I enlisted in the Navy while I was still in high school, but didn’t have to go in until the fall after graduation. There was nothing thought-through in this choice of service. I had grown up in Annapolis, my father was an Annapolis grad, and the thought of doing something other than joining the Navy had never even occurred to me. At the same time, the war in Vietnam was still hot, and because of contrarian impulses, I actually wanted to go. I was an ardent anti-communist (still am), and all the liberal anti-war sentiment around me in high school just exasperated me. But at the same time, it had to be Navy — ours was simply a Navy family. A number of my uncles were Navy men as well, and joining the Army seemed to me like trying to square the circle. At the same time, not to decide was to decide. My draft number was something like 19.
Navy hospital corpsmen were attached to Marine units, but then Nixon pulled all the marines out. I then thought briefly of striking for gunners’ mate, and trying to get on a river boat in the Mekong. But my father, wise in the ways of the Navy’s assignment proclivities, told me that if I went for gunners’ mate, I would spend four years somewhere chipping paint. The Navy has a love affair with paint. If it moves, salute it. If it doesn’t, paint it. If it’s moving slow, paint it. Anyhow, my dad’s good advice spared me.
But I still wanted excitement and adventure, and I wanted to be involved in the struggle against the communists. After boot camp in San Diego, I applied for quartermaster school, which was also in San Diego. In the Navy, a quartermaster’s work is navigation, to be distinguished from a quartermaster’s supply work in the Army. Anyhow, while in quartermaster school, a fellow sailor recommended a book about submarines, which I read and that did it. I volunteered for submarine school, which was in Groton, Connecticut. The submarine service only took volunteers — for many sailors, the idea of a ship sinking on purpose seems counter-intuitive, and so they eyed the proposition warily.
Out of sub school, I was assigned first to the Tusk (SS 428). The link says 426, but my plaque says 428. It was an old, diesel boat, commissioned (I believe) the year after WWII ended. I found out many years later that the Tusk was part of the first “northern run,” the kind of mission I will discuss in a moment. I spent about a year and a half on the Tusk, staying with her until she was decommissioned and sold to the Taiwanese. The last three months there was interesting, because we had two full crews on the boat, with the Taiwanese sailors trying to “qualify” on the submarine in a compressed time frame. I mentioned a moment ago that I was an anti-communist, but I have to say that the Taiwanese put me into the shade. One time we spotted a Russian fishing trawler off Long Island, and for a ship that was supposed there for the fish, they sure had a lot of antennae. Anyhow, our Taiwanese friends not only went to battle stations, but were fully prepared to start the festivities.
The only other notable incident involving the Russians that occurred while I was on the Tusk was in the Med. We snuck up on a Russian destroyer and surfaced alongside her. Blehh! We were on high alert, and so were they. Some of our sailors went up on the top of our sail and yelled obscenities at the Russians which they (presumably) returned in kind. And after we sailed alongside them for a short time (just to prove we could), we went away. Your tax dollars at work.
But there was a serious point; there was a lot of this cat and mouse kind of thing, with our Navy doing its best to keep the Soviets honest. Communism really is evil, and the Soviet Union really was (to use Reagan’s phrase) an evil empire. The work of standing against its expansion (an expansion that seemed like the future, a forgone conclusion to many “progressives” here) was in fact a noble one. I am no friend of American imperial expansion, but I have to say that I was very privileged to be a tiny part of the Cold War, which leads to my next submarine assignment, the Ray (SSN 653).
Those who want to read about a little known (but crucial) part of the Cold War can get a copy of Blind Man’s Bluff, by Sontag and Drew. The subtitle is “The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage.” I was part of this, and for the Atlantic fleet, our work was largely done off the north coast of Russia.
The Ray was a fast attack nuke, which meant that we did not carry the ballistic missiles carried by the “boomers.” The boomers were designed to be mobile platforms for nuclear missiles. The fast attacks were intelligence gathering submarines, designed to get up close and personal. In the course of these submarine intelligence gathering missions, the US Navy conducted about two thousand of these missions. I was on two of them. In fact, this is where I met Mike Lawyer, my friend and colleague here at Christ Church. He was in the quartermaster gang with me on the Ray.
As quartermasters, our job was to keep close track of where we were, and we were in some interesting places. One time, when we were transiting the Atlantic, about 400 feet down, I remember it dawning on me where we actually were. It was quite a moment. I am down inside the Atlantic Ocean, and how did this happen? And where we were going was even more interesting. We would submerge off Norfolk (our home port), and we would be under the water for the next two and a half months. We would transit to our “station,” which was just off the north coast of the Soviet Union, near the Soviet port of Murmansk. Those of you who have Google Earth can go take a look at it. Murmansk is up river, and just outside the mouth of the river is an island called Kildin Island, which I have stared at through a periscope. Speaking of which, may I now intrude one of my Navy jokes, spoken one time to an unappreciative Navigation Officer? “Sir, there is more to this periscope than meets the eye.”
As a quartermaster, all my scrap paper (with latitudes and longitudes scribbled thereon) was top secret, stamped as such on both sides and put into a burn bag. We were not supposed to talk about where we were or what we were doing, which I dutifully did not for many years after I got out of the Navy. It was all classified. But after the Soviet Union collapsed, I figured we were okay. And many more details can be found in Blind Man’s Bluff, including details that those of us who were involved did not know at the time.
Anyhow, our job was to sit off Murmansk, waiting for Soviet ships to come out to conduct training ops. We would follow them out, sneak up on them (we called these northern runs “sneaky peek” runs), and listen in on their test missile firings and what not. For the two northern runs that I was on (and this was standard), we had a small supplementary crew of “spooks.” These were men with the rates of “cook” or “machinist mate” who happened also to be mysteriously fluent in Russian, or were electronic telemetry experts. In short, we were spies, and I am afraid this is all some people might need to complete their indictment against me. I am afraid we were not zoned for what we were doing. All very irregular.
“To the Soviets, American submariners were more than an enemy; they were ever-present pests. To other Americans, they were simply the anonymous men of the Silent Service. This book is their story, one that has gone unspoken and unheralded, until now. This is one of the last, great, untold stories of the cold war” (Blind Man’s Bluff, p. xiii). It really was a crucial part of a noble effort against the Soviets, and I was privileged and honored to be a tiny part of it.