The most harrowing part of the night is when we spotted a merchant ship. I said earlier but you don’t exactly get many contacts out there in the middle of the Philippine Sea, and I had been hoping to go the night without one (it must have been just before midnight when I took the watch) but here one was coming along. My big worry is that we couldn’t maneuver out of the way of anyone since we didn’t have propulsion. It doesn’t feel great to be a sitting duck nuclear powered warship without propulsion and it feels worse to announce it to the world, but I had the off-going lookout try to rustle up the “not under command” lights which were supposedly hidden in the fan room somewhere. I’m not sure a nuclear-powered submarine has ever displayed those lights and unfortunately I didn’t get to be the first because we never found them. Anyways it was all moot in the end because although the merchant ship was coming from such an angle that we would have been the give-way vessel had giving way been necessary, he never got within 10 miles of us so none of it mattered in the end.

That left me with the second-most-harrowing part of the night, which was that I started to get a little chilly. It might have been the Philippine Sea near the equator, but I was used to warm temperatures and it was the middle of the night and there was a bit of a breeze and there I was in just my coveralls so I started to get just a wee bit cold. I thought fondly of my sweater that was hanging up in my stateroom (on good days, you know when you have a nuclear reactor that operates, the AC is on full blast and the control room gets a little chilly and you can just chill in your fetching little sweater as you command a warship around). I also thought about all my poor crewmates boiling in a very hot submarine with sweat literally dripping down the walls, and more importantly what their reaction would be if I complained about being a little chilly, and so therefore decided that discretion was the better part of valor and opted not to ask a messenger to run me up a sweater.

Meanwhile all those nerds back in the engineroom were trying to fix whatever was wrong so we could start up again. I stayed out of it. I did have to call back at one point to ask nicely if we could turn on the air compressor and the Engineering Officer of the Watch was kind enough to give us the power to do so, but I tried to avoid bothering them and also tried to avoid learning anything at all about what was going on. I was pretty successful. Eventually my relief came up and my watch ended. My relief was standing his first surfaced Officer of the Deck watch and was excited about getting such an easy one after hearing all about my honestly very relaxing seven hours or so. The sun was coming up and he was looking forward to a glorious morning of getting a tan. It was not to be. They had fixed the reactor and it was now time for the emergency reactor startup. That, I understand, went pretty flawlessly, thanks to the Engineering Officer of the Watch who was probably a bit intense for his own good but just intense enough for the good of our continued propulsion. Our poor Officer of the Deck had to suddenly figure out what was going on, ask for various permissions, and, you know, drive a submarine around. Poor guy.

Meanwhile I had a lovely breakfast of whatever the cooks could scrounge up and then hung out until it was time to do some rigging for dive so we could get back underwater once the reactor was going. Those duties eventually complete, I went to bed. The weirdest part about this whole adventure is that when I woke up for my next watch it was honestly like the whole thing had never happened. Everything was back to normal, the walls were no longer sweating, and I took over a watch as Contact Manager in my cozy little sweater with the soft sounds of passive sonar coming in over the speakers. The emergency reactor shutdown and startup and panic and diesel generator not starting and then it did start and high pressure blows and all that jazz was like a weird dream. Except someone had to write an incident report. Not me. I stayed out of it. Nuclear power kids: fantastic, the best, but much more enjoyable when left to other people.

The end!

As another side note, a buddy of mine one time met someone who worked in Hollywood or something. This person told my friend that he knew some guys and maybe if he worked something up he could pitch a submarine TV show to some people. The greatest submarine TV show is of course Last Resort, but it was fun to imagine alternatives. My buddy turned to me to help out with ideas, and the two I remember were doing an episode a la Waiting… where a new Ensign shows up and can’t get a word in edgewise all day as he is shuffled around from misadventure to misadventure, and my other idea was basically my experience here where a dude wanders around oblivious to the obvious crisis going on around him because he just woke up and had expected drills anyways. Of course this TV show never got pitched let alone made, but knowing someone who knows someone and saying that maybe something could get pitched seemed like a very Hollywood experience if not the quintessential Hollywood experience and I was happy to be a part of it.

On watch the first brilliant idea I had was that we should shut down some sonar arrays. They take up power and we were at periscope depth so they weren’t really all that necessary. So I wandered into the sonar shack with the intention of telling them to shut some stuff down, but when I opened the door I was immediately greeted by our senior sonar tech in his underwear who announced to me all wild-eyed that they had already shut everything down and they were only on the hull array. Later I thought to myself that he should have asked me first before he did that but in the moment I just said good and backed away slowly, and then quickly.

