W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps VII - Behind the Lines

During an orientation ride on a fleet submarine before beginning their training, Lieutenant Commander Thomas B. Elliott, USN, Annapolis '32, gave them a little talk, explaining that the makeup of some people simply disquali-fied them for the silent service. These individuals had nothing to be ashamed of, Lieutenant Commander Elliott said, any more than they should be ashamed of having blue eyes, or red hair. It was the way God had issued them.

The Navy's intention with the orientation ride was to save both the Navy and the individual whose makeup was such that he couldn't take submarine service time and money by sending him back to the surface Navy now-and without any sort of stigma attached-before the lengthy and expensive training began.

That, Ensign Chambers D. Lewis knew, was bullshit pure and simple. Any officer who couldn't handle being in a submarine shouldn't be in the Navy at all. And certainly a notation on a service record that an officer who volunteered for submarine training, and was accepted, and then left New London within a week of his arrival would be tantamount to stamping the record in three-inch-high letters, COWARD. Cowards not only deservedly enjoy the contempt of non-cowards, but are unfit to command men, which is the one basic function of a Naval officer.

Lewis remembered very clearly the first time he heard a submarine skipper give the order to "take her down." He had nightmares about it, waking up from them in cold sweats.

He was standing not six feet from the skipper when he heard that com-mand. And the moment the Klaxon horn sounded, and the loudspeakers blared, "Dive! Dive! Dive!", he was bathed in a cold sweat, virtually overcome by a mindless terror. For a time he thought his heart stopped and that he was going to faint. He remembered little else about his first voyage beneath the sea except that he was aware they were under it; that just a foot or two away the sea was doing its best to break through the flimsy hull and crush and smother everyone inside, including him.

Lieutenant Commander Elliott gave them another little chat after they tied up back at New London-and Lewis had a clear picture of Elliott, too. He looked competent and professional, everything an officer, an officer of the si-lent service, was supposed to be.

He wanted to emphasize, Lieutenant Commander Elliott told them, that absolutely no stigma would be attached if anyone decided now that the sub-marine service was not for them. To the contrary, it was their duty to make their uneasiness known, to save themselves and the Navy a good deal of diffi-culty down the line. The lieutenant commander went on to say that he knew of a dozen young officers who had the balls to speak up, and were now doing very well elsewhere in the Navy, in both the surface Navy and in Naval Aviation.

He would be in his office from 1900 until 2200 that night, Lieutenant Commander Elliott said. If anyone wished to speak with him regarding a re-lease from the silent service, they should come see him. Anyone who did so would be off the base within two hours, and there would be absolutely no stigma attached to their transfer. He would also be in his office for the same purpose every Saturday morning from 0800 until 1100, so long as they were in training.

Ensign Lewis talked himself out of seeing Lieutenant Commander Elliott that night by telling himself that the mindless terror he experienced on the dive was an aberration, an isolated incident that would not be repeated, and that it would be the highest folly to throw away his Naval career-and the tough four years at Annapolis that preceded it-because of one incident, an aberrational incident that would not be repeated.

And he got through the rest of his training at New London in much the same way, one week at a time, telling himself that this Saturday he was going to bite the bullet and see Lieutenant Commander Elliott and tell him that he'd tried, he just didn't have the balls to be a submariner.

And every Saturday morning he decided to wait just one more week. He came closest to seeing Commander Elliott after the Momsen Lung training. The training itself-you're inserted at the base of the famous water-filled tower, you put the lung in place, and then you make your way up a knotted rope to the surface-didn't bother him as much as what it implied:

Submarines, and thus the submariners aboard them, would inevitably get in some kind of trouble, and an attempt to escape from a disabled, and doomed, submarine would be necessary. In Lewis's opinion, there was little chance that the Momsen Escape Procedure would work as well in combat as it did in New London-if it worked at all. If an enemy depth charge caused sufficient dam-age to a submarine to leave her without power, her crew might as well kiss their asses good-bye.

The various possibilities of dying aboard a submarine ran vividly through his imagination at New London, and later at Pearl, and on patrol, and now in Australia.

He graduated fifth in his class, and after an initial evaluation cruise aboard the Cachalot, a 298-foot, 1,500-ton submersible of the Porpoise class operat-ing out of Norfolk, Virginia (SUBFORATL), he was transferred to SUBFOR-PAC at Pearl Harbor, and assigned to the Remora, another Porpoise-class submarine.

By then he had, he thought, his terror under control. At the same time, he came up with a solution to his no-balls dilemma. If he applied for Naval Avia-tion while aboard the Remora, no action would be taken until he completed his assignment. His records would show that he was relieved to transfer to Naval Aviation, not because he quit. And completing his tour, holding his terror under control while he did so, would solve the moral question of whether he had enough balls to remain a Naval officer.

He was on patrol, a long way from Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese struck on December 7. Remora immediately went on the hunt for Japanese vessels. She found six, and fired a total of fourteen torpedoes at them. Of the fourteen, nine missed the target-they ran too deep, something was wrong with the depth-setting mechanisms. Of the five which struck their targets, only one detonated-something was wrong with the detonators.

When the Remora returned to Pearl Harbor, the crew were sent to Waikiki Beach Hotel for five days' rest and recuperation leave. He spent the five days drunk in his room, not just tiddly, plastered, happy, but fall-down drunk.

He made four more patrols. After each of them he drank himself into ob-livion. And then there was a fifth patrol, the last-of three-that the Remora made to Corregidor to evacuate from the doomed fortress gold and nurses, and, on one of them, a dozen men blinded in the war. He woke up after that drunk in the hospital at Pearl Harbor with his head swathed in bandages. He had been found, they told him, in his hotel bathroom, where he had apparently slipped in the tub and cracked his head open. He had been unconscious for four days and had lost a good deal of blood. And it had been decided that his medical condi-tion precluded his return to sea until there was time to determine the extent of the concussion's damage to his brain. The Remora, he was told, had sailed without him.

The memory of his enormous relief that he didn't have to go out on her again, the shame that he was not sailing with his shipmates because he'd gotten fall-down drunk, made him literally nauseous. He was sorry they found him before he'd bled to death.

Rear Admiral Daniel J. Wagam appeared in his hospital room three days later. There was good news and bad news, Admiral Wagam said. The good news was that he had been declared fit for duty; there was no permanent dam-age from the concussion. The bad news was that his aide had been promoted, and therefore he needed another aide. And unfortunately, Lieutenant (j.g.) Chambers D. Lewis, USN, not only met the criteria the Admiral had set for an aide, but was available.