Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^FOUR GEEKS WITH TATTOOS: THE MOST DRIVEN MEN I HAVE EVER KNOWN ^{ON A NUCLEAR SUBMARINE} North Pacific Ocean, Spring 2005

I now planned to travel back across the Pacific Ocean on a fast-attack nuclear submarine.

It might seem that I was on a very different path than the one I had staked out the previous spring in Iraq.¹ But I wasn’t. As long as men walked the earth, war would be a permanent feature of human history. Thus, it was merely a question of what kind of wars we would have. During the fighting in Al-Fallujah the year before, I had seen how the future of war was the past. Despite technological advances, the grubby work of infantry was still relevant and at times necessary, a drama of corporals proceeding house to house with guns and bayonets. But the future of war was also the future, in which conflict would be reduced to blind mathematical abstractions, without even the sky or the surface of the earth to keep one’s bearings, where nothing could be seen, but only intuited through electronic transmissions.

Nor was there anything contradictory about the growing relevance of both urban combat and submarine deployments: of both the past and the future. Their dual importance was explained by the emptying out of the twenty-first-century battlefield. Rather than large concentrations of infantry or surface warships in a confined geographical space—the stuff of conventional, industrial-age land and sea battles—there were now small clusters of combatants hiding out in cities, jungles, and deserts, as well as beneath coastal shelves and great oceans. The entire earth was now a battlespace. Killing the enemy was easy; it was finding him that was difficult, whether he was concealed amidst civilians on a crowded bazaar street, or lurking in oceanic layers where sound waves traveled and refracted at unpredictable speeds and angles.

This meant a premium on intelligence gathering. In an age when rogue states and transnational terrorists might avoid satellite surveillance by anticipating their patterns across the sky, no instrument of warfare was as integral to espionage as the submarine, able to pull down onshore cellphone conversations by dipping an antenna above water.² During the Cold War, submarines were a principal means of spying, through the collection of electronic data close to the Soviet coastline. By placing taps on underwater telephone cables, subs snooped on enemy phone conversations more effectively than did satellites overhead. Facilitating this was the development of nuclear-powered submarines, which, with virtually endless stores of energy, could remain obscured underwater for months at a time. With the advent of nuclear reactors, the only limiting factor in a submarine deployment was the amount of food that could be taken on board.

By the end of the Cold War, American nuclear attack submarines had carried out over two thousand spying missions against the Soviet Union and its allies. Of these activities, the most important was tracking the “boomers,” Soviet subs over three hundred feet in length that packed up to twenty ballistic missiles, with ten nuclear warheads each. While President Dwight D. Eisenhower had “only hesitantly approved” U-2 spy flights over the Soviet Union, for fear of aggravating Nikita Khrushchev, American submarine captains “believed it was their job—and forget the niceties of international law—to drive straight into Soviet waters,” write Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew in Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage. Few of these men suffered moral or political doubts. “As far as they were concerned, détente and diplomacy were public shows put on by both sides to hide true intentions.”³ Nowhere was the Cold War hotter than under the sea.

After the Cold War, submarines snooped around likely battlefields in Iran and North Korea. They helped enforce the economic embargo against Iraq, and seal off Bosnia and Haiti from arms shipments. They launched cruise missiles against Iraq during the first Gulf War and again in 1997 and 1998, and against Serb targets in Bosnia in 1995. Subs fired 25 percent of the Tomahawks in the Kosovo war of 1999, and a third of them in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in 2003. The first shot of OIF was fired from the USS Cheyenne, a Pearl Harbor–based sub.[50] The missile strikes against suspected chemical weapons facilities in Sudan and terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 1998 also came from submarines.⁴

Now the Chinese Navy was preparing to push out into the Pacific, where it would encounter a U.S. Navy and Air Force unwilling to budge from the coastal shelf of the Asian mainland. There was no better indication of China’s blue water ambition than its investment in both diesel-and nuclear-powered submarines. China was attempting to achieve a sort of parity with the U.S. Navy through an emphasis on missiles and submarines, rather than by a proportional, across-the-board buildup of conventional assets like carriers and other surface warships. In terms of raw numbers, if not in quality, China’s submarine fleet could at some point become larger than that of the United States. Most of China’s seventy submarines were past-their-prime diesels of Russian design; but these vessels could be used as the equivalent of mobile minefields in the South China, East China, and Yellow seas, where “uneven depths, high levels of background noise, strong currents and shifting thermal layers” would make detecting them extremely difficult.⁵ Add to that seventeen new stealthy diesel subs and three nuclear-powered ones that the Chinese Navy was planning to deploy by 2010, and one might envisage a Chinese Navy with the ability to launch an embarrassing strike, or stunt, against the United States or one of its allies.

To compensate for the increasing demand for American subs in the Pacific, tied to the military rise of China, East Coast–based subs were transiting to Pacific locations via the North Pole and the Panama Canal.

“The Cold War was about finding and being able to sink Soviet subs in the deep and open oceans,” explained Rear Adm. Paul F. Sullivan, the departing commander of the Pacific Fleet’s submarine force. “Today, there is a shift in focus from the Atlantic to the Pacific, due to the proliferation of subs among certain nations [like China, though he didn’t say it], that tremendously complicates” American security. “Instead of one mission in the deep ocean,” he went on, “there are now multiple missions in shallow waters, crowded with fishing fleets.”

Sullivan, a Naval Academy graduate from Massachusetts, was delivering his farewell address during a change-of-command ceremony at Pearl Harbor, where he was being replaced by Rear Adm. Jeffrey B. Cassias, a graduate of the University of Texas at El Paso.[51] Such ceremonies, though practically a daily occurrence in the U.S. military, were nevertheless stirring, particularly this one, which I attended my first day back in Hawaii.

Consider the scene: a makeshift wooden platform with red, white, and blue bunting atop the fast-attack nuclear submarine USS Pasadena, which looked out onto a crowd of submariners in full-dress and summer whites, here with wives and retired officers and sailors in colorful Hawaiian shirts, all huddled under a tent at the Sierra Nine pier. Behind us was the USS Cheyenne, and near it the USS Alabama, a ballistic missile nuke. In the middle distance, across two hundred yards of shimmering milky turquoise water, were four Arleigh Burke–class destroyers. Bells pealed. A Navy band played “Ruffles and Flourishes.” Guns fired from the USS Frank Cable, a submarine tender, also decorated with bunting for the occasion.[52] Sullivan and other speakers reminisced about submarine “warriors” who spanned the decades, from the Vietnam era of “student protests against authority in general” to the current season of “bringing democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The ceremony, which ended with a chaplain’s blessing and the decking of flower leis on the two admirals and their wives, was a gathering of an extended family. Much of the crowd knew one another. The wives had the weathered expression of hard-faced, good-looking women accustomed to weeks and months alone at a time, while their men were on deployments that could not be spoken about. During the Cold War, a wife would get a phone call the day before her husband’s arrival at the pier—the only advance notice she would get. It was a culture different from that of the surface Navy.

The next day I left on my journey aboard the USS Houston, or SSN 713 (sub-surface nuclear-713). The Houston was one of fifty-four Los Angeles–class, fast-attack nuclear submarines, to be distinguished from the larger SSBNs (sub-surface ballistic nuclear boats). Able to gather all sorts of intelligence, hunt old adversaries like the Russians and potential new ones like the Chinese, escort carrier strike groups, insert Special Operations forces, and project power by their ability to fire long-range missiles, SSNs were among the country’s most critical national security assets.[53] In all but a few cases, they were named after American cities.

The Houston had been commissioned in 1982. Its namesakes included two surface warships: the cruiser USS Houston, which had carried President Franklin D. Roosevelt on four official cruises and was later sunk by the Japanese during the February 1942 Battle of Java Sea, and the light cruiser USS Houston, which was commissioned in 1943 and distinguished itself in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944.

