Dark Transit

Afterword

The expression, ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ comes to mind when I think about this book. Bear with me while I list a few examples.

Anthony Pacino’s near-death experience featuring a dark, pulsating tunnel that pulled him deep inside it and stopped him halfway while he floated and listened to spirit voices debating his future actually happened to me in a Navy Scuba School drowning incident.

The teasing and abuse suffered by Anthony Pacino for being a ‘non-qual air-breathing puke’ officer who is not yet qualified in submarines is real, as I experienced it both during a long-submerged midshipman cruise on the Pargo and as a newly reporting junior officer to the Cold War-winning attack submarine Hammerhead. The tradition’s purpose is to motivate the unqualified to learn the boat as quickly as possible for safety reasons, since each crewmember relies heavily on all other crewmembers for survival, and a non-qual crewmember could be useless in saving the ship.

The joking and fun-loving character of the hard-drinking cadre of a submarine’s officers when off duty, juxtaposed to the serious and sober hard-as-steel formality while on duty is real. One day in a liberty port, I was braced up and flamed on, suffering a volcanic verbal tirade from the executive officer, who screamed at me that I was restricted to the ship for being delinquent in submarine qualification progress (known as “being dink”). Seven hours later, he screamed at me to get in civilian clothes and join him at the local bar for a night of drinking. The next morning he screamed at me for illegally leaving the ship the night before, in violation of the previous day’s order. That very afternoon, he shouted at me again to get civilian clothes on and join him at the bar for another night of debauchery. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Showing up hungover to the ship in a liberty port early after a night of revelry in order to start the reactor and drive the ship out, and walking into the wardroom with a lower face smeared with lipstick stains actually happened to me, and earned me the nickname ‘Lipstick,’ which stuck for decades, and which my submarine buddies still call me to this day.

Being a non-qual yet acting as approach officer in a tactical situation is required for an officer to earn his dolphins. Three times, I was approach officer in various attack situations. Those hours were some of the most thrilling of my life.

The crazy, backwards 270-degree turn into the Elizabeth River Norfolk Harbor Reach done by Vermont’s Man Mountain Vevera actually happened exactly as described, to the Cold War-winning submarine USS Hammerhead. And whom do you suppose was on the conn as officer of the deck? You guessed it. T’was I.

The intense, weaponized nightclub-singer femininity of the fictional character Bamanda (Redhead), that morphed into violence in the form of thousands of dollars of damage to an expensive sports car, and changed back again after a reconciliation, was half of a story that actually happened to me. The damage done to my life was far worse than just the destroyed paint job and the unhappiness of my good friends at USAA, who paid for the repairs without complaint. But that second half of the story is for another book.

Sadly, like Yuri Orlov, Boris Novikov and Georgy Alexeyev, I’ve lived through the nightmarish experience of being in a serious committed relationship with an amazing woman and learning, stunned, that she cheated on me. If there’s a lesson to be learned, it’s that a relationship that is failing should have a timely close-out meeting to disassemble it under mutually agreeable terms. Being an adult should mean ending one thing before beginning the next, no matter how painful that is. And I’m not just preaching to you — this could be me giving advice to my younger self.

The lore of the ultra-secret projects executed by so-called “project boats” is real. Their missions are rarely spoken of or memorialized, even half a century later. The current project boat is the Seawolf-class submarine USS Jimmy Carter. What it’s up to right now, no one can say except a fraction of the crew, the National Security Council, the CIA and the president.

Next, regarding my comments regarding the Kilo’s supposedly dangerous liquid metal-cooled fast reactor — the nuclear industry goes to great lengths to state the fact that civilian reactors can’t explode like nuclear bombs. Military reactors, on the other hand, with bomb-grade uranium or plutonium, are not quite so tame, and in particular, fast reactors. It still should not be possible for one to explode in a nuclear explosion, but a prompt-critical rapid disassembly with a steam explosion, flash of radiation and scattering of radioactivity can happen, as it did at the U.S. Army’s SL-1 reactor, at Chernobyl and as fictionally depicted in the Kazan reactor. The baby should not be thrown out with the bathwater — reactor safeguards can be designed that eliminate most of the risk and operator training can ensure reactor safety. That said, I’d prefer they be far out at sea and not in my backyard.

About the discussion of “decision theory” and “bias” that Quinnivan and Catardi talked about — none of that is true. I confess I made all that up. And yet, I use that philosophy in my private life every day. So I list it here as an element of the truth-in-fiction theme.

And about that philosophy of the simulation theory, that all of this life is a digital simulation, and that every decision causes a new reality, and that somewhere, sometime, our base soul in the afterlife examines the results of every reality — I suppose all that comes as close to a religion as I can imagine for myself. Having died and gone halfway to the afterlife, I believe I may be on to something. So I’m tossing it in with the other truths, knowing full well many will differ with me.

A final word about my depictions of the Russian submariners — were the scenes with the Russians realistic? As a Cold Warrior, I often wondered, despite the conflict between America and the Soviet Union, what it would be like to hang out with Russian submariners. I suspected that we’d have more in common with a Soviet sub crew than with our own countrymen. We both went to sea in ships designed to sink, closer to death than any surface warrior. Working in stealth, going to secret hazardous places, dealing with stress, canned food, lack of sleep, in an environment where there are no weekends or vacation days for months on end. Where communication with loved ones is restricted. Where entertainment is truncated. Where the food progressively gets worse until it runs out. And on a submarine, there are a thousand things waiting to kill the crew, as the incident on the Voronezh demonstrated. Many years later, as social media bloomed, I became friends with former Soviet submariners including commanding officers and senior officers, and I found that my theory would prove true. One former-Soviet submarine captain posted photos of the interior of his Victor-class fast attack submarine at Christmas. There were several decorated Christmas trees, evergreen ropes, group photos of the crew smiling in the crew’s mess or at their work stations — which looked startlingly like our own — all reminders that the Russian crews were just like us. I believe the lesson is in complete agreement with the first quote listed before the prologue:

All that is a long way to say, the way the Russian submariners were depicted in this book is real.

Thank you for reading this. I hope you enjoyed it. I also hope you will go through my backlist and read them all. You can reach me by messenger on the Facebook dot com.

Michael DiMercurio

Undisclosed Location, USA

http://facebook.com/michael.dimercurio.author

Author of:

Voyage of the Devilfish

Attack of the Seawolf

Phoenix Sub Zero

Piranha Firing Point

Barracuda Final Bearing

Threat Vector

Terminal Run

Emergency Deep

Vertical Dive