So, there we were. Submerged in the middle of the ocean, combat tax exclusion zone, last day of the month. There were at least six reenlistments happening on the submarine throughout the day. The engineering department organized what can only be described as a reenlistment rodeo late on the swing shift. Everyone who was not on watch gathered in the engineroom. The watch officer came over the announcing circuit, corralling us to the locations specifically selected by the sailors who were reenlisting. Our first spot: The main reduction gears, where a nuke mechanic, like a king on his throne, sat high atop the casing for the propulsion shaft. We circled around him, watching the shaft go round and round, and cheered as he took his oath. Then we waited excitedly for the announcement of our next location.
“The next reenlistment will take place in the Engineroom Lower-Level Bilge in five minutes,” the watch officer’s voice said over the announcing circuit. “To the bilge!” my machinery division chief cried out. “To the bilge!” everyone recited back in unison. It was a mad dash while the two dozen or so people scrambled to get down to the lower level of the engineroom. We crawled under the deck hatches and squatted together in darkness, our flashlights pointed up at our faces as if we were about to share ghost stories. When everyone was assembled, the reenlisting sailor swore his oath. We cheered, and so it continued. I don’t remember much about that deployment. After a while they all blur together. But I do remember crouching in a bilge with 20 of my closest friends on a day that got more ridiculous as it went on.
Three Keys to Success
Fast forward to several weeks later. It was May 2020 and our submarine had just pulled into homeport.
“I’ll give you three keys to success,” the captain said as he addressed the crew. It was both the first and the last all-hands call we would have after returning from sea. Not only were we about to split into shift work rotations to start a maintenance period, but we were also set to stagger in-person interactions, a COVID-19 protocol that we were still getting used to.
We had been underwater for the entirety of the spring and thus during the onset of the virus, so we were not sure what to expect once we got home. For weeks we joked about the parallels to “The Last Ship,” a show in which a naval vessel remains at sea unaffected by a world crisis (or so I’m told. I haven’t watched it. But the junior officers on the boat are certified TV enthusiasts and thus good authority when it comes to all pop culture references). Dinner conversations during this time usually revolved around how we would divide into teams to conquer a zombie apocalypse should the pandemic result in one. Or how we would convert hull space on the boat into a hydroponic farm so that we could grow our own food and stay out forever.
Of note: I preferred the option of growing submarine tomatoes over combating a zombie apocalypse.
But ultimately, after two years of forward deployment with the emerging pandemic and a looming overhaul period, we decidedly returned home to a world that was changed.
What did not change: the submarine’s tasking. Instead of embracing the work-from-hom trend with the rest of the world, the crew stepped back on U.S. soil and immediately launched into a major maintenance period. Shift work, an expedited drydocking, new-to-us COVID-19 precautions. Name your challenge and it was there. But this was a crew that once left on a four-week underway that turned into a four-month deployment. “The Last Ship” we seemed to remain, unaffected by the chaos around us. We would carry on with the ship’s schedule as we always had, only this time with masks on.
Cue the captain’s keys to success. Just three. Three doable tasks to get each other through an arduous shipyard period, which at the time of writing this, 18 months later, has yet to come to an end.
The first:
Know your counterpart. “You should know the phone number for shopworker XYZ by heart. If you need him, call him. Ask him how his kids are. Ask him what he thought of the baseball game. Then ask him to come down and inspect the valve that’s leaking.” This, the captain advised, is knowing your counterpart.
Know that the ship’s project manager comes to work at 0500 to organize the crane schedule. Know that the quality assurance office audits every controlled work package for every boat on the waterfront. Know that electrical general foreman is a huge Notre Dame fan. Why?
Because if you need a crane lift, you can show up to the project manager’s office while he’s assigning them. If you need to do research for a controlled work package, you can call the quality assurance office and ask for references. And if you need electrical technical assistance, you can schedule the work for Saturday morning instead of Saturday afternoon so that the job gets done and everyone gets to go home to watch the Irish win. Know your counterpart.
It was simple tasking: make sure you know whom to call for help and how they can help you. But the underlying message is a tried and true fundamental within the military: we succeed when we work together. Moreover, we succeed when we know how to work together. And the only way to know how to work together is to know who you’re working with.
The second:
Know when to work and know when not to work. Don’t be fooled. Trust me, we have worked. We labored on Labor Day. We manned a 24-hour shift work schedule for 9 months. We spent the least romantic Valentine’s Day ever huddled together in the engineroom during week three of cold operations testing. But that’s because it was time to work.
So when is it not time to work? For one, the day after the aforementioned all-hands call, which happened to be Mother’s Day. Instead of what was considered the norm—working all day to secure systems immediately after pulling into port—the captain gave the crew a holiday to see their families. For another, the captain has consistently refused all work past 2000, when the oncoming watchstanders should be sleeping in preparation for their midnight watches, and the off-going personnel should be home putting their kids to bed. Or even during major nuclear test evolutions, when I thought that as the engineer, I would just move onto the boat for the duration of testing. Even then, the captain personally came back to relieve me as a supervisory watch for a late evening shift so I could go home for a few hours.
Know when not to work. So that when the Captain says “it’s time to work”, we can make it so.
The third (and my personal favorite):
Don’t lose your sense of humor. To be honest, I modified this one. The captain’s actual guidance was “maintain a positive attitude.” I cannot in good conscience say I have always had a positive attitude, and I’m sure that my watch officers have stories at the ready to prove me right. A submarine overhaul period brings some dark days, and not just because we are literally working on a submarine sun up to sun down. But where there is darkness, there can still be humor.
Such as on the evening before undocking, when Auxiliary Division was still on the boat at midnight trying to correct the ship’s list by filling tanks with firehoses because we had no trim and drain system. I only remember laughing when the firehose pressure got so high after maxing out the flow rate that the division had to form a human daisy chain to anchor one another to the ground, in the dark, without a working flowmeter, because they did not want to lose time filling tanks. Or one typical Friday morning when I followed the sound of voices loudly singing Blink 182’s “All the Small Things” down to the lower level of the engineroom to find all the mechanics stuffed in the bilges, cleaning during field day, in surprisingly good spirits as they staggered the choruses of their favorite millennial pop songs.
Despite the insanity of the last 18 months, and all the months before, the crew continues to find the humor in everything we do. I asked my junior officers to tell me about their least positive moments throughout the maintenance period. They included the night we had to change the tank filling plan hours before undocking, or that they may never remember another Valentine’s Day with their spouses but they will always remember cold operations testing. But after recounting the stories, we ended up laughing at the absurdity of it all. Maybe the captain will be satisfied with a Type 2 positive attitude if we couldn’t give him Type 1.
It Comes Back to Three Doable Tasks
We often refer to our maintenance period as “the project” and to everyone involved with it as “the enterprise.” Eighteen months into it, the captain was right. We have been successful for three reasons. We know everyone in the enterprise, counterparts and coworkers alike. We know when the project needs work, and, of course, we know when the project does not need work. And we know that at the end of it all, we will eventually be at sea again, probably cramming into a bilge for some sort of celebration (or more likely, another four hours of field day), and plotting our strategy for how we’ll survive the next world crisis together, sense of humor intact. I only hope there are fresh tomatoes.
