7. Long, Hard, and Full of Seamen

“DIVE! DIVE!”

<AROOOOOT, AROOOOOT>

“DIVE! DIVE!”

The Chief of the Watch made those announcements over the 1MC ship-wide announcing circuit under orders passed from the Captain, to the Officer of the Deck, to the Diving Officer, and then finally to him. That COW-boy also sounded the modern digitized dive alarm. The 688 class did not come equipped with the classic Klaxton “AROOOOOOOOGAAAAH” sounding dive alarm you hear in the movies.

Back aft, the Engineering Officer of the Watch repeated the announcement over the 2MC Engine Room announcing circuit, just with much less fervor and no repetition. It kind of sounded like an inconvenience.

“Dive.”

If you were somehow accidentally left topside after the swabbie who snagged the final breath of fart-free fresh air, slid down the ladder, and then declared to the Officer of the Deck, “Last man down. Hatch secured,” you would soon see five geysers blowing from our main ballast tank vent valves. Three up front, two back aft. Then we slowly start to slip below the surface. Sucks to be you. The ocean rushing into the bottom of the ballast tanks squishes the air out through those vents forcefully, making our boat heavier and heavier and heavier until we no longer float. And just like that, we vanish. Enjoy the swim home.

Once submerged, we operated in three dimensions. The Helmsman and Planesman drove us to the specified depth not unlike an airplane. This is probably after someone, I dunno, maybe the Diving Officer, said something all submariney like “Deck’s awash.” I mean, I really don’t know. I was never up in the Control Room when we were going down into the sea; regardless, we took some sort of a down angle and our nuclear-powered propulsion plant pushed our sleek black sewer tube deeper and deeper into the ocean.

Back in the Engine Room, Jay-Jay and I slid forward on the anti-skid metal deck plates due to the film of lubricating oil that settles upon them. There is always a pinguid mist in the air due to the poor little electrostatic precipitators becoming overwhelmed with all that hot turbine oil vapor, which eventually lubricated all the horizontal surfaces. On our way to leveling off at our depth, we had to inspect our spaces thoroughly for seawater leaks. There sure are a lot of hull penetrations throughout Engine Room Lower Level from which leaks could spring!

Up in the Control Room, the Chief of the Watch adjusted water in the trim tanks to give us the proper buoyancy and reported it up his chain of command.

“Diving Officer, all conditions normal on the dive.”

 “All conditions normal on the dive, aye. Officer of the Deck, all conditions normal on the dive.”

“Very well, Diving Officer. Captain, we’re at one five zero feet, trim satisfactory.”

“Very well. Take her to four hundred feet, ahead standard.”

“Four hundred feet, ahead standard, aye sir. Helm, all ahead standard.”

“All ahead standard, aye sir.”

“Diving Officer, make your depth four hundred feet…”

Once there, well, then we went for a wild ride. Down ten degrees, up ten degrees. Down twenty degrees, up twenty degrees. Down thirty degrees, up thirty degrees. And then we took some high-speed turns. A left and a right, a faster left and right, an even faster left and right. The submarine rolls a wee bit during these turns, again not unlike an airplane. Best to hold on!

Are they all drunk up there!?! Why are we engaging in such madness!?!

Jay-Jay had said last time that we engage in such madness to ensure that the boat is stowed for sea. They call this maneuver “angles and dangles.” You see, we simply can’t have pots and pans come crashing down while lurking around in areas we’re not supposed to be lurking around with all those pots and pans. I mean, who would bring pots and pans on a spy mission, anyway? Seamen would. Seamen would bring pots and pans on a spy mission. (Swabbies gotta eat.)

So, we drove the submarine like a crackhead for a bit to see what shook loose. At least that’s what we were told. Sounds plausible, I guess. Personally, I suspect the real reason we did angles and dangles was because we can, and it’s fun. Maybe some crafty Captain back in the day had to quickly come up with an explanation after word got out of his lively little maniacal maneuvering, and he was called to the carpet for it. Then I suppose, entirely in my mind of course, that this well-meaning, yet gullible Admiral fell for it.

Good work, Commander. That’s exactly the out-of-the-box thinking I’ve been saying this Navy needs. This will now be standard practice for all submarines in our fleet. Oh, and one more thing Commander… you’ll be full bird soon. I’ve made some arrangements.

That cunning Captain no doubt smirked a bit upon his return from headquarters. Because let me tell you something: Those thirty-degree angles are too steep for us to move about inside. You have to grab onto something for dear life, especially when standing on those lubed up deck plates in the Engine Room. It sure puts a giant shit eating grin on your face though.

This atomic contraption I’m within is indeed an impressive one!

After all those angles and dangles, well… that’s when the fun was over, unfortunately. The boat settled out, and we settled in. There was no more rocking and rolling like when we were on the surface. That was great for all the sea-sickness susceptible seamen, but not for thrill seeking swabbies such as myself. Underwater, the San Fran was remarkably steady when not maneuvering. That was even in—or below rather—tropical storms. It was all smooth sailing from submergence on out. This was where the routine started, and this was where the boredom began. Hours and hours, days and days, weeks and weeks, and even up to months and months at a time of mind-numbing routine in which we settled.

Before this boredom began for me, however, there was a period of uncertainty. I was a noob after all. You see, the transition into this repetitive routine can be abrupt and awkward for new jacks going out to sea for the first few times in one of these big boats. It was all on account of my purpose. We had just been in homeport with shutdown watches set. I had already qualified as Shutdown Roving Watch and knew what I was doing for the most part. Before the shutdown watch turnover, we set steaming watches and spent several hours starting up the reactor and steam propulsion plants prior to the underway. Then we set the maneuvering watches and left port for the open sea. Finally, we made it to deep water and submerged.

Since the wee hours of the morning, everyone was up, had a place to be, and had something to do. We had purposes! Even if that purpose was to put on a sound-powered phone headset and stand in front of and stare at a control panel used for manual manipulation of equipment functioning perfectly fine in automatic mode during your entire forced standing and staring time. Something could happen! If it did, some of us might become heroes! It could be my time to shine! At any moment, I might be needed! And then all of the sudden, I wasn’t needed. At all. Anywhere. For any reason. Just like that. Very abruptly. Very awkwardly.

Umm… I just lost my purpose. What am I supposed to do now?

I experienced this rather uncertain feeling during the transition to the routine on my first underway aboard the San Fran. Here it was once again on my second underway greeting me like a new unwanted acquaintance. Go away! I really didn’t like to be in this grey area. I really didn’t know what to do with myself or where to be but didn’t want to be scolded for this lack of knowing. And that kept me from asking anyone important the questions I had been wondering.

Do I have to stay here, or is it okay for me to leave the Engine Room now?

No one seemed to need me, but no one had dismissed me either. I lingered a bit, just in case. But why? There was nothing to do. Eventually I got this sense that maybe if I left the Engine Room, no one would even notice. I reasoned that if I did stick around, some Chief would eventually see me and then give me something to do. Not something that necessarily needed to be done at that exact moment, just that I was a body without any purpose, and therefore should be given a task to do. Maybe there was a dirty bilge somewhere. But I sure didn’t want to be tasked with something like wiping down a dirty bilge. I had done a lot of tasks this day already. I helped make steam for example. That particular steam I made had just propelled the ship out to sea and then down into it. My work was done here—for now. Surely then, this was the exact moment I should abide by the junior enlisted sailor’s creed:

Out of sight, out of mind.

I made a break for it. Yes, I bravely left the Engine Room and immediately chickened out while passing by the Mess Deck. Why were there so many swabbies still sitting there? I mean, once we dive the boat into the ocean, shouldn’t all those not on watch just dive into their racks? Were we not allowed to go to sleep yet or something? Undoubtedly everyone would be doing that if we were actually allowed to do that. Through careful observation, I presumed that we weren’t allowed to sleep, and therefore I too sat down there with everyone else. Just in case. I pictured Queen La Chiefa taking his day out on me if he caught me sleeping at a time like this. At a time like this!?! No, we wouldn’t want that at a time like this.

I suppose I could have asked another junior sailor a silly question like, if in his opinion, would it be okay if I took a nap. But I couldn’t do that! I’m a seasoned sailor with a Mediterranean deployment under my belt for crying out loud. No, no, no. I know what I’m doing here. Yeah, we dive the boat, and then we park our asses on the Mess Deck for a bit. Just in case. Anything could happen at any time. Hell, there’s even a depth gauge on the Mess Deck just in case. I, however, don’t exactly know why they mounted it at shin level under the milk machine, but it’s there to view just in case something seriously dire was happening.

Oh yeah, we’re definitely sinking uncontrollably now. Maybe we’re in a jam dive. What’s our crush depth again? I think we’re getting close. Also, does anyone want some milk while I’m down here? Hate for it to go to waste.

So, this of course was the old standard Mess Deck pause after diving, right? I knew that. I sat there with the other dopes convincing myself of that. Some coner across the table I didn’t know broke the silence, directing small talk at me whether I wanted it to be directed at me or not.

“Ya think they’ll do pizza night tonight?”

“No idea.”

“Like, it’s our first day out to sea, right?”

“Uh, yeah. Right.”

“So, don’t you think they’ll do pizza night for us then?”

“Well, it’s… definitely one possibility, sure.”

“Yeah, I thought so. I really like pizza night.”

“That’s amazing.”

“Totally is. But you know something?”

“What?”

“If they’re not doing pizza night tonight, I’d be okay with anything Italian.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, like spaghetti and meatballs or those meat raviolis they make.”

“You actually want those meat raviolis?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow, that’s even more amazing.”

“Yeah, they’re pretty good right? You like them too?”

“Uh… not particularly.”

“Wait. You don’t like them?”

“No, I sure I don’t. Not at all.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Oh man. That crap is from a can, they’re so damn mushy, and they taste… they taste really weird. Like that shit is definitely not filled with real meat, I’ll tell you that much.”