This Houston, the first submarine to carry the name, carried a price tag of well over $1 billion, had a best speed of greater than 25 knots (28.8 miles per hour), and could go to depths below 800 feet. Its claim to fame was executing an emergency blow near the climax of the film The Hunt for Red October, when, in the fictional role of the USS Dallas, the Houston shot high out of the surface at a thirty-degree angle by flooding its ballast tanks with pressurized air, thus quickly emptying them of water.

The Houston was 33 feet wide and 360 feet long, though it would seem a lot smaller as I would be restricted to the forward half of the boat; in the aft section was located the nuclear reactor and propulsion system, which I lacked the security clearance to access. The crew during the time of my travels numbered 17 officers and 130 enlisted men. This was about half the size of the crew of the Benfold, in dramatically less than half the space. The age of the average crewman was twenty-six. There were no women, unlike in the surface Navy. The men often had higher test scores on their résumés than those of a destroyer crew.

Once I boarded, the Houston would spend two days firing torpedoes off the western Hawaiian Islands. Then it would sail underwater to Guam, almost four thousand miles westward across the central Pacific, the boat’s home port. Guam was also home to the forward-deployed Submarine Squadron 15, which, in addition to the Houston, included two other fast-attack subs, the USS City of Corpus Christi and the USS San Francisco. The San Francisco had recently suffered a near-catastrophic underwater collision with an uncharted seamount southeast of Guam, which had resulted in the death of one crew member and injuries to twenty-three others. On the Houston, I would meet several crew members of the San Francisco who had experienced the crash.

Though the journey would take me from one tropical archipelago to another across the central Pacific—over the Central Pacific Basin and the Mid-Pacific Mountains, rearing up 9,500 feet off the ocean floor—the Navy called this part of the ocean the “North Pacific,” because both Guam and Hawaii were located north of the equator. In all, I would spend two weeks below the surface.

During the first few hours, the experience was similar to my previous embeds—a bewildering new environment coupled with a bewildering sameness of faces and uniforms that I would quickly have to separate out into individual personalities. At the same time, everything was different. The Marine infantry unit with which I had been implanted in Iraq represented one end of a cultural spectrum; the crew of a fast-attack nuclear submarine another. Yet I found them similar: both were manned by a certain brand of extremist, men who enjoyed a deserved superiority complex because of their willingness to incur extreme sensory deprivation.

Like marines, submariners had a very personal relationship with their service’s history. The first submarine in the U.S. Navy was commissioned in April 1900 as the USS Holland, named after its designer, John P. Holland, who sold it to the Navy for $160,000 after sea trials off Mount Vernon, Virginia. Just as marines celebrated the birth date of their service with a ball in November, so did submariners in April, when they remembered those who had fallen and were thus “on eternal patrol.”[54]

Still, as I said, this journey was radically different from my previous ones. The pier at Pearl Harbor had looked empty at first, until I got closer and noticed the Houston’s sail and top third of its steel hull sticking out of the water—coated in blackish-gray, hard rubber tiles.[55] Unlike at a destroyer pier, only a few people were milling about. This was mainly because of the higher level of secrecy surrounding submarine deployments. I was greeted by the boat’s captain, Comdr. John Zavadil of Grosse Ile, Michigan, and the executive officer (or XO as he was better known), Lt. Comdr. Brian Davies of Newark, Delaware.[56]

Though the rank structure was exactly like that of the Benfold, the personalities were not. I noticed immediately that Capt. Zavadil was more communicative than Capt. Don Hornbeck of the Benfold, with a lively, boyish look and shock of bright red hair; whereas the XO, Brian Davies, was not domineering in the manner of the Benfold’s executive officer, Dave Dunn. A submarine, with a smaller crew and quarters, constituted a less formal environment than a surface warship. And because there was no night and day—only the smell of frying bacon to tell you that it was morning—there was no reveille, so everyone, including the boat’s commanders, wore what Capt. Zavadil called “warrior blue coveralls.”[57]

Except for the khaki belts of the officers and chiefs, I never saw khakis, let alone dress whites, on the Houston, even when we entered a port. The pomp and circumstance had ended the day before at the change-of-command ceremony. The distance between the rulers of the Houston and their men was less daunting than on the Benfold. It had to be, for as soon as I descended the ladder with my backpack into the bowels of the boat, I realized that while a destroyer was a civilization unto itself, comprised of both men and women, a fast-attack sub was a single organism—as though one human being had replicated himself over and over again.

Such togetherness was borne not only of proximity, but of psychological isolation from the outside world as well: e-mail connections were worse than on a surface ship, and there was much that occurred on a sub that the crew could not talk about with family and friends, because of the classified nature of their operations.

It was as if the world of the destroyer had been exponentially shrunken. The Benfold’s staterooms and p-ways, whose reduced size and low-hanging pipes had made me gasp upon first exposure, now seemed immense by comparison. I was put in Lt. Comdr. Davies’s stateroom, the second largest on the boat. Yet it was half the size of the one I had shared with an ensign on the Benfold, and only about a quarter the size of the XO’s stateroom there. Both the sink and the desk folded out from the wall. The plastic garbage can was cut to a width of two inches. The blue carpeted floor was partially concealed under neatly stacked notebooks for all of the XO’s paperwork. The lone chair was used to stack more notebooks. There was dramatically less space than in a college dorm room, yet with dramatically more work expected. Whereas most bright and privileged students look forward to more privacy in living conditions upon college graduation, these men willingly chose less.

And this was luxury. Other officers were packed together in a single stateroom, with racks stacked vertically a foot or two apart from the other. The dirty laundry was in canvas slips attached to the wall against their bodies. The enlisted berthings were more crowded still, with ninety-six racks for 130 sailors, so many “hot racked” (shared the same bed). On account of rolling eighteen-hour shifts, this was not a problem. When one sailor was ready for his six hours of sleep, the other was on duty. Some slept in the torpedo room, where the lights were never turned off, and where racks were interspersed with the weapons on sliding stows.

Prior to departure, lunch was served in the officers’ wardroom—a replica of the Benfold’s, though so much smaller that the Formica-covered walls seemed almost to breathe. Instead of a picture of Eddie Benfold, there was the Houston’s insignia, featuring the American and Texan flags, along with the Latin words for “Always Vigilant.” The officers sat jammed together, making light fun of a Virginia Military Institute graduate at the end of the table, Ensign David Bartles of Falling Waters, West Virginia, who, they told me, could never stop talking about how superior VMI was to the Naval Academy and every other institution of higher learning.

There was the usual military formality that for a civilian in the early twenty-first century was impressive to behold. In an age when both young waitresses and elderly corporation presidents insisted on calling strangers by their first names—in a manner that was often completely insincere—in the Houston’s wardroom, amid the laughter of young men who knew one another like the best of friends, it was always “Captain,” “XO,” “Mr. Bartles,” “Mr. Murphy,” “Mr. Luckett,” and so forth.[58]

It is said that attrition of the same adds up to big change. The Benfold’s officers had stunned me with a scientific intensity that demonstrated how warfare could be conducted by means other than manly aggression. Here that attribute was further intensified. That, together with the miniaturization of everything, allowed me past another barrier—to a qualitatively different brand of military officer: men who bore expressions so concentrated and screwed tight that each appeared to be wearing glasses, even if he wasn’t.

This should not have been surprising, given that these officers, in their twenties and early thirties except for the captain, operated a boat bristling with weaponry and listening devices, which was also a fast-moving, underwater nuclear power plant. Submariners, like Air Force pilots, worked in an unforgiving, zero-defect environment. At several hundred feet beneath the surface, you might as well be in the space shuttle. Anal retentiveness was a matter of survival. Yet to know such a fact was not the same as appreciating it through a sustained close encounter. “It’s like being back in seventh grade,” said one enlisted man. “If you do something stupid, your crew mates never let you forget it.”

If a surface warship was a clean world of sea and steel, especially compared to the dust and muck of Middle Eastern deserts and tropical jungles, a sub-surface warship was cleaner still—antiseptic almost—for no smells could be allowed in such a claustrophobic environment. Sailors showered constantly. Trash was regularly compacted by a machine and attached to weights for its journey to the bottom of the ocean. Sinks were scrubbed after every use. Just as the officers were the most fastidious I had encountered in the U.S. military, the chief petty officers were, too, more punctilious than swarthy: men with tattoos who had high enough math and science scores to be accepted into the submarine service. The sub was the ultimately maintained tool. But unlike a commando or soldier-diplomat operating alone in the wilds, it was under extreme central control from headquarters.