Our senior sonar tech was in his underwear because as I alluded to for our poor Gulf of Aden friends as soon as you shut down the reactor it gets hot. You can only run the air conditioning when you have the reactor because the load is too big for the diesel. And out there near the equator the water temperature is in the 80s, and as the submarine is, you know, immersed in water the coolest it can ever get is in the 80s. Then you add into the mix every source of heat on the submarine, such as any cooking that happens, all the waste heat from the computers, all the body heat from over 100 people, and oh yeah all the latent heat in the steam plant and the decay heat from a whole nuclear reactor and it gets so very very hot on the submarine. Sweat dripping down the walls hot. Our captain pretty quickly said people could go to half-mast on their coveralls, and I was unfortunate enough to get to witness the good (he was not very good) captain set the example by peering through the periscope in his white boxers and white undershirt, positively glowing in the dim red lights of our overheated control room.

My prescient prediction during the pre-watch brief that we might surface, or might not, came true very quickly when the captain burst in to tell the OOD to do a 10-second high-pressure blow. We did that and we were surfaced. Usually surfacing is a bit slower than that, but without the reactor you couldn’t do it the slow way and since we were going to be in this for a bit it was better to be bobbing on the surface instead of maintaining periscope depth. Surfacing through presented some troubles, namely that we had to send someone up to the bridge to man it up there and also have two people on the periscopes and there were barely enough warm bodies to go around. I was on periscope while the bridge got manned by the off-going OOD. Luckily my OOD had gotten the diesel started and came back to man the periscope with me. Once the bridge got manned we had to decide who was going to go up and relieve him since he was off-going. I gave my OOD (well he was supposed to be OOD but due to this whole thing he wasn’t OOD) the option of going up, but he said he would rather stay in control, so up I went to man surface OOD. And man lemme tell ya it was nice. As I was heading up there my poor helm made a point to note that he couldn’t maintain a course within 40 degrees of anything. Since we were in an emergency we were on the emergency propulsion motor which on a good day gives you like three knots but since it wasn’t a good day it wasn’t giving us anything at all really so without propulsion we couldn’t maintain course. That was fine, really, we had no place to be. So there I was on watch with nothing to do since we had nowhere to go and everyone was really busy trying to get the neutrons back in the reactor or whatever. The biggest decision I had to make is that my Chief of the Watch called up and asked if there was any way we could run the high pressure air compressor since we had used up all our air on the surfacing procedure, and so I called back to the Engineering Officer of the Watch, who was pretty busy, and asked nice, and he said we could, so there you go (he had to balance loads on the diesel).

To be continued…

The point I was trying to make with that anecdote is that after discovering that I was just as competent as anybody else trying to run the reactor and “just as competent” meant that everyone was pretty much faking it, the wool was pulled off my eyes and I realized a large chunk of what we did was just dumb. One time I was in the midst of a reactor repair and it would take a lot of context to explain fully but a guy hit the wrong menu item on a laptop and I think re-downloaded some data instead of saving it, or something. This affected nothing and the obvious solution was just to hit like “save” again but we couldn’t do it because it wasn’t in the procedure and so I had to sit there and stare at this dude, and we had both been on watch for like 14 hours at this point, and were very sleep deprived, while the other nuclear people went off and had a very serious discussion over whether we could hit “save” on this stupid little laptop because that was the obvious answer but it wasn’t written in the procedure so we weren’t sure if we would be smited by the nuclear gods if we did this, and look it was all really really stupid and in nuclear power you had to pretend like it wasn’t and I was fed up with it all. I requested to be de-nuked actually. I have a whole other set of stories about how nuclear qualification testing worked, but honestly I’m not going to get into that. If you haven’t caught on the whole schtick of these current set of blog posts is to tell the most meandering sea story possible so I can catch up on over a month’s worth of posts, but going into nuclear qualification testing is a bit too much. I gotta save something for later.