“What are you talking about? What do you think they fill them with?”

“I dunno. Tastes like they put baby food inside them.”

“Baby food!?! What? They don’t fill them with baby food. You’re crazy.”

“I’m not crazy. You know who’s crazy? Someone who likes food that looks the same coming out as it did going in. That’s who’s crazy.”

“It doesn’t look the same.”

“Okay maybe not exactly, but pretty damn close.”

“No.”

“Okay, how about this? Why don’t you go check the menu board? Maybe it’s pizza night. Then we don’t have to argue about what the mushy meat raviolis look like when they come out.”

After a half an hour or so of such thrilling conversation, I disengaged and ignored any words being directed at me. I was staring far, far away beyond the hull of the ship. Perhaps even into another dimension. Just looking without seeing, deep in thought. But they just kept talking! I put my head down on my folded arms on the table to prevent any more words being directed at me. I began getting a bit worked up about being stuck on the Mess Deck for so long without being dismissed. I recapped my last forty-eight hours.

I had woken up on a beach with a wicked hangover, had duty, was the Shutdown Rover for the 8am, 4pm and midnight watches, participated in the startup, helped man-handle those heavy ass shore power anaconda cables, stood an under instruction Lower Level watch during maneuvering, and with practically no sleep, was now somehow the oncoming Lower Level watch under instruction again in a couple of hours.

Sure, that’s nothing out of the ordinary mind you, and nothing a few hundred sailors before me hadn’t done the day their boats went out to sea, yet I couldn’t help but feel that maybe this was a personal injustice directed exclusively at me. At the moment, I was the only sailor in the sea, and I just wanted to get a little down time! But for some unknown reason, I was stuck on the Mess Deck.

Yet there was actually no reason, known or unknown, to be lingering like that on the Mess Deck. It was a useless linger. I had no purpose, and hell, even my lingering had no purpose. I didn’t yet realize that I was the only one preventing myself from hitting the rack. Most of those guys on the Mess Deck probably didn’t have as eventful of a last forty-eight hours and simply weren’t sleepy. Maybe they were just socializing with their buddies because they were bored but not tired, and the Mess Deck was one of the few places with comfortable seats. Or maybe they decided to wait for the next meal, possibly pizza, before going to sleep because they weren’t the oncoming watch. I most definitely created my own misery, but I got out of it through bargaining with myself.

Technically speaking, I’m oncoming. If I go to sleep now, I wouldn’t be doing anything wrong because I’m supposed to be alert on watch. I need to be well rested. I’m supposed to be sleeping. Besides, I wouldn’t even be hiding really. The messenger could wake me up at any moment because I would be in my assigned rack. Think about it. That’s the first place you should look for a missing sailor. His rack.

The bargaining worked. I once again summoned all my bravery and went to bed. It is truly an interesting sensation crossing the threshold from the main passageway into the pitch-black frigid berthing area the first time after diving the boat when you’re confident no Chief saw you do it. It’s pretty much the biggest relief imaginable. Like you saw a shark while floating in the ocean, swam your ass off towards the shore, and now your feet just touched sand. Safe!

Whew! Made it! That was a close one! Queen La Chiefa can’t get me now!

This unwavering anxiety of believing you’re doing something wrong when you’re actually doing something perfectly acceptable stemmed from years of conditioning in the Navy. I remember the time before I was conditioned. Just when I would think I wasn’t doing anything wrong, an angry Chief would pop out of nowhere to chew me out for how much wrong I had been engaged in. He saw the whole thing. Whatever it was.

Yes, once I made it into the berthing area, my awkwardness and anxiety subsided. The reality was most likely that all the other Chiefs not on watch retired to the Goat Locker to play cards and drink burnt coffee. Yet in my mind, the Chiefs were all still on patrol—but since they can’t see in the dark, I was safe in the pitch-black berthing compartment. (Out of sight, out of mind.) Only the messenger would come in here, but he’s probably too busy burning coffee for the Chiefs stuck on watch to be dispatched to look for me.

Once I climbed into my rack for some sleep, my boring ass at-sea repetitive routine officially began. Boring ass at-sea repetitive routine included sleeping of course, but the main part of the boring ass at-sea repetitive routine was the watch. Everything else like sleeping and eating fit around that. My watch, as I’ve said half a dozen times already, was Engine Room Lower Level.

That watch, along with all of the other at-sea watches, was six hours long. Therefore, there were four watches to be stood at each watch station for every twenty-four-hour period. However, there were only three watch standers to stand these four watches in a day—at least for all but the most senior watch stations. Senior watches did have that fourth person in the rotation. (Rank has its privileges.)

So, from a junior sailor’s perspective, our days were not twenty-four hours long; our days were eighteen hours long. Six hours on watch, twelve hours off watch. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Repeat ad nauseum. And repeat some more. Since we slept sometime between our watches, I had no problem calling a full eighteen hour cycle a “day.” However, I’ve found calling those eighteen-hour rotations a “day” confuses those who take things too literally.

If your days are only eighteen hours long, then what calendar do you use? Is it like a star-date from Star Trek? Maybe a sub-date? Is that what you call them? Sub-dates? Like, “Captain’s log, submarine date blah blah blah; we hit a pair of humpback whales while traveling at flank speed. Following the incident, the USS Grissom transported the pair to the Sausalito Cetacean Institute where they are listed in critical but stable condition. They are expected to make a full recovery.”

Well, I exaggerate. No one has literally asked me about sub-dates, but they have looked puzzled and asked me what calendar we use based on those eighteen-hour days. No, it’s not really a day. It just feels like one to us based on our sleeping habits. But there’s no special calendar for our rotating shifts. Nobody cares what day a confused little junior sailor thinks it is except for the confused little junior sailor himself.

Shit, what day is it today? Did I sleep through pizza night? Damn it, not again!

The submarine simply followed the ordinary Gregorian calendar based on little baby Jesus and the sun we never see. The days stayed the same as the rest of the world on a boat. Time, however, did get changed. Once all the hatches were closed, we synchronized our watches to Zulu Time, so that’s kind of neat. (For you civilians out there, Zulu Time is the exact same time as the not-so-neat sounding Greenwich Mean Time. Like, who wants your time to be mean anyway?) When you think about it though, this little switch to Zulu Time could actually change the date. Let’s say it’s three o’clock in the afternoon in Pearl Harbor when you shut the last hatch. Now it’s suddenly one o’clock in the morning the next day. Time travel!

I hope you had a big lunch shippy because you just missed dinner.

Another thing I should note is that we don’t use am/pm in the Navy. No, we always use military time, almost as if being in the Navy was like being in the military. How do you make it military time? Well, it’s easy. Just don’t stop counting your hours until you hit 24, put a zero in front of any hour under 10, get rid of the colon, stop saying “am” or “pm,” and replace the phrase “o’clock” with “hundred hours.” Example? We’ll use my Zulu Time time travel example again, but in military time this time.

Let’s say it’s fifteen hundred hours in Pearl Harbor when you shut the last hatch. Now it’s suddenly oh one hundred hours the next day.

Not sure why the military calls a zero an ‘O’ when telling time. Now, using military time, let’s walk through one full cycle of a three-section watch rotation starting at midnight, with your ass on watch. I should note that our last meal of the day was something called “midrats.” That’s a naval portmanteau for midnight rations. Also, here I am using “day” to mean a real twenty four hour day, not a confused little junior sailor’s eighteen hour day.

DAY 2:
0000-0600: OFF WATCH (standby)
(BREAKFAST)
0600-1200: OFF WATCH (oncoming)
(LUNCH)
1200-1800: ON WATCH
(DINNER)
1800-0000: OFF WATCH (standby)
(MIDRATS)

DAY 3:
0000-0600: OFF WATCH (oncoming)
(BREAKFAST)
0600-1200: ON WATCH
(LUNCH)
1200-1800: OFF WATCH (standby)
(DINNER)
1800-0000: OFF WATCH (oncoming)
(MIDRATS)

DAY 4:
There is no day four. This is three-section, shipwreck. Go back to 0000 on day one. In case you’re wondering what time 0000 is, well it’s midnight. It is also unofficially known as balls o’clock. And if you’re really some sort of a super shipwreck still having a little bit of trouble with military time, I’ll put this right here for you:

0000 = midnight
0600 = 6:00 am
1200 = noon
1800 = 6:00 pm

Okay. So, this three-section watch rotation was what drove our boring ass at-sea repetitive routine on and on and on and on until we returned to port. The six hours on watch was the main part of this routine. For the twelve hours off watch portion of our routine, we would sleep, go pee-pee, shove some grub into our pie holes, blast that grub out of our butt holes, clean the boat, clean ourselves, run drills and break the boat, perform maintenance to fix the boat, attend training to learn how to fix the boat after we already sort of fixed it, and be fixin’ to do whatever else the Navy demanded of us. This twelve hours off watch time was broken into two distinct six-hour periods called standby and oncoming.

Standby was the six hours immediately after our watch for us to be used and abused. We would try to sleep, but we really couldn’t get too comfy in our racks. Since we were on standby, we could be woken up for any number of those aforementioned reasons. Realistically speaking, by far the number one reason we were woken up if we hit the rack while on standby was to relieve the on-watch guy so he could go potty.

Some of the subpar sub meals hit hard an hour or two into the watch—right when the on-watch watch stander’s standby guy was just falling into deep sleep. But the call for a relief was a necessary evil because sometimes it was that guy on watch who really, really needed his relief. Other times it would be you who would be on watch and really, really needed a relief! (Well, two forms of relief when you think about it. One for our duties and one for our doodies.)

God damn mushy meat midrat raviolis, I swear! They come out so fast that they really do look the same as when they were scooped right out of the can.