The chiefs’ lounge on a fast-attack nuclear submarine was a mere table with a computer screen for movies; no food was served because the space was too small. The chiefs ate on the nearby mess deck (the “Longhorn Café”) with the other petty officers and apprentice sailors. The mess deck, in turn, was close to the officers’ wardroom. Because everybody on an SSN lived, worked, and ate within arm’s reach of one another, distinctions between the officers, senior enlisted men, and sailors were more subtle than on a surface ship even. Despite the blue carpets and tiles in the staterooms and adjacent p-ways, “officers’ country” had little meaning here.

Another bond was the fact that all officers, save for the supply officer, as well as seventy of the 130 enlisted men on the Houston, had graduated from “nuke school,” the Navy’s nuclear propulsion school in Charleston, South Carolina—a crucible of six hours’ daily instruction in engineering, chemistry, math, reactor physics, and fluid and thermodynamics, where one excruciating exam followed another. I was in a steel-hulled cloister occupied by the most intense and driven people I had ever known.

Take Lt. Junior Grade Anthony Williams of Fayetteville, Georgia, a graduate of Georgia Tech and a chemical-radiological assistant in the reactor complex. His sensitive, precise enunciation gave more indication of an academic background than a service one, even as every generation of his family going back to 1685 boasted a member in the American or British militaries. His father was an Air Force pilot and his brother was in the Army. Lt. Williams was very passionate about ideas, as I learned during a discussion we had about the future of American democracy, about which he was deeply worried. His concern for America was not affected. It was as though the country were his child that he was willing to physically defend and give his life to. As delicate as he seemed, he betrayed the sort of character that gave rise to bravery. Seeing how disoriented I was at lunch, during a discussion about “wet transmission checks,” “magnetic silencing,” and “thermoluminescent dosimetry,” not to mention a host of acronyms I had never heard of, he took out an exercise board from the closet and explained a few basics to me:[59]

• Layer Depth. A region of the ocean, usually beginning around two or three hundred feet below the surface, where the effect of surface sunlight is dramatically reduced, so stable, colder temperatures ensue. This is conducive to sonar transmissions because the greater the degree of water pressure, the stronger the molecular connectivity that facilitates the movement of sound waves. The ocean has many layer depths, but the term often refers to the first cold region beneath the surface layer. This region, several hundred feet down, was where the Houston would be traveling during most of its journey to Guam.

• Thermocline. The rate that temperature decreases as one descends beneath the surface, represented by a sloping line on a graph. The straightening out of the thermocline is indicative of the start of the layer depth.

• Baffles. A cone of 120 degrees in the water, aft of the boat, where the sonar technicians cannot hear anything specific because of the white-water noise caused by the turning of the propeller—what submariners call the “screw.” Because sonar is seeing through hearing, it represents a dangerous blind spot.

Lt. Junior Grade Williams ended his tutorial with a description of the difference between the Cold War and the Global War on Terrorism, from the operational viewpoint of submariners. Because the Cold War was fought mainly in the Arctic, it signified a shallow and uniform layer depth, since polar sunlight does not penetrate very deep in the water. The difficulty was not in identifying the layer depth, but in the unpredictable sonar refractions caused by indented icebergs and “marginal” or partly melted ice. The War on Terror, on the other hand, because it was occurring mainly in the tropics, with more variable sun and wind patterns, meant no problems with ice, but lots of problems with “deeper and more complex” layer depths.

It was time for the Houston’s departure. Following lunch and the tutorial I put on a harness. I climbed a succession of ladders to the top of the twenty-foot sail, which, when the sub was above water, functioned as the bridge. Outside, I shackled my harness to a latch and stood atop the highest point of the boat, a narrow space crowded with six crew members in blue coveralls, including the captain, the officer of the deck, and the conning officer. Further reducing the available room were two periscopes, a tangle of antennae and computer screens, a mounted MK-43 light-medium machine gun for force protection, and a “snorkel” device that ventilated fresh air into the boat. All of this constituted the “rigging,” which would be either manually removed or hydraulically lowered into the sail prior to descent.

Right below me, extending on both sides at the midpoint in the sail, were two giant wings: the fairwater planes, which, by adjusting their angle, allowed the sub to quickly ascend or descend while underwater. Far aft, by the rudder and hidden under a few feet of water, were the stern planes, smaller wings that allowed for angling and finer adjustments in depth. A submarine operated much like an airplane. The fore and aft ballast tanks filled with water to achieve neutral buoyancy; then adjustment of the wings and tail—the fairwater and stern planes—allowed for most of the course movements.

“Get the ship under way,” announced Capt. Zavadil, standing beside me.[60] “Aye, aye sir,” came the reply from the officer of the deck. A tug-boat helped nudge us away from the Yokohamas, as crew members in coveralls under green vests stood topside along the length of the hull, “manning the rails” and casting off the mooring lines. The American flag was lowered from a pole aft, and raised on the sail a few inches away from my head, functioning now as “the ensign.”

The rudder amidships, we slipped past the Arleigh Burke destroyers and the USS Pasadena, the sub atop which the ceremony the previous day had been held. In front of us, before we turned, was the battleship Missouri with the Arizona Memorial off the starboard bow. The boat’s whistle sounded like a foghorn as the Houston turned to the outer harbor around Hospital Point, and concentric ribbons of water curved green over the bow.

Not even on the bridge wing of a destroyer was there such a feeling as riding atop the sail of a submarine, your feet dangling over the sides, only the harness to keep you from sliding into the water. The sensation intensified as we picked up a few knots of speed, so the water—now green, pastel blue, and navy blue in succession—spilled over topside, with only the sail and fairwater planes still dry.

The boat accelerated to full speed, or “full bell” in submarine language, meaning eighteen knots (flank bell and best bell were faster). Water cascaded all over the hull in explosions of suds, reaching closer to us. The officer of the deck lit a cigar, and I leaned back against the periscope tower, enjoying the sun and the roar of waterfalls less than twenty feet below now. Two children with their mother, standing at the edge of the shore on the residential grounds of Hickam Air Force Base, waved small American flags as we passed.

Once clear of Pearl Harbor and vicinity, the “maneuvering watch” was over, and the “at-sea watch” commenced. The captain unshackled his harness and went below to the control room, which would henceforth function as the bridge. Down there, others would take over the roles of officer of the deck and conning officer. As I went below, I hit my head against the revolving radar and began bleeding all over my clothes. Seeing me pass into the washroom to clean away the blood, one sailor remarked, “You just came on board and already you have a sea story to tell.”

The moment I went below I passed from a world of exhilarating traveler’s sensations to one of digital abstractions, from a world of vivid blue tropical seas to a purgatory of dead fluorescent lighting, prison-gray electronic monitoring panels and switching devices, endless entrails of seafoam green ducts and cables, and blinking red LED (light-emitting diode) numbers. The weather on a sub was always the same, “69 degrees and fluorescent,” in the words of one chief petty officer. The Formica paneling of the wardroom and some of the p-ways was the closest thing to aesthetic luxury.

Eyeing the industrial-age gray and seafoam green, one sailor remarked, “Yeah, Martha Stewart sure as hell didn’t do the interior decorating on this boat.” “What’s a sub like?” another sailor asked rhetorically, looking up at the continuous spaghetti of pipes and cables in the most dismal, mealy shades. “It’s like being stuck in the boiler room of your high school for several weeks.”

On the mess deck, sailors were already studying for boards and other qualification tests: settling in for two weeks at sea. I noticed red and yellow signs here and there, warning of the danger of radiation if one passed through a door, or a certain point along a p-way. The Navy was careful to the extreme regarding the protection of sailors from radiation. Between its submarines and aircraft carriers, the Navy had operated many dozens of nuclear reactors for decades—twice as many as the number of nuclear power plants active in the United States—without incident.