So anyway. Finally. My one decent sea story. Look, it’s going to start off nuke-y which I’ve said is bad but bear with me for a bit. We did an emergency reactor shutdown at sea and I’m not entirely sure why. My impression was that we didn’t really need to but it was the current hip thing to do in the submarine force so we did it. What started this whole thing off was an intentional shutdown. Sort of. A scram drill. A scram drill wasn’t that big of a deal, or at least it isn’t supposed to be. A down-and-up, they’re called. In a simple scram drill you throw the scram switch, half the rods go down, and this shuts down the reactor though the reactor barely notices. I knew they were going to do a down-and-up drill on the watch before my watch, so when I woke up there were 1MCs (ship-wide announcements) about a scram but despite the fact you are supposed to listen to 1MCs I just entirely ignored them. I just went about my wake-up routine, such as going to the bathroom and taking a shower. I was only supposed to stand contact manager that watch, which is a really easy job out there in the middle of the Philippine Sea where you will get like one contact a watch, maybe, and it will be a distant merchant ship, and so all you do is just stand there, so there wasn’t a need for a robust pre-watch tour. So there I was in a little la-la land of my own making when I finally wandered up to the bridge and realized everything was on fire. Luckily, only metaphorically. Our down-and-up drill had just turned into “down” because when they inserted the scram something or other went wrong. I’m not sure what, as I’ve reiterated, but it meant we had to do an emergency reactor shutdown. Look, I know what you’re saying, we had a scram in so the reactor was already shut down, this is true, but we shut it down more. There are procedures and stuff. Maybe some valves? I dunno, it’s been a while. What was going on with the reactor was only relevant to me because the submarine was at periscope depth and people were panicking. If the reactor is going to be shut down for a while you have to start up the diesel so you can continue to run important stuff like reactor coolant pumps with keep the reactor cool, and ventilation fans and ballast pumps which keep us from dying. And just about the time I wandered up to the bridge they were trying to start the diesel and it wasn’t starting. Uh oh! The guy who was supposed to stand OOD was the guy who was in charge of the diesel, so he had to run off to try to fix that so we didn’t die or whatever. That left me the person in charge, and I had barely thought I would need to stay conscious this watch. I tried to evaluate what was going on, watch-wise, which was mostly AHHH EVERYTHING IS BAD AHHH, and then I went down for the pre-watch brief. We normally did the pre-watch brief in the wardroom, but that was full of people trying to figure out how to reverse course on the whole AHHH EVERYTHING IS BAD AHHH thing, and plus half the watchsection, including the OOD, was off trying to fix the problem, so that left me and a small gaggle of the leftover watchstanders in athwartships, the most out-of-the-way place we could muster, with me trying to lead a pre-watch brief. Just to finish painting the picture in my memory it must have been night or something and so all the lights were red and various slightly panicked 1MCs were being announced so it was confusion. And the pre-watch brief consisted I think pretty much literally of me saying: “Well, uh, we are at periscope depth and the reactor is shut down. We might surface, or we might not, who knows, so, um, be prepared for that. Any questions?” There were no questions. We gobbled down some I think olives and pudding (i.e. things out of cans because there was no power to cook with) and head up to watch.

To be continued…

A normal reactor startup is very boring. All that really actually happens is you pull the control rods out, but since it is the nuclear navy doing that rather boring thing comes with a whole bunch of paperwork and oversight and a big brief and not being allowed off the ship the night before lest you show up to work drunk or hungover, which is probably a fine state to operate a nuclear reactor in but is officially discouraged by the powers that be. So an emergency reactor startup, to a nuke, sounds like a lot of fun. It isn’t too much fun, but something that is a little fun in the nuclear world is about as good as you are going to get so people hanker for it. When nukes talk about emergency reactor startups they are usually described as like, doing a reactor startup without any of the safety stuff, but that is not really true. If the lay man were to watch one they would be bored out of their minds, but theoretically it happens a bit faster than a normal startup because you move some mostly paperwork portions to after the startup instead of during, and like, I don’t think you have quite as many independent checks of some switches or something, but overall what I am trying to say here is that despite it being a very safe and controlled procedure every nuke ever wants to do an emergency reactor startup because it sounds fun and cool and when this submarine got to do one, despite the fact they all spent three days on the edge of heat exhaustion right in the middle of waters surrounded by people who don’t necessarily like us all that much, we were all very jealous.

And then do you know what happened?! Another one of the submarines stationed in Guam did an emergency reactor startup! I don’t recall at all why they felt they had to do an emergency reactor shutdown at sea, but they got to do a startup and we were so very very jealous. I mean it is one thing when some submarine you don’t really know gets to do an emergency reactor startup, but it is a totally different thing when like people you know get to do one! No fair! No fair at all! But our time would come. I make the point that we were jealous because from my understanding there was no real reason we needed to do an emergency reactor shutdown, but it had become the hip cool thing to do so when we had even a modicum of an excuse we went for it. Though I’m not entirely sure what had happened. By this point in my time on the submarine I was thoroughly disgusted with nuclear power. After I got out of the Navy I was trying to get my Mate’s license, and this involved taking classes with a bunch of ex-Navy types. They would ask me why I got out of the Navy, and I would just reply that “nukes are a bunch of anal-retentive assholes,” and all these ex-Navy guys would just nod in agreement and there would be no further questions. So that was part of it. The other part was just like, look, being “Engineer Qualified” is a big thing in the Nuclear Navy. It literally means you are qualified to serve as an Engineer Officer, but in a more general sense it means, or is supposed to mean, that you have a deep understanding of the nuclear plant and are as qualified as anyone to decide how the thing should be operated and that you could, if called upon, run the Engineering Department. You can be in charge of a nuclear reactor! Kind of cool. Before I was Engineer Qualified, I respected the judgement of Engineer Qualified people and thought they had some deep knowledge of nuclear reactors that I lacked but would someday gain. To get Engineer Qualified you go to Prospective Nuclear Engineer Officer School and study up on nuclear stuff for like, I think it was three months? Something like that. I thought people learned stuff there but I am here to tell you: no. I mean they do, but it is all what I refer to as “nuclear trivia.” Like, interesting things about the plant, and it is probably useful to spend some time reading Reactor Plant Manuals after you probably haven’t in a year, but there weren’t any deep secrets about the nature of nuclear power revealed or hidden tomes that only those that have paid their nuclear dues were allowed to read. It was just, you know, kinda nuclear trivia. And you memorized a whole bunch of that stuff and they sent you to DC to talk to some engineers that frankly had better stuff to do that day and they called you “Engineer Qualified” and suddenly you could be an Engineer if you wanted? I immediately lost all respect for anyone who was Engineer Qualified as soon as I became Engineer Qualified. Like all the time the Engineer would think one thing and I would think another and before of course I would have deferred to the Engineer but now I was just as qualified as he was, and clearly since we disagreed he was the idiot, and who the hell put him in charge of all this? That Engineer wound up getting fired for incompetence, which was unfair, because while he was in fact a tad incompetent every new guy is and in the case of the Engineer it is the captain’s job to make him competent and our captain, like I mentioned before, got fired for sheer incompetence and so was in no position to improve the lot of our Engineer. Honestly I think everyone involved is much happier now that they are out of the Navy. But that is a different story.