The potty break relief procedure actually took some time as you could neither abandon your post to grab your relief nor directly call that person. The process involved a series of requests and orders relayed to the messenger to wake up your relief, plus a lot of holding all that mushy meat inside of you rather impatiently. In Engine Room Lower Level, our first move was to call Maneuvering with the sound powered phone system for the potty break request.

<whoop, whoop… whoop, whoop, whoop.>

“Maneuvering.” 

“Maneuvering, Engine Room Lower Level. Request a relief to use the head.” 

“Request a relief to use the head, Engine Room Lower Level, Maneuvering, aye.” 

“Sir, Engine Room Lower Level requests a head break.” 

“Very well. Call the Chief of the Watch for a relief.”

“Call the Chief of the Watch for a relief, aye sir.”

<whoop, whoop, whoop… whoop… whoop.>

“Chief of the Watch.” 

“Chief of the Watch, Maneuvering, Request a relief for Engine Room Lower Level.” 

“Request a relief for Engine Room Lower Level, Maneuvering, Chief of the Watch, aye.” 

“Messenger! Send a relief to Engine Room Lower Level.” 

“Send a relief to Engine Room Lower Level, aye Chief.” 

The messenger then had to go look at the watch bill to see who was supposed to be the relief for Engine Room Lower Level as the off watch standby watch stander, and then he had to go down to berthing to look at the rack assignment bill and see where that relief was supposed to sleeping. Hopefully he was there! And also, hopefully he didn’t just fall back asleep after being woken up. Mushy meat midrat ravioli waits for no one! You had like thirty minutes tops to make it to the toilet after the first intestinal pangs.

Good luck, shippy! Hope you don’t fill up your poopysuit!

Now if we were sleeping during the six hours before our watch as the oncoming, potty breaks were not your concern. They generally let us continue to sleep so that we would be alert on watch. As reactor safety is our primary concern, alertness was very, very important while on watch. Yes, very, very important. Key to reactor safety when you think about it, that’s how important it was to be sleep thoroughly prior to your watch without interruption. Unless of course they needed us to clean something.

Oh yeah, they would wake our asses right the hell up to clean something even if we were oncoming and dead ass tired. Fuck reactor safety, and twice on Sundays! (Because the major all-hands four hour straight cleaning was usually done on a Sunday.) But there were many other reasons to wake up the oncoming guy: training, running drills, and taking care of actual emergencies. Basically, the oncoming guy could only sleep through potty breaks, I guess. That’s about it now that I think about it.

So, as part of the oncoming watch (and not yet fully qualified), I was safe and sound from those potty breaks. Free to sleep like the dead inside my tiny little submarine bunk, which did feel a bit like a coffin to be perfectly honest. Yes, a coffin with one side missing and replaced with a little blue privacy curtain. My coffin was just one of many coffins stacked three high in a compartment filled with these three high coffin stacks end to end to end longitudinally with a cross-section arrangement of coffin-stack/aisle/two coffin-stacks/aisle/coffin-stack, port side of centerline all the way to the hull. So many coffins in this compartment!

As you can imagine, racks that we called coffins were pretty cramped, and like real coffins, there really weren’t a whole lot of sleeping positions possible inside them. No room for people who sleep like a scorpion or a pretzel. In my opinion, on your back like you were in open casket at a wake was the best position. There was a limit to just how much you could bend your knees, so even sleeping on your side could be difficult. But there was also a limit to how far you could straighten your legs if you were tall. (Not my problem.) Sailors over 6’2” did have that problem as they had to bend their knees slightly to fit in. Or so I was told.

The racks were pretty damn narrow as well, again much like a coffin. Arms had to be folded over your stomach or straight at your sides in order to keep your arms inside the ride at all times. Otherwise, the arm by the curtain would certainly hang out, get hit by someone walking by, and wake your ass up just as you had fallen into deep sleep.

Wait, I’m up but no one has to poop!?! This is bullshit!

There was not much vertical room either. If you were lying on your back, you couldn’t bend your knees up high enough to lock in place. Hell, you couldn’t even hold a magazine fully upright over your chest. You had to bend the magazine down towards your face, which blocked out your little overhead florescent light, making it quite difficult to view the reading material in the shadows.

Damn it, how the hell am I supposed to rub one out in these conditions? I can’t see the boobies!

Yet we persevered. I mean it was obvious we persevered with our shadowy naughty periodicals because everyone treated a lone sock adrift on the deck of our berthing compartment like radioactive material. Yeah, nobody wanted to touch what was potentially another dude’s “patrol sock.” You gotta kick those presumptive patrol socks away from you just in case they were contaminated.

Like, stick ‘em in a burn bag with the classified documents to be disposed of for Pete’s sake!

Speaking of such items, our nudie books and socks (patrol or otherwise) plus everything else we took with us on the voyage had to fit in the space underneath our mattress pans. That’s all the personal storage we had in the world, and it was only accessible by lifting up that hinged mattress pan. While it was the length and width of your coffin sized rack, the space was quite shallow. For example, our civilian shoes were crushed no matter which way we tried to store them. Say, if you had high-top sneakers and had to lay them on their sides to fit in there, the next time you grabbed them to wear, the soles would be V-shaped. That’s how shallow it was. The depth of the bed pan was not even the width of a shoe!

I can’t complain about my coffin though. At least I had one, and it was all mine. Despite being one of the newest members of the crew, as a Second Class Petty Officer, I did not have to experience either of the other two dreadful sleeping arrangements. You see, the Navy didn’t install enough racks for every sailor to enjoy some of their favorite inactivity.

One might assume the Navy did this on purpose to keep us fighting men ornery, but the real reason was because these Los Angeles class boats were designed to be hotrods. The ship designers made a lot of compromises on these boats to maximize their power and minimize their displacement, all in the name of speed. One of these compromises was to reduce the number of bunks. (Kind of like how some factory-made race cars available to the public come without a back seat, radio, carpeting, spare tire, or air conditioning. All for speed, baby!)

On account of the lack of racks, many of the noobiest of noob sailors, like brand new Seamen, had to sleep with the torpedoes. When I first heard about this, I remarked that it sort of sounded like a military version of a mob threat. Sleep with the torpedoes? I mean, is that what the naval architects said when they realized that there weren’t nearly enough beds for all of us?

You know something, swabbie? It would be a real shame if someone were to say, mention the missing racks to anyone. It doesn’t look good for anybody if you know what I mean. And we wouldn’t want that particular chatty person to have to sleep with the torpedoes. Capisce?

I’m sure that was just a joke to cover up their miscount. But then the Navy brass overheard their joke and took them seriously. They clearly thought it was a great idea. (The brass really have no senses of humor. God, they’re so literal.) Consequently, the lower ranking noobs had to sleep on makeshift beds which were just the tiny standard coffin sized two inch thick submarine mattresses thrown on top of the lower torpedo rails, right alongside dozens of massive underwater bombs.

Think about that. Right next to their little sleepy heads were these big ass warheads. Those Mk.48 ADCAP torpedoes had 650 pounds of high explosives, plus they were filled with a propellant called Otto II fuel. This Otto fuel, by the way, was structurally related to nitroglycerin.

Nighty-night, shippy! Hope you’re not much of a kicker!

I jest. I don’t think any seamen accidentally detonated a torpedo while sleeping a bit restlessly. (Hmm…well maybe that explains the Scorpion and the Kursk?) No, seriously, I jest. From a practical standpoint, there were many more unpleasant reasons why this was a horrible place for some slumber. This had to be done in a rather well-lit and noisy Torpedo Room. If you were a light sleeper, then you were genuinely screwed. You see, we didn’t have a lounge inside our attack submarine—the stripped down hotrod—and the Mess Deck was often off limits for cleaning or training or various other reasons. Therefore, the giant Torpedo Room became the de facto lounge.

All the many skylarkers—or nautical tricksters—in the Torpedo Room made quite a bit of noise while spreading the latest scuttlebutt—or nautical gossip—and arguing over some stupid inane topic. I’ve never actually heard any of the crew have a heated debate about the different versions of the Silver Surfer like in the movies, but there were still plenty of swabbies who got into lively debates which escalated into playful (maybe?) physical forms of arguments. (Those skylarkers always forgot that “horseplay leads to sick bay.”) Yes, a fair number of impromptu wrestling matches broke out in the Torpedo Room. Not one shit was handed out to the poor Seaman Recruits and Apprentices trying to sleep in there. I guess the skylarkers thought they could just shoot ‘em out the torpedo tubes if they complain.

There was another (less but still) dreadful way to make up for the rack shortage. This was more widespread and for the not quite rock-bottom junior sailors, like for the Third Class Petty Officers. This arrangement was to share racks. Now this being a boat full of seamen, I should probably point out that this whole bed sharing thing was not at the same time. 

Hey sailors! Are you bunking together again? That is specifically prohibited by regulations!

If you remember during my boat check-in process, I had to sign some papers that I read and understood the whole Standard Organization and Regulations Manual—or SORM—in like a week. I in fact most definitely did not read and understand the whole thing before signing that I did read and understand the whole thing. I did, however, accidentally read and understand the part about not sleeping with your shipmates. Yes, I shit you not, that was actually in there. It said that no two crewmembers were permitted to occupy the same rack at the same time.

I found it quite amusing to think about just how exactly that rule came into existence. Some angry uptight officer actually had to write that one in there! What happened!?! Take a minute and try to wrap your head around this whole thing. I mean, first of all, just how many swabbies were sleeping together that this angry uptight officer felt like he had to put a stop to it? This ends now. Must have been a lot, right? One or two times, no big deal. But like, where do you officially draw the line? It must have been happening quite frequently.

