Chuck Palahniuk - Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)

Now Ed and Bill are fat eyesores, but that summer, really, dude, they were massive. A good pump… my father… the Anadrol… all that's left is the intangible story. The legend.

And, okay, that thing about frontiers, maybe it wasn't Thomas Jefferson, but you get the idea.

There will always be cougars outside. It's such a chick thing to think life should just go on forever.

The People Can

You go to sea tired. After all the business of scraping and painting the hull, loading provisions, replacing equipment, and stocking parts, after you take an advance on your pay and maybe prepay your rent for the three months you won't be home, after you settle your affairs, you leave «sell» orders with your broker, you say goodbye to your family at the gate of King's Bay Naval Base, you maybe shave your head because it's a long time until you'll see a barber, after all that rushing around, the first few days at sea are quiet.

Inside "the people can" or "locked in the tube" as submariners call their patrol, it's a culture of quiet. In the exercise area, the free weights are coated in thick black rubber. Between the weight plates of the Universal equipment are red rubber pads. Officers and crew wear tennis shoes, and holding almost everything-from plumbing to the running treadmill, anywhere metal meets metal-are rubber isolators to prevent rattling or drumming. The chairs have a thick rubber cap on each leg. Off watch, you listen to music on headphones. The USS Louisiana, SSBN-743, is coated to deaden enemy sonar and stay hidden, but any loud, sharp noise they make might be heard by someone listening within twenty-five miles.

"When you go to the bathroom," says the Louisiana's supply officer, Lieutenant Patrick Smith, "you need to lower the seat in case the ship makes a funny roll. A slamming lid could give us away."

"They don't all go at once," says the executive officer, Pete Hanlon, as he describes what happens if the ship changes depth with toilet seats left open. "You'll be on the bridge and hear WANG! Then WANG! Then WANG! One after another, and you'll see the captain getting tighter and tighter."

At any point, a third of the crew may be asleep, so during a patrol the only overhead light in each bunk room is the small red fluorescent light near the curtained doorway. Almost all you hear is the rush of air in the ventilation system. Each crew bunk holds nine berths, triple-deckers, in a U-shape facing the doorway. Each berth, called a "rack," has a six-inch-thick foam mattress that may or may not be dented by your alternate on the submarine's alternate crew. Two crews alternate taking the Louisiana on patrol, the Gold Crew and the Blue Crew. If the guy who sleeps in your rack while you're in port weighs 250 pounds and leaves a dent, says Gold Crew mess management specialist Andrew Montroy, then you stuff towels under it. Each berth lifts to reveal a four-inch-deep storage space you call a "coffin locker." Heavy burgundy curtains close each bunk off from the rest. At the head of each mattress is a reading light and a panel with an outlet and controls for a stereo headset similar to the system used on passenger airliners. You have four different types of music from a system that plays compact discs brought on board by the crew. You have volume and balance controls. You have an air vent. Also at the head of each rack is an oxygen mask.

"The biggest fear we have on board is fire," says Lieutenant Smith. "The reason for that is smoke."

In the case of a fire, in narrow passageways full of smoke and without lights, in the pitch darkness, you'd pull the breathing mask and canvas flash hood over your face and you'd feel along the floor for your next breath. On the floor are dark, abrasive patches, square and triangular patches. You'll Braille the floor with your feet until you find a patch. A square patch means an air port you can hook into directly overhead. Triangular patches point to air ports on the wall. You'll plug into the port, take a breath, shout "Air," and then move down the passageway to the next port for your next breath. An outlet coming off the mask lets another crewman hook up to you and breathe as you breathe. You shout «Air» so nobody is alarmed by the loud hiss of air as you disconnect from a port.

To make the Louisiana a home, Lieutenant Smith brings whole-bean Gevalia coffee, a coffee grinder, and an espresso machine. Other crewmen bring their own towels, they bring photos to tape on the underside of the bunk above theirs. Montroy brings his thirty favorite CDs. They bring videotapes of life at home. One crewman brings a Scooby-Doo pillowcase. A lot bring their own quilts or blankets.

