by Chase La Rosa
THE TEAM
Nav had a first name, John, but no one would ever call him that. Eng could be Eng, and you could maybe sneak in a Gary over beers. Weps could be Weps or Weps Rose. I’m not actually sure if he had a first name. My second Weps was also called Weps, but we knew his first name. XO had lived in Tennessee and his name was Ed May, but you couldn’t call him that, except one time he got really drunk at an officers’ bonfire and started waving a gun around. We looked around at each other grinning; that was such an Ed May move.
Torp-O Dan’s real name was Dan. He was from Montana and swore that the best bar in the world is in Montana, just like the best people in the world are from Montana. I always pictured the bar in Montana being inside a double-wide, with wooden steps and a wooden railing going into it. Probably named something like ‘Clyde’s’ or ‘The Shack.’ No one actually called Torp-O Dan Torp-O Dan, and technically he was only the Torpedo Officer for a couple months, and technically it’s somewhat of a fake job if you had a good senior chief (which we did). I just called him that because you need to keep yourself in good spirits on deployment. Torp-O Dan hated stewed tomatoes, which was good because our cooks had purchased too many tomato cans by a factor of about a billion and we had them every morning with rice and feggs (fake eggs: you mix yellow powder with egg powder (whatever that is) and recycled water and it resembles (and actually tastes quite like) real eggs). Somehow goddammit just sounded funnier out of his mouth in the morning; maybe that’s also a Montana thing. I’ve never seen someone throw a dip in his upper lip in a more violent way than how Torp-O Dan did it; that’s always stuck with me.
Ryan was very short and had to go onto his tiptoes to spin on the periscope. Months into deployment he would still be handing out snacks that he brought from home, and we all figured that he could bring so much junk food because he was so small; there was more open space in his bed rack to store sour patch kids and pretzel sticks.
Dustin was a good officer with bad tattoos. We would always stand watch in Control together; I would be Officer of the Deck and he would be Contact Manager. The Captain adjusted his sleep schedule to eat his two meals during our on-coming and off-going; we were the fun ones. On my second deployment Dustin and I played chess 99 times and I won 50 times and refused to ever play him again. We disagreed when I said that I could beat up every single 14 year old in the world in a 1 on 1 fight. He thought the number was probably 13 because there must be some massive 14-year-old black belt in one of those just-on-maps countries (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Belarus). That argument lasted weeks, and the boat eventually had to take a poll. I won, plus Captain agreed with me that the number was probably 14 vice 13.
Tim was a good officer, very serious, and didn’t like me because I wasn’t always focused. Even he had to admit though: I was a good guy to have on deployment.
THE SHIT
Nav always had to take a shit twenty minutes into his Officer of the Deck watch, which was funny to everyone except Weps, who had to stop eating his off-going meal and re-take the watch. This was the daily routine. Weps would stand his eight hours, and Nav would come up around the seven-hour mark and ask the normal questions. Where are we in the world? Still in the Red Sea. Any mission updates? We came up to periscope depth about 3 hours ago, low sea state, Dive had no problem keeping us up. Copied the broadcast and pulled message traffic. No updates. Grabbed News and Sports too, which is nice. Contact picture? No one. Just us out here. Had a trace come in from our stern at PD, so we held and did another baffle clear… turned out to be biologics. They come in a lot stronger once we’re shallow here than they did in the Atlantic.
