Lessons learned at theleansubmariner – 2013

Looking back over the past year of blogging, I have learned a few things about what people seem to like. Like most blogs, I have the ability to see what gets hits and what does not. The top post for the year (and frankly since the beginning of the blog) was I’d like to be […]

The First Thanksgiving (Updated from Original Post in 2013)

The First Thanksgiving If you are expecting a traditional story about Pilgrims and Indians, you might as well go back to your search engine and try again. This is a story about my real first Thanksgiving that occurred somewhere in the western Pacific Ocean about 150 feet below the ocean exactly forty years ago today […]

I’d like to be a submariner. How hard could that be?

Caution: Some salty language may be found in this post I belong to a number of very fine military organizations that all have special purposes. The Navy League for instance is a group that supports and promotes the sea services. I think this is important because of the dangers still present in the world at […]

Three Remarkable Days in Japan

Fast attack submarines play a key role in our nation’s defense and have done so for as long as I have been alive. For the record, that’s more than at least 59 years. I was a crew member on three different fast attacks although I only really deployed on one: The USS San Francisco SSN […]

Submarine Force Issues 2013

Its probably no coincidence that submarines are the focus of this article during a week that marks the highs and lows of US Navy submarine history. Save Our Subs: Prioritizing The Attack Submarine By Rep. Randy Forbes and Rep. Joe Courtney AOL Defense, April 9, 2013 For a host of security and economic reasons, […]

Escape of the Casabianca

One of the most daring episodes of World War 2 submarining took place on November 27, 1942. That story comes from the French Navy in the port of Toulon in a most unexpected fashion. On that day, the officers and men of the Casabianca disobeyed the orders of the Vichy French and managed to pull […]

In the First Hour of the Next Day

I wrote this story a few years ago before the current North Korean situation evolved. I wonder how real it could actually be The launch was not detected by our satellites because they were looking in the wrong area. No one would have suspected that the slow moving foreign flagged freighter carried such a horrible […]

But it was on the internet… they couldn’t put it on there if it wasn’t true could they?

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" – Edmund Burke Great quote! Unfortunately Edmund Burke never actually said that… The above is most likely a summary of the following quote in Burke’s "Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents": "When bad men combine, the good must […]

The Storyteller’s Burden

I don’t know when I first learned how to tell stories As a young boy, I listened to the stories of many people who were older than me. Some of them were meant to inform, some were meant to teach lessons, and of course in the early days, the hope was that if I listened […]

Bluejackets Manual, eighteenth edition, 1968 (Third Printing, September 1969)

I’m sure I have mentioned it before but I have a modest collection of Bluejackets Manuals dating back to the early 1900’s. I started out with my Grandfather Parkin’s manuals from the Second World War. From that time, I have added them as I find them in old book stores, sea ports, and Army Navy […]