Seconds after he sat down and started shoveling into the eggs, some of his new companions joined him. Boatswain's Mate First Class Charles Scobey — though everyone called him "Big C" — sat down on his left, while Torpedoman's Mate Second Class Roger Benson sat down on his right. Electronics Technician Second Class James T. Jablonski, his left arm in a light blue hospital sling, set his tray down one-handed and sat down on the other side of the mess table.
"So, get lost yet, nub?" Jablonski asked cheerily. "Nub," O'Brien had learned the day before, stood for "Non-Useful Body," a "newbie," a sailor fresh out of school and serving aboard a boat for the first time. It was an appellation he would not be able to escape until he'd signed off on his quals and won his dolphins.
"Not really."
"Well, nub," Scobey said, "don't sweat it. You'll be scrambling to get your bearings for a few days, but you'll catch on. If the Old Man or the Exec don't have you for breakfast first." The others laughed.
"You can forget most of what they taught you in Sub School," Benson said. "Living on a submarine isn't like living anywhere else in the world, 'cept maybe on board a ship out in space somewhere."
"Well, that's not exactly 'in the world,' is it?" Scobey put in.
"Shit, Big C, you know what I mean. Anyway, like I was sayin', you need to get used to a whole new lifestyle. Port 'n' starboard watches that go on and on for weeks, sometimes. Hot bunking."
"A 688 Flight II boat like the Pittsburgh doesn't have enough racks for all of her enlisted people," Scobey told him. "So you'll be sharing your rack with someone else, with a schedule drawn up so that one of you is sleeping when the other's working."
"You've got a hell of a lot to learn," Benson told him. "All the tricks of the trade, as it were."
"Take the bug juice," Jablonski said with the air of a sage discussing arcane philosophies. He gestured grandly at the glass of orange liquid sitting on the table in front of O'Brien. "Now a true submariner knows that the redjuice is the good stuff. The orange stuff, though… pah! Don't drink it. Ever! It'll rot your insides!"
"I saw an experiment done once," Scobey said, nodding. "Y'take a piece of iron — a flat metal fitting or plate. You tie it to a string and let it hang inside a glass of orange bug juice. Three days later, you haul it out and have a look. The iron plate's riddled full of holes, worse'n Swiss cheese! Imagine what it's doin' to your guts!"
"Works with the red bug juice, too," Jablonski said.
"I've seen that done with Coke," Benson put in. When the others scowled at him for taking their psych-out campaign off-topic, he added, "but it works really, really well with bug juice."
"Actually, the orange shit is great as an all-purpose solvent and scouring agent," Jablonski put in. "Real high acid content, y'know? Scours tiles and fittings better'n soap powder. Just don't ever use it on any 'J' or 'Y' type fittings."
"Wha… what are those?" O'Brien asked.
"Damn it, kid, don't you know anything?" Scobey exploded.
"What are they teaching you kids at Groton these days?" Benson asked, shaking his head.
"J and Y fittings are the ones with rubber seals," Scobey said, with the patient air of one telling the absolute truth to an absolute idiot, "and they lead to the outside of the boat. Things like seawater-intake valves and positive-pressure flushing flanges."
"Waste-dump outlets," Jablonski said, nodding. "Pressure-balance influx lines."
"Right," Scobey said. "If you use acid on them — and that orange shit does have a real high acid content, believe me! — it'll eat through the rubber, rupture the seals, and some chilly day when we're at a thousand feet they'll fail. You ever seen what happens when water comes in through a ruptured seal, with a pressure behind it of five hundred pounds per square inch? It ain't pretty!"
"I scraped one poor nub off the bulkhead once," Jablonski said, shaking his head sadly. "Used a three-inch paint scraper and a sponge to get as much of him into the body bag as I could. Only found about this much, though." He held his hands out, shaping a shape the size of a basketball. "Five, maybe six pounds' worth. We decided to use a plastic trash bag from the galley instead of a regular body bag, 'cause there just wasn't enough left to make it cost-effective! You know, those regular body bags cost hundreds of dollars each."
"I remember that," Scobey said, almost mournfully. "There were bits of bone and teeth that were driven across the compartment and actually embedded in the steel bulkhead. Needed a dentist's drill and pick to dig them all out….
O'Brien's brows slammed together at that. "Hey!" he said around a mouthful of egg. "If that'd really happened, the Pittsburgh would've gone down and never come up again! You guys are pulling my leg!"
"How do you know it didn't?" Scobey said, leaning close by O'Brien's ear, dropping his voice to a melodramatic growl. "How do you know the 'Burgh isn't a ghost ship… and that you were doomed to walk her decks with the rest of us the moment you set foot aboard her haunted decks!.. "
O'Brien blinked, swallowed, then shook his head. "Geeze! You guys!"
He'd heard dark tales in Sub School about the hazing that went on with newbies aboard submarines. These seemed like pretty decent guys, though, and so far their hazing had been merely of the tall-tale variety.
ST3 David Kellerman brought his tray to the table.
"Squee!" Benson exclaimed. "How the hell are you?"
"'Squee?' " O'Brien asked, confused. Some submariner terminology was absolutely baffling.
"Don't ask," Boatswain's Mate First Class Archie Douglas said, joining the table.
"Oh, you can ask," Scobey said. "But if we told you, then Squee here would have to kill you. And we need you topside today on a working party."
"I thought I was supposed to start my quals in the torpedo room today."
Benson laughed. "You are, sort of. But the first thing you have to do is learn how to bring the torpedoes aboard. And before that, you have to take them off the boat. Can't have all that high-explosive shit just floating here beside Pier Two, waiting for some idiot to trip and fall and set the whole shebang off, and maybe take half of Vallejo with it."
"And getting torpedoes on and off the boat is a major evolution," Jablonski said, "because they haven't yet figured out a way to make a nineteen-foot-long Mark 48 torpedo go around corners in a submarine's companionways."
"Well, how do they do it?" O'Brien asked. "I know there's a forward torpedo-loading hatch, but I've never seen it actually done."
"What are they teaching you kids in school these days?" Douglas said, shaking his head sadly. "Don't worry," Scobey said darkly. "You'll see. You'll see!"
Commander Gordon stood at attention, his right hand rigidly held with fingertips touching the right side of his uniform cap's bill. Commander Mike Chase stood to his right in an identical pose as they faced the flagpole above the dock-side where a colors party was running up the flag. The last notes of the "Star-Spangled Banner" floated from a loudspeaker on the side of a nearby building. The two men dropped their salutes, and watched as the colors party formed up and marched away in parade-ground step.
"Still brings a lump to the throat, eh?" Chase said quietly.
"Always," Gordon replied.
Chase looked at the other man. Once they had been best friends, Annapolis roommates, about as close as two men could be.