Satisfied with his briefing, Nav would flip through the messages likely to be sent off the boat at his PD trip and drink his first coffee. Once everyone completed their tours, the watch leaders: Nav, Dive, Chief of the Watch, me, Engineer of the Watch, everyone would go to the wardroom and fill up their coffee cups again and go over the plan for the next 8 hours. Then us officers would sit and eat our on-coming meal. Nav would eat quick and relieve early. The rest of us would eat slowly, talk about anything to postpone relieving the watch until we absolutely have to, and say hi to Weps when he came down from Control for his off-going meal. Happy to be off watch, he would normally come down and talk shit; Weps was a good guy and we liked him a lot. I would listen to him for a little while, and then go up to control and relieve Torp-O Dan. Once I did, Nav would grab Torp-O Dan’s arm and say “can you get Weps? I need to shit.” Torp-O Dan would snicker every time and say “you got it sir.” I would snicker every time, anticipating Wep’s exasperated groan that he made every time. It never got less funny. Weps would come back to control, every time halfway into his meal, and cut off the Nav, who tried to give him a proper watch turnover. I have no questions Nav I relieve you. Nav would run out of Control and take half an hour to shit, while Weps steamed and bitched about his meal getting cold. It was my favorite part of the day.
Every submarine is named after a state or a city. The ballistic missile subs, the “boomers,” the ones with the nukes on board, those were named after states. Their only mission was to be quiet and hold the big stick. If you ranked every country in the world by their firepower it would go: USA, Russia, China, a single USS Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine, and we have a bunch of them. But they didn’t really do missions; they drive in quiet circles and wait to start and end World War Three. The subs that do everything else, those are called fast-attacks, or fast boats. They’re named after cities and do the real stuff. There is a saying in the Submarine Force: fast boat real boat. Every submarine is named after a state or a city and has a slogan. My boat was the USS Newport News, a real boat. Our slogan was “Thunder From Below,” which if you say fast enough sounds like “Thunder Buffalo.” Three of my sailors got a thigh tattoo of a buffalo head with lightning bolts for horns. Dustin has Real Boat on his fingers. I have a scuba diving rooster on my right foot and a pig in an inner tube on my left. On submarines we don’t really get anchor tattoos; gone are those days, or maybe that is just a surface thing. Compensating. You don’t need serious tattoos when your job is in the real shit. Fast boat real boat, thunder buffalo.
When in port we wore camo, but at sea we wore our coveralls, called poopie suits. Submarines recycle air; that’s how we can stay below the water’s surface and not die. All air is recycled, and apparently it was not a perfect system back in the day. The air in the sanitary tanks would also get recycled. You wouldn’t notice you smelled like shit while underway, but once you got home, all the wives and girlfriends would bitch about how your coveralls smelled like shit. So, poopie suits. The CO2 scrubbers and air cleaning mechanisms are better these days but the name stuck. Everyone wears poopie suits underway, but only one person is allowed to wear the poopie pants. That’s a rule I instituted in my watchteam. Everyone can be having a bad day, but only one person is allowed to complain at a time. You had to request them poopie pants, from me, and the appropriate announcement would be made: “Attention in Control, Fire Control Technician 2nd Class Mezzadra has the poopie pants!” Everyone would echo the announcement back and grin to each other. Normally someone else would get mad throughout the course of the watch, and it was a real battle to keep the poopie pants the whole time. Sometimes we would wake Tim up just to give him the poopie pants, since he was so grumpy and serious all the time. One time I was getting yelled at by the XO, who was stopped by a junior sailor. “Excuse me sir, you have to request the poopie pants.” That was the end of that.
Our sanitary tank was pumped overboard by, well… by a pump. Apparently it was a small pump, and there was a pretty small opening from the tank to the pump itself, which would suck all the contents of the tank into a vacuum and out of the hull of the boat. You couldn’t flush anything that wasn’t shit or toilet paper from a toilet; that was gospel. If you did, the pump could lock up, or jam, or the opening could be covered. We had a special-super-secret-squirrel team come on board once, and on the first day they ate all the strawberries, and one of the technicians flushed his brass belt buckle down a toilet. Auxiliaryman 1st Class Henson volunteered. We got one of the nuclear-disaster big yellow radiation suits and put him in it and gave him a pair of swimming goggles for extra measure. He opened the tank, and I made the announcement for no one to shit for as long as you can hold it (which was overkill; we could do a code yellow, which means you can piss and shit but just not flush and is a semi-common thing for when there’s sans maintenance; we have signs for it and everything. I just wanted to make that announcement). After about thirty minutes in the tank, Henson found the belt buckle, which he handed back to the special-super-secret-squirrel technician unwashed. We hosed Henson down and the captain gave him an award at the end of the deployment. Since we were technically in a combat zone, Captain gave him the “Global War on Terrorism Combat Expeditionary Medal,” which sounded super badass and was well-deserved. No one else wanted to climb into that tank.
