Grunt (26 page)

To settle the matter, here comes the US Forest Service. Had you been off-loading garbage at a certain Minnesota dump on August 11, 1988, you would have been witness to an arresting sight. “We tied . . . [used] tampons to a monofilament line and spin-cast them to foraging bears,” wrote Lynn Rogers and two colleagues at the North Central Forest Experiment Station. Despite some fine fly-casting chops on show—the bait being “cast past the bears and dragged back under their noses”—20 out of 22 tampons were ignored. Such was also the fate of used tampons proffered “by hand” to black bears that frequented—though perhaps not anymore—an experimental feeding station. Also ignored: five used tampons tied together and thrown at a group of black bears, as well as all but one of a tasting flight of sodden tampons placed in the middle of a bear trail—four soaked with menstrual blood, one with nonmenstrual blood, and one with rendered beef fat. Ten out of eleven bears “swept their noses closely over the group, ate the tampon containing beef fat, and walked on.”

All in all, a resounding testament to the safety of national forests, and the patience of black bears.

F
RANK GOLDEN
was an authority on the things that happen to a human body immersed for any length of time in cold seawater. Golden—a physician who, by his own description, “swam like a stone”—researched the topic for the Royal Navy Air Medical School during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The text headings in Golden’s classic
Essentials of Sea Survival
provide a menu of horrors awaiting service members or anyone else forced to abandon ship or ditch a plane over water: Cold-Shock Response, Breath-Hold Time Reduction, Swim Failure, Drowning, Secondary Drowning, Saltwater Ulcers, Hydrocution, Trapped Under Ice, Severe Hypothermia, Oil Contamination, Immersion Foot, Turtle Blood,
§
Sunburn, Wave Splash, Osmotic Diarrhea, Rescue Collapse, Rewarming Collapse. There is no heading for Shark Attack. Sharks don’t even make the index.

To a sailor whose sunken craft is a submarine, all of this, the myriad dangers and discomforts of the ocean’s surface, are a distant fond dream.

___________

*
Two months into it, the Chief of the American Intelligence Command wrote to Harold Coolidge urging him to add piranhas to the list. AIC needed better piranha intelligence. Years ago, nature filmmaker Wolfgang Bayer told me the story of the time he was sent to the Amazon to get footage of bloodthirsty piranhas devouring a capybara. Bayer strung nets across the river to trap a school of piranhas. He captured a capybara and herded it into the river. Nothing. He starved the piranhas. Still nothing. He went home.

†
You may have heard stories about how Julia Child’s first recipe was for shark repellent. Her OSS employment file shows that she indeed worked for the head of the shark repellent project, Harold Coolidge, in the Office of Emergency Rescue Equipment in 1944. However, her title was Senior Clerk, and her name appears nowhere in the OSS shark files. Child herself made no claim to have come up with the recipe for Shark Chaser but said merely that she followed it, mixing the ingredients “in a bathtub.” This seems odd, as none of the other repellent prototypes were produced or tested at OSS headquarters. Leading me to wonder: Did she cook up Shark Chaser, or just a good story?

‡
The creator of the two-piece swimsuit, Louis Réard, named it “bikini” because of the explosive reaction he hoped it would generate. The false prefix “bi” has duped many over the years—including the inventors of the monokini, the tankini, the trikini—into wrongly assuming that
bikini
means “two pieces” in Marshallese. In fact, it means “coconut place”—making the term deliciously if inadvertently appropriate.

§
This one is not so bad, provided you know what you’re doing. Norwegian shipwreck survivor Kaare Karstaad, whom Harold Coolidge interviewed while working on an ocean survival booklet during World War II, knew what he was doing. He’d catch the turtles at night, when their blood was “cold and refreshing.” “Drink it right away,” he counseled, “before coagulation takes place.” Don’t shy away from body cavity fluid! A fifty-pound turtle yields “about 2 cups of ‘consommé’ which . . . is delicious and not extremely fishy.” Sharks, by the way, were “not particularly vicious.” (Or delicious.)

That Sinking Feeling

When things go wrong under the sea

T
HERE’S A SOUND THAT
water makes, under pressure, when it pushes through a hole too small for its urgency. I know it mainly as a sprinkler sound, a pleasant lawns-in-summer sort of sound.
Phhhhhhhh
. . . . To a sailor on a submarine, where there are no lawns and no summer, it’s not pleasant, this sound. It’s the sound of water coming in where it mustn’t. A leaking flange, a ruptured pipe. The ocean with its foot in the door. The deeper you are, the harder it pushes. Three hundred feet down, seawater slams through a two-inch hole with enough force to bend a knee the way knees don’t bend. At a thousand feet, an eight-inch hole lets an Olympic swimming pool on board every three minutes. If it’s not fixed fast, you’re in trouble. You’re sunk.

I’m looking down into a submarine engine room that’s putting out a lot of that sound. Eleven wet necks are bent over leaks—first three, now four. We are 200 feet above sea level, inside a building in Groton, Connecticut, so the risk of drowning is minimal. The room is a mock-up, part of the Naval Submarine School’s Damage Control Trainer, a.k.a. the Wet Trainer, a.k.a. “one of the reasons sailors swear.” I’m on the dry side of a large and very clear (it has wipers!) window that looks in on the engine room and the cursing sailors.

With me at the window is the instructor in charge today, Chief Machinist’s Mate Alan Hough. Every few minutes he gives directions over his shoulder to a colleague at a console manning the leaks, but his main focus is the students. He’s both grading them and giving them feedback. The latter he conveys via signs that he holds up to the window, because no one can hear him through the glass and over the
phhhhhhh.
TWO PERSONNEL PER LEAK. WORK BEHIND THE PATCH. NO STRAPPING IN THE WATER STREAM. The signs are rigid red plastic, custom-printed by someone who must have wondered.

