Stealth Boat: Fighting the Cold War in a Fast Attack Submarine

By Gannon McHale

Stealth Boat is a memoir of Gannon McHale's years in the U.S. Navy and of the men he served with in the Submarine Service between 1967 and 1970, and some of what they accomplished and experienced during that time. It is my also his remembrance of what it was like to grow up aboard a nuclear powered Fast Attack Submarine. McHale reported aboard USS Sturgeon (SSN 637) still a boy, and left a young man. This was the most important period in his personal development, and it profoundly affected the way he has lived the rest of his life. For many years any public discussion of the mission of Fast Attack submarines during the Cold War has been strictly guarded. The Freedom of Information Act now allows us to look back at a period in our nation’s history that is worth remembering, and the part played by the U.S Submarine Service in winning that war is undeniable. America in the late 1960’s was tortured by internal and external conflict. The war in Vietnam was unpopular and the Draft was still in operation.At the age of nineteen millions of young American men faced the probability of being drafted and sent to fight a war that many of them did not believe in. Some fled the country, others were drafted, and many more like the author chose to be proactive about their military service and enlisted. His book focuses on several men who did just that, and in the process became lifelong friends.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781612513461

Book preview

STEALTH BOAT

STEALTH BOAT

Fighting the Cold War in a

Fast-Attack Submarine

Gannon McHale

Naval Institute Press

Annapolis, Maryland

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2008 by Gannon McHale

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published in 2013.

ISBN: 978-1-61251-346-1

Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows:

McHale, Gannon.

Stealth boat : fighting the Cold War in a fast attack submarine / Gannon McHale.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1.McHale, Gannon—Anecdotes. 2.McHale, Gannon—Friends and associates. 3.United States. Navy—Submarine forces—Biography. 4.United States. Navy—Submarine forces—History—20th century—Sources. 5.United States. Navy—Sea life—History—20th century—Sources. 6.Sturgeon (Submarine)—History. 7.Cold War.I. Title.

V63.M33A3 2008

359.9’33092—dc22

[B]

2008015587

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

212019181716151413987654321

First printing

In praise of otherwise not famous men . . . the submariners of the Cold War

First in her class, finest in the fleet!

Motto of the USS Sturgeon

(SSN 637)

Contents

Preface

Prologue

Decommissioning

PART I 1965–67 From Jacket and Tie to Bellbottoms

PART II 1968 Change of Command

PART III 1969 At Our Best

PART IV 1970 Transfer and Separation

PART V Looking Back

Charleston, 1994

Denouement

Epilogue: Afterlives

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Glossary

Sources

Index

Preface

MOST OF THIS HAPPENED over forty years ago, between March 1967 and August 1970, when I served in the U.S. naval submarine service. This book is a recollection of the men I served with and some of what we accomplished and experienced during that time. To accurately reconstruct the events in question, I visited and interviewed many of those men. They are the real authors of this book. We remember clearly not only the dangerous things we did in service to our country but also the fun we managed to have in the process, when we were younger, slimmer, faster, and smarter. Our memories are colored by the passage of time, however, and therefore must be read in the context that they are somewhat limited in scope.

This is also my remembrance of what it was like to grow up on board a nuclear-powered fast-attack Submarine. I reported on board USS Sturgeon (SSN 637) when I was still a boy, and I left a young man. This was the most important period in my personal development, and it profoundly affected the way I have lived the rest of my life.

The whole project began at the suggestion of my shipmate, Barry Avery, who insisted I write down all those old sea stories. Now, there is a certain sea story element to this book, but sea stories, for the uninitiated, are anecdotal and are usually told when two or more sailors congregate for some idle time; however, they all have a modicum of truth to them, even if the embellishments often strain credulity. So even if some of what follows may seem, at times, to be fictional, that is not the case. Everything in this book actually happened, and all of the characters are not only men I served with but some of the finest men I have ever met.

The everyday working language of a submariner is, at the very least, salty, and the Sturgeon was no exception. By modern novel standards this language is mild, but in the interest of those who object to expletives and cursing, I have eliminated most of the ubiquitous shipboard profanity and retained only those instances that are necessary to define character or are simply too humorous to pass up.