"I call it my security blanket," says Gold Crew storekeeper first class Greg Stone, who writes a diary he can read to his wife later, while she reads hers to him.

You go into the water with only the air that's in the submarine. This same air is cleaned with heated amine, which bonds to the carbon dioxide and removes it. To generate new oxygen, you use 1,050 amps of electricity to split molecules of demineralized seawater. The carbon dioxide and the hydrogen are vented into the surrounding ocean. You use three thousand pounds of hydraulic pressure to compress onboard garbage into sixty-pound, steel-wrapped canisters-about four hundred for each patrol-which you jettison.

You can't drink alcohol, and you can smoke only in the area near the twelve-cylinder Firbank Morris diesel auxiliary engine, called the "Rocker Crusher." The diesel engine acts as backup to the nuclear power plant, the "Pot-Belly Stove."

If you're a crewman, you sleep as little as six feet away from the twenty-four Trident nuclear missiles that fill the center third of the ship, stored in tubes that run from the bilge up through all four decks. Outside the bunk rooms, the missile tubes are painted shades of orange, lighter orange toward the bow and darker toward the stern, to help crewmen with their depth perception in the hundred-foot-long compartment. Mounted on the missile tubes are lockers full of video movies and candy for sale by the Rec Club.

You're surrounded by colored pipes and valves. Purple means refrigerant. Blue, fresh water. Green, seawater. Orange, hydraulic fluid. Brown, carbon dioxide. White, steam. Tan, low-pressure air.

According to Hanlon, Smith, and Gold Crew chief of boat Ken Biller, depth perception is not a problem despite the fact that you'll never focus your eyes farther than the length of the center missile compartment. According to a crewman drinking coffee on the mess deck, your first day back in the sunshine you squint and wear sunglasses, and the Navy recommends you not drive a car for your first two days ashore because of possible problems with depth perception.

Mounted on a couple missile tubes are brass plaques to mark the time and place a missile was fired. On tube number five, a plaque marks the DASO launch on December 18, 1997, at 1500 hours. Blue Crew fired the missile.

"Once in a while," Gold Crew Lieutenant Smith says, "a boat is lucky enough to shoot its missile."

Gold Crew has never fired one.

There are no windows or portholes or cameras mounted outside the hull. Except for the sonar, you are blind in the event you're ever attacked by a…

"… by a giant squid?" Lieutenant Smith says, completing the thought with raised eyebrows. "So far, that hasn't happened."

"We did hit a whale once," says Gold Crew machinist first mate Cedric Daniels. "Well, there are stories about it."

Unexplained bumps against the hull have been explained as whales. On the sonar, deep under water, you can listen to the calls of whales and dolphins and porpoises. The clicking racket made by schools of shrimp. These are noises the crew calls "biologicals."

You go to sea with 720 pounds of coffee, 150 gallons of boxed milk, 900 dozen large eggs, 6,000 pounds of flour, 1,200 pounds of sugar, 700 pounds of butter, 3,500 pounds of potatoes. This is all packed in "food modules," lockers measuring five by five by six and a half feet tall, filled in warehouses ashore and lowered into the ship through a hatch. You go with 600 movie videos, 13 torpedoes, 150 crewmen, 15 officers, and 165 "halfway boxes."

Before departure, the family of each man on board gives Chief of Boat Ken Biller a shoe-box-sized package, and on the night that marks the halfway point in the patrol, called Halfway Night, Biller distributes the boxes. Smith's wife sends photos and beef jerky and a toy motorcycle to remind him of his own bike onshore. Greg Stone gets a pillowcase printed with a photograph of his wife, Kelley. Biller's wife sends pictures of his dog and his gun collection.

Also on Halfway Night, you can bid for an officer as they're auctioned off. The money goes to the Rec Fund, and the auctioned officers work the next watch for the winning bidders.

