Mary Roach - Grunt

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?

Neither the Tang nor the Squalus could get enough bubble. The first order of business for a sub on the floor of the sea is to alert potential rescuers. Then, as now, each submarine compartment is equipped with mini launch tubes for flares, smoke signals, location buoys. On World War II–era subs, the location buoy was a sort of floating phone booth in the middle of the ocean. “Submarine Sunk Here,” read the sign on the Squalus buoy. “Telephone Inside.” It was like a New Yorker cartoon that didn’t quite make sense. There needed to be a third line: “No, really .” A length of cable connected the buoy to the downed sub. When a rescue vessel arrived, its crew would haul the thing aboard and reach inside for the phone. Peter Maas recounts this moment in his book . The rescue vessel’s commanding officer, Warren Wilkin, takes the receiver and opens with a breezy “What’s your trouble?” Like he’d pulled up alongside a car on the side of the road with its hood propped open.

The commanding officer of the Squalus —here, too, seemingly unflurried in the face of catastrophe—comes back with a chipper “Hello, Wilkie.” Whereupon a swell lifts Wilkin’s boat and snaps the cable, leaving all further communications to be hammered out in Morse code on the hull of the sub.

Technology has of course advanced since the 1940s. The modern location buoy, SEPIRB (Submarine Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), sends a coded message via satellite with the sub’s ID and whereabouts to the closest rescue coordination center. The buoys are still launched through the little tube, though, and ideally that tube hasn’t been welded shut, as it was on some cold war–era subs—to keep the buoy from launching accidently and revealing the sub’s position to the Soviet subs upon which it was spying. Before a location buoy is launched, someone takes a grease pencil and writes all over it, as much detail as there’s room for: damage to the sub (and crew), air quality on board, etc.

What happens next depends on how dire the situation is. Inside every US sub is a fat, white three-ring binder labeled “Disabled Submarine Survival Guide,” and in the front of that is a stay-or-go diagram: a decision tree of yes-or-no questions. Is the flooding contained? Are all fires out? If so, if the situation is stable, the answer will likely be Stay. Wait for the rescue vehicle. In water less than 600 feet deep, it may be possible to get out of a sunken sub and make one’s way to the surface—Hello, Wilkie!—however, for reasons we’ll shortly get to, this is a last resort.

A US sub is stocked with enough oxygen-generating and carbon dioxide–subtracting capability to last at least a week without power: a week of what Clarke calls “bottom survivability.” By bottom he means the ocean floor, but the British accent, to my ear, anyhow, tilts it toward the naughty meaning. Which kind of fits: bottom as in, “your ass,” will it be saved? Seven days is meant to be the outside limit of how long it should take for help to arrive. Fifteen countries and NATO have submarine rescue systems—deep submergence vehicles with decompression capabilities—but they differ in how deep they’re able to go. None is designed to function deeper than 2,000 feet; then again, neither are most submarines. (Modern US submarine “crush depths” are classified [54] 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! information, but educated speculation puts them in the neighborhood of a half-mile down.)

Clarke adds that there may be well more than seven days of supplies. “Because you’re probably dealing with a proportion of the crew.” It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. He was saying that the oxygen will probably hold out longer than a week, because some of the crew won’t be using any. Aboard the Squalus , twenty-six men drowned in the first few minutes of the disaster, entombed in the flooding compartment when the watertight doors closed.

The least of anyone’s worries is starvation. Subs leave port stocked with full provisions, much of it in cans—so many cans, in fact, that they may overflow the storeroom on the smaller class of subs, with the result that entire passageways, in the early weeks of an underway, are cobblestoned by cans. Water may be a concern, if the desalination unit isn’t functioning. The Disabled Submarine Survival Guide includes unflinching water conservation strategies. “Minimize water closet ops following bowel movements to one minimal flushing cycle… every three uses.” To control odors, the Guide recommends covering the mess with the powder used by the galley crew to mix the “bug juice.” The high acidity of the drink is pointed out, leading one to assume that that’s why it’s used for this, though it’s also possible it’s an editorial comment on bug juice. [55] 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.”

And then you wait. The men of the Squalus huddled disconsolately on the torpedo room floor, eating canned pineapple. It is notable that neither crew, Squalus nor Tang , exhibited panic. Aboard the Tang , the commanding officer wrote in his report, “No one was hysterical or disorderly at any time…. Toward the last, conversation seemed to be mostly about their families and loved ones.” One of the last messages tapped out by the crew on the hull of the sub S-4 , accidently rammed and sunk in 1927, was “Please hurry.” The laborious and time-consuming inclusion of “please” breaks my heart. It’s so Navy: courteous and respectful to the end.