Your “Whaddya Mean I’m Sick?!” Monday Evening Open Thread

Here’s the first one. I may have posted an earlier version of this one here before I can’t remember. I hope I don’t bore anybody:

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I was an engineer in the US Navy submarine service, between the age of 18 and 23, and I did main propulsion, known as M-Division or a “Nuke.” I’m one of the last of the Rickover trained engineers.

If you don’t mind, let me tell you about being at sea in the North Atlantic and some of the different ways you can get the shit kicked out of you.

The first is called a “tail broach” and this is unique to submarines. Have you ever seen a nature documentary where a whale lifts it tail out of the water and then slaps it down? When we were snorkeling (once a week) and blowing our tanks and running the diesel and ventilating we always did this in fairly rough seas to keep the surface ships of five different Navies who were trying to follow us from getting too fresh. And it was rough for us (it was a violent ride) but we knew we would dive again after about an hour and get out of it, unlike the surface vessels who had to live in it. I served back aft in the engine room, and you learned very quickly when snorkeling that if you heard the main engines overspeed it meant the tail was out of the water and that it was going to slap back down on the stern planes, just like a whale. You held on to something and bent your knees in order to absorb the shock, which was considerable.

To civilians, the best way to describe this is if you were standing (not sitting) in a Boeing 737 parked on an airfield. A crane picks up the aircraft and lifts it to 10 or 15 feet, and then drops it back to the tarmac. That’s a quality tail broach.

Another was surface running, which we didn’t do very frequently. We were a submarine and being submerged was better and smoother and more comfortable and safer. Running on the surface is simply not what a nuclear submarine is hydrodynamical designed to do efficiently; if the sea is rough you are in for a rotten ride. Sometimes we almost rolled sideways. I had my sea legs but I once walked down the passageway outside the mess decks while surface running and the starboard bulkhead came over and pounded me in the face, as if the boat had suddenly pivoted ninety degrees. This happened more than once.

A submarine that is surface running at night carries very minimal running lights (unlike a cruise ship, for example, which is lit up like a circus). If you are in the cockpit on the sail at night in clear weather you can look up and see the entire universe. There is a falling star about once a minute. We would go down to the Caribbean every so often to do torpedo qualifications, and by day the water is bluer than blue (turquoise) and by night our considerable wake would stir up bioluminescent plankton that would leave an extraordinary beautiful glowing green trail behind us.