Grunt (28 page)

The bursting bag has been replaced by a video of itself, because the real thing was too intimidating, and no one wanted to get in the Escape Trainer afterward. Few of the students will cop to it, but there’s some anxiety in the house today. Some of these boys can barely swim. The Navy entrance requirement is minimal. You are dropped in a pool fifty feet from the edge, and you get to that edge however you can. You don’t have to like water to join the Navy. “I don’t even like baths,” said one submariner I met.

Nabors explains to the students the sequence of events. A pair of divers are with each student up to the time he begins his ascent, to be sure he’s exhaling at the right rate, that he’s been able to clear his ears, that he’s not feeling panicked. Then they let him go. It’s over in a few seconds. “You’re going to pop out of the water, and a diver is going to say, ‘Are you okay?’” Nabors says. “And you’re going to shout your name, your rank, and ‘I’m okay!’” (So the guy standing by with the clipboard can put a check next to the name.) “Got it?”

“Yes,
sir
!”

A few minutes later, the first student pops out of the water, buoyant with air and relief. A diver is there to receive him and steer him to the edge. If you wandered onto the scene without knowing where you were, you might think,
baptism?

“Are you okay?” shouts the diver.

“Yeah.” Nabors and the clipboard guy exchange a look. Kids today.

One student backs out of the ascent. You can tell who he is by the red bathrobe; everyone else’s is tan or blue. This isn’t done to shame him; no one but the staff knows the significance of being “red-robed.” It’s a way to alert them to keep a watchful eye out, in case a medical issue develops. In this case, the boy was just scared. He confesses a fear of drowning. I glance at his bare feet for the traditional Navy “anti-drowning tattoos”: permanent inkings of a pig and a chicken, one on each foot. Because when the old frigates sank, pigs and chickens from the ship’s hold could be seen floating on the water’s surface.

The boy’s fellow students were sympathetic, and this he expected: “One team, one fight.” I’ve heard the word
brotherhood
applied to submariners. At 7 percent of the Navy, it’s a tight-knit community. Especially boat by boat. Where an aircraft carrier crew may number 6,000, US submarines have room for fewer than 200. There’s an intimacy born of not only the diminished personal space that the smaller classes of subs impose but the months-long isolation and, until recently, the absence of women. “There’s a lot of hugging and stroking heads,” a former NSMRL psychologist told me. “I was taken aback by how physically affectionate they are.”

Inevitably, this has fueled rumors. Andrew Karam, author of
Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet
, told me about sitting in a bar with his shipmates when a “skimmer”—a surface sailor—walked in. “When he realized we were all submariners, he said, ‘I know about you guys. Hundred forty men go down, and seventy couples come back up.’”

“That’s not true,” Karam deadpanned. “We have some threesomes.”

The US Submarine Force began integrating female officers in 2010, with enlisted ranks following in 2016. So far, so good. Jerry Lamb says a recent ban on cigarettes provoked more clatter. And then this happened: The day before my visit,
Navy Times
broke the story that female officers on the USS
Wyoming
had been filmed in the shower.

I ask Nabors whether he has to tell his students not to urinate in the Escape Trainer.

“It’s not even a topic of discussion. It happens.”

I forgot he’s a diver. I’m told divers pee in their wetsuits. Me, I’ve never. “I can’t even pee in the ocean.”

The guy with the clipboard glances at Nabors.
Wow,
the glance says.
Live a little
.

T
HE STUDENTS
troop single file to the stairwell, ducklings in a row. They are going down to the bottom of the Escape Trainer for the big ascent, the 37-footer. This time they’ll wear a SEIE (Submarine Escape and Immersion Equipment) suit, a partially inflatable head-and-face-encompassing zip-up that attracts unwanted comparisons to a body bag. Like its more minimal predecessors the Momsen lung and the Steinke hood, the SEIE suit incorporates an air supply and openings to vent excess air as it expands on the ascent. This allows the escapee to breathe normally and not have to worry about bursting lung parts. Students practiced the “exhaling ascent” earlier so they’d know what to do if there was a problem with the escape suits. Something like this, for example: “The rubber was cracked and tacky and most of them were stuck together.” This is Andrew Karam in an email to me, describing the Steinke hoods he was asked to inventory for an underway in the late 1990s.

“On the bright side,” Karam went on, “we spent almost all our time in water more than a thousand feet deep, so opportunities to use them were few and far between.” The maximum depth at which a Steinke hood has been successfully tested is 450 feet. The greatest depth at which a SEIE suit can be counted on to save you is 600 feet. That is really all you need ask for, because if you’re escaping into water deeper than 600 feet, you’re likely to be killed by decompression sickness no matter what outfit you have on.

To understand decompression sickness (the bends), it’s useful to think about one of those countertop carbonation units. Bubbly water is tap water with the bends. When you force pressurized gas into a container with liquid in it—be that container a SodaStream bottle or a scuba diver—some of that gas may go into the liquid. (To get all jargony, the gas goes “into solution” for the greater cause of equilibrium.) Now say the pressure in the container lets up suddenly—because the bottle has been opened or the diver has swum up toward the surface. Those gas molecules that had been forced by the air pressure into the liquid will now come back out of solution. (Here again: seeking equilibrium.) As they do this, the gas molecules link together in the form of bubbles. Never mind why. They just do. Now you have a glass of refreshing fizzy water, or a looming case of the bends. The bends is bubbles migrating through the body and causing problems: acting like a clot and disrupting the flow of blood to vital organs, or pushing apart tissue and causing pain, or both, and more.