Prologue

Periscope Depth, Off the Coast of Russia, Spring 1969

MY CHART SHOWED Kashin-class destroyers in two different places in the upper-right-hand corner, Osa-class torpedo boats running back and forth at high speeds across the top, and a Soviet November-class submarine smack in the middle of the quadrant while we approached from the west. The captain hung off the number 2 scope and observed everything from a distance. I had a good solution on that November class when suddenly the captain called out: Mark these bearings. Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark!

The captain spun the number 2 scope around and called out the bearings so quickly I couldn’t keep up, and because they were as much as twenty to thirty degrees apart, they made no sense.

This is a patrol plane flying figure eights. Just draw a big figure eight pattern around those bearings. What do we have for a solution on the target? What does ‘Mr. Spock’ say?

From the analyzer at the forward end of the fire control panel, red-headed Lieutenant (jg) Hoff replied, The increase in bearing rate indicates a course change, Captain. Contact is headed northwest, out of the area.

What have you got, Yeoman?

One seven nine, five hundred yards, dead ahead, Captain.

That’s him. He’s on a one eight zero course. They don’t have him yet, but we do.

A moment later, the captain again called out: Mark these bearings. Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark! Mark! and a second figure eight pattern overlapped the first.

Where’s the ‘X’ in the figure eight? the captain demanded. Where do the lines cross? That’s his target. Where’s the ‘X’?

I turned toward the periscope.

Captain . . . we’re the ‘X’!

Decommissioning

AGUST OF WIND ended my daydream and brought me back to a chilly day in January 1994. The boat looked good, with her service ribbons and other decorations proudly displayed underneath her hull number, which appeared only on the inboard side of the sail. On the pier, a tent provided the guests with some shelter, but no heat. Clear, sunny, and unusually cold, the weather guaranteed a brisk pace for the ceremony. A Navy band segued from Anchors Aweigh to the repertoire of John Philip Sousa. I forgot about Navy protocol—when you invite flag officers to a party, the ante goes way up.

A group of middle-aged men from all over the country came to that pier in Charleston, South Carolina, to say good-bye to the USS Sturgeon (SSN 637), the vessel they served on some twenty-seven years earlier. Many were members of the commissioning crew, invited to the ceremony as guests of honor by the decommissioning crew. Some reported on board in the shipyard and worked twelve-hour days, seven days a week, during the boat’s two years of construction, and others, like me, reported on board later for her first operational years. Also present were several former commanding officers.

The enlisted crew wore dress blues with medals, and the officers appeared in full dress with swords. An honor guard stood at attention as a boatswain’s whistle piped on board the commanding officer of the USS Sturgeon—a commodore, four admirals (including former executive officer Bruce DeMars, the director of naval propulsion and scheduled principal speaker), and one tall man in civilian clothes.

I and almost every enlisted veteran present came not only to see the boat for one last time, but to see him—the one man on the dais in civilian clothes. On his introduction, every one of us instinctively stood to applaud our commanding officer, Capt. William L. Bohannan, USN (Ret.).

He began his remarks about his time on the USS Sturgeon with the realization that he had no sea stories to offer because almost everything we did back then was still classified.

I’m no longer cleared to even think about it anymore, he said, "but there is one aspect of my experience on Sturgeon I can talk about. The thing that still stands out in my mind is the incredible confidence, dedication, and integrity of every member of the crew that I was blessed with during the four years I was entrusted with Sturgeon. These qualities are so prevalent in our submarine force that many of us tend to forget that the rest of the world may not be the same. During my own post-Navy experience, I have yet to find any team of people in the civilian world that even comes close to matching these ennobling qualities. Yes, the country is indeed blessed to have such quality folks to defend our liberty. I salute you all."

We stood only for him that day, and it did not go unnoticed.

After the ceremony, a member of the decommissioning crew came up to me and said, We saw you guys stand for your captain.

If you served with him, you’d have stood, too, I replied.

He must have been good.

The best.

The decommissioning crew member added, And the boat was new back then.

We were all new back then, I said.

