,” the instructor, Eric Nabors, is saying. “Don’t hold your breath.” Nabors carries the evocative title Diving Officer, and seems built in keeping. His hair is buzzed to a half millimeter, his wedding band tattooed. Nothing disrupts the hydrodynamic flow of Eric Nabors in a wetsuit.

To modulate their exhalation—not too fast, not too slow—the young men are instructed to pretend they’re blowing out birthday candles. Yelling also works. To further discourage breath-holding, Nabors and his fellow instructors used to inflate a wine bag down at the bottom of the water and let it go. As it surfaced, the bag would burst.

While Nabors and I have been chatting, I’ve referred to the wine bag as a bota bag. Nabors finally stops me. “
What
are you saying?”

Did I have the wrong term? That goatskin pouch that herders used to sling over one shoulder? In Spain? The kind where you open your mouth and squirt in the wine?

Nabors blinks at me. “I’m talking about the bag from wine-in-a-box.”

My escort for the day has been chatting with Nabors, and I notice she calls him “Jim.” This would explain the Jim Nabors album (
Kiss Me Goodbye
) mounted on his office wall, but not the ID badge, which says “Eric Nabors.”

“I fought that battle for a long time,” he says when I bring it up. When your last name is Nabors, there will be people who call you Jim, no matter what you do to discourage them. “Eventually I gave up.”