Secondly, how the fuck did two guys even fit in there? I mean, they must have gotten stuck in those itty bitty bunks. Oh yeah, they definitely did. There’s no way they didn’t. And that’s probably how they kept getting caught. All wedged in there crying out for help? You see guys, that’s exactly how you get new rules written into the SORM by those angry uptight officers. You get yourselves in a pickle, need help getting out of it, and then you ruin it for the rest of us. You all knew the Admirals were terribly concerned about where we put our pee-pees back then. Jeez. Next time bring some lube.

Alright Admiral, I need a status update for the presidential daily briefing.

Yes Secretary, of course. Significant Russian naval exercises have commenced in the Bearing Sea, we’re tracking two Chinese Type 091 submarines patrolling the Formosa Strait, and we found Jones and Miller stuck in the same bunk again.

Jones and Miller? Again? I’ll wake the president.

All jokes aside, such specific rack rules as specified in the SORM were quite unnecessary in my opinion. As you already know, one swabbie by himself could barely fit in a rack, let alone two. So like I said earlier, this second of the two dreadful sleeping arrangements—the sharing of racks with other swabbies—was not to be at the same time.

This was a purely mathematical solution to the rack shortage problem. Since there were three swabbies for each watch station yet one of the three swabbies would be up and out of the rack on their station at all times, that swabbie didn’t need his rack for those six hours. Therefore, three junior sailors could be assigned to just two racks. That checks out mathematically. Three swabbies times twelve hours off watch per rotation equals two racks times eighteen hours per rotation.

We had a name for this bed time-sharing routine. Owing to the fact that you got into bed right after your relief got out of it, the rack would theoretically retain some of your bunk buddy’s body heat. Therefore, we called this practice “hot-racking.”

It’s definitely not as dreadful as sleeping with the torpedoes, but in my estimation, hot-racking was still pretty dreadful for two reasons. First of all, you now had to share the already limited storage space. You get one third of the space under two bed pans. So, you only get two-thirds the space compared with the guys who didn’t have to hot-rack. (I guess with the shared storage space, you also had to be careful not to share patrol socks.)

The second shitty thing about hot-racking was also regarding your storage space. Since you slept in the other rack each time you got off watch, you couldn’t always access one of your two thirds at any given time. That’s exactly half of your shit!

This was on account of how the storage space was accessed. If you remember, you had to lift up the hinged mattress pan, which included lifting up the mattress on top of the hinged mattress pan, and that would include lifting up the guy sleeping on top of the mattress on top of the hinged mattress pan. Good luck doing that without waking up that sleepyhead swabbie (or perhaps not getting punched in the face by the disgruntled and disoriented sleepyhead swabbie you just woke up).

So yes, hot-racking was a real pain in the ass for things like staging your shower gear and CD Walkman. If you left your shower shoes, shampoo, soap, and silly little loofah in the other rack again, well you’d have to wake a dude up to get it. Of course, you could bring two loofahs, two bars of soap, two bottles of shampoo, two pairs of shower shoes and two CD Walkmans—one for each rack so you didn’t have to risk a bloody nose for waking someone up. That of course takes up twice the amount of your precious little space. Another solution was to simply resign yourself to taking showers every thirty-six hours; that’s one shower after every two watches.

Such things like sleeping with torpedoes in a bright, noisy room, or not having access to half your shit at any given time were not my concern, however. I had my own personal rack and was sleeping soundly in the ice cold, dark room, snug as a bug. After such a long eventful forty-eight hours, it really didn’t get much better than sleeping like the dead in my coffin. I was so thoroughly exhausted by the time I made it to my rack, but now safely in it, I was resting just, so, so, so peacefully. It was really nice to finally fall into that deep, deep sleep after blasting a full Napalm Death album into my ears with my CD Walkman. That really lulls me into that deep, deep sleep. And that’s when someone whipped open my curtain and blasted a flashlight into my face.

“Droughton, wake up! You got watch.”

Ugh! That was one merciless messenger! He moved on without waiting for my response. No need to I suppose. That fucking light went right though my eyelids! No one could sleep though that. What a rude awakening! Maybe he could just give us a verbal the first time or a little nudge perhaps and only resort to the flashlight blast for tardy ass stragglers? Thankfully, I wasn’t alone in my misery. I could hear the messenger wake up others and see a little bit of light flashing briefly.

“Vanderbilt, wake up! You got watch.”

<a few seconds pass, fainter flash of light>

“Brown, wake up! You got watch.”

<a few more seconds pass, light not really seen, voice a bit hard to hear>

“Bells, wake up! You got watch.”

<a few more seconds pass, no light, words unintelligible>

“Smprwkup! Oogawtch.”

When I was laying there in the dark with no will to get up while maintaining a questioning attitude towards my life’s decisions, I heard curtains opening and the gentle rustling around as tired ass sailors emerged from their racks in one of three methods. Some rolled out of their lower racks and grunted softly as they stood up, some put a leg down and rotated out of their middle racks with no effort, and others climbed down from their top racks with a slight thump onto the floor as there were no steps or ladders.

A few rounds of muffled burps and farts, more like little toots, rack pans being lifted and closed, and belt buckle clinking sounds sent home the realization that I actually did have to get up. If I didn’t, the messenger would return for two more rounds to ensure no one fell back asleep. If anyone did, he blasts them in the face again. There’s no escape. But hell, I wanted more sleep. I had to be quick to cover up the flashlight with a hand.

“Yeah I’m up. I’m up. Give me a minute. I’m just trying to figure out how I ended up in here.”

Five minutes later I had to block it again, but that was as long as I could hold out. Had to roll out of my rack or risk missing chow time. The first stop after getting up and getting dressed was of course the head. It was time to pee! The head was quite a sudden contrast to the berthing compartment with respect to what demands you place on your eyeballs. You see, the berthing compartment was pitch black with the lights off, and even with the lights on, it was a fairly dark space due to the tall boxy floor to ceiling stacks of racks blocking light, and with all that fake dark wood paneling and deep dark blue curtains everywhere.

But the head was one of the brightest spots on the entire boat due to the florescent lights reflecting off all the stainless steel walls, stalls, sinks and showers, and the mirrors. The floor was a light shade of blue-grey which added to the overall brightness of the head. It was made out of, I dunno, some sort of cement or epoxy and had almost a pebble pattern to it I’d say. I could see this type of coating being used in wet areas of a 1980’s motel or town pool bathroom. Anyway, it was bright as fuck in there.

Just imagine emerging from total darkness into a blinding boat bathroom a few minutes after your eyelids were securely shut. The contrast certainly strained my eyes. It was so bright in the head that I would have to pee with one peeper barely open until I got used to the lighting, fighting back yawns the entire time. As you can probably tell, I was no go-getter after waking up. Some sailors were, but I most definitely was not.

We had a name for those go-getting sailors: Diggits. Diggit rhymes with “bigot” and was the mashing the words “dig” and “it” said together. To be clear, diggit was a derogatory term for someone who “digs” being in the Navy and gleefully follows military rules to the letter. I could see how it came to be:

You fucking dig it, don’t you? You fucking dig it!

Note that in my time in the Navy, it had only been used as a verbal insult as far as I know. I had never actually seen “dig it” or “diggit” spelled out before. But here I added the second ‘g’ to avoid making it look like I am talking about numbers. Technically with the way I’m spelling it here, it’s not a true Navy portmanteau though, which is maybe slightly disappointing. We love our portmanteaus for sure.

Regardless of official spelling, diggits were quite easily spotted even before they opened their mouths. Diggits typically wore an absurdly large diver’s watch (despite never having actually scuba dived in their entire lives), a holstered multi-tool such as a Gerber or Leatherman, a mini Maglite flashlight (also with its own holster), and if in the Engine Room, they would have an oil rag hanging out of their back pocket. Gotta keep your spaces clean, shipmate! I would not be surprised if some diggits lobbied the command to get fanny packs and kneepads issued as uniform items. Nope. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

As you might have already guessed, nobody liked diggits. Nobody. Not the command who viewed them as totally fucking annoying butt snorkelers, not the disgruntled swabbies who would murder them in their sleep if they could get away with it, and not even the other diggits. They usually lacked self-awareness, often not even realizing that they were in fact themselves diggits. Unbelievably, they would even claim to dislike other diggits when asked. Yet despite such admissions, when free roaming, they tended to gravitate towards other fellow diggits for reasons they probably would be unable to explain.

Now I’m sure those diggits had disdain for swabbies like me who wouldn’t get up until the last flashlight blast, but believe me, I was doing them a favor. You see the main head—located between the two largest berthing compartments—was only equipped with one urinal, two showers, and three toilets. There weren’t enough of those for everyone going on watch to use at the same time. I never took a shower before my watch, as I always slept in, so both showers were available for all those go-getting diggits to cycle through should they desire to take one before watch on their fine Navy day.

If you find yourself siding with the diggits right about now and are picturing a nice hot and steamy shower to get your morning going, well you are sadly mistaken my friend. This was not the place for one of those. No, no, no. First off, submarine showers were these tiny little phone booths made out of some insanely fucking cold stainless steel. So cold that our brains had trouble processing the sensation and made it feel like we were actually getting burned if some part of our bare ass bodies touched the metal sides.

Of course, once inside and naked, we were constantly getting tossed around into those brutally cold stainless-steel walls because we were on a ship that moved about unpredictably. Actually, it was quite predictable. The boat would be rock solid steady for hours and hours—right up to the point you stripped down and stepped into the tiny little shower booth. That’s the exact time they’d decide to do some maneuvering. It sure sucked when it happened to you, but it was funny as all hell to hear grown men in the shower screaming like little schoolgirls when the boat jostled a bit from a sudden turn or change in depth.

The second reason you couldn’t actually take a nice hot and steamy shower like at home was due to the official submarine shower procedure. You were supposed to get in, turn on the water briefly to get wet, turn off the water, soap up your body and shampoo your hair, turn the shower back on to rinse off, turn off the water, squeegee the walls down, and then get the fuck out.