The control room, henceforth functioning as the bridge, was a B-52 cockpit writ large—clunky gray, World War II–like consoles that often masked the latest and greatest technology. The helmsman controlled the rudder and fairwater planes. Seated beside him to his left was the “out-board,” the equivalent of a co-pilot, who managed the stern planes. Beside him was the chief of the watch, who handled communications throughout the boat, as well as the amount of water pumped into the ballast tanks. Behind all three sat “the dive” (diving officer of the watch), who had overall responsibility for the boat’s movement in the water. The goal was RAMOD (reach and maintain ordered depth). That depth was determined by the conning officer, in consultation with the quartermaster, or navigator. Given that the weaponeers and sonar techs also sat nearby, the control room was the pulsing heart of the sub.

Final preparations were in progress for descent, which included retrieving the rigging on the sail, testing the hydraulics and ventilation systems, and bringing down one of the periscopes. The Houston’s speed had slowed considerably in the moments prior to leaving the surface, and the boat was rolling about to a much greater extent than a destroyer did in similar seas. I thought I might become seasick: subs were designed for underwater stability, but they could be notoriously unstable platforms on the surface.

“Dive! Dive!” came the command. We descended thirty-five feet at a five-degree angle, at which point the second periscope was lowered. I heard the hissing of water through one of the sound sensors. Then, increasing the angle to fifteen degrees, so my body leaned forward, we descended another four hundred feet. The rolling ceased and my on-coming seasickness subsided immediately as we crossed beneath the wave action. There had been only the faintest feeling of falling, as in a slow elevator. All was now quiet and calm. “It’s good to go deep,” someone said, just above a whisper.

Speed was increased to twenty-four knots. That necessitated restraining the fairwater planes and steering by the smaller stern planes only. This was a safety measure: if the larger wings shifted precipitously to a steep angle while the boat was moving at full bell or faster, they could quickly bring the sub down to crush depth, a point where the water pressure would bend the hull inward.

Almost four thousand miles underwater to Guam, I thought. It was an amazing prospect, yet utterly routine given the history of this mode of travel. “The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe…. It is a spacious wilderness,” says Captain Nemo, the commander of the submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne’s 1870 visionary epic Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.⁶ The first U.S. nuclear submarine, the Nautilus, was named after Verne’s imaginary ship, which in the novel reaches the South Pole; its American namesake drove under the North Pole in 1958. Verne’s story, which only a fool would confuse with one for adolescents, establishes the fundamental tenet of life aboard a submarine: that the boat is a “holy ark” whose cramped space encompasses all of human progress. Inside are victuals, security, calm, and—at least on Verne’s Nautilus—a library of humanity’s twelve thousand greatest books, while outside are only the black and crushing depths, the equivalent of interstellar space.⁷

In fact, every U.S. submarine boasted a prodigious library—of technical manuals. They were everywhere on the boat and referred to constantly. A destroyer in a mechanical emergency could call in expert technicians by helicopter from a nearby carrier, but a submarine crew was on its own deep beneath the surface, so these thick manuals were veritable bibles.

We were now sailing north of the Nautilus’s course in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Whereas Captain Nemo had taken his boat south from Hawaii to French Polynesia, and then west through Oceania to the Torres Strait, between Australia and New Guinea, we were to end up due north of that longitudinal point, in the Mariana Islands chain.

Again I was struck by how every inch of space counted. The hospital corpsman shared his cubbyhole office with launchers for sonar buoys and torpedo countermeasures, in addition to the usual dense jungle of pipes and cables reaching down to his nose. The lone exercise bike was squeezed between fuse boxes, temperature gauges, and sonar transmitters. Technical manuals were fitted into shallow wall recesses for quick retrieval. Hundreds of cans of food lay in storage spaces that also served as benches in the crew’s mess, where the cooks, whenever they were not preparing a meal, were on their hands and knees scrubbing every nook and cranny. With 147 men stomping in and out of the mess, and no outside air for weeks sometimes, cleaning was an interminable necessity.[61]

Such eighteen-hour-a-day drudgery, absent the sensation of day or night, allowed me the privilege of being with people whose pride depended on not needing to rest. Their escape consisted of porn in the racks, smoking or dipping tobacco aft, watching a movie, playing cribbage, or mainly just engaging in bull sessions.

The U.S. Navy, as I had learned on the Benfold, comprised a veritable childhood map of the interior continent, as so many enlisted sailors hailed from the great land sea of the Middle West and Great Plains, with its corn, soybean, and wheat fields, which engendered boyhood dreams of the blue ocean. Machinist’s Mate Jeff Meinheit of Auburn, Nebraska, was a typical bald and bulky Navy senior chief, with a mustache and a splendid disposition. He and the nine sailors under him were responsible for fixing everything on the boat that was not part of the nuclear power plant: from the esoteric equipment that converted hydrogen to water vapor and scrubbed carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, to mundane devices like the laundry machine and clothes dryer. Chief Meinheit ruled over a multi-level maze of screaming boilers, generators, pumps, and valves, negotiated by narrow deck plates that were more like catwalks. “Pretty much anything with a pipe on this boat belongs to me,” he said.

Because something was always broken, the labor was unrelenting. Chief Meinheit’s dad had been in the Army, his sister in the Air Force, and his uncles in the Marine Corps. The only way to deny that the volunteer American military was not a caste was to avoid the life stories of the enlisted men and women in it. Meinheit was full of details: how a week’s worth of emergency oxygen was stored in pressurized banks fore and aft; how the amine used to scrub the air of carbon dioxide was odorless inside the boat, but as soon as you left the submarine and were back in your home, you discovered that all of your clothes reeked of the chemical. One more chore for the wives of submariners.

Electronics Technician Gordon Boese of Richey, Montana—another senior chief and farm boy from the Great Plains, with a mug of coffee perpetually in his hand—had spent fourteen years on submarines, including many months above the Arctic Circle as a radioman, and under the North Pole. “I was twenty-three, married, no great job, and always interested in military service. I met the Navy recruiter and then sold the wife on it. The population of this submarine is more than half of that of my hometown. The sub force has really broadened my horizons.”

One chief hailed from Cape Girardeau, Missouri—Rush Limbaugh’s hometown, he told me with pride. He hoped to return there after reaching the twenty-year mark in the sub fleet. Another senior enlisted man had a stepdad who had served in the Army Air Forces on Tinian in the Marianas, when they brought in “Fat Man and Little Boy,” he said, referring, respectively, to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Electronics Technician 2nd Class Kyle Marshall Limb of Vernal, Utah, was an enlistee with whom I became acquainted at the start of the voyage. At twenty-three, he was the same age as the Houston. Enthusiastic to the point of giddiness sometimes, with an innocent voice, he, too, had relatives in other branches of the military and had joined the Navy both to better his social station, and, he told me, as a response to 9/11. “All of us are a little kooky living in this 3-D math world,” Limb went on. “Not only are we packed together underwater, but because it’s hard to send e-mail we lose touch with the outside world to a greater degree than other sailors.”

Petty Officer Limb, raised as a Mormon, was the lay leader of the “eclectic services” on the Houston, offered every Sunday morning along with Protestant and Catholic worship. Eclecticism was essentially a “neo-pagan” movement, he explained, which combined elements of old Norse religions, and Druidic, Wiccan, and other covens. Sometimes Buddhists and what Limb called “solitary practitioners” took part. I had heard stories about neo-paganism among marines in Iraq and enlisted sailors on the Benfold, but this submarine was the first place where I encountered it directly. Limb told me that he had to persist with his superiors to get it officially sanctioned: a wise decision on the part of the Navy, since only seven sailors attended in any case, and this way it did not become some subversive, underground youth faction. It was a matter of being tolerant without being indulgent. “We don’t sacrifice animals or pray to the devil,” Limb said. “I’ve never touched drugs. We stand in a circle and sprinkle salt water, and ask for blessings from the physical elements. Our moral basis is, do as you will, as long as ye harm none.”

