Bob Bishop is a friend of mine and shared this story with me from his time aboard a Ballistic Missile Submarine. It’s a compelling story from the Cold War and I hope you will give it a read. The movie, “The Hunt for Red October” is a bit of child’s play, compared to what these guys did on a daily basis. My only contribution here is a bit of editing.

My first real duty station was the USS Nathanael Greene (SSBN-636), Blue Crew*. She had just completed her fourth patrol (two Blue, two Gold) when I reported aboard in April 1966 in Charleston, South Carolina. She was about as seasoned as I was and commissioned the same year I graduated from the Academy. We were in the middle of the Cold War, and Russia was building submarines as fast as we were. Vietnam was still just a little country somewhere over there, on the other side of the Pacific.

Every day on patrol on a Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine (FBM) is, in many ways, just like the day before or the day after.  You have watches to stand, duties to perform, qualifications to train for and, at random times, all-hands drills (such as, “FIRE IN THE TORPEDO ROOM,” or “FLOODING IN THE MISSILE COMPARTMENT”) to wake you if you are off-watch or to interrupt the routine of your duties if you are on watch. 

While on patrol, all FBMs, like the Nathanael Greene, must remain in constant radio contact to receive any and all incoming traffic all day, every day.  However, a FBM only broke radio silence to send a message in a dire emergency, as sending a message would risk giving away the ship’s position to any nearby enemy ship or aircraft. 

Because any change in the volume of message traffic from the sender (i.e., the Pentagon) could have some intelligence value, the radio schedule is purposefully full 24 hours a day.  

The most important messages are the operational orders — to change a submarine’s patrol area and thus its missile target package. The Navy filled the remaining time with national news, sports scores and stories, all of it in coded 5-character groups. Every ship received the same radio broadcast, but you only really paid attention to messages sent for your ship. All of the news, sports scores, etc. were printed out and attached to a clipboard in the Radio Shack for anyone to read.

The Navy used the same radio system to conduct simultaneous tests of the combat readiness of all FBMs on patrol through a periodic WSRT (Weapons System Readiness Test). The WSRT begins (and the clock starts counting) with the receipt of a special message which begins, exactly as a real launch message would, with the heading “Top Secret — Cryptographic.” The text that follows, even though still in five-character groupings, is in a code that can only be deciphered through use of a special code book.

When such a message was received, the radioman immediately alerts the Captain (CO) and Executive Officer (XO) a potential Launch message has been received, and the Officer of the Deck instantly sounds “BATTLE STATIONS – MISSILE.” Every member of the crew has an assigned battle station, in addition to their regular job, and moves there at a dead run.

Meanwhile, the Communications Officer hustles to the Radio Shack, as does another officer designated at the start of the patrol by the CO to fulfill the required Two-Man rule. The Communications Officer opens the first safe, and the other officer opens the inner safe where the code book is kept. They extract the code book and break the text into English. They then rush to the Control Room to give the CO the plain-text message. Based on the message, the CO unlocks a cabinet in the overhead just forward of the #1 periscope shear, and pulls out the appropriate firing key – black if it is a drill and red if it is Launch. It’s a little cabinet, maybe 3 inches high by 14 inches wide and 8 inches deep, but within it is the key to launch 16 ICBMs towards their targets thousands of miles away.

WSRTs occurred about every eight to ten days. The time and day chosen were “random.” The experience of the “Old Salts” suggested the frequency was selected by somebody in the Pentagon seemingly based on a roll of the dice – it was never sooner than 2 days after the previous drill, and always within 12 days. It also never occurred on a Sunday morning (i.e., between Saturday midnight and Sunday noon) – to give the crew a break from the chaotic 24/7 pace of shipboard life and to allow an opportunity for anyone who wanted to worship (as a result, Jewish services were also held on Sunday mornings).

Fast forward two years…

The world had become a much more dangerous place.  The summer of 1968 was a time of great turmoil, both nationally and internationally.  Vietnam was raging.  The USSR invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague uprising.  North Korea had captured the USS Pueblo.  France was in turmoil – as student protests turned into riots, workers joined them striking across the nation and Charles de Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly.  At home, LBJ decided not to run, due to the Vietnam War.  Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated in April, resulting in race riots across the country.  Whole blocks of cities were ablaze.  Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June added still another dimension to the generally bleak outlook.  It was a time of high unemployment in the U.S, strained race relations, unprecedented heat waves, and scattered power outages.  The tone and tenor of the news we received in those coded messages was alarming.

You couldn’t help but be affected by thinking about where your loved ones were, how they were, and what was going on around them.  I had married a scant 3 months before, between patrols, and Suzan was in DC.  The turmoil there was frequently mentioned in the news reports, both as local news and as a setting for reporting on what the Federal government was doing to respond.  