We were only allowed two minutes of water per shower because we only had so much potable water onboard at a given time. The reactor propulsion plant had the water rights, not you. If you took a shower that lasted significantly longer than a few minutes, some diggit would notice and get all lathered up about it. Wasting ship’s resources!?! Diggits won’t stand for that. This ends now. They would bang on the door and verbally shower shame you for it:

“Come on Hollywood, let’s go!”

Fucking diggits, I swear. Despite the two-minute water use time restrictions, lest you earn that Hollywood moniker, and the fact that taking a shower in a sub is a bit like you’re inside a real-life Hasbro game of Operation, these submarine showers were pretty similar to the showers at home.

In contrast to submarine showers however, submarine shitters are most definitely not like the land-based latrines back home. I mean, you still sit on and poop in them and all, but the flushing method is quite a bit different. You don’t just hit a lever, walk away, and hope for the best like you do with a civilian potty. No, flushing a toilet on a submarine required a bit of judgment and skill.

There’s a fill valve with a dark green handwheel that you spin counterclockwise to add seawater to the bowl—make sure you don’t overflow it, shipwreck—and a large dark green lever on the side that you pull down to operate the heavy-duty ball-valve to dump everything into the “sans tank.” I think sans was short for sanitary tank. I’m not really sure. Whatever, the sans tank is the shit tank. That’s all you need to know.

If you operate the fill and drain valves incorrectly, you get one hell of a whiff of the wickedness brewing down below in the sans. It’s a brutal mixture of piss, shit and low-tide-like seawater complete with dead and decaying sea life down there! Noobs were always pulling the lever to dump their dookies down first, and then refilling the bowl afterwards. Really noobs? This just stinks up the whole damn place. Fucking new guys, I swear.

Experienced toilet operators would first crack open the fill valve to get the bowl water level nice and high, then in one quick snap, yank the drain valve lever, drop your dirty deed down, and then quickly shut the valve before breaking the water seal. It takes practice and coordination, and it’s definitely a challenge with floaters, but it works well to contain all that nose searing sewage stink. And always remember this before walking away: the fill valve doesn’t shut itself, shipwreck.

This complicated valve arrangement was due to the need to seal off the toilet bowl from the high-pressure compressed air that blows the sans overboard. Although we could in emergencies, we didn’t often puree our poopies through the Main Drain Pump. No, we were gentlemen and blew them out with compressed air in one hell of a big ass submarine shart.

Now to blow the boat’s bowels overboard, the air pressure must be greater than that crushing seawater pressure just absolutely squeezing the shit out of our submarine and trying to make it implode. Yeah, we have to push our poop out against and into that. So, we’re talking about toilets rated for a few hundred pounds per square inch of pressure. Enough pressure to make your precious little pure white porcelain potty at home fucking explode.

Not on a sub. No, these mil-spec crush depth toilets are tough. Damn tough. And without those lever-operated heavy-duty ball valves that confused all the noobs, we would be blowing the contents of the shit tank violently back up through the toilet, making a massive poop geyser. Now you know why we had such a complicated flushing arrangement! It was imperative to avoid painting all the nice shiny stainless steel walls a dirty shade of brown.

Honestly, it didn’t really take long to become a potty master on a submarine once the toilet operator gained some experience and knowledge. But knowledge is power, and with power comes responsibility. Unfortunately, some people just want to watch the world burn. With this particular flushing arrangement, there were certain skylarkers onboard who often used the separate fill and drain valves for sinister purposes. When these valves were discovered to be manipulated in this maniacal method by innocent victims, it was often accompanied with much fanfare.

“Oh my god! Look at the size of this thing!”

“What?”

“Somebody drydocked a really fucking big one!”

“Drydocked… a really big one?”

“Yeah, really fucking big! You have to see this thing! Here, take a look!”

“Oh fuck, wow, yeah that’s one gigantic turd for sure.”

“Right?”

“Definitely among the biggest I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“It’s like someone snuck a horse onboard.”

“Like a Clydesdale.”

“But dude, I just walked right in here without even knowing it was there.”

“They got you good.”

“Yeah they did. But isn’t it weird how it’s not stinking up the whole place?”

“Hmm. I don’t smell it either now that you mention it. That is weird.”

“Really fucking weird.”

“Maybe it’s so damn big that it generates its own gravity field and has a self-contained shitty little atmosphere around it.”

“Man, I’m really fucking glad I looked down first. Almost didn’t. I would have shit right on top of that shit. Could you imagine?”

“Wow, yeah that would have been pretty fucking confusing when you went to flush. Like, uh corpsman, I think there’s something wrong with me…”

“Yeah, totally. Like, uh did I just shit out some of my organs?”

“Worrisome for sure.”

“Oh shit. I really gotta take a dump now. Let me get rid of this thing.”

“Good luck.”

“Fuck. I think I am gonna have to shit on top of it anyway. Oh god.”

As you probably have already figured out now, with the complicated toilet flushing valve arrangement on a Los Angeles class attack submarine, one could perform this odious prank after crapping by cracking the drain valve open until all the water is let out. Those shitty ass skylarkers would leave a little, or in this case, a giant surprise behind in an otherwise completely empty bowl for an innocent swabbie to discover when next to use the stall. That’s what a submarine sailor means by drydocking.

I never once drydocked a dook myself, but quite a few times I must admit I did fall victim to someone else’s nasty ass drydocking prank. Fucking mongrels, I swear. To spite them, I’d just flush them down without making any announcements. This ends now. Their hard work would go completely unappreciated and unadmired.

After waking up, getting dressed, taking a leak, and dodging drydocks, we’d pile up on the chow line in the dimly lit narrow main passageway leading to the Mess Deck and catch each other’s yawns while waiting. This p-way lighting choice was likely because it connected the officer’s staterooms to the stairs up to the Control Room. The dark passageways would help those looking out through the periscope to have their eyes already adjusted for low levels of lighting. It can take as much as a half an hour for eyes to fully adjust to darkness after being exposed to bright white light for a while. Something to do with the rods and cones inside your eyeballs.

Frikkin rods and coners.

The wait in this poorly lit passageway wasn’t too long for the oncoming watch standers. Since each meal was merely an hour long for potentially over a hundred and twenty people to eat, and since there were only enough seats for about a sixth of the crew at any given time (ten minutes each to eat), the oncoming watch standers were given head of the line privileges so that those who were going to be relieved from their posts had a fighting chance to grab some grub before the cooks closed up shop.

The Mess Deck was once again a bright location, and the lighting fixtures providing that light were unusually low compared with the other spaces. I was told that this was unique to boats built by Newport News Shipbuilding, the entity which built twenty-nine of the sixty-two total 688-class sewer tubes in existence. I can neither personally verify that claim nor the claim that the other thirty-three boats built by NNS’s chief competitor—General Dynamics Electric Boat—had raised up lighting on the Mess Deck. Who knows? Not me. But it’s just one of those things I heard and accepted. The only thing I can vouch for is that the Mess Deck lighting was indeed low on this particular ship, the USS San Francisco.

It didn’t bother a short guy like me as I fit underneath the fixtures. In fact, for what I think are obvious reasons, it would soon become a source of immeasurable entertainment for me. You see, all four meals provided each day were buffet style, and these meals were served out of several hot trays located on the forward bulkhead of the mess deck—and right behind the lowest of the low lighting fixtures. You can surely see where this is heading, but let’s take a step back from this low hanging lighting fixture for a minute to discuss the rule of three on a submarine.

Despite their massive size on the outside, the insides of these submarines are indeed quite cramped. Nearly every cubic inch of these sewer tubes is packed with equipment, making provisions for its human occupants seem almost like an afterthought.  Miles and miles of wiring and piping snake through these beasts like nerves and intestines, typically protruding into the same space people are supposed to occupy.

A good rule of thumb is that you have to bludgeon the outside of your cranium three times on an object before the location of that particular low hanging fixture is embedded inside that same cranium, but there were exceptions.  Back in Shaft Alley, there was this notorious portside pipe hanger on the way to the designated smoking section that made everyone wonder if the sadistic group of engineers who designed these vessels ever actually set foot inside their infernal creations.

It was a low hanging bracket located on a short landing between two sets of steps, such that while you were paying attention to your footing, this menacing protrusion gouged a wicked flesh trench into your head without mercy. Throughout my duration aboard the San Fran, every few days while making the rounds and avoiding that low hanging bracket, I would see chunks of flesh—often with hairs still attached—smeared across the immovable blunt metal object.

It once gashed the M-Div Leading First so badly that he had to be treated by the corpsman. Treatment of course means taking a Polaroid photo to share with the rest of the crew for their enjoyment, and then eventually getting around to disinfecting and stitching him up. After studying the rather close-up photograph for a few moments, many sailors came to the same conclusion regarding this incident: The wound on top of his head amongst the somewhat sparse hairs looked a bit like a bleeding vagina. In a boat load of bored young men underway, this made him a highly popular topic of conversation for a number of days. Onboard scuttlebutt doesn’t often get much better than that!

Hey, did you see Harrison’s new vagina!?!

I don’t think the Leading First ever forgot where that bracket was after that. While one single bloody gash could put your memory into overdrive, it normally took three less severe whacks to the head to memorize where a low hanging fixture was located. That’s what the rule of three was on a submarine. It was kind of weird. We all noticed that same phenomenon. Three times? You too? Yeah, three times. Must be a thing. You hit your head three times, and it’s finally committed to memory. Ah, so that’s where they put that thing. It really did apply to most of the crew. Most. But not all.

So now let me introduce you to a very special member of this crew. He was someone directly in front of me in the chow line. Above his poopysuit’s right breast pocket was the word “SAMPLE” as if he was free to try, but the location of that word indicated that this was his last name. Yes, this Navy nuke character was Petty Officer Second Class Daniel Sample, and he was hilarious. One of those people that you look at and think,

“I don’t know what is going to happen next, but I can tell it’s really going to be something.”