The very compression of this far more intense, squeezed-together version of the bobbing and swaying universe of the destroyer Benfold made it frightening in its tyrannical possibilities, had iron-fisted discipline not been so total that it barely needed to be asserted—or implied even. It was just there: the discipline of a true elite, in which the lowliest of enlisted men could take great pride.

The personal security I felt among these 147 young males thrown together in the primordial deep allotted me the luxury of ruminating on its opposite: the mini-universe of men behaving like beasts, with the strong and less intimidated preying upon the weaker and more intimidated, in a finely stratified hierarchy of bullies on a small ship in the mid-Pacific. That is the world of Jack London’s The Sea Wolf—the story of an independently wealthy and bookish scholar captured by a seal-hunting schooner, on which he is both terrorized and, finally, at the age of thirty-five, brought to manhood by a captain “so purely primitive that he was of the type that came into the world before the development of the moral nature.”⁸ There is a swift, deeply etched quality to London’s characters in the story that might make them seem stark and exaggerated, and thus unsophisticated by some literary standards. But if you spent enough time in close quarters with vigorous young men—unrefined by the wider cosmopolitan world, like many on this submarine—you would realize that London was merely being realistic: that he had seen far more of the world than those who relegated him to the realm of the merely “self-taught.”

The discipline that did not even need to be asserted had much to do with the COB (pronounced “cobb”), the chief of the boat, Command Master Chief Scott Weaver of Fernandina Beach, Florida, near the Georgia state line. At fifty, Master Chief Weaver had been in the Navy since 1979, almost the whole time on submarines, much of it spent in the North Atlantic tracking the boomers and other Soviet subs. In the entire world of the Navy, chiefs of the boat had an especial allure, more so even than master chiefs on surface ships. Truly, COB Weaver’s authority was more subtle than that of Master Chief Craddock on the Benfold. Whereas the latter loomed over you, the former was more like that of a parent or high school teacher whom you did not want to disappoint, or test. The COB had gray hair and round wire-rimmed glasses. The impression he made was trim and neat, not burly. He was an avid backpacker in the Olympic and Cascade ranges (for decades Washington State had been a major submarine hub). The mountain air was the antidote he had chosen to a quarter century underwater.

“My grandfather was a sailor on a Navy cruiser and my dad an Army Ranger. But my grandfather was a better storyteller. I was enthralled by his tales about riding out typhoons, even if they were exaggerated.[62] And I was named after him, so I joined the Navy and became a sonar tech.” The COB gave out the family death messages, knew whose crew members’ wives were in the hospital, set the smoking and liberty policy, set the watch bills, was responsible for cleanliness on board (“heads and beds”), and was on the noise reduction and other technical committees—all in addition to the two hours of daily paperwork he had. He napped rather than slept. Like all master chiefs and sergeant majors, COB Weaver had pet peeves: he would not tolerate sailors who went about unshaven or with their hands in their pockets.

“We’ve finished the basic phase,” Capt. Zavadil told the group of officers and senior chiefs crammed into the wardroom toward the end of our first day at sea. “I’d say we’re now mediocre. We need to focus on navigation, sonar analysis, torpedo strikes, mining, noise reduction, and the like.” Raising the boat to periscope depth and holding it steady in a rough sea—to ventilate the air inside with the snorkel—had been a big deal some weeks back. Now it was routine. The Houston, having recently emerged from a three-year overhaul in dry dock that featured a $200 million refueling of the nuclear reactor, was finally back in the water, with the crew reacquainting itself with war-fighting skills.[63] It was a matter of getting a lot better at them, before the boat could go out on sustained operational deployments. That meant drills, and more drills, which would commence the following morning. As the captain told me, “We’re in spring training, preparing for the regular season.” The pressure on him was severe: as a forward-deployed sub, the Houston’s training and operational treadmill was faster than that of subs based off the mainland and Hawaii, because more time at sea was expected of it.

Whereas Marine generals often looked like Marine generals because of the physical toughness required for close-quarters combat, submarine commanders had no particular look to them, and whatever that look might be, it definitely wasn’t gritty. Still, the requirements for being the commanding officer of a nuclear submarine were of the kind that would intimidate the most ambitious of people in the civilian world. Fair-complexioned John Zavadil was forty, but looked much younger. He was cheerful and uncomplicated in the extreme. Sometimes the chemistry of strong leadership is simple. It certainly was in Zavadil’s case. Because of a pleasant disposition, he was able to be blunt all the time, without offending anybody.

Zavadil saw the future of submarine war fighting in the following terms: more warm water as opposed to cold water operations, and more SOF (Special Operations Forces) deployments off submarines. While the recent past had been carrier strike group–centric, the future would emphasize force multiplication: get close, real fast, to a coastline to collect data or sink a ship when no one thinks you’re there, perhaps even frightening away the enemy before he has time to muster his forces. In sum, it was about preparing the battlespace. It could apply to the defense of Taiwan, the subjugation of North Korea, or much less obvious scenarios like killing a concentration of terrorists in a remote part of the Indonesian archipelago.

Indeed, the submarine, which could deposit SEALs on a beach at night, and the V-22 Osprey, which could land and take off vertically from a dirt strip and be refueled in the air, were two examples of how the American military might employ technology to circumvent the need for diplomatic permission slips and foreign basing rights prior to the insertion of forces: by gathering intelligence and killing “bad guys” without the media or a host nation even knowing about it. Together with Marine and Army Special Forces training missions of third-world militaries, such hardware was helping to ease a paramount security problem of the early twenty-first century: how to meld the political reality in distant regions of the world without the need for cumbersome, large-scale interventions as in Afghanistan and Iraq—interventions that, because of the big footprint they created, required the approval of a global media to be successful. And of all the big footprint hardware in the U.S. military arsenal (tanks, B-52s, carriers, destroyers), only the sub was completely invisible.

The more powerful the media, the greater the benefit from being able to operate unseen. The height of the anti-war protest movement in the late 1960s was also a time of particularly aggressive American submarine infiltration of Soviet waters, which at the time elicited nary a headline. Because submarines were absent from the media radar to a more significant extent than the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency, they might, for example, allow a liberal president, publicly committed to multilateralism, to conduct a compensatory, unilateral foreign policy behind the scenes. The sub was where the true intentions of a nation were revealed.

“Embrace the suck” was an American military cliché that I had been hearing for years. It meant: accept the extreme bodily discomfort demanded of operational deployments, whether in a theater of actual war or in a rigorous training environment that simulated war. “The suck” wasn’t only the dust, the filth, the insects, the heat, and the cold, but also the smaller things like the absence of decent beds or chairs, or tables on which to unfold maps and eat meals. On a submarine—“a sealed people tube,” as sailors called it—the suck was the extreme absence of space, of forever rubbing up against other male bodies in narrow p-ways. It meant maneuvering your way into your rack without banging your head against the one above you; sharing a tiny toilet and shower with a large number of other officers or sailors; stepping gingerly between things piled on the floor, because there was no other place for them. The first night on board was rough, but as the nights accumulated my sense of scale adjusted, and the once-tiny stateroom and p-ways became, as on the Benfold, gradually of normal dimensions.

I had only a mild taste of the suck of submarine existence. Take the four-month-long undersea voyages, without once coming near the surface to ventilate the air, experienced by Culinary Specialist Otis Hines of Calion, Arkansas. The fabled Sturgeon-class spy sub USS Parche had won six Navy Unit Citations and one Presidential Unit Citation while Chief Hines was aboard, between 1995 and 2002. He had to plan the meals and, more importantly, store food for 120 days under way. Stacks of canned goods had covered the p-ways, including the floors between the racks in berthing, he told me. With the floors raised, crewmen’s heads were closer to the already low ceilings, and soon the ceiling bolts were filthy with tiny pieces of hair and bloody skin from all the minor scalp injuries. “It got worse when we started working our way down through the cans, and sailors started stumbling all over the place.” The eggs and potatoes were packed in the bilges, while coffee hung in canvas bags from the ceiling. Standing up straight anywhere was next to impossible. “I’ve spent eighteen years in the sub force doing stuff that no one would even think or have any idea about,” Chief Hines told me.

