trip.
When the plane landed at Honolulu, the sergeant just stared out the window at the clusters of vacationing tourists disembarking from nearby aircraft. As the plane doors opened, the sound of Hawaiian music entered the cabin, the fragrance of Plumeria blossoms floated through the air, and the lucky few of us assigned to Hawaii could not get off the plane fast enough. Jim arrived in Hawaii on a different day, but his flight carried a similar sad group of men. The memory of the unfortunate soldiers on that flight stayed with me during the tough times of the Viperfish’s submerged operations and somehow made my work seem easier by comparison.
I called Pearl Harbor from the airport and was quickly connected to the Viperfish.
“USS Viperfish, Petty Officer Kanen speaking,” the young voice fired out. “May I help you, sir?”
Thirty minutes later, a chief petty officer from the Viperfish jumped out of a car, asked my name, and firmly pumped my hand.
“Welcome to Hawaii, Dunham, I’m Paul Mathews, from the Viperfish-you’re one of the new nukes, aren’t you?” He was in his middle thirties, I guessed, a strong-looking man of average height and weight, and full of enthusiasm when I told him that I was a reactor operator ready to report on board.
“Throw your seabag in the back of the car,” he said with a smile, “and we’re on our way to Pearl. I’ll give you a ride even though you are a goddamn nuke.”
As we drove down Kamehameha Highway under the blue sky and brilliant tropical sunlight, Chief Mathews told me more about the Viperfish. He confirmed that the submarine had been designed to launch Regulus missiles, each equipped with a large nuclear warhead and fired from a rail launching system on the topside deck of the Viperfish. He told me that, during the past few years, the Viperfish had made several deployments to the western Pacific Ocean with nuclear missiles stored inside the cavernous hangar compartment in the front half of the submarine. During this time, she was the front line nuclear deterrent force for the United States.
The Viperfish had made a total of thirty-two test firings of Regulus missiles at sea. Each shot required the crew to surface, open a large door (christened the “bat cave” by the crew), roll a Regulus missile out of the hangar and onto its track, establish radio contact with the guiding system of a nearby American jet, and then finally fire the thing into the sky. The entire operation took about twenty minutes. Immediately afterward, the crew rapidly closed the bat cave and rigged the boat to dive so that, as quickly as possible, the Viperfish could disappear beneath the surface. The Regulus system provided nuclear protection prior to development of the Polaris missile program and construction of the first Polaris submarine, the USS George Washington (SSBN 598).
“With the Polaris missile system now going ahead full steam, the Viperfish isn’t involved with Regulus missiles, right?” I asked Chief Mathews the obvious as we entered Pearl Harbor’s main gate.
“Right,” he answered. “They unloaded the missiles and changed her back to SSN.” There was a period of silence, and I waited for him to continue.
Finally, feeling stupid, I blurted out, “Okay, what does the Viperfish do now, Chief?”
He hesitated, then began speaking in slow, measured tones. “Although her mission is secret, she has been redesigned to perform activities that you will find extraordinary. Because of these changes, there are now three crews on board the boat. There is the nuclear crew, composed of goddamn nukes like yourself, and the others who keep the reactor on the line and the steam in the engine room.”
After turning left past the main gate, we were moving in the opposite direction from the arrows pointing to the submarine base.
“And then there is the forward crew, the men who really run the boat,” he said. “They are occasionally called the forward pukes by the nukes-our shipmates to the rear. The non-nukes run the ballast control systems, the diving station, navigation, sonar, fire control-”
“I understand all that, Chief,” I interrupted. “And the third crew?”
He took a deep breath, stared straight ahead, and softly said, “The third crew is for the Special Project.”
We turned right, drove down Avenue D and into the naval shipyard. “What kind of special project, Chief?” I asked, sensing that I was going to learn little.
“You’ll find out all about that from your security briefing, Dunham. All you need to know for now is that we are developing a combined civilian and military project, a cooperative effort, so to speak, that expands the capabilities of the Viperfish.”
Although the prospect of civilians being assigned to a nuclear warship seemed unusual and even a little unsettling, it was apparent that the chief was not going to say anything more on the subject. We made a right turn off South Avenue to 7th Street, where a cluster of towering shipyard cranes came into sight. Mathews began talking about cranes as we approached the dry dock area. He said that the largest cranes were of the “hammer-head” style, as unique to Pearl Harbor as the Arizona Memorial.
The Viperfish was not moored at the Southeast Loch submarine base with the other submarines. The Viperfish wasn’t even in the water. Mathews parked the car, and we walked in the direction of the biggest dry dock, looming like a gigantic rectangular hole ahead of us. I stopped at the edge of the massive concrete chamber and stared down at the submarine that was to be my new home for the next three years.
* The term “boat” is generally used to denote a small vessel that can be hoisted on board a ship. Early submarines were small enough to fulfill this definition. The camaraderie of the first “boat sailors” and their pride in serving on board such unique vessels resulted in this term remaining in common use among submariners. The official U.S. Navy definition of a submarine is a ship, but submarine sailors, in accordance with tradition, continue to call their vessel a boat.
SINCE THE EARLY 1960S, the waters off the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula have been closely monitored by United States surveillance systems that acoustically track submarines as they approach and depart the naval bases at Vladivostok and Petropavlovsk. One of the most comprehensive of these systems is the passive hydrophone array, known by the Department of Defense as the sound surveillance system (code-named SOSUS), capable of accurately identifying the positions of ships at sea. Installed at a cost of $16 billion and stretching for thirty thousand miles, the SOSUS microphones were arranged in a highly classified manner throughout the Atlantic and Pacific oceans for the primary purpose of detecting Soviet missile-carrying submarines. By 1966, this system was already in operation and quietly analyzing the acoustic signatures of Soviet submarines sailing from their home ports into the Pacific Ocean from the Sea of Okhotsk and the Kamchatka Peninsula.
The ocean is filled with noise spanning a wide range of frequencies emitted by abundant biological life-forms. From the train of sharp clicks generated by the sperm whales (often rattling thirty to forty clicks per second, they sound like a cadre of carpenters hammering simultaneously) to the growling of the fin whales, the rasping and drumming of the triggerfish, and the whistles of