I already knew of this legend. Danny Sample was a tall pasty white glasses-wearing guy who had jet black hair where he wasn’t balding and a pretty damn large forehead—a fivehead one might say—and he talked to himself quite a bit. Like during the entire wait in the main passageway line, while the rest of us were fighting off yawns, he was just mumbling a bunch of shit to no one in particular. Actually, maybe talking to himself doesn’t quite accurately describe what he was doing. I mean, he wasn’t having a conversation with himself. Perhaps I could be more precise by saying it seemed like he was just thinking out loud. Thinking out loud, but with passion.

You see, he was in the same division as Hash Brown, but Dan Sample didn’t quite have the same happy go lucky stoner-surfer personality as Don Brown. No, he was a much angrier fella. Many of his audible thoughts were grumbles about something, oftentimes appearing like he was going on one of those epic rants just before he was about to go postal. Oh yeah, keep him the fuck away from the gun locker because he seems just too damn disgruntled for comfort! Well, except when there was food involved.

Yes, he was quite the happy camper with chow in front of him. And I get it. Being woken up in defeat to go on watch sucked balls, so having a nice meal was one last tiny victory before surrender. The sheer joy he displayed coming around the corner from the main passageway and spying a meal he approved of in those hot trays was infections. Such excitement!

“Oh look! They made beanies and wienies today!”

<BAM!>

“Owwwwww! Shit fuck fuck dick! Rrrrrrrrrr!”

Distracted by the steamy hot grub on display, he smacked his head on that low hanging light fixture and threw a tantrum. This poor guy. So happy one second, and then immediately brought back down to Earth by a couple of Newport News shipyard workers the next.

The light goes here? This low? You sure? Alright, no problem. Hand me that 7018 rod.

Sample scooped up his giant portion of beanies and wienies after smacking his head and walked off disgruntled once again. Motherfucker stupid light. As I grabbed my plate to begin scooping up my own portion of beans, Sample spun around abruptly to add a few more wienies to his plate, and then bludgeoned that poor giant forehead once again.

“Rrrraahh! Son of a bitch! Grrrrrr!”

One more whack, and he’ll remember that light fixture for sure. Gotta get that third one in and everything will be okay. But then again, this couldn’t have been his first time eating here. This was now suspicious.

Maybe he truly is a very special member of the crew.

Danny Sample sat down at the nuke table, as did I along with Jay-Jay, Hash Brown, everyone’s favorite squat Bruce Bells, my former barracks roommate Andrew Roscoe, one of my two current apartment roommates Jeff Decker the twidget, and this other twidget dude Christie, a Reactor Operator with a woman’s first name as a last name.

We usually used last names to address each other, even when off duty and off base. We were just so used to it, it carried over. And it could be amusing. For example, I would eventually serve with swabbies who had last names like Buggs and Pease. Since I am easily amused, I would crack up whenever an angry Chief would scream out their names with no context. Just their names. (Try yelling one of those two names out loud to someone random to see their response.)

Of course a Chief yelling out a name means get the fuck over here now, but as a very visual person, my mind instead would picture the Chief yelling out those names after either being startled by a sudden discovery of larvae somewhere in the Engine Room (Buuuugs!!!!) or that this Chief is warning all of us about the cook’s rather disappointing selection of vegetables that day (Peeeease!!!).

But this method of addressing sailors was most unfortunate for people who had girl’s first names for their last names, say like Kelly, Ashley, Madison or in this case, Christie. What are you a friggen girl!?! The odd thing about teasing this Reactor Operator Christie about having a girl’s name was that he was pretty much the strongest guy in the Engine Room. You’d think it would be a big burley mechanic, but no, it was an egg shaped twidget with lanky arms and legs. (He basically had the upper body of an orangutan.) Oh, the irony when these macho mechanics did not have the strength to do a certain task, they would always have to ask a twidget with a girl’s name for help.

Christie, I was told from some of these mechanics, could twist apart small valves with his bare hands. Okay, sure, but as a Reactor Operator, his watch station was at the very sensitive Reactor Plant Control Panel, and Christie was the only one in Maneuvering on our watch who was allowed to operate the critically important reactor control rod raise and lower switch. The Engineering Officer of the Watch probably shit a brick every time Christie had to adjust rod height.

Please don’t snap the switch off. Please don’t snap the switch off. Please don’t snap the switch off. Oh god, phew! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Christie might be the first guy you’d want to help you open a jar of pickles that you couldn’t, at least until you realize he would most likely shatter the jar with his grip strength, so you may as well just break it open yourself with a hammer. It’s like Christie had in his hand muscles a little bit of that fast-twitch fiber or whatever makes chimpanzees that are half our weight have 35% to 50% more strength than a human.

But Christie wasn’t the only one at the nuke table with superhuman abilities. Sample had ’em too, albeit his was a different set of skills. I was merely one person behind Sample on the line, yet I didn’t even get a bite into my grub before Sample polished off his entire plate. This guy just really loved to eat, and he had a technique. Sample tilted his neck almost parallel to the table, held his plate up to his face like a feed bag, and then shoveled the food in as fast as he possibly could. (I think that’s the most efficient feeding method when there is no funnel available.) To this day, I’ve never seen someone able to inhale so much food so rapidly.

It was like we picked him up in a dingy adrift at sea with ragged sun-bleached clothes and he hadn’t eaten in a few weeks. No wonder why he didn’t know the lighting fixture’s location yet. But holy hell, the speed and the sheer quantity of food he consumed was beyond most human’s abilities! Jay-Jay was visibly disgusted by it, and others chimed in too once he said something.

“Jesus Christ, Sample.”

“Save some for the guys on watch.”

“Yeah, slow it down Hoover.”

“You’re gonna suck up the whole table!”

“Dude, like where do you have room for all that food?”

“He keeps it in his forehead!”

Hoover was a pretty solid nickname for someone who vacuums up food for sure, but it was nowhere near as golden as his official nickname. I mean, this was the type of guy you just stare at in wonder. How does a person like him actually exist? When he got up from the table to get seconds, I had so many questions for Jay-Jay.

“He had to know what the lowest rank in the Navy was before joining, right?”

“Sample? Who the fuck knows what goes on inside that thick skull of his, mumble-ranting all that bullshit nonsense every other fucking minute?”

“There’s no way he didn’t know. No way. And yet he still joined anyway.”

Despite Danny Sample already making the rank of Second Class Petty Officer by the time I joined the San Francisco crew, all of his shipmates still called him Seaman Sample. Definitely a tough name/rank combo to shake, kind of like Private Parts or Major Wood, and I’d almost be inclined to feel sorry for him over that. Almost. But I mean, this guy could have joined the fucking Air Force. He was definitely smart enough. So instead of feeling sorry for Seaman Sample, I instead pictured his poor fucking drill instructor in boot camp. Yeah, some unlucky Chief had him lined up with all the other recruits not knowing how hard it was about to get keeping those fresh off the bus recruits together.

Imagine trying to be a serious and slightly scary military leader in front of all those recruits and about to address this Seaman Sample guy as your subordinate without having to pause for a bit to hold it in, desperately trying to maintain your composure, or just flat out busting out laughing. Go ahead and try it. Be the drill instructor. Give him an order in front of the other recruits who you’re trying to keep in line. Go ahead and shout this out:

“Extra duty for Seaman Sample!!!”

That’s a guaranteed complete loss of company composure right there! You’re not so scary to the recruits anymore, are you? So yeah, who do you really feel sorry for now? The drill instructor right? When thinking of that poor guy, I looked up from the table to see Seaman Sample spastically cut in line for seconds, nearly pushing the others out of the way while mumbling something, and then smack his forehead again.

“Grrrrr son of a bitch! Fuck!”

It didn’t deter him from filling up his plate one bit though. I wondered if his fivehead was originally a normal forehead size and then it just filled up with scar tissue. I soon discovered that he would bludgeon that poor noggin of his relentlessly on the same objects day in and day out. At least each and every time he did this, he would react hilariously, grumbling and cursing, making these immensely unpleasant faces right after his skull took a good whack and then he’d just wander off ranting out loud. He most definitely did not abide by the rule of three, and it was glorious.

Seaman Sample sat back down with us, positioned his head parallel with the table, picked up his plate and shoveled another round of food in. My roommate Decker started making tornado noises. Everyone’s favorite squat Bruce Bells reached over in front of Seaman Sample to get the salt. Bruce immediately pulled his arm back and hid it behind his back while crying out,

“Ahhh!!! He bit my arm off and ate it!!!”

None of this phased Seaman Sample. He finished his plate, told everyone to fuck off, and went for thirds. He managed to not clobber his head for a fourth time, as if the rule of three worked, but unfortunately for him, that rule seemed to reset after each day. The light fixture in front of the buffet trays would surely get him again a few times tomorrow. And I was going to be there to witness it!

As you might be able to tell, I was a big fan of Seaman Sample. If you took the time to get to know him, you’d find that he was smart, competent, and funny. And by funny, I mean not just unintentionally, but also intentionally funny. Yeah, he had all these clever quips if you actually tuned into what he was grumbling about. Okay, hold on. Who am I kidding? This Seaman Sample guy was pure comedy gold almost entirely for his propensity for hammering his head into things like he meant to do it, and his insane superhuman eating habits, the likes of which I had never witnessed before.

These Mess Deck observations of him had me thinking though. There was this persistent maxim throughout my time in the Navy that submariners were served the “finest food in the fleet.” I, however, never bought into such propaganda. Now I had a theory behind this maxim. Those who made the determination that submariners get the best chow in the entire Navy must have based their findings purely through surveillance of submarine sailors such as Seaman Sample when feeding.