Another Halfway Night tradition is auctioning pies. Each winning bidder gets to call the man of his choice to a chair in front of the whole crew and smacks the guy with the pie.

Everybody on board calls Supply Officer Smith «Chop» because the gold insignia on his collar, which are supposed to look like oak leaves, look more like pork chops. Chief of Boat Keller is called "Cob." Chief Executive Officer Hanlon is called "XO." A member of the original crew, like Mess Management Specialist Lonnie Becker, is a "plank owner." You don't watch a movie, you "burn a flick." A door is a hatch. A hat, a "cover." A missile, a "boomer." In the new and politically corrected Navy, the dark-blue coveralls crewmen wear while on patrol are no longer called "poopie suits." Crewmen who serve on the mess deck are no longer "mess cranks." Sauerbraten is not "donkey dick." Ravioli isn't "pillows of death." Creamed chipped beef on toast isn't "shit on a shingle." Corned beef is not "baboon ass."

Not officially. But still you hear it.

Hamburgers and cheeseburgers are still "sliders." Patties of chicken meat are still "chicken wheels." Bunks are «racks» because of the racks that held hammocks on sailing ships. A bathroom is still a "head," named after the holes in the bow of those ships. Two holes for the crew, one for the officers, cut in the heaving, wave-washed deck above the keel.

As XO Hanlon says. "Those guys, they didn't need toilet paper."

Another landmark night during patrol is "Jefe Café." Pronounced hef-AY, and Spanish for "Boss's Café," on this night the officers cook for the crew. They turn off the lights on the mess deck and wait on the crewmen with chemical glow sticks on the tables instead of candles. There's even a maître d'.

For religion, there are "lay leaders," crewmen who can lead Protestant or Catholic services. At Christmas, sailors string lights in their bunk rooms and put up small folding foil trees. They decorate the officers' dining room, the Ward Room, with snowflakes and garlands.

When you go to sea aboard the USS Louisiana, this is your life. Crewmen live on an eighteen-hour cycle. Six hours per watch. Six hours' sleep. And six hours off watch, when you can relax, exercise, and study PC-based correspondence courses toward an associate's degree. Every week or so, you sleep an eight-hour "equalizer." The average age of crewmen is twenty-eight. From your bunkroom, you go to the head in your shorts or a towel. Otherwise, most sailors wear their coveralls.

Officers live on a twenty-four-hour cycle. You do not salute officers while on patrol.

"After we're locked in the tube," says Lieutenant Smith, "this is our family, and that's the way we treat them."

Smith points out the framed Pledge of Service on the mess deck wall and says, "A guy can have a great day, but if he comes through here to eat and the service is lousy, the food is lousy, the plates aren't hot, if we don't provide him with that at-home atmosphere, we can ruin his whole day."

Your last few days on patrol, everybody gets "channel fever." You don't want to sleep. You just want to get home. At this point, there are always movies going, with pizza and snacks out around the clock.

On shore, the wives and significant others are raffling off the "first kiss." All the money from the pies and auctions and raffles goes toward the crew party to celebrate coming home.

And the day the USS Louisiana arrives home, the families will be on the pier with signs and banners. The commanding officer is always the first ashore, to greet the commodore, but after that…

The winner of the raffle is announced and that man and that woman, in front of everyone, they kiss. And everyone else cheers.

POSTSCRIPT: The photographer for this piece, Amy Eckert, jumped through a lot of government hoops to make it happen for Nest magazine. She warned me that, since Nest was a «design» magazine, the Navy brass seemed worried it had a homosexual reading audience and the piece would be a big exposé about homo activity in a submarine setting.

The photographer stressed how I was never to broach the subject of anal submarine sex. Funny, but until she mentioned it, I'd never even thought about the issue. I was more interested in the slang vocabulary specific to submariners. I wanted to build a picture of very unique words. Slang is the writer's palette of colors. It broke my heart when, before the article was published, Navy censors removed all the slang, including "donkey dick" and "baboon ass."

Still, the sex phobia became the big invