Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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"The biggest fear we have on board is fire," says Lieutenant Smith. "The reason for that is smoke."
In the case of a fire, in narrow passageways full of smoke and without lights, in the pitch darkness, you'd pull the breathing mask and canvas flash hood over your face and you'd feel along the floor for your next breath. On the floor are dark, abrasive patches, square and triangular patches. You'll Braille the floor with your feet until you find a patch. A square patch means an air port you can hook into directly overhead. Triangular patches point to air ports on the wall. You'll plug into the port, take a breath, shout "Air," and then move down the passageway to the next port for your next breath. An outlet coming off the mask lets another crewman hook up to you and breathe as you breathe. You shout
To make the Louisiana a home, Lieutenant Smith brings whole-bean Gevalia coffee, a coffee grinder, and an espresso machine. Other crewmen bring their own towels, they bring photos to tape on the underside of the bunk above theirs. Montroy brings his thirty favorite CDs. They bring videotapes of life at home. One crewman brings a Scooby-Doo pillowcase. A lot bring their own quilts or blankets.
"I call it my security blanket," says Gold Crew storekeeper first class Greg Stone, who writes a diary he can read to his wife later, while she reads hers to him.
You go into the water with only the air that's in the submarine. This same air is cleaned with heated amine, which bonds to the carbon dioxide and removes it. To generate new oxygen, you use 1,050 amps of electricity to split molecules of demineralized seawater. The carbon dioxide and the hydrogen are vented into the surrounding ocean. You use three thousand pounds of hydraulic pressure to compress onboard garbage into sixty-pound, steel-wrapped canisters-about four hundred for each patrol-which you jettison.
You can't drink alcohol, and you can smoke only in the area near the twelve-cylinder Firbank Morris diesel auxiliary engine, called the "Rocker Crusher." The diesel engine acts as backup to the nuclear power plant, the "Pot-Belly Stove."
If you're a crewman, you sleep as little as six feet away from the twenty-four Trident nuclear missiles that fill the center third of the ship, stored in tubes that run from the bilge up through all four decks. Outside the bunk rooms, the missile tubes are painted shades of orange, lighter orange toward the bow and darker toward the stern, to help crewmen with their depth perception in the hundred-foot-long compartment. Mounted on the missile tubes are lockers full of video movies and candy for sale by the Rec Club.
You're surrounded by colored pipes and valves. Purple means refrigerant. Blue, fresh water. Green, seawater. Orange, hydraulic fluid. Brown, carbon dioxide. White, steam. Tan, low-pressure air.
According to Hanlon, Smith, and Gold Crew chief of boat Ken Biller, depth perception is not a problem despite the fact that you'll never focus your eyes farther than the length of the center missile compartment. According to a crewman drinking coffee on the mess deck, your first day back in the sunshine you squint and wear sunglasses, and the Navy recommends you not drive a car for your first two days ashore because of possible problems with depth perception.
Mounted on a couple missile tubes are brass plaques to mark the time and place a missile was fired. On tube number five, a plaque marks the DASO launch on December 18, 1997, at 1500 hours. Blue Crew fired the missile.
"Once in a while," Gold Crew Lieutenant Smith says, "a boat is lucky enough to shoot its missile."
Gold Crew has never fired one.
There are no windows or portholes or cameras mounted outside the hull. Except for the sonar, you are blind in the event you're ever attacked by a…
"… by a giant squid?" Lieutenant Smith says, completing the thought with raised eyebrows. "So far, that hasn't happened."
"We did hit a whale once," says Gold Crew machinist first mate Cedric Daniels. "Well, there are stories about it."
Unexplained bumps against the hull have been explained as whales. On the sonar, deep under water, you can listen to the calls of whales and dolphins and porpoises. The clicking racket made by schools of shrimp. These are noises the crew calls "biologicals."
You go to sea with 720 pounds of coffee, 150 gallons of boxed milk, 900 dozen large eggs, 6,000 pounds of flour, 1,200 pounds of sugar, 700 pounds of butter, 3,500 pounds of potatoes. This is all packed in "food modules," lockers measuring five by five by six and a half feet tall, filled in warehouses ashore and lowered into the ship through a hatch. You go with 600 movie videos, 13 torpedoes, 150 crewmen, 15 officers, and 165 "halfway boxes."
Before departure, the family of each man on board gives Chief of Boat Ken Biller a shoe-box-sized package, and on the night that marks the halfway point in the patrol, called Halfway Night, Biller distributes the boxes. Smith's wife sends photos and beef jerky and a toy motorcycle to remind him of his own bike onshore. Greg Stone gets a pillowcase printed with a photograph of his wife, Kelley. Biller's wife sends pictures of his dog and his gun collection.
Also on Halfway Night, you can bid for an officer as they're auctioned off. The money goes to the Rec Fund, and the auctioned officers work the next watch for the winning bidders.
Another Halfway Night tradition is auctioning pies. Each winning bidder gets to call the man of his choice to a chair in front of the whole crew and smacks the guy with the pie.
Everybody on board calls Supply Officer Smith
Not officially. But still you hear it.
Hamburgers and cheeseburgers are still "sliders." Patties of chicken meat are still "chicken wheels." Bunks are «racks» because of the racks that held hammocks on sailing ships. A bathroom is still a "head," named after the holes in the bow of those ships. Two holes for the crew, one for the officers, cut in the heaving, wave-washed deck above the keel.
As XO Hanlon says. "Those guys, they didn't need toilet paper."