Russian sailors' U.S. soul mates reflect on life in `the tube'

In nuclear submarine life, the guy at the periscope may be the only one on board to see the sky for weeks.

Rarely will a fellow sailor ask if the sun is out.

The world of nuclear submarines can be so strange and isolating, often the people submariners most relate to are their enemies.

"They live in a world where they can't tell anybody what they do or where they've been," said Sherry Sontag, co-author of "Blind Man's Bluff," a history of the U.S. Navy's spy sub program. "And they live in a world where the only people who really understand what they do are the other people doing it."

With the crew of a Russian nuclear sub trapped on the ocean floor in the Arctic, many of the 5,900 military personnel at the Bangor Submarine Base were likely enrapt yesterday.

"I haven't spoken with anybody today who wasn't paying attention," said Navy spokesman Lt. Kevin Stephens.

For a base that controls eight of the country's 18 Trident nuclear subs, the disaster hits particularly close to home.

"Anybody who has ever been out to sea can't help but think about what's going on in that ship," said retired Seattle-area submariner Charlie Meeker.

"They're all thinking the same thing - `There but for the grace of God go I,' " said Ralph Enos, a retired Navy submariner and former director of its Undersea Museum in Keyport. "Really, they're all soul mates."

The Navy was strictly controlling information from its submarine bases yesterday. But a few retired submariners who reside in the Northwest shared their thoughts on the situation.

Subs typically are out for 70 to 80 days at a time. There's no telephone and no e-mail and certainly no McDonald's. Bosses and co-workers become family and friends. Life inside "the tube" is confined to such a small space that sailors have been known to have trouble driving cars once back on land. The reason: lost depth perception.

It's a world where participants are always busy, either keeping their ship moving and in working order, training for emergencies or studying to advance to the next level of undersea military life. And it's a place where the participants know, in a fatal accident, they may suddenly have hours or even days to think about their pending death.

"I think about those guys and know they must be stewing in their juices," Meeker said. "They know they're in trouble, but the end doesn't come right away. If you're stuck on the bottom, there's very little you can do to affect the outcome."

During normal days, submariners "usually don't have umpteen hours to just sit and stare at the wall," he said.

Submarine training is rigorous - physically and psychologically. Those who wind up working on subs - especially nuclear subs - form an elite crew. They are fiercely proud, fiercely loyal and sometimes, former submariners admit, cocky.

"It goes with the territory," said former Capt. Steve Slaton of Bremerton. "Nuclear submariners take an extremely complicated machine - a machine as complicated as the space shuttle - put it in a hostile environment, submerge it in an undersea world and turn something most people think of as an extraordinary feat into just a job."

They are almost completely self-sufficient. Fire on board? They put it out. Leak? They seal it off. Despite such potentially dire circumstances, panic is rare. Enos vividly recalled the only time a fellow sailor screamed and cowered during a deep dive. The rest of the crew watched, saddened, but it wasn't contagious.

Ret. Vice Admiral Roger Bacon, a former deputy chief of Naval operations for submarines who retired in 1993, said the Russian sub's fate will make sailors hug their children tighter at night.

"It's a risky business, but we've lost so few subs, we don't often think about it," he said.