“We have a bandwidth tracking problem, with enemy totals in the area,” Capt. Zavadil announced in the control room. Translation: sonar was scanning transmissions for a hostile fast-attack nuclear submarine. The Houston was cruising at a depth of four hundred feet. You didn’t want to be at periscope depth when on the hunt; even the tip of a periscope above the water with light reflecting from it could alert the enemy. The enemy SSN did not exist. It was being simulated in a torpedo-firing drill run for the Houston’s benefit by the Navy’s nearby Barking Sands missile base on the western Hawaiian island of Kauai, which I had visited the previous autumn.

“Resolve ambiguity,” Zavadil announced further. The sonar towed array, attached to a thousand feet of cable dragging behind the boat, was the Houston’s best eyes and ears. But since the towed array could hear sound in all directions, it was unclear from what angle exactly the enemy’s sonar signature was coming. Resolving ambiguity meant doing a zigzag that, by putting the dragged towed array in successively different angles to the boat, allowed the sonar shack to triangulate the enemy’s position. This was a game of measuring frequencies that established a pattern of enemy movement. That led, in turn, to a “fire control solution”—killing the other sub with a torpedo, that is. (The choice of adversary, specific to a given country, was mere logic, given the shifting power dynamics in the world. But it is one that I am not allowed to identify.)[64]

Zavadil closed his eyes and said, “Come left hard rudder 175 degrees.” His action was based on finding the enemy SSN at 217 degrees southwest, and he wanted to be about 40 degrees off the latter’s stern as he converged from 9,000 to 7,000 yards. Two hours later, after patient tracking, a pattern of movement was established for the SSN, and a fire control solution found: an angle of 295 degrees at 7,000 yards from the target. The torpedo was “smart,” meaning that under its own guidance system it could fine-tune its course as it neared impact. But the goal was to minimize the area of uncertainty. Because the loaded torpedo tube was on the Houston’s port bow, the captain wanted the boat’s starboard side facing the enemy. That way the boat’s own sonar signature would shield that of the torpedo until it was too late for the enemy to evade it.

I heard a thud from the torpedo tube. A few moments later the good news came from Barking Sands. Capt. Zavadil announced, “We just sent an enemy…to the bottom of the ocean. Not bad.” The crew started talking and joking again, signaling its relief.

The XO, Lt. Comdr. Brian Davies, had the most difficult assignment during the exercise. Through headphones, he had to run a three-way conversation between the sonar shack, the watchstanders at computer combat control, and the weapons officer (or “weaps,” as he was known), who supervised some but not all of the watchstanders. Each watchstander had a different function—for example, one evaluated the trajectory of the torpedo, while another tracked secondary contacts in the area so that the torpedo’s guidance system would not be confused. Conflicting advice emerged frequently, and the XO had to make quick calls based on often-complex geometry.

Davies was a typically quiet and conscientious Navy officer, of the kind I had met on the Benfold. He had loved math and science courses in high school, and didn’t think that merely going to classes all day at college would be enough of a challenge, so he applied to Annapolis. At the Naval Academy, he gravitated toward submarines. He was interested in nuclear physics and, as he told me, “When subs go to sea they go to war to a greater degree than surface ships.” Davies had to be incessantly curious about every technical aspect of the sub, from the torpedoes in the bow to the reactor aft, so that when junior officers or chiefs were not on top of problems, he knew it before they did.

Upon completion of the torpedo drill, we set sail for Guam, down a pre-established underwater highway, or submarine interstate. Guam was four time zones to the west, but because it was on the other side of the International Date Line, it was twenty hours ahead of Hawaii. Rather than shift the boat’s clocks one hour at a time every few days, Zavadil decided to do it all at once. Thus, while the Houston was still in the vicinity of Honolulu, 10 a.m. on Saturday, April 23, became 6 a.m. on Sunday, April 24. It didn’t matter. Deep under the water there was no indication of night and day; thus you could inhabit any time zone you wanted.[65] Because Saturday and Sunday became one day, the XO made sure not to delete religious services from the schedule: Protestant, Catholic, and Eclectic.

On this trans-oceanic journey, like the previous one on the destroyer, the drills commenced immediately. “Light smoke in the torpedo room,” came the announcement, as a general alarm sounded in the fashion of a police siren. In the control room, the watchstanders all put on EABs (emergency air breathers), a sock-like mask that draped onto your shoulders, with a filter and tube that you snapped into one of the many oxygen manifolds located throughout the boat. The control room filled with the hissing noise of deep breathing. At the same time, the helmsman drove the boat on a fast ascent from 485 feet to 150 feet below the surface. During most emergencies, the submarine had to be in a position to quickly resurface.

I ran down two sets of ladders and forward into the torpedo room, leaping onto one of the stows to observe the action, careful not to hit my head on the ceiling. For the moment, the only ones in the room were the drill monitors, with red ball caps and stopwatches. Then a line of sailors wearing EABs hustled in carrying a pressurized fire hose. They were followed by other sailors in firefighting ensemble—oxygen tanks and helmeted masks, thermal imagers in their hands to identify the source of the fire through the smoke. The stopwatches indicated that the response had been below average. Both the captain and the XO were annoyed because one sailor came storming in with an axe instead of a wooden pole. An axe was a conduit of electricity and thus particularly dangerous. Its only likely purpose on a submarine would be to destroy equipment in case of an imminent enemy takeover of the boat. “Anyone wants to use an axe or crowbar,” the captain said, smiling but dead serious, “they can come into my stateroom afterwards to do push-ups.”

The crew would have to practice the procedure again, and again. There might be no sight on a submarine more memorable than sitting on the mess deck with every seat occupied as sailors ate, yelled, argued, and exchanged stories, just as the fire alarm sounded and the crew became a single life-form: exploding off cheap vinyl benches and adjacent berthing racks, tearing down p-ways and hatchways to their watch stations, their heads ducking to avoid protruding bolts and pipes, simultaneously pulling on EABs.

There was a simulated oil spill in which the sailor contaminated was given the most expensive medical treatment available, two aspirins and a cup of coffee.[66] Another drill involved filling the escape trunk with seven hundred gallons of water, so that the pressure inside would equal that outside the sub, thereby blowing the hatch and allowing four crew members at a time to accelerate upward to the surface because of the air bubbles inside their pressurized suits.

There was, too, torpedo and mine mustering. The Houston had four torpedo tubes and space for twenty-six MK-48 ADCAPS (advanced capability torpedoes) and MK-67 mobile mines, situated on massive iron tables (stows) moved vertically and horizontally by hydraulics. Shifting the weapons around, sliding them into the tubes with ramming devices, closing the interior hatches, pressurizing the tubes with water, and then opening the exterior hatches was another complex procedure accomplished by one sailor reading out loud from a manual, while others carried out the orders. From the movies, one thought of torpedoes being rammed into ejection tubes. But the ramming devices silently slid the massive weapons into position over greased skids. The very oozing slowness of the procedure made its intent seem even more ominous. The air pressure from a torpedo firing was such that wherever you were in the forward half of the boat, your ears popped.

One of the operators before the mealy gray control panels was TM-2 (Torpedo Man 2nd Class) Kevin Mallory of Coos Bay, Oregon, an “old dog” at thirty-five, who had been in the submarine fleet a decade before leaving the Navy, only to reenlist after 9/11. “Was it worth it to reenlist?” I asked. “Yes and no,” he told me. His pay was one-third that of his civilian job, and he hadn’t seen his wife in months.

I had met Mallory at breakfast at 6 a.m. in the crew’s mess while rap music was blasting as the kitchen staff was busy scrubbing the deck on their knees. He was joshing with another sailor about the feasibility of storing golf clubs on board. With the sub at a steady “trim” at a depth of five hundred feet, you could putt in the p-ways. Crew members were noisily coming on and going off duty. It might as well have been noon.

