"Things like that do happen, son. More often than you'd believe. But we don't talk about them. Submariners are a pretty closed-mouth lot to begin with."
"Uh… sir? Are you a submariner?"
"Open your eyes, son." He nodded slightly toward the gold dolphins riding his uniform jacket, just above the rows of colored ribbons.
"Oh! Sorry, sir. I didn't notice. I guess I didn't want to look like I was prying."
"The fruit salad is there to be read, son. As is the badge. Helps you know who you're dealing with. It's not rude to know something about your shipmate."
"I understand, sir. Thank you, sir."
Gordon sighed. He didn't think the kid really understood, even yet.
They rode in silence through Vallejo, along the typical Navy-town avenue with its uniform shops and tattoo parlors, locker services for civvies and magazine shops ripe with skin mags and crotch novels.
They turned left and crossed the G-Street Bridge above the sullen brown stillness of the Napa River, crossing onto Mare Island and stopping at the main gate, where Gordon, O'Brien, and the driver all showed their IDs. Gordon told the driver to drop O'Brien off at the enlisted barracks first, before taking him on to the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, BOQ.
"I guess they don't come much greener than that," the driver said, shaking his head as he removed Gordon's luggage from the trunk.
"We all have to start somewhere," Gordon replied. "And it's usually at the bottom. Thanks for the ride."
"My pleasure, sir."
He followed the driver into the BOQ, where he signed in at the front desk. We all have to start somewhere, he thought. Where the hell do I start with my marriage?
"Now fire in the reactor room, fire in the reactor room!" Klaxons blared, red lights flashed, lending an air of surreal urgency to a scene already verging on nightmarish. "All hands, man your damage-control stations! That is, man your fire and damage-control stations!"
Panic flooded through Doug O'Brien's mind. A reactor fire! And he didn't know what his duty station was, or where he was supposed to be.
"Now flooding in the reactor compartment, flooding in the reactor compartment. Damage-control watch, report to flooding stations…?
O'Brien sat bolt upright in his rack… and smashed his forehead into the bottom of the rack above his, hard. "God damn it," he exclaimed, dropping back to his thin mattress, hands cupped over his forehead. "Shit, shit, shit!" Thrashing, he rolled through the curtain separating him from the rest of the boat, landing on bare feet on the cold linoleum tile deck of the crew's quarters.
Odd. The emergency Klaxon was no longer sounding. He heard only the gentle hum of the Pittsburgh's ventilator system, the normal-sounding scuffs, bumps, and scrapes of other men going about their duties elsewhere on the boat.
He was standing in the passageway beside his rack, in Pittsburgh's crew spaces. There was no reactor emergency, no flooding.
He was going to live. Live!
Had the emergency, then, been just a dream?
"Jesus!.. "
"Hey, keep it down out there!" a groggy voice called from one of the curtained-off racks.
He groaned and looked at his watch. Almost time for reveille. No time in any case to get back in his rack for another ten or fifteen minutes' sleep. He might as well get up and get moving.
Lifting the bottom of his rack, he opened up his personal locker and from the recess within pulled his shower thongs, soap case, and shampoo bottle, then skinned out of his T-shirt and boxers and removed his watch. Taking a towel, he flip-flopped aft to the shower head, where he stepped into a stall and began wetting down.
The nightmare, he recognized now, was one he'd been having a lot lately, ever since his first few weeks at Sub School in Groton, where the students were subjected to a steady run of alarms and drills, designed to get them to react, and react correctly, the instant something bad started to go down.
By the time he'd finished his shower and dried himself, the morning watch was rousting from their racks. "Now reveille, reveille, reveille," a voice was calling from a speaker overhead. "All hands on deck…."
And then, " The uniform of the day is dungarees. The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized compartments…?
And O'Brien's second day of life aboard a Navy sub began.
He'd reported aboard yesterday, after spending Sunday night at a receiving barracks ashore.
Born in Rockville, Illinois, out on the flat and corn-shrouded prairie northwest of Chicago, Doug O'Brien had started out about as far from the sea and a sailor's life as was possible. His father worked in a John Deere dealership and never talked about his three years as an Army draftee in the late sixties. Certainly, there'd been no pressure on him at home to join the all-volunteer Navy, much less a volunteer elite within the Navy like the Silent Service.
But he'd wanted to be a submariner ever since he'd seen The Enemy Below as a kid. Sure, the submariners in that movie had been Germans, the bad guys … but somehow
Kurt Jurgens had made life aboard a German U-boat seem glamorous and exciting. O'Brien had been a small kid, and bright — two strikes against him when he went to school and began losing fights with bullies who beat him up for his lunch money or simply because they could.
Somehow, the image of the German sailors singing through the shattering thunder of a depth-charge attack had raised images of a camaraderie that the lonely O'Brien had never dreamed of before.
For you, my friend, and you, my friend, and all of us together…
The beatings his father had given him to punish him for losing the fights with the bullies had made things impossibly worse at home, especially after his mother had left and his father had started getting drunk every night. He'd run away from home on the morning of his eighteenth birthday and signed up with a Navy recruiter in Chicago that same afternoon.
Dressing in his dungarees, he made his way to the enlisted mess, only getting turned around and lost once. Unlike a supercarrier, even an L.A.-class submarine was essentially a sewer pipe with three decks, and it was pretty hard to lose your way.
The Crew's Mess was the largest single open space on board the boat, big enough for six tables with their attached seats, plus a counter leading into the galley forward, and an array of drink dispensers — various offerings of soda and the ever-present drink beloved of submariners for decades, the fruit drink known solely as "bug juice."
He took a metal tray from the stack and filed through the chow line, receiving hefty servings of scrambled eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, and sausage, with a glass of orange bug juice in the place of the time-honored tradition of Navy coffee. He'd never acquired a taste for the stuff, even though he'd wanted to like it in order to fit in with the other sailors almost from his first breakfast in boot camp at Great Lakes.
Much of the day before, his first day aboard, was still a fuzzy blur made dim by strangeness, haste, and exhaustion. He'd been through an orientation program right here at this same mess table, where he'd learned that he would have to rotate through each department aboard the Pittsburgh to earn his "quals," beginning with the torpedo room. He would not win his coveted dolphins until all of his department supervisors had trained him, tested him, and signed him off.