I was a Lieutenant now, in charge of the largest Division in the Engineering Department, and on my fifth patrol. I was the only junior officer qualified both to operate the ship and to run the nuclear plant (the only other officers qualified both “forward” and “aft” were the XO and the Engineer). As a result, instead of a typical watch rotation of one in three (six hours on and twelve hours off), I was standing a watch aft as Engineering Officer of Watch, in charge of the nuclear plant et al., then a watch forward as Officer of the Deck, in charge of driving the ship (so my schedule was twelve hours on and six hours off, repeated every 18 hours).

It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and we had just finished a WSRT. My Battle Station was, with Chief Blackmon, to oversee the operation of the Torpedo Fire Control System, which was on the starboard side of the Control Room.  Once we launched our sixteen ICBMs, we would immediately leave the launch area and become an attack submarine, to seek out, track and sink any hostile ships.  During Battle Stations, my boss, Bill Fernow, the Engineer, was aft, watching over the nuclear plant and other engineering systems.  

As we stood down from Battle Stations, there was a palpable tension in the ship because of what seemed to be the deteriorating situation in the U.S. and the world. More than one of us was thinking “Someday this could be real.”

I was dog-tired, but the WSRT had occurred while I was Engineering Officer of the Watch, so after we secured from Battle Stations, I went aft to relieve my boss. He looked at me, and then at his watch, looked up and smiled and said, “I’ll take it from here. You look like you could use some sack time.”

I didn’t argue.  I went forward to Officer’s Quarters, and leapt into my rack.  Forty minutes later, I was woken for my next watch, the 1800 to 2400 shift.  

After a quick bite in the Wardroom, I went up to the Control Room to assume the Conn.  

I was relieved at 11:45 p.m. after a thankfully routine watch, sat down in the Wardroom for a quick sandwich, and was asleep within seconds of hitting my rack.  Exhaustion does that to you.  (When the patrol was over, I found I had logged just a bit over 5 hours of sleep per 24-hour period – for 72 days.)

At 3:42 a.m., the klaxon sounded and the cry “BATTLE STATIONS – MISSILE” came over the 1MC. The advantage of being so tired was that you wore your jumpsuit to bed so you didn’t have to waste precious seconds getting your clothes off, or on. I was at my station at the Fire Control panel in the Control Room within 20 seconds, probably the last 10 seconds of which I became cognizant of the situation we were going into.

The last WSRT was just hours ago and never – never – had there been another WSRT so close to the previous one. And it was early morning on a Sunday.

Battle Stations is always a time of pressure – to do your job as well as possible and to hope your systems performed as designed. This time, however, there was a unique quiet. Everyone knew this was the real thing.

There was no emotion, only a deathly quiet. Given my Battle Station location in the Control Room, I was standing about six feet from the XO, and the CO was about eight feet to my left, standing on the raised platform of the Conn. I could hear each of the stations reporting “Battle Stations manned and ready” to the XO’s sound-powered phone-talker. When the last of the stations had reported in, I watched the XO turn to the CO and report formally “Battle Stations are manned, Captain.”

Although everyone was tightly focused on making sure they did what they were supposed to do exactly right, part of each of our brains was recognizing the inevitability that we would never again see everything we knew and loved. Our families, our country, were surely gone. Our future was the ship, and our sole mission was to launch our missiles, seek the solace of the deep, and then seek revenge.

At that moment, the Communications Officer ran into the Control Room and handed the CO the decoded message.  The CO read the message, took the lanyard from his neck, unlocked the firing key cabinet, and reached in for the firing key.  We were about to launch… And then, he took out the black key, the WSRT drill key, NOT the red firing key.

Among those of us who could see what had just occurred, there was a moment of disbelief, the sure knowledge that you couldn’t believe your eyes.  A double-take, and then the realization it really was a drill after all.  The sense of relief was palpable, almost as if everyone, at the same time, slowly exhaled the breath they had been holding since Battle Stations had been called what seemed like hours ago, but was in reality, only a few minutes.

We knew we were at war. And then, suddenly, not. Just as there had been no sobbing or other shows of emotion when we each realized we were at war, there were also no cheers or high-fives to find that we weren’t. Instead, there was only a somber reflection that we were, to a man, trained and ready, but fortunately had not been called upon.

Addendum:

– * Submarines have two separate identical crews, called Blue and Gold, which alternate manning the boat. While one crew is deployed, the other is in port for leave, refresher training, and preparation for their next patrol. This maximizes the amount of time the submarine itself is deployed. At the time, a typical deployment was 72 days – the complete cycle, taking over from the other crew, making needed repairs, installing new equipment, and a short sea trial to test everything out, meant nearly 100 days away from home, twice a year.

– Special thanks to my friend Bob Bishop for sharing this story. Bob graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1964. At the time, Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the founder of the modern nuclear Navy, personally interviewed and approved or denied every prospective officer being considered for a nuclear ship. The selection rate was not very high.