Early in the morning and again at night we’d come up to periscope depth, raising the antennae four feet above the water to capture messages on the secret net. Then we’d dive deep and fast. Through the periscope in late April, I saw the moon illuminate the rocking sea a “baffling protean gray,” in Jack London’s words, a gray “which is never twice the same; which runs through many shades and colorings like intershot silk in sunshine.”⁹ Lying on my stomach in the rack at night reading London’s Sea Wolf—there was no room to sit up—I reflected that at fifty-two, I stayed young certainly not so much by journeys with the military, but by occasionally carrying around the same paperbacks I had read a third of a century earlier, when I was riding trains through Turkey and Iran, and taking car ferries around the Greek islands. Rediscovering The Sea Wolf for the first time in decades was like going back in time.

Through the periscope in the morning, I’d look out at the blue, post-dawn water and sometimes espied a merchant ship ten thousand yards out on the horizon. The invigorating clarity of the scene appeared not quite real, even as it was only fifty feet above the grim, industrial grays of the congested control room. In a submarine, peering through the periscope was the equivalent of strolling amid sunlight and fresh breezes on the outer deck of a surface ship. Or you could go inside the sonar shack and listen to the “biologics,” the screeching cries and whistles of whales and dolphins, registered by a spray of dots on the computer screen, as opposed to the solid, bold shapes of commercial fishing trawlers.

Sensations inside a submarine were indirect, making them even more precious and fantastic to consider. “The reactor is critical,” would come the announcement sometimes when we were at flank speed. You would feel the powerful shudder of the propeller (screw), along with the pressure against your back (if you were sitting against something), and realize that the boat was traveling at over twenty-five knots against a veritable wall of resistance, five hundred feet below the surface, where the pressure per square inch was the equivalent of a 220-pound man sitting on your thumb.[67] Flank speed on a surface warship, with a rooster tail of white water rising several stories up, felt like going eighty miles per hour on a highway. But I traveled faster on the Houston, in depths where the water pressure would have reduced the destroyer’s gas turbine engines to a crawl.

The sub could travel at the same speed for years without ever slowing down, with all the lights, computers, and machinery operating at the same time, and with much of the crew taking hot showers. The reactor needed to be refueled only about once every two decades. There was evidently a lot to be said for nuclear power.

In a tiny recess amid screaming air vents, signal storage equipment, and a bank of transmitters that created wattage for sonar transducers, I found STS-3 (Sonar Technician Submarines 3rd Class) Steve Spence of Woodlands, Texas, crouched on the floor, notebook in hand, studying for an examination in equipment damage control. Sonar Tech Spence always knew that he would join the military. The only question was which branch. “I had the call in my soul—just like my father, an oil drilling engineer, who got the call from his spirit to be a Baptist preacher.” Spence had been in the Air Force’s junior ROTC program in high school, but upon graduation decided to join the Navy because, as he told me, the Navy recruiter was more specific about educational opportunities.

Spence had been a crew member of the USS San Francisco, another fast-attack nuclear sub that was part of the same Guam-based squadron as the Houston. A few months earlier, on January 8, when the San Francisco was 350 miles southeast of Guam, traveling at a speed of twenty-five knots, five hundred feet beneath the surface, Spence was in a middle-level p-way, on line for chow, when the sub smashed into an uncharted seamount at a ten-degree upward angle on the port side. He had heard a boom and a shake and the next thing he knew he was on the floor, having hit his head, his glasses missing. A general alarm sounded. Aching and bleeding, he found himself helping more severely wounded sailors.

Another crew member of the San Francisco with whom I spoke had had a similar experience. He was in a compartment of the engine room that got kicked out from under him. Regaining composure, he ran to the crew’s mess, which soon took on the appearance of a battlefield hospital, with blood everywhere and intravenous bags hanging from the ceiling.

The San Francisco had been traveling south toward Australia through the Caroline Islands, near Satawal. Though it was in a designated submarine lane, the charts were contradictory. It would turn out that the chart the San Francisco used showed no discolored water—green and light blue water indicating shallow depths, usually accompanied by a shoal or reef. As Lt. Michael Murphy, the Houston’s “nav” (navigator), explained to me, when it comes to underwater mapping, lines on a chart “are mere cartography” that do not necessarily correspond to depth soundings. The fact is that much of the ocean floor remains a mystery that has yet to be mapped out nearly to the degree of accuracy of the much smaller, terrestrial portion of the earth’s surface. After all, beneath a few hundred feet there is no practical need for surface vessels of any kind to be aware of depth changes. And because the Pacific is deeper than the Atlantic, and also played less of a role in the Cold War, until recently the Navy had paid less attention to its underwater topography.

While the uncharted seamount that the San Francisco hit had reared up suddenly like a sheer cliff, the very shoal-laden geography of the Carolines, coupled with the contradictory cartographic information available, might have led the San Francisco’s commanders to be extra careful. The San Francisco was, at the time, in dry dock in Guam with a crumpled bow.

With the San Francisco in mind, Lt. Murphy, a graduate of Duke University’s ROTC program, was taking no chances. He noticed a particularly questionable area in the pre-designated submarine lane that we were transiting, around 162 degrees east latitude north of Wake Island. It was an area of some rather dramatic seamounts, with a shoal and reef here and there perhaps, appearing on some charts and not on others. Murphy did not assume that just because the route had been selected by headquarters in Honolulu meant it was safe. Thus, for a few hours, when the Houston was in this area, Murphy, with the captain’s permission, limited the MOD (maximum operating depth) to 150 feet and the speed to ten knots. He also stood up a modified piloting party—more people in the navigation section, with a sailor required to constantly look at the depth soundings on the fathometer, and note them down every five minutes.

While nothing unusual showed up on the fathometer during the piloting party’s watch, a few hours later, two hundred miles east of the Marianas chain, where the charts indicated a seamount rising to 2,641 fathoms (15,846 feet below the surface), the fathometer displayed a steep, cliff-like mountain rising to a depth of 1,173 fathoms (7,038 feet), a whopping difference of 8,808 feet from the charts. In a region of many active, undersea volcanoes, the ocean floor was not only little known but also unstable.

With the Navy’s increasing emphasis on unconventional shallow-water operations in crowded sea-lanes, navigation had become an especially critical art, even as the American submarine fleet was rusty at certain aspects of it, at least compared to Cold War days, when cat-and-mouse games with Soviet boomers made American submariners expert at following close behind other boats, by hiding in the latter’s baffles.

Shallow-water operations also demanded better-honed periscope techniques. Because the objective was to stay undetected, theoretically you wanted to keep the periscope up for as short a time as possible. That meant getting the most out of the time the periscope was up, which, in turn, entailed micro-managing every second of its use. It was the perisher navies—the Dutch, Swedes, Australians, and others—with diesel subs designed for patrolling littorals, that mentored their American allies on periscope techniques.

Before rising to periscope depth, the boat would swivel to “clear baffles”—that is, to inspect the 120-degree blind spot created by the propeller-made white water. Then the periscope (“one-eyed lady”) would ascend and the officer of the deck would do three eight-second, 360-degree sweeps, followed by a second series of sweeps to check for airborne contacts. Meanwhile, both secret and unclassified message traffic would be uploaded and downloaded on a priority basis, before the boat quickly dove again.

There was also the “dip scope” technique: surface just long enough to snap a photograph through the periscope of a ship that had been detected by sonar, then calculate when you had to surface again to keep visual tabs on the ship, based on its speed and direction.

On the other hand, the longer you had the periscope up, the more intelligence you could pull down through ESM (electronic surveillance measures)—the monitoring of radars on enemy ships, for example. In fact, the American submarine fleet considered itself an “up-scope navy”—that is, an aggressive navy, willing to brazenly ascend to periscope depth to gather as much intelligence as possible while avoiding detection. This was part of a Cold War tradition, when American subs would hover at periscope depth in Soviet waters above the Arctic Circle. For submariners, the Cold War was surrounded by nearly the same halo of risk and glory as World War II. And given the significant role played by subs in operations in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf in the 1990s, it was a service that saw itself permanently at war.