Part I

1965–67

From Jacket and Tie to Bellbottoms

In the Beginning

IN THE FALL OF 1965, I was a day hop college sophomore, living in dread of midterm exams. Totally unprepared, I found myself face to face with failure. My parents, in hopes that I would be one of the doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs who ran everything in Rhode Island, made sure I attended the right schools, including St. Raphael Academy and Providence College, both of which were all-boys’ schools that required students wear a jacket and tie to enter the classroom. After graduation, I was expected to pursue a conventional approach to local success, which included marriage and children and, in my case, a career in education. Teachers were in demand. A high school social studies teacher in Rhode Island could retire after twenty to thirty years in a public school system and then either start another career in a private school with less difficult students or cross the border to the neighboring state of Massachusetts to pursue yet another public school pension. The entire approach was conservative, guaranteed, and deadly dull.

After thirteen years of parochial education, I hit the wall when a priest at Providence told me that the only acceptable philosophical outlook was the Summa Theologiae. Though I was no philosopher in those days, even I knew there were a few other guys besides Thomas Aquinas. I wasn’t enjoying college to begin with—I still lived at home and had absolutely no privacy, which made study difficult, if not impossible. A part-time job slinging hamburgers never made me enough money to go anywhere or do anything, and I spent my life going to class, work, and Army Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) drills, and then to bed in my parents’ house. Miserable and facing impending academic doom, I did what anyone in my shoes would do: I quit.

Several short-lived factory jobs followed in close order, but then President Johnson escalated the war in Southeast Asia, and in early 1966, I made the next big decision of my life: I enlisted in the Navy, making a six-year commitment comprising four years of active duty and two years of inactive reserves. After a lot of thought, I considered this an acceptable alternative to facing the draft. I couldn’t imagine myself surviving tours of duty in Vietnam. The recruiter—out of pity, I suspect—gave me a 120-day inactive duty deferment, which allowed me to spend the last, glorious summer of my boyhood at East Matunuck State Beach in Rhode Island. In August, armed with the greatest tan of my life, I boarded an aircraft for the very first time and headed off to Great Lakes, Illinois, for eleven weeks of basic training.

I arrived at O’Hare airport in Chicago and found myself, along with twenty or so other guys, herded into the lower level in some far corner of the terminal to wait for a Navy representative to arrive and transport us to recruit training at Naval Station Great Lakes. Hours passed before a petty officer 2nd class showed up with a bus. We arrived on the base after dark, and in a dusty old barracks with no bedding, we slept in our clothes. Hustled from one building to another for three days, our recruit company finally formed in a barracks of our own. My ROTC experience in college led to an assignment as a platoon leader.

After several weeks of training, we explored our future at a sort of job fair. We spoke to enlisted representatives from all the different parts of the Navy to see what each entailed, and in the end, each man filled out a form that listed his preferences. We called this list our three wishes. These three preferences for your future were, of course, meaningless, as we were also told that the needs of the Navy would always override the desires of the individual.

One sailor approached our company and asked, Any singers here? Anyone think they’re good enough for the Navy Chorus? Come sing for us. Let’s see what you can do.

I sang in my church choir as a boy, and I still enjoyed singing, so I thought about it, but it wasn’t for me, and the audition process itself scared me off. I wanted a real experience in the Navy: I wanted to do something. I wanted an adventure. I also knew I didn’t want to get lost on a big command. Many of the guys in my company enlisted because they wanted or were promised a career in aviation, so they tried to get duty on an aircraft carrier. I thought that with my luck, if I went to a carrier, I would probably be relegated to the ship’s laundry for four years, never to see the light of day. Then I remembered a favorite television program called The Silent Service, which dramatized the operational history of American submarines in World War II. So, after a short conversation with the counselor, I volunteered. Submarines were considered hazardous duty which meant receiving both sub pay and sea pay, and anything more than my $90-per-month base pay sounded good to me. At the time, I didn’t realize that decision cost me any chance for an A school. Instead, it led to an additional set of physical and dental exams and placement on a duty roster that guaranteed I wouldn’t spend time in the base galley or stand any outdoor watches during a cruel November alongside Lake Michigan.

