WE WERE PIRATES



[pic]

One Ship, One Crew, Never to Die

By: Bill “Lanny” Lanahan

“When I was advised that on May 7, 2007, that my “Qual” boat, the USS Sailfish (SS-572) was used for target practice and sunk by a MK48 ADCAP torpedo fired by the USS Topeka (SSN-754), I realized that a part of me went down with her and now lays in a watery grave some 1,451 fathoms below the surface of the sea.” Lanny

Being a West Coast smoke boat sailor, many hours were spent enjoying hydraulic lunches at the Pump Room at Point Loma, shots and beers under the colorful undergarments that adorned the walls and ceiling of the Red Garter (respectfully referred to as the ‘Gutter’) in San Diego, and at small groups of tables while sitting in the Starlight bar, or Dumb Shit Okies in Yokosuka Japan while witnessing another boat sailors version of the ‘Dance of the Flaming Asshole’.

Over forty years later as I sit on my back deck with a glass of Glenlivet single malt and a freshly lit Cuban Bolivar, I can’t help but think back to the times spent on that old gal babysitting cantankerous distilling units (referred to as ‘Bud’ and ‘Oly’), misbehaving HPAC’s, leaky cylinder liners, and plugged fuel oil purifiers within the engine rooms that I grew up in. I think of the time, energy, and long hours (as a non-qual) crawling through the oily depths of the bilges in each compartment of that metal suppository trying to trace fuel, water, hydraulic, or air lines so that I could answer any question thrown at me during the pursuit a qualification signature. I remember the many torn and tattered pairs of dungarees and oil soaked bald caps, bloody knuckles, and smashed fingers that were the all too common casualties of shear determination in the pursuit of plowing water and poking holes in the ocean from one port to the next, and from one op area to another. Yes, I along with many others have ‘baptized’ the 572 with ‘Blood, Sweat, and Tears’. A part of every crew member was left behind within the steel frames of each compartment over the twenty two years of service that the USS Sailfish was commissioned.

Several years ago I took two of my grandsons to see the latest movie sequel of Pirates of the Caribbean, and couldn’t help but to draw a parallel between my first submarine Sailfish and her crew, to the doomed ship and crew of Davy Jones’s Flying Dutchman. My grandsons, at that time in their life truly believed that I was once a ‘Pirate’ especially, after having listened to the many colorful stories that I filled their young minds with during those special times together. My tattoos, grey beard, pony tail, and gold crown molar, to them, were all positive proof that I was in fact at one time an equal to old Davy Jones himself!

There were parts of the movie in which the crew of the Flying Dutchman would somehow come alive from within the timbers of the framework and bulkheads of the sunken ship while chanting the phrase, “One Ship, One Crew, Never to die”. Was I a pirate? Well, I guess if you call pillaging a Christmas tree from the commons area of the Officers Club in Yokosuka and strategically placing it on the forward deck of the boat being a pirate, then I guess I’m guilty as charged.

I don’t expect anyone from today’s Navy to fully understand any of this since I served in a different time, and under different circumstances. I was an engineman on a Diesel Electric submarine. More time was spent on the surface rather than under water, and names, terms, and phrases such as ‘Bull Nukes’, ‘Coners’, or ‘Air Scrubbers’ – let alone orders such as ‘Make your depth 20,000 leagues under the sea’, were never mentioned on a smoke-boat. We had no ‘Blue Crew’ or ‘Gold Crew’ - just ‘One Crew’ on ‘One Boat’, no separation whatsoever. Our war was a Cold one. It was one spent playing hide and seek with Cold War Commies, or on patrol standing by for Lifeguard Duty in the South China Sea. It was eighteen hour reduced electrical load runs, timeless hours underway while overhauling blowers, pulling upper crankshafts, or replacing the spring-packs in those twelve cylinder Fairbanks-Morse OP vertical drive units. It was steak and lobster or Italian night in the galley, BBQ’s and swim calls on Sunday, mid rats, casino nights, the same movie every night, port and starboard watches and snorkeling on the surface during typhoons. It was hot bunking, sleeping under leaky steering hydraulic valves, blowing the stack, blowing negative, the smell of diesel mixed with the smell of fresh baked snorkel bread and drinking your dolphins after finally being ‘Qualified on Submarines’. All of this may be considered the past, but I can guarantee that these memories are very much alive in the spirits of each and every smoke boat sailor who served behind the water tight doors in whatever compartment they lived or worked in within that metal suppository.

I wonder if anyone aboard the Topeka took the time to truly understand what they were delivering to Davy Jones and his locker just before firing that MK48 ADCAP torpedo. I guess I’ll never know, but I’m sure that Davy Jones himself is grinning from ear to ear with pride in the fact of having an old ‘Smoke Boat’ full of the spirits of the young men who bravely served within her steel hull as one of the newest additions to his fast growing fleet of ‘Fossil Fuelers’. “One Boat, One Crew, Never to die”

Rest well Sailfish, you’re home now. The pain and agony of sitting helplessly on the surface as part of a mothballed fleet are finally over. You served your country well – even to the end. You never failed me. You never failed your crew. You always brought us safely home before that fateful day in 2007 when the total number of your dives outnumbered the total number of your surfaces.

DBF

Bill “Lanny” Lanahan - Former EN2 (SS) - Sailfish (SS-572) 1971 – 1975

[pic]

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download