To be continued…

My only decent sea story does not begin in a bar, so it can’t be that good, though it does remind me of this one guy we had on the ship, Roberts. Roberts started his Navy career a bit later than the rest of us, and so when we all met him as impressionable like 25-year-olds he was the unimaginably old age of 28. If I recall correctly he worked as a college professor before joining the Navy. We had recently left Singapore and the ship had just popped out into the Pacific between Indonesia and Australia when Nav heard a weird noise. We were sitting in our stateroom and he asked me what it was and I said like “I don’t know” and we moved on with our lives. The noise was Roberts having a seizure and he woke up on the wardroom table (that’s where they do surgeries if they have to do a surgery at sea) with Doc and the Captain staring down at him. We had to get him off the ship lest he be dying or whatever but we were hundreds and hundreds of miles from any port that would be useful to us. We were eventually told to go back to Singapore and we zoomed on back there, diverting the submarine from whatever important thing we were doing and set off instead on a mad dash to get Roberts to a medical facility. A crew of over a hundred and a whole nuclear reactor and significant operational risk (by which I mean running into a banca boat (“banca” means “boat” so “banca boat” is redundant but that’s what we called them) which would cause us a lot of headaches and the poor guy driving the banca boat his life, probably) all dedicated to making sure Roberts didn’t die. We were successful in getting him to Singapore alive and from there he was supposed to get almost directly onto an airplane to Hawaii (i.e. the closest Naval Hospital that could give him a CT scan). Later, I forget where, we all ran into Roberts and talked about what happened. Turns out when he landed in Singapore, instead of going to the airport he called and got his flight bumped to a day or two later. He then proceeded to spend those two nights just partying his as-far-as-we-knew-at-the-time critically injured brains out. Singapore has a place the sailors all affectionally called the “Four Floors of Whores” (the ship had to post a watch there, to make sure no one got in too much trouble), and let me tell you Roberts was aware of this. He also told us that turns out once he got to Hawaii they discovered he had a brain tumor. It was benign but was pushing on his brain, giving him the seizure. Still, Roberts was viscerally aware that all good sea stories start with “so there I was in a bar…” Like I said this sea story, my one decent sea story, does not begin in a bar. It begins in the Philippine Sea. If you look at a map, the Philippine Sea is indistinguishable from the Pacific Ocean. But one time I was driving from the Bridge while we were tooling around west of Guam, and I noted we were in the Pacific, but my captain very quickly corrected me to say we were in the Philippine Sea. I am sure the fish are the same on either side of Guam and for what it’s worth that captain got fired due to sheer incompetence. Anyways. Previous to this sea story there had been a submarine that had to do an emergency reactor shutdown in I think the Gulf of Aden. Those guys did not have a good time. It is very hot in the Gulf of Aden, and once you shut the reactor down you don’t have air conditioning anymore. It got so hot that people couldn’t stay in the engineroom very long which hampered their efforts at diagnosing whatever was wrong with the reactor that caused them to shut down so they could fix it and start up again, which would give them back air conditioning. It would also of course give them back propulsion because a submarine with a broken reactor is a sitting duck, mostly just bobbing around on the surface with no real defense mechanisms. Not a great situation! Especially in the Gulf of Aden! A frigate came to try to help out but they mostly also just bobbed nearby (not a lot of nuke technicians on a frigate, which are also mostly without defense mechanisms, poor things). But every nuke that I knew was pretty riveted to this story, because an emergency reactor shutdown at sea means you get to do an emergency reactor startup when you finally fix whatever was broken.

To be continued…