So that brings us to meal service. How is the food on submarines in your estimation? Any good?

Well sir, they eat the food so rapidly that they have trouble breathing and are on the verge of passing out.

Is that so? Wow.

Yes, sir. In fact, they deem the food so good that it’s worth running head-first and ramming into anything that stands in their way in order to obtain some.

Hmm. Indeed, they must be served best damn chow in the Navy. Put that on the recruitment posters.

How about the ‘finest food in the fleet,’ sir?

Perfect. Make it so.

It was a solid theory because while the food on a submarine was decent, was it really the finest? Was it actually any different than what they served on an aircraft carrier? I don’t think so. It’s not like we were being served champagne and caviar or anything like that. I mean, if the food was so damn good on a submarine, then why the hell was it still served in a place called the Mess Deck by people called Mess Specialists? That’s the same as every other tin can in the fleet and only one step away from calling the food slop!

Now if you are wondering why the Navy called our food a mess, it wasn’t because we sailors were a bunch of fucking slobs while eating. I mean, sure, many of us indeed were, like Seaman Sample for instance, but that’s not the origin of the name. Pardon my Old French, but mes—from which “mess” was derived—simply means a dish (as in an entrée), and not how sailors actually ate back then or eat right now. So, the Mess Deck could literally be translated to the “food level” on a ship.

But I stand by my logic. If we were truly served the finest food in the fleet, then they would at least upgrade the name of the location we were served such fine food in order to distinguish this service from other vessels. And I would think that they would at least name it anything other than something synonymous with a floor containing dirty debris in disarray. Instead of the Mess Deck, in a submarine, could we not eat on the Entrée Entresol with this finer food of ours?

No, because we didn’t have finer food on submarines. Like I said, it was decent. Nothing to write home about. It was basically high school cafeteria food. Hotdogs, hamburgers, bland tough cuts of steak, lots and lots of slimy skinned baked chicken, overcooked mushy spaghetti and meatballs and all sorts of canned vegetables, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, boiled potatoes, French fries, baked beans, lima beans, kidney beans, navy beans, canned corn, creamed corn, corn on the cob, and apple sauce were standard fare. Those were the decent meals, but there were also some really bad ones.

Most of the bad ones were served for midrats. You already know about the canned ravioli filled with baby meat and laxatives. But even those raviolis weren’t the worst of the midrats in my opinion. I think my least favorite midrats meal was the pile of nasty bologna sandwiches that came with hardened American cheese slices and were slathered with insane amounts of mayonnaise that needed to be wiped off. (I really hate mayo.) It’s a meal you make and eat when you have simply given up on life.

But at least you knew what you were in for during midrats. It’s midrats; what do you expect? So, the absolute worst meal was when we were looking forward to a decent lunch or dinner like burgers and fries, but then you look at the menu board in the main passageway and see that the Mess Specialists decided to really fuck us over by making their infamous beef yakisoba. It was just awful. At least the way they made it. I had no idea of what beef yakisoba was actually supposed to taste like, but I was one hundred percent certain that this was not it. And they put that disgusting what seemed to be cabbage flavored spaghetti with chunks of shoe leather tasting crap on the menu once a week, on random days you couldn’t predict.

Why would they do this to us!?!

Yet it’s not all doom and gloom. There were also things they made that were outstanding. A peculiar thing about our Mess Specialists, and I’m not sure if this applies to all those on submarines in general or specifically to the ones aboard the USS San Franciso, but they were fantastic bakers. Passable cooks, horrible beef yakisoba makers, but simply fantastic bakers.

This is odd to me because unlike cooking, baking seems more like an art than a science. Once you put all your ingredients together, you don’t have the ability to fine tune what you’re baking during its time in the oven unlike how you are able to when simply cooking something. Hmm, needs more seasoning. No, with baking, you get what you get once it comes out of the oven.

While I was aboard the San Fran, wow, those Mess Specialists made incredible bread, cake, and cookies. I will say their oven warm chocolate chip cookies were among the best I’ve ever had. Sorry mom! Okay I’m in trouble now, so let’s move on to talking about how skilled they were at making bread from scratch. (Mom never did that.)

Yes. Their hot, freshly baked bread. So good! We needed it, and they kneaded it. The smell was great, but the taste was fantastic. From French bread to dinner rolls to pizza dough, this was a pleasant surprise. So that chatty coner was right. Pizza night was truly the best night. (It would eventually become a reoccurring thing for Friday night midrats, the only midrats we looked forward to.) Everyone got up for the made-from-scratch dough, fresh baked pizza night, even if they weren’t the on-coming watch. Everyone. It was that good!

So, maybe the surface fleet had shitty bakers? Maybe they didn’t know how to make fresh pizza with dough from scratch? I dunno. What I do know is that I don’t think our baked delights alone were enough to stake the claim that submariners were served the finest food in the fleet. I actually have a pretty damn convincing argument as to why I think this “finest food in the fleet” saying was just a misinformation campaign to get you to sign up for the entirely volunteer silent service. It was one word:

Portmanteaus.

Allow me to explain. The Navy just loves portmanteaus as you must be well aware of by now. So, let’s compare a couple of the portmanteaus regarding food in the two different types of vessels. You know that submarines get MIDRAT’s, and you know that stands for midnight rations, and you know they’re pretty gross. But did you know that aircraft carriers get UNREP’s? No? So, what are those then? They’re underway replenishments.

All those targets in the Carrier Battle Groups get an underway replenishment every seven to ten days, which includes food. Lucky them. Submarines don’t get unreps. We slip away and then don’t reveal ourselves until we return to port. That means a heavy reliance on frozen and canned items. How the hell can that be part of any fine food experience? Shouldn’t a fine food experience be exclusively fresh food!?!

That was definitely not the submarine experience, as the longer we were out on patrol, the more food items we would run out of. Fresh produce, for example, was gone after one week. Then each new week brought a new shortage, with milk from an actual cow’s teat typically being another early casualty. After running out of real milk, we’d soon be out of real eggs and would switch over to powdered eggs.

Oddly enough, after a few weeks in, the noticeable shift to powdered eggs came as a slight relief. This was because we kept the real eggs in the Engine Room for all those previous weeks, right on my watch station. I mean, don’t we have to refrigerate them back at home to keep all that bacteria out? Evidently not on a submarine. I dunno. Maybe they were unwashed European eggs with their cuticles still intact. If not, hmm… suspicious. Perhaps they figured poisoned eggs were a good way to kill off the weaker sailors.

Since they usually kept those cases upon cases upon cases of our unrefrigerated eggs in Engine Room Lower Level, it gave me an activity to do while bored on watch. I used to poke little holes in the big boxes, steal an egg or two, and then attempt to hard boil them. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any actually boiling water in my spaces. I only had warm water or steam. Those were my choices. So, I’d stick them in a drain funnel and crack a steam blowdown valve above them. Seemed like no matter how long I left them steaming, they always came out too runny for my tastes. That’s probably how the French seamen preferred them.

As you can probably tell, one could get quite a bit of mileage from egg jokes on a submarine with its bored, captive audience onboard. For example, we never tired of mentioning our green eggs and ham, as Dr. Seuss popularized, since the powdered eggs usually came out kind of green for who knows what most likely unsettling reason?

Would you eat them on a boat? Would you eat them with a goat?

Another classic was telling everyone that we couldn’t fit the fresh eggs in the refrigerators because, duh, that’s where we have to keep all the wet garbage! Well, that actually wasn’t a joke. The refrigerators were precisely where they put the big, leaky, smelly bags of wet garbage. Right on top of the food about to be consumed. Those bags had to go someplace, so I suppose that I should be grateful they put the eggs in my Lower Level watch station instead of those smelly bags of wet garbage.

Speaking of wet garbage, if you were thirsty, you could drink either plastic cow or bug juice. Plastic cow was powdered milk, what we drank after running out of real milk, and the nickname sort of made sense. From where else would you get fake milk? It was pretty bland, like drinking white water, thick white water rather, but if you added a little bit of sugar to it, it at least tasted like something.

Bug juice was military spec Kool-Aid, yet the name was a bit puzzling in the pre-internet days. Turns out that the bright red water-soluble food coloring came from a cactus dwelling insect called a cochineal. Wish I knew that back then. Requesting a “cochineal cocktail” from the food service attendant has a nice ring to it. But no, we always called it bug juice, and just like our green eggs, no one knew the reason why.

We obviously also had plenty of water and coffee to drink as well, but unlike on aircraft carriers, we didn’t have fresh juice or soda fountains or even soda vending machines to buy an ice cold one post-watch. After a two year addiction to highly caffeinated soft drinks like Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper which sustained our long days of studying through the nuclear peepayleenay, you have to quit such cold sodas cold turkey once aboard a submarine. (It’s like they’re preparing you on your way to becoming a Chief by only offering burnt coffee for the caffeine fix you need to stay awake on the balls o’clock watch.)

After roughly ten minutes of bug juice and beanie and wienie consumption—where somehow Seaman Sample was able to ingest three whole servings of such in that little time—it was time for us oncoming watch standers to clear out of the Mess Deck and head aft to the Engine Room. Christie was the Reactor Operator, Seaman Sample was the Electrical Operator, Hash Brown was the Throttleman, Roscoe was Engine Room Upper Level, Decker was the Reactor Technician (in Engine Room Middle Level), Bells was Engine Room Forward, and Jay-Jay and I were Engine Room Lower Level, with me under instruction. We cranked open the hatch to the reactor tunnel and disappeared back into the engineering spaces to make our reliefs.

< SIX HOURS LATER >

The hatch would slowly crank back open and the lot of us would pour out from the reactor tunnel after being relieved. We needed more food and a chance to use the potty! After hitting the head, we’d hop on the chow line in the dimly lit main p-way. So that makes this a good time to talk about the submarine string. Right there in the main passageway.