Eight weeks of schooling at the New London Naval Base followed basic training. Submarine school included classroom work, intensive psychological and physical examinations, and pressure and escape training. Pressure training consisted of learning the Valsalva maneuver, which involves forcibly exhaling while your lips and nose are closed. This maneuver equalizes the pressure on your inner ear in situations when ambient pressure increases. If you couldn’t pop your ears, you couldn’t be on submarines. After we demonstrated an ability to pop our ears, half a dozen men at a time were placed inside a chamber that tested our ability to equalize down to a depth of 100 feet. For some inexplicable reason, however, once inside the chamber I couldn’t get my ears to pop. Upon completion of the test, I reported to the base infirmary, where they gave me some medication to help relieve the pressure. For several hours, I thought the fillings in my teeth would explode, but eventually my body readjusted.

Despite my inability to equalize in the chamber, the submarine school staff cleared me for the next test, escape training in the diving tower. While wearing a Steinke Hood—an inflatable life jacket with a hood that completely covered my head and trapped a bubble of air—I equalized in the escape chamber at 50 feet below the surface, then entered the tower, placed my hands directly above me to protect my head from coming in contact with anything on the surface, and performed a free ascent. All the way to the surface I laughed aloud like Santa Claus, Ho, Ho, Ho! This technique guaranteed the exhalation of all excess air in my lungs, which would otherwise cause the decompression sickness known as the bends. The ascent took only a few seconds, and when I reached the surface at the top of the tower, my body flew out of the water like a rocket. I then swam over to the ladder, climbed out, looked directly at the instructor, and said in a loud voice, I feel fine, Sir, to ensure he didn’t hustle me into a decompression chamber and back down to the equivalent of 50 feet. I passed that test—one of the most exciting things I have ever done.

Several kinds of submarines operated at that time. Squadrons of diesel-electric–powered fleet boats made coastal patrols that often departed on Monday and returned on Friday, but fleet boats were considered to be old—relics of World War II—and on their way out. The real glory lay in fleet ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs): Forty-One for Freedom! The core of the Navy’s strategic nuclear deterrent, each SSBN had two rotating crews—a blue crew and a gold crew—that made three-month deployments from exotic sounding places like Guam, Scotland, and Spain. Almost everyone in submarine school wanted to be part of the blue-and-gold crew approach, which allowed for a considerable amount of recreational time. I found the idea of being at sea for months at a time doing missile drills very unappealing, so I opted for the workhorse of the nuclear navy, fast-attack

Reviews for Stealth Boat

[ecw0647 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

At age 19 in an effort to avoid the Vietnam draft McHale dropped out of college, where he was facing failure and joined the Navy. For whatever reason mostly because he is like the TV show silent service when he was younger he has to be assigned to submarines. He was sent to join the USS sturgeon a fast attack sub that was brand new.Years ago, I helped a good friend, a retired board member, write his memoirs. Clarence was already a published author and a good writer (Riverhill Soliloquy by Clarence Mitchell.) Clarence had lived a fascinating life: he had been a cowboy in Montana recounted in another book I worked on (Montana Montage), worked his way up from apprentice and journeyman to become editorial director of a large publishing concern. In spite of my best efforts, however, he insisted on adding the name of virtually everyone he worked with and knew (a lot; he lived to be 102.) Almost all of those mentioned had predeceased him and really of little consequence. Of much more interest was his descriptions of the printing business and how it had evolved not to mention his time in Montana and growing up in NW Illinois. All those extra personages really made a mess of the book. So it is with this book. There are some nuggets of very interesting material about the submarine service during the Cold War and their missions. He was a Yeoman and so had an interesting perspective on events, but except for his friends who are mentioned, the reader really doesn't care to know the backgrounds of all his friends nor the places and times they all went out drinking. In addition, current events are paraded before the reader (“Yellow Submarine” fell of the record charts, etc.) I suppose it was intended to provide context. It felt like padding. In the end, the thousand days (his counting) should have been reduced to a few hundred. It’s a shame because he’s a reasonably good writer and some parts are quite interesting.