One of the unique aspects of service academies is that your summer is spent with the Fleet, doing the typical operational stuff. It changes in different eras, but in the Cold War era you had Youngster Cruise after your Plebe year (learn what it’s like to be enlisted by being dropped into organizations and doing typical E-4 and E-5 jobs), a rotation through the various Naval functions after your sophomore year (aviation, surface warfare, marines), and then junior officer tasks after your junior year that pretty much match what you’ll be doing as an Ensign or 2LT after graduation.

Top Gun and Red October

My generation entered USNA fully embracing Top Gun and The Hunt for Red October, so it was pretty natural to pick submarines for my Youngster Cruise. It was also intriguing because if you picked a boomer cruise (a full SSBN deployment) you’d have a chance to earn your enlisted submarine warfare qualification and get to wear the silver dolphins.

Qualifying — aka “quals” — in the Navy means that you have passed a strict set of standards, starting with a ton of signatures in your qual book and then usually a board or other strict panel review. On submarines, it starts with Damage Control quals, which is how you transition from being a NUB (non-usable body) to a member of the crew who can fully stand watches and handle emergencies. Your DC qual starts with being able to answer — in detail — how you would reach any of the hundreds of key alarms, valves, and fire suppression equipment scattered around each compartment. As I covered, the US Navy takes damage control very seriously.

Once you have all your signatures for the submarine warfare qualification, you then had to first get past a board of Chief Petty Officers. It was expected that you would bribe them, so for the entire deployment, all of us who thought we’d eventually qualify were hiding away chocolates, snacks, and other food items the Chiefs might want to take back to the Goat Locker (Chief’s berthing space) and share. Then you got to have a “pinning ceremony” when the dolphins are placed on your uniform but without the clips on the back and a line of senior enlisted come through and punch the dolphins. Oh, tradition. A few years later, a pinning ceremony video leaked and suddenly that tradition vanished.

Submarine prep

If you were headed to subs for your Youngster Cruise, you had a separate set of screening interviews and training, since submarines are a high stress environment and SSBNs in particular are out for 72 straight days on patrol with very little ability to correct personnel mistakes.

SSBNs that have mechanical or other failures are described as “not being able to cover their target package.” In the US version of strategic deterrence, different parts of the triad — ICBMs, strategic bombers, and SSBNs — combine to cover all the designated targets of the Single Integrated Operational Plan. Captains of SSBNs will do just about anything to maintain coverage as failure means other assets — and in the Navy, that means submarines and crews undergoing maintenance and R&R — have to be deployed unexpectedly.

As part of the training, a key message was repeated over and over again.

No water in the people tank

It perfectly captures the ethos of the Silent Service. Information conveyed in memorable, cheeky, if slightly fatalistic way. Submarines are profoundly dangerous places. The ocean wants to crush you. You’re running high pressure hydraulics and air systems. You’re running 440/3-phase electric systems (that are no joke to get a hit from). Nuclear weapons. Otto fuel for torpedoes. The list goes on and on.

You really can’t work in that environment and not have a sense of humor about it.

My first DC station

After I become Damage Control Qualified, my DC station switched to Missile, Lower Level. On the 616-class the section with the missile tubes had three levels — Missile Upper, Middle, and Lower Level. Upper Level was officially to be bypassed except when actually doing work there, because the background radiation level is higher than other locations on the sub (the warheads are on the top of the missiles). As you’d expect, everyone ignored that directive when moving forward and aft because it was the most direct path aft to engineering since the reactor tunnel — the passage above the nuclear reactor where you really didn’t want to spend extra time — connected to Missile, Upper Level.

But, my station was Lower Level, where the gas generators are. US SLBMs are launched via a “cold launch.” Every movie and special effect shows SLBMs rocketing out of the submarine, engine already ignited. Wrong! Instead, a gas generator vaporizes enough water to create sufficient pressure to eject the missile from underwater to high enough out of the water for its engine to light. Missile Lower Level also housed our hover system, a very sensitive depth sensor for ensuring we were exactly at the depth we thought. On Lafayette, the hover sensor was isolated by the hover valve, itself hidden underneath deck plates that you had to lift and crawl under. Being on Youngster Cruise, I was of course voluntold to go open the hover valve.

It turns out, the reason our hover system was isolated was that it leaked. A lot. So as soon as I opened the isolation valve — and doing this, by the way, under deck plates, pretty much against the keel of the submarine. Imagine a crawlspace under a house, but colder, more metal, and fewer spiders.

And now water rushing in. Definitely violating the whole “no water in the people tank”-rule.

There was much laughter from my fellow watch standers, all of whom knew what was coming, of course. Worse, because we would have to pump all this sea water back out, I had to stay down there for the entire evolution so that as soon as we secured from General Quarters I could close the isolation valve again. The whole Navy is like this, of course. If we cross paths, ask me about “diving a tube” and repairing the sail comm hull passthrough (we did that on the surface — you have no idea what kind of stuff grows between the pressure hull and hydrodynamic hull).

What always stuck with me though was that first phrase. No water in the people tank. It’s a pretty good rule.