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…