!!!!Warning, middle aged nostalgia!!!!! not that this will make a lot of sense to most people, but you can blame HFXcrow for getting me started :
You just had to remind me of Deano Marsaw, didn't you? I only knew him as a junior officer. He was well respected...by his seniors. Those of equal or lower rank had a much different opinion of him. I have no doubt that he would always make it back to the surface. The question always was would he bother to bring anybody else back with him.
Full disclosure. I never had a problem with Marsaw. That's because at the time the stokers were insulated by a very senior CERA that nobody in the navy (especially Marsaw) was dumb enough to mess with.
Oh boy, that brings up the memories. Off the top of my head.
At the time the pay was pretty good for a single guy. P2 stoker with spec pay, sub pay and 9 years sea time increment when I had 11 years in. Not to mention the subsistance allowance and hotel rooms provided in foreign ports because no one was allowed to live on the boats in port really helped with the run ashore budget.
The reaction when the feminist commission decreed women were allowed to serve everywhere except on subs. What they put in the official report sure wasn't what they said when they toured the boats.
Escape tower training in Gosport and living in the Crimean war barracks. Do they still send sputs to dolphin for tower training? Does the RN still put Aussies and Canucks together in the "Colonial class" and expect to not have trouble?
Being under RN control for three months where every RN ship in the exercise breaks down at precisely 1500 every Friday afternoon and we got sent to spend the weekend in some horrible bed and breakfast in some dumpy little British seaport noone had ever heard of. The only items on the breakfast menu, runny beans with bangers, fried tomatoes and fried toast. Unless you were in Scotland, then you could get cold deepfried pizza and deep fried Mars bars leftover from the night before.
English curries when the pubs close and you are sailing the next morning. Spending the next two days wondering which end to point at the head, too weak to kill yourself or the supposed winger that said, "Try it, you'll like it."
Being a training boat and getting orders from the Teacher to be creatively incompetent to give the trainee RN captains good training time. Like we needed encouragement.
Sticky Buns the cook/canteen manager getting permission to store a couple of hundred cases of English hard scrumpy cider in one of the aft trim tanks. Surface transit home, every time we rolled, you could hear the cans exploding. I wonder if they ever managed to get the smell out of Onondaga's aft ends.
Sailing from Halifax in February when it was so cold the harbour steamed up so you couldn't see Dartmouth and heaving to a day later for a swimex in the Gulf Stream.
Being on watch in the Engine room nursing the diesels when the sea water cooling temps go from 34F to 78F in a half hour.
Watching one of your engine room crew sitting down on one of the cylinder heads of a running V16 supercharged diesel and knowing that despite the noise, heat and vibration the kid would be sound asleep in 30 seconds.
Tying up next to a nuke boat in Rosy Roads and having a dozen Yank Chuffs and Puffs camped out in our mess for two days trying to drink our bar dry. Still got the USN ditty bag (real nice white nylon. much better than our red naugahyde issue) and most of the shinies they stuffed it with for thank you presents.
Sailing under a shell shocked Aussie that got press ganged out of his exchange shore billet when we ran short of skippers.
Sailing with 6 homesick Aussie sputs on workups. That was one of Ottawa's better strokes of genius. Two boats on high intensity ops covering for the third in midlife refit, the training system bogged down, barely enough qualified people to go round, and Ottawa offers six training slots every six months to the Australians. You can imagine what kind of training they got.
Coming back from workups and having a quarter of the crew posted off that day.
The night I got yanked off a duty watch and press gangs were sent out to grab everybody still in the dockyard wearing dolphins to get the Oka-no-go to sea for a SAR. Getting turned around after a couple hours because it was a false alarm.
The day a skipper who shall remain nameless lost the bubble completely. One eye glued to the periscope, white knuckled death grip on the handles, shaking with rage and screaming foul obsceneties at the trainee Sea King crew happily dunking their sonar 1500 yards off with no idea where we were. He did have a bit of an excuse though. We had spent the previous half hour starting a snort with both engines running, raised all masts and periscopes, turned on the collision avoidance light and even broached the boat to the surface trying to get their attention. Doing training ops for newbie aircrews and skimmer sonarmen was just so much fun I was a bit disappointed the XO convinced the skipper that chasing after the Sea King to fire flares at them was not a good idea.
The year you could not go to Stad wearing dolphins without that jerk base chief writing you up for something. Trying not to laugh as he dressed me down for not replacing my ID card when I grew a mustache. I had seen the notice from ID office that cards would not be replaced for mustaches, only full beards and I knew the sub squadron cox'n was tossing the writeups in the gash without reading them.
Watching one of those interchangable MND's tour the Obejoyfull wearing a work dress jacket and white turtleneck sweater a few months after skimmer command issued a rather nasty order specifically forbidding submariner's from wearing white turtleneck sweaters.
Doing a "tourist to the bridge" after the mids on a surface transit when the wake glows for a mile back and the Milky way is a solid white bar across the sky.
I loved the life but I'm glad I got out when I did. I was burnt out. They burnt out a lot of people but they don't seem to have learned any lessons from it.