Today’s subs run on modern technology, but when something goes wrong, the tools sailors turn to may date back to the days of wooden sailing ships. One of the sailors we’re watching uses a simple marlin. Beginning an inch below the hole, he winds a length of thin rope tightly around the pipe, choking the leak one wrap-around at a time. The “pine plug” is just a wood cone, an object more commonly seen in building block sets or geometry classrooms. The tip of the cone is hammered into the hole as far as it will go. As the pine absorbs water, which pine does more greedily than most woods, the cone expands, becoming a snugger fit and a more effective plug.

“Horn,” Hough says over his shoulder. The man at the console blasts an air horn to make the students look up from what they’re doing. Hough grabs a sign (TWO HANDS ON HAMMER) and points at the young man whose hammer and plug the water stream has batted away like a kitten with a yarn ball, or Godzilla with a kitten. This happens nine out of ten times, Hough says; they lose the plug, the hammer, or both. It wastes time when there isn’t any to be wasted. And is dangerous. Ninety pounds per square inch (psi) turns a geometry class learning aid into a “pointed missile hazard.” The sailor retrieves the cone, which is bobbing on the water a few feet behind him. “One good thing about pine,” says Hough. “It does float.”

A hammer does not. “That’s why we tell ’em: hammer of opportunity.” If you lose the hammer, grab what’s at hand. This goes equally for plugs. When al-Qaeda blew a 40-by-60 foot hole in the hull of the USS
Cole
, the crew stuffed it with anything they could find. “Mattresses, wood, mooring line, sneakers . . . ,” Hough says soberly. “Wrapped it up and shoved it in the hole.” It took three days, but they got the flooding under control.

I had met Hough earlier in his office, which he shares with two other men. A jar of Smucker’s Goober Grape stood out for the stripey, colorful whimsy it brought to the ill green-beige that someone, at some point, decided to paint the US military. Hough is rangy and pale-complected. He has an appealing overbite that, as he speaks, causes his incisors to touch down on his lower lip like children jumping on a bed. He was raised in a region of the country where people use “them” as an indicator rather than “those.” But Hough is nobody’s goober. He can take apart a steam turbine faster than most people can put a name to it.

Everything else in today’s leak-stopping arsenal is classed as a patch. The term is apt, but misleadingly unintimidating. This isn’t like patching a pair of pants. It’s like patching a riot hose while the water’s still on. You can’t come down on the rupture from above. The patch has to be slid over it from the side, like a blanket over a trash-can fire, and then cinched tight.

Hough watches a pair of sailors fail to secure a medium-sized patch called a strongback. The strapping they’re using is designed to hold up to water pressure as high as 6,000 psi. “So, for water at 90 psi to be leaking out, that’s a very bad job they’ve done.” The red plastic sign Hough would like to hold up does not exist: UNFUCK YOURSELVES.

Hough is tough on his students because the Wet Trainer is a kiddie pool compared to the reality it represents. Here was the situation on the USS
Squalus
, 50 feet down, after a 31-inch air-induction valve failed to close on a test dive in 1939. “The sea had found its way into the maze of pipes that ran the length of the
Squalus
. In the control room, jets of salt water sprayed from a dozen different places.” I’m quoting Peter Maas’s account of the sinking in
The Terrible Hours
. “The men worked frantically . . . seizing hold of whatever they could to stay upright.” And then the lights went out.

And this is from the submarine patrol report of the final patrol of the USS
Tang
, October 24, 1944, the day one of her own torpedoes broached the sea’s surface, curved sharply left, and blew a hole in her stern: “The
Tang
sank by the stern much as you would drop a pendulum suspended in a horizontal position.” A Lieutenant Lawrence Savadkin described the scene: “With the sudden downward angle of the boat, men and loose gear were bumping and falling by me with the rush of water.” The sub school Wet Trainer doesn’t tilt, but the one at the Officer Training Command in Rhode Island, nicknamed the USS
Buttercup
, does. (Apparently quite dramatically. “You never save the
Buttercup
,” Hough says.) With the understated monotone that comes of hindsight and report-writing, Savadkin concluded, “Confusion was great at this time.”

In extreme scenarios like these, the crew skips patches and plugs and heads to the watertight doors. Separating the three or four watertight compartments of a submarine are great, thick round hatches that, in appearance and penetrability, fall someplace between the door of a bank vault and that of a front-loading washing machine. Everything behind the door may fill, but the flooding stops there. Depending on how much sea has been taken on, an “emergency blow” may be ordered. A blast of pressurized air empties the submarine’s ballast tanks like a Heimlich maneuver on a purpling guest. The hope is that this lightening and hollowing of the stricken vessel will counter the weight of the floodwater and float it to the surface.

“If you can’t get enough bubble, you’re going down.” This from Jerry Lamb, technical director at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Laboratory (NSMRL), a few buildings over from the Damage Control Trainer. I’ve left behind Alan Hough and his sopping sailors to meet with Lamb and one of his counterparts from the UK’s Royal Navy, Surgeon Commander John Clarke. Both are well versed in the sequel to damage control: submarine escape and rescue.

Lamb pours me coffee, and Clarke goes off to find milk. He’s back a minute later, squinting at the date stamp. “Jan 20. Should be okay.”

“What year?” Jerry Lamb is a droll, upbeat soul, his essential good cheer yellowed but slightly by two and a half decades with the Navy. The Navy: smart people, dumb bureaucracy. Meetings, paperwork, conferences. A moment ago I heard Lamb refer to something called the “missile defense luncheon.” I pictured doilies under water pitchers and PowerPoints of incoming warheads. Who could eat?