Sound the Collision Alarm, Flooding in Lower Level Engineroom forward

Not really sure which I had more respect for on a submarine; fire or flooding. I think most people who aren’t in a flooding situation will tell you that a fire is more feared. Between the round shape of the hull and all the stuff that can burn, fires have a tendency to spread pretty […]

A Shiny New Coat of Paint

I think that one of mankind’s greatest achievements is the evolution of paint. I also believe it is mankind’s greatest admission of imperfection. I have been intimate with paint since I was a young boy. My Grandfather had an old boat on the Monongahela River in Western Pennsylvania called the Dawn. She was a forty-eight […]

Monkey See, Monkey Do

As I have gotten older, I have discovered that the words on pages seem to have grown smaller and less distinguishable. I was convinced for some time that this was a result of printing companies using cheaper and less effective ink and smaller letters to conserve costs. Kind of like the fast food restaurants are […]

The Old Metal Box

We have moved 18 times in our thirty one years of being married and I moved quite a few times before that dating back to 1972. As far back as I can remember, I have kept two things with me in all of those moves. One is a tattered old World Atlas that I faithfully […]

What Would You Take With You?

One of the questions almost always asked during one of my submarine life talks is about sleeping on the sub. Most people who have been around sub sailors have heard about hot racking and I will have to admit to doing so a few times in my career as a lower rated enlisted man. Getting […]

Too Big To Fail

I was only able to serve on five subs and two of those were 688 class boats so my viewpoint may be a bit limited. But I am under the opinion that the designers did a pretty good job making a machine whose sole purpose was to hunt and kill the enemy. The reactor and […]

Need a lift?

August 8 1974 was the day when one of the most interesting events of the Cold War came to a dramatic point. On that day, the Glomar Explorer completed a journey and a mission that had been so well cloaked in secrecy, it is doubtful that we even know today all that transpired during the […]

Disrespected

Somewhere, Mrs. Stamps (my third grade teacher) is standing with her shoulders slightly slumped and shaking her head. She has just heard one of her students use a noun as a transitory verb for the hundredth time and feels like her mission of bringing proper English to the children of Mt. Vernon Elementary School has […]

You want me to do WHAT sir?

Most of us remember Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force. A 688 class submarine operating submerged has a displacement of about 6900 tons. So it […]

What a mess!

Imagine yourself on the periscope of a submarine about to shoot a torpedo. You can feel the adrenaline coursing through your veins and there is an icy sheen of sweat on your forehead. You call out for the Quartermaster to take your mark and he rushes over to note the direction. The control room crew […]