He’s shit – An insult
He’s a shithead – An insult
He’s full of shit – An insult
He’s the shit – A compliment
He’s got his shit squared away – A bigger compliment
He’s shit hot – An even bigger compliment
Scared shitless – Pussy
Shit boat – A bad boat
Really shit boat – A very bad boat
Real shit boat – A good boat that does the real shit
Engineering Laboratory Technician 1st Class Cooke got married before his first deployment on USS Newport News. We were in the Atlantic and other places, doing unique and specific things. We were gone seven and a half months, and when we returned, his wife was gone, as were his kids. She divorced him. Engineering Laboratory Technician 1st Class Cooke got married before his second deployment on USS Newport News as well, to a different woman. This deployment we were in the Mediterranean, Red Sea, and other places, doing other unique and specific things. His second wife emailed him a few months in and said she was going to divorce him when he got home. At an all hands call, COB talked about our current mission and said something to the effect of “I know this is a very different situation that what we are used to,” and Cooke interrupted. No COB, this shit is pretty much the fucking same if you ask me. Even COB had to laugh at that one.
Any coffee besides Maxwell’s Regular Roast is shit coffee and heaven help the junior officer that puts in French Vanilla-flavored coffee into the coffeepot because it makes the coffeepot taste like flavored coffee for weeks after which will have the Captain privately stewing and Torp-O Dan will see that and decide to yell at whatever sonofabitch shithead who did it.
Submarine life is a strange life, for strange people. It’s not for everyone. Those people say it’s like prison but with less windows. Some submariners feel like they’re in Hell. Maybe we all died and went there. Most people don’t know that when a person dies, they lose control of their bowels. That would make sense, that we all died and ended up here in the shit. Sometimes deployment drags on forever, and it feels like we’re trying to turn a wheel that’s off its latch, getting nowhere.
Whenever a SEAL team comes on board, we play a trick on them. There is a big lead door that separates the submarine forward and aft. The engineroom is in the aft part of the boat, with the reactor and engines and turbines and such. In the case of a major steam line rupture, flooding, or nuclear meltdown-type situation, the sailors up forward can shut that hatch and isolate the aft compartment until the casualty is over, or everyone aft is dead and the rest of us need to get in there. The way to shut that door is through a giant wheel. You have to spin it. The door is so heavy, you’re not getting it open or closed without that wheel. The wheel can be latched or unlatched, which is to say you can make sure that door moves or never budges. When a SEAL team comes on board, we would have Ryan take them on a tour of the boat. As the tour nears our favorite door, Ryan will explain the door, and how important it is. At that exact moment, hell will break loose onboard. Every alarm in Control will be tripped, and the Officer of the Deck will make announcements that sound as if everyone is about to die. Ryan will start to run away, stop, and yell at the newly onboard team: “CLOSE THAT DOOR.” He will not have told them about the latch. That SEAL team will, convinced their lives depend on that door being closed, try and shut it with the wheel, which will do nothing. Sailors fully decked out in Fire Suits, Steam Suits, whatever they can get their hands on, will run by with hoses and light torches, and scream at the SEAL team to get that door shut, which of course is impossible off the latch. The lights in that compartment area will be turned off, making the latch impossible to find. The Officer of the Deck will order hard angles upwards or downwards, which will make the SEALs fall and trip over each other and crash into the walls in pitch black. After we ensure every one of the SEALs thinks they are going to die, we secure the prank, and make fun of them endlessly. That’s just fast boat real boat thunder buffalo shit.