In the middle of a typical drill, when the nuclear system seemed to be self-destructing, I soon learned that everybody jumped up from their chairs and stood in front of their panels as they flipped switches and called out information to the EOOW, who, in turn, grabbed his microphone and blasted out orders over the loud-speakers. During all this time, lights throughout the engine room were going out as electrical power was lost; alarms were blasting out their shrill noises; circuit breakers were slamming open or shut; red lights were flashing; and other loudspeakers, controlled by men outside the engine room, were announcing the loss of reactor power. Although appearing to be total chaos, this was actually a tightly coordinated process of highly trained men taking action to allow for the continued production of power. The system worked quite well-most of the time.
Always in the back of my mind was the thought that, if I screw up the reactor in some unexpected manner, if I twitch a switch to the right instead of the left, or if I forget some important fact I had been trained to know, I could conceivably kill us all. It was this fear, plus the intense training always to "make things safe" no matter what disaster might be happening, that led to my nightmare.
We were about halfway to Pearl Harbor and I had squeezed into my rack to catch a couple of hours' sleep before taking the next training reactor operator watch. Just before I went to sleep, the Viperfish surfaced and began rolling back and forth. I moved into a deep sleep and envisioned myself sitting before the reactor control panel. Plunging deeper into the dream, I watched the meters and red lights before me as the boat increasingly rolled from the impact of the waves on the hull. With each movement of the boat, the reactor control panel lifted high above my head and then dropped down far below me. Suddenly, we took a huge roll at the moment I was looking up at the reactor control panel towering above me. To my horror, the entire panel broke off its moorings and fell on top of me. It knocked me from my seat and crushed me against the floor!
For an indeterminate period of time, I found myself tightly squeezed under the massive panel as I struggled to "make everything safe," mostly by just trying to shut down the nuclear reactor. The panel crushed my arms and I struggled as hard as I could to reach the SCRAM switch that would shut down the plant. I cursed with the effort, I ground my teeth, I sweat furiously, I stretched my arm as far as possible in the direction of the switch, and I cursed again. Just as I accepted that I was going to die, I woke up.
Trying to orient my mind in the darkness of my rack, I discovered that I had somehow managed to turn myself all the way around, a feat that was almost physically impossible. My head was mashed against the bulkhead where my feet normally rested, my arm was trapped behind the medicine cabinet next to the sleeping area, my dungarees were drenched with sweat, and my head pounded from the clenching of my teeth.
I lay silently in the quiet dark of my rack for ten minutes and tried to assess the stress factors associated with my efforts to become a reactor operator: the lack of sleep, the confined quarters, the repetition of intense drills, Bruce Rossi hammering away about quals, the necessity to get qualified before Nicholson departed the Viperfish, the control of so much power upon which all our lives depended. Stress was taking its toll, and the nightmare seemed like a sign that it might be too much for me.
The psychological tests I had taken in submarine school were filled with strange questions about our feelings relating to the odor of a man's sweat, the feelings we would have after launching Polaris missiles, and other feelings about this and that. We had been told that there were "no right answers, no wrong answers." From the unplanned departure of several men from our class immediately after the test was graded, it was apparent that some answers were not right enough to suit the Navy. There was nobody on the Viperfish to counsel us about stress, and I would not have been inclined to meet with a psychiatrist if one had been on board. So, I just pulled my curtain tightly shut and thought the thing through.
After a half hour of contemplation, I finally decided that my reaction to everything so far was, in fact, appropriate to the conditions that I was experiencing. When all hell breaks loose at four hundred feet below the surface, one is supposed to react, even start shaking a little, if the reactor develops a SCRAM and the lights go out-so long as the reactions are appropriate and the problems are properly resolved. "Builds character" was a phrase often used when we reflected on the intensity of various drills and our reactions to these challenges. I pushed the nightmare from my mind, climbed back into the engine room, and proceeded to build more character at the reactor control panel of the Viperfish.
And that was the night we burned a hole through the movie.
I took a couple of hours off after the evening meal to escape into the Hollywood drama projected against a screen on the far bulkhead of the dining area. It was a low-budget cinema with no plot to speak of, but the dining area was filled to capacity because of one beautiful actress who would provide us, we all hoped, with some memories of what women looked like. Steaming below the Pacific Ocean, surrounded by steel and men and nothing but a few pictures here and there to remind us of the females of our species, we were eager to watch-and to fantasize about-the actress.
When she walked across the screen, she was as beautiful as we remembered, her sweet body looking gorgeous as she moved from one scene to the next. Each time she appeared, conversations among the men hushed as each of us mentally placed ourselves into the movie.
At about the middle of the film, during a bathing scene that showed the actress washing herself from behind an opaque shower door, we all struggled to imagine the details of what we were unable to see. To our delight, she was suddenly called from the shower to answer the telephone, and we were treated to a flash of the naked woman moving at high speed before the camera.
"Stop the movie!" at least five voices hollered in unison as Larry Kanen grabbed the controls of the projector.
"Back it up!"
"Bring her back!"
"Reverse the projector!"
Back up the film, Kanen!"
In a few seconds, Kanen finally found the reverse switch and we were all treated to the scene played backward, the actress flashing before the camera again as she backed into the shower, with water flowing up from the drain into the shower head.
"Look at that body!" one of the machinist mates said.
"Jesus, I'm gonna die!" another exuberant voice called out.
"Make it go forward, slowly!" Nicholson hollered from the other side of the dining area.
"I'm working on it, I'm working on it," Kanen said, his voice harassed. "Hang on a second, you bunch of horny bastards."
The shower water began flowing in the correct direction again, and we all leaned forward for a closer look. Kanen moved the film slowly, one frame at a time as we waited and waited. After about five long minutes, we saw the shower door begin to open in slow motion and all of us prepared to savor the moment.