Tales Of Submarine Service

[Subdeacon Joe]

Found on FB 

 

Quote

Ballad of the tall submariner:

“Down the hatch, Down the ladder,
Bonk the head, see brain cells scatter.”

And so it was, at the bottom of the main hatch, I turned to see my new home.  It left an impression.

On my right temporal lobe, specifically. It was more solid than anything I’d ever felt.  Being a nub, I had no idea what I’d clocked my cranium on.  But therein lay the beauty of the Submarine qualification program.  I would soon be able to 
Identify every single head trauma by ship’s frame, subsystem, associated components, function, and nomenclature. 

It still hurt though.

My first destination was the ship’s office.  Maybe 20 steps through control and the upper level passageway - past Sonar, past Supply, across from Radio.  In those 20 steps, I found two battle lanterns, two vents, two pipe mounting brackets the hard way.  In somewhat of a daze, I took a hard draft reading of the ship’s office door, height from the deck.  It stood approximately 6’2”.  I was 6’4”.  

I still remember which wrinkle of my aggravated  forehead collected this data.

The first underway was the next morning.  I met what would become my defining nemesis shortly.  But first, the torpedo room/crews mess watertight door softened up the back of my head, ungently calibrating the extent to which I needed to bury my head in my chest to get my torso through.  I would soon learn to go feet first whenever possible.  

But immediate problems demanded immediate attention.  Still rubbing the base of my skull, I discovered the vent in the crews mess - the one that protruded only an inch or so from the overhead, and painted to match (which is how everything gets painted on a submarine).  It’s edge caught me well up into the (1986 vintage) hairline, and with absolutely no warning.  I rocked back a bit, and re-adjusted.  And sat down a moment on one of the benches

Whereupon someone asked me where my qual card was, and why was I sitting and not working on it.

I tried not to glare.  But the glaze in my eyes was misinterpreted.  Sensing a tedious discussion, I stood back up, only to hit the same vent in the same spot.  Yeah, the crew’s mess wasn’t going to be my friend.

I managed finally to stagger clear of the galley, only to bump-test a pipe at the top of the ladder to lower level.  In my own head, the impact seemed to say, “Clang!”  It would evolve into an entire battery of imagined sound effects, some of which I would utter out loud at times.  This would prove later to be a bad idea.  

It happened again on returning to the torpedo room, this time on the starboard torpedo ram handle that sat waiting for someone just over 6’2” to duck through the watertight door NOT feet-first, and in a hurry.  There really was a “clang” that time, and may have been a couple minutes downtime.  It happened again while avoiding the head valve in ops upper level.  It happened in AMRLL.  It happened in Shaft Alley.  It happened in LL Berthing.  Always, in my head, I heard and said, “Clang”.  And I moved on.

In a couple short weeks of underway, I memorized the overhead layout of the boat faster than anything else.  I developed the skill of sensing impact with my hair, reflexively preventing the worst of impacts.  As I would navigate a passage, my head would flop and bend like a curb feeler in a downtown Chicago Cadillac.  The first few days’ worth of damage had begun to heal, and my qual card began to fill out with signatures. I began to walk with a little confidence.  I walked a little straighter, as it hurt to hunch constantly, letting my neck control my destiny.

And so it was that I came to be gliding through the crew’s mess again one day, intent on my task at hand.  With a full head of steam, I spectacularly failed to duck for the vent as I strode through towards the Torpedo room.  What happened next is a little fuzzy, but there was a “clang” that wasn’t mine.  I was busy holding my head from the gritty impact on the Vent of Despair, which had set me down on a bench again, so someone took the liberty of saying it for me.  In my misery, I burst out with some sailor-ish vulgarity, signaling to the ever-attentive crew that I’d reached some sort of emotional limit.  Suddenly the entire space erupted in enthusiastic chorus of “Clang!”

And thus for many weeks, I endured being known simply as “Clang”.  The name lasted through my time of qualifying, until my next snarky outburst at the end of a stores load, when I found myself walking through lower level berthing on two layers of #10 cans, whereupon I carelessly said to myself, “hey!  I’m Harry the Hamster, walking through my Habitrail™️.

I was awkwardly overheard.  But that’s another story...