If you are not familiar with the submarine string, it’s a cliché in nearly every submarine movie. One of the characters ties a string across two bulkheads, nice and tight while on the surface. Then the Captain immediately crash-dives the ship to some extremely deep depth. For what reason? I don’t know. For movie reasons. It’s Hollywood.

Typically, they submerge beyond their maximum allowable depth because the fictional Captain knows his fictional ship better than the fictional engineers who pretended to design it. At this point, the camera pans back to that once taut string. It is now sagging considerably, and some noob swabbie makes a frightened face. This face and that string display the tremendous compression stress the submarine is subjected to due to the crushing ocean pressure. The Captain will then make some remark such as, “She’s a tough boat.”

And cut!

Such cinematography! However, I have never so cinematically tied a string on the San Fran, nor have I witnessed others do it. This was not due to lack of curiosity. Of course, I wanted to know if this Hollywood submarine cliché was legit. The curiosity was there, but the necessity was not. You see, I had all the information necessary to confirm it on the Mess Deck. This data was provided by the depth indicator—inexplicitly located at shin level below the milk machine if you recall—and by the menu case located in the main p-way at the forward entrance of the Mess Deck.

Other than the odd low-down location in which I can’t explain, the depth indicator itself needs no explanation. The menu case, however, surely does. It was nothing fancy. Really it was just a sheet of plexiglass fastened directly into a metal frame mounted on the steel bulkhead. The daily menu was slipped behind that plexiglass. It was tight enough against the bulkhead that the menu was held up firmly in the center. On the surface that is.

Once submerged, the submarine would begin to compress, including the bulkhead and the metal frame that the plexiglass was attached to. At our standard operating depth, the plexiglass was no longer tight, and the menu would fall to the bottom. One day while waiting in line, I noticed the menu case bowed out over an inch from the wall. A quick glance under the milk machine confirmed that we were at our maximum allowable depth, which is called our “test depth.” No strings were attached. No noobs were frightened by the loose menus. No fictional Captain to call the San Fran a tough boat. (Although in seven years, she would prove that she most certainly was.)

I should add that I was glad my Captain wasn’t a fictional one, and that there was no script for us to go beyond test depth to check the string. We always forgot to tie that string. And without that string, the next cinematic cliché to show the immense seawater pressure would be a rivet or two shearing off and shooting around the place like a bullet. Someone would get grazed but never killed. And if there were no rivet bullets available, the last cliché was always some inconsequential pipe bursting that is easily isolated with one valve and a lot of yelling, yet oddly has no discernable effect on ship’s performance for the duration of the movie. (Like maybe don’t install all these non-useful water pipes just waiting to rupture in the Control Room in the first place, you damn fictional engineers?) Hollywood writers, I swear!

After chowing down, we weren’t quite done with our duties. Once the meal was complete, we had to head back to the Engine Room to take care of the two combined hitlists of “items to correct” made by the Engineering Watch Supervisor (usually a Chief, but sometimes a lowly First Class Petty Officer and sometimes a mighty Senior Chief) and the Engineering Officer of the Watch (usually a Lieutenant Junior Grade, but sometimes a lowly Ensign and sometimes a full-on Lieutenant). They made their hitlists during their individual once-per-shift tour of the Engine Room. And by correct, they meant clean. This one-hour post-watch clean up session was directed by the off-watch EWS himself.

The post-watch cleanup was mostly just some stupid going-through-the-motions gestures since we were constantly cleaning throughout the watch anyway. You don’t want to bag your relief with oil streaking down all over the place and pooling somewhere or having bilges filled with water. We went through these motions because senior officers like the Engineer, Executive Officer and Captain just love hitlists. In fact, the only thing senior officers love more than hitlists are hitlists with each line crossed out. We were cleaning things simply to get some lines crossed out on those lists and make those senior officers happy.

For this post-watch cleanup, we had the Bull Nuke, a mighty Senior Chief, watching over us as he was the fresh off duty Engineering Watch Supervisor. (EWS’s and EOOW’s are on four section rotation, not three section rotation like us lowly junior enlisted watch standers. Therefore, we had a different EWS and EOOW for each watch over our three-section rotation.) The Bull Nuke chose Shaft Alley, port side forward as our spot to clean. I was assigned shop vac duty, and he wanted me to clean out the frame sections that were actually below the deck plates for the big R-114 air conditioning units.

I always found that the best post-watch cleanup duty was operating the shop vac, so this was pleasing to me. With the shop vac, I could hide out of sight around a corner somewhere while leaning up against something in a relaxed manner doing next to nothing. (Out of sight, out of mind is always best.) All I had to do was move an oil rag in and out of the nozzle to change the pitch of the vacuum cleaner every so often. That made it sound like I was actually doing something meaningful. Believe it or not, I never got caught skylarking like this.

While leaning up against the port side air conditioning units, I had a good view of the others with their shittier cleaning assignments like Seaman Sample walking around with their buckets of hot, soapy water and scrubby pads. Sample was a watch-stander in Maneuvering but was now cleaning my turf in Shaft Alley. A fish out of water. By observing him, I believe I learned a bit about the Newport News Shipbuilding design philosophy.

One of the drills we’d run every-so-often was one called “Repel Boarders.” The coners up front, particularly the Torpedomen, had to train with firearms for this drill. In contrast, there wasn’t much for the nukes to do in the Engine Room. The order merely had us gather heavy tools to beat people with. (I am not joking. That was my duty when they ran that drill. Find the largest wrench and keep it on me until we secured from the drill. Never did get to beat anyone, unfortunately.) And now I understood why Newport News designed the ship with all these traps. Clearly for these unwanted boarders to become ensnared inside an unfamiliar vessel.

Take the location of one of the oxygen candle furnaces used to make breathable air in emergencies when our main oxygen generator was down (which actually happened rather frequently). There was one up in the cone, but I’m talking about the one on the port side forward of Shaft Alley here. That little round furnace was down on the deck, and at first, it looked to me like it was just thrown there when they realized they forgot about it. But then they ran a low hanging cooling water pipe right in front of it. They did this all over the ship. Distract you with things on the deck so you’d brain yourself on something you would ordinarily be staring directly at when looking straight ahead.

It’s a trap!

From behind, I saw the Shaft Alley shy Seaman Sample wander into the area carrying his bucket of hot soapy water looking for a dirty spot, catch sight of the oxygen furnace on the deck, predictably smack his head into the low hanging cooling water pipe hard enough to spill quite a bit of his hot soapy water out the bucket, and then grumble and curse as was his custom. I found this immensely enjoyable of course while momentarily pausing the movement of my oil rag in and out of the shop vac nozzle.

After a couple of seconds of recovery, he then took a few steps, noticed that it was a dead end, abruptly turned around, took a few steps back the other way while looking down at the oxygen furnace to avoid tripping over it, and then fucking bludgeoned his head on the exact same cooling water pipe as he did when entering the area just a moment prior. He spilt more water, grimaced, grumbled and cursed, and found this even more enjoyable than the first hit as I could see his face this time.

Only people who personally know Seaman Sample will believe I just saw this this double whammy in the space of two spastic seconds.

The Bull Nuke returned to my area about forty five minutes into our post-watch cleanup to inspect the results. I hadn’t done a damn thing he directed me to do, as I had been utilizing the oil rag in the nozzle trick to keep him away, but then he pulled out a god damn mother fucking Maglite flashlight! I didn’t expect that! I was doomed! The Bull Nuke started looking down into the frame below the deck plates while shining the flashlight right where he told me to vacuum. I was expecting to be chewed out for poor performance, as I cleaned not one iota of what he prescribed.

“Looks good.”

“Uh, really?”

“Yeah, empty out the shop vac, strap it down, and then you’re dismissed.”

“Sure I didn’t miss any spots, Senior?”

“I’m sure. Get out of here.”

I felt a mixture of relief and anger. I was sure glad I didn’t get into any trouble. Yet this made it especially evident that this post-watch cleanup crap was a waste of our fucking time, and it made me really mad. I could be sleeping! Why the hell did we just waste our time doing this!?! Like was the Bull Nuke simply satisfied that he was now able to cross something off a list of items to “correct” in order to turn that bullshit crossed off hitlist over to the Engineer, so regardless of actual results after an hour, we were in good shape?

It fucking burned me. Damn, I really hated that post-watch clean up crap. Worse than mushy meat ravioli midrats, worse than rough cut bologna, hardened American cheese and mayonnaise slathered midrat sandwiches, and hell, maybe worse than even surprise beef yakisoba! But then I eventually swung back the other way and settled on feeling that this was definitely way better than getting chewed out and told to clean for another hour.

I went to the cone, took a Hollywood shower, returned to the Mess Deck to watch a midnight movie, and finally hit the rack with Napalm Death blasting into my ears at full volume. Then someone whipped open my curtain and blasted a flashlight into my face.

“Droughton wake up! You got watch!”

“Fuck.”

This cycle repeated every eighteen hours for as many days as it took until we heard the Chief of the Watch declare we were surfacing over the 1MC ship-wide announcing circuit, sound the dive alarm, announce it again, wait a bit, and then finally hear the Engineering Officer of the Watch unenthusiastically repeat it once over the 2MC engine room announcing circuit as if it was an inconvenience.

“Surface.”

The Helmsman and Planesman would then drive us up to the surface, and some coners would line up the low pressure blower to push the water in the five ballast tanks out the bottom of them until we were as buoyant as a beach ball bobbing around on the surface. We would rock and roll our way back to Pearl Harbor, tie to the pier, wrestle the shore power anaconda cables back over the brow so the wire biters could make the connections, shut down the reactor and propulsion plants, offload trash, and then those who didn’t have duty would get the hell out of there.

We had surfaced from the sea, and it was now time for us to dive into some booze.