Divers can avoid the bends by ascending slowly. This gives the body a chance to simply exhale the gas as it comes out of the blood and into the lungs. (Nitrogen is the main culprit; air contains a lot of it, and it likes to dissolve and hide in fat.) The more time a diver has spent breathing pressurized air, and/or the more highly pressurized the air, the more nitrogen she’ll need to dump and the slower, therefore, she’d need to ascend.

Decompression may or may not pose a danger to escaping submariners. If they’re lucky, the air inside the stricken sub has remained as it was when they left port: pressurized to sea level. In that case, submariners can usually escape with little danger of the bends. But if the vessel floods, the water that’s come on board will compress the air like a trash compactor. Now the sailors are like scuba divers: They’re breathing pressurized air, and some of the gases in that air will be pushed into their blood and tissues. Depending on how long they breathe this air and how compressed it is, they may, like a diver, need to decompress in order to ascend to the surface safely. Breathing the pressurized air in the escape trunk for the minute or so that one is inside it isn’t enough time to create a problem unless one is down very deep. At, say, 800 feet, the air in the escape trunk would have to be so highly pressurized (to equalize with the outside pressure and allow the hatch to open) that breathing it for even a minute would force enough nitrogen into the body to put one at risk for the bends.

At the far, nightmare extreme of the bends is something called explosive decompression. On November 5, 1983, four divers were relaxing in a decompression chamber on the deck of an oil rig in the North Sea. For reasons that remain unclear, one of the dive tenders opened the hatch, reducing the pressure in the chamber from what it would be at 305 feet underwater to what it is at sea level—in a fraction of a second. Nitrogen bubbled out of solution instantly, in the men’s brains, their blood, their fat and muscles. The pathologists wrote in the case report that the men’s fat looked like “sizzling butter on a frying pan.” They surmised that the blood had begun to bubble instantly, “leading to an instantaneous and complete stop of the circulation.”

Diver four had been at the hatch when it blew. Good-bye, Wilkie. He was the champagne at the top of the bottle. The pathologists speculated that in addition to the breakage caused by being shot through the partially open hatch, he “also must have exploded.” He arrived at the autopsy suite in four plastic bags. Some of his organs were missing, having been “blown straight into the sea.” Like the gases in the abdominal cavity, air in the brain pan had also expanded in an explosive manner. “The scalp, with long blond hair, was present but the top of the skull and the brain were missing.”

I’ve been looking through a porthole at the bottom of the Escape Trainer. Watching this scene, the rag doll movements of the divers and the silvery jellyfish air bubble that floats from the hatch in a languid blurp, it is easy to forget the murderousness of deep water. Submariners can’t afford to forget. Mistakes can so swiftly give rise to disaster, and then where are you? Too deep for help or escape.

The risks are amplified when someone on your crew has been up for sixty hours. It has been an enduring unease of the military that the last people you’d want operating subs or fighter jets or automatic weapons are often the ones doing it: the persistently, catastrophically sleep-deprived.

___________

*
As someone for whom the phrase “top secret” has applied mainly to decoder rings and campy spy movies, I had to remind myself that these are actual security classifications. I found it hard to take seriously the sign on the chain stretched across the navigation room door saying, TOP SECRET—KEEP OUT. They may as well have added NO GIRLS ALLOWED. I saw a printer in the crew lounge labeled SECRET PRINTER.
Secret printer!

†
Almost as good as this one, by Andrew Karam, in the cold war–era submarine memoir
Rig Ship for Ultra Quiet
: “Bug juice didn’t come in flavors, just colors.”

Up and Under

A submarine tries to sleep

T
HE BEDS IN THE
missile compartment are a recent addition. When the USS
Tennessee
got a technology upgrade, some years after the sub was built, extra crew were needed to serve the servers. This posed a problem, until it occurred to someone that there’s room for a bunk pan in the space between two nuclear missiles. The Trident II launch tubes—of which there are twenty-four on board—stand 45 feet tall, spanning all four decks of the submarine. The multifloor missile compartment is the least hectic place on board. It’s like the stacks in an old college library—a still, private place to put your head down and catch some sleep.

Though not just now. “All hands awake!” The voice on the intercom is accompanied by an alarm, loud and insistent.
Bong, bong, bong, bong.
An annoying child with a stick and pot.

“Simulate sending all missiles.” This is a lot of missile. Each Trident carries multiple warheads, each programmable to its own destination, with sufficient precision to, as I’ve twice heard it put, “hit a pitcher’s mound.” The ballistic missile submarines of the US fleet, fourteen in all, are a roving underwater nuclear arsenal. Along with missiles in underground silos and others on bomber aircraft, they make up the “nuclear triad” of US strategic deterrence. You would be crazy to nuke us, is the message here; we have more bombs than you have, and you can’t take ours out first because you’ll never find the ones on the subs. Ballistic missile submarines have whole oceans to hide in, and a nuclear reactor aboard to generate power and water, so they never need to surface for fueling. They can stay deep until the food runs out.

The
Tennessee
’s second-in-command, Executive Officer Nathan Murray, invited me to join him in the missile compartment for the drill. (I sailed out to the sub with a group of prospective commanding officers going aboard for a practical evaluation.) We pass a row of sleeping spaces along one wall, some closed off with black vinyl curtains, giving them the look of bathroom stalls at certain punk clubs in the 1980s. Murray points out the bed of a young man who shares his space with the wall coupling for the fire hose. He was woken up last night for a fire drill, and now this.