“A sub’s not a job; it’s a way of life,” Senior Chief Anthony Maestas of Salt Lake City remarked. His was among the intense, screwed-tight faces I had noticed during my first hours on the Houston; his expression told you a lot was going on in his head. Senior Chief Maestas had grown up Hispanic in a white-bread, Mormon environment. “I understood early what racism is, and how to see it coming,” he told me. “You can’t tolerate even a hint of racism or ethnic innuendo in a sub because of the small community we inhabit, and our dependence on one another.” Much of Chief Maestas’s family had served in the Army in Vietnam, and he enlisted out of high school, becoming a 13 Bravo artillery gunner. But he wasn’t fulfilled in the Army—he just wasn’t, though he had a hard time explaining why. After two years he switched to the Navy. Because he didn’t know that it was illegal to enlist in one service while serving in another, he spent several days in jail for the infraction. He now had twenty-one years on submarines, and had traveled all over the Orient, the Persian Gulf, and north of the Arctic Circle, in places where the U.S. military denied it had been. In 1999 he spent 310 days at sea. “The wife has to be strong,” he remarked.

“In school, I didn’t like the kids who got A’s in calculus without having to study much,” he continued. “School came hard to me.” Chief Maestas worked at it though, and was now the department chief in the engine room, a key component of the nuclear reactor complex, with sixty sailors working under him. “It’s easy to mold a sailor into anything you want him to be, because on a sub he can’t go anywhere. He’s yours.

“This crew’s going to get a lot tighter and more disciplined when we go out on actual missions, a few months from now,” he went on. (The Houston was forward-deployed in Guam, two days’ sailing from Taiwan.) “During the Gulf War, I saw shitbags turn into warriors after we had fired our first Tomahawks. We’re still in the midst of changing the Houston from a yard boat to a warship, from a caterpillar into a butterfly: when it will be loaded down with weaponry that we won’t be able to confirm or deny we have, when dropping a wrench on a deck plate will have consequences because it raises our sonar signature. Yeah, you think the atmosphere is serious now—just wait.”

I got to know Maestas better after I moved into the chiefs’ quarters, into a top rack with two inches between my nose and a nest of valves, which I entered by grabbing on to a couple of pipes, pulling my knees up to my chest and then into the mattress. It was worth it, though. I got to listen to the chiefs talk about the individual problems of junior petty officers. What carrots could they offer this one exemplary sailor who was on the fence about reenlistment? How could they rein in this other sailor who was smart but cynical, and was ridiculing younger, more ambitious seamen for “kissing the chiefs’ asses”? What about the sailor who was overeating? Could they get him counseling? Nothing—no bullying, no slacking off—was missed on the boat.

“Even if we know they won’t reenlist, we still have a responsibility to prepare them for society,” COB Weaver explained. He spoke of a sailor on another boat who had been raised by a grandparent, and had gotten a “less than honorable” discharge. Months later, the grandparent—a retired sailor proud of his own military service—called and said that his grandson never came home after leaving the Navy. Did the COB know where he was? No, he didn’t. The following year, someone spotted him homeless in the streets of Tacoma, Washington. Weaver used the story to scare sailors about whom he was worried.

The chiefs’ discussion happened to occur while the Houston was at “test depth” over the Mariana Trench. That is, we had descended at an angle of thirty degrees to a depth of greater than 800 feet in over 28,000 feet of water. Between the ocean floor and the surface you could fit K2, the second tallest mountain in the world. We were somewhere in between.

Two weeks into the underwater voyage, land was sighted through the periscope: the island of Rota, north of Guam in the Marianas chain. The Houston passed west between the two islands and then turned south into the Philippine Sea, where we surfaced. The hatch was opened. I scrambled up the sail and into what seemed like the most glaring sunlight I had ever experienced. There was a delicious racket of white water as the bow cut through the ballpoint blue. With the sea right below me, I felt on top of the world. The high cliffs of Guam’s northwestern tip, guarding Andersen Air Force Base, lay ten miles abeam. The heat—stifling, humid heat as opposed to the fresh, cool Hawaiian breezes—told me that the central Pacific had been spanned.

Alongside me atop the sail, now serving as the officer of the deck, was Lt. Comdr. Michael Luckett, the boat’s “eng” (chief engineer in the nuclear power plant). He was so smart and conscientious—his eyes seemed to register the light more than other people’s—that the XO had decided to let him alone and concentrate on the work of other junior officers. Luckett’s next sea tour would probably be as an XO himself. Members of his family had served in both World War II and Vietnam. The same story: he wanted something harder than college, and living quarters that were more crowded than college dorms didn’t matter to him. He applied to the three service academies and ended up at Annapolis. Later, he got an advanced degree in engineering at Berkeley, where, as he remarked, “The science and engineering students on the north side of the campus lived in a different political universe than the liberal arts students on the south side.”

“Why’d you choose submarines?” I asked.

“Because I knew I’d work with the smartest NCOs in the military.” He ticked off the names of Chiefs Maestas, Meinheit, and a handful of others, handing out superlatives. He and his wife had recently bought a house in Guam and were looking forward to purchasing a fifty-foot sailboat. Their plan was to retire in this U.S. territory, where there was a sizable American military community.

The Houston soon passed Asan Beach, where the Marines had landed sixty-one years before in a bloody campaign to retake Guam from the Japanese. Then the boat turned east toward the shore, into a wall of wind that almost tore my notebook from my hand as the American flag crackled beside me. Rounding Spanish Point into the entrance of Apra Harbor Naval Station, I noticed the smashed-up USS San Francisco in dry dock.

A tug pulled alongside us, and the commodore of forward-deployed Submarine Squadron 15, Capt. Brad Gehrke of Odebolt, Iowa, stepped onto the Houston along with a small team from his headquarters. We immediately turned around and headed back out to sea. The commodore had come aboard to observe two combat drills scheduled for the next morning.

The mine drill was the big one. The scenario called for the Houston to lay eighteen defensive mines around Apra Harbor. In the process of laying the mines, the crew had to be careful not to be counter-detected by two enemy warships, a guided missile destroyer and a diesel-electric submarine, whose mission was to penetrate the military facilities in the harbor. The identity of the enemy was the same as that in the exercise earlier in the journey. A succession of junior officers and chiefs drove the briefing in the wardroom that night. The tension was palpable.

Capt. Zavadil peppered the briefers with questions as Commodore Gehrke looked on: Did they really need to leave the fathometer on? Zavadil asked. After all, why provide the enemy diesel sub with an additional sonar signature? A junior officer responded that the fathometer could work on a high frequency that the diesel wouldn’t pick up. Why should the boat turn to port rather than to starboard when outside the harbor? the captain asked, this time just to test the knowledge of one chief. Because the towed sonar array, dragging behind the boat, could get caught by the propeller in the event of a sharp rightward turn, the chief answered. On it went.

The chances of an American sub having to fire torpedoes—complicated by systems’ failures that the drill monitors had pre-programmed—and then lay mines the same morning, which (again as the monitors had arranged) would suffer their own mishaps, were unlikely in the extreme. The whole idea, as Commodore Gehrke explained to me, was to make the drills so frustrating and complex that actual combat operations would be easy for the crew. After all, this crew was going to war, in a way that was similar to the way American subs went to war from the 1950s through the 1980s, though few were aware of it.

The morning dragged on. A torpedo misfired. A mine didn’t work. Drill monitors in red ball caps smiled furtively at one another as the crew quietly, persistently struggled with getting their weapons off. Lunch was missed. Crawling under the stows in the torpedo room to get a better look at the mine-loading operation, I got green grease all over my shirt. In the crew’s mess, a galley worker gave me detergent to try to remove it. We were joking about my ruined shirt when a general alarm sounded, followed by the announcement: “Hot mine in a torpedo tube, there has been a toxic gas release, everyone to their watch stations.” EABs were ripped out of closets as sailors leapt over tables, out of racks, and out of toilets. Another pre-programmed drill.

Later, in the control room, I noticed an authentic set of Texas long-horns lying atop a bank of computers. Capt. Zavadil told me that after the crew had reached a higher level of proficiency in these drills, and gone and returned from a successful operation, he planned to mount them on the bridge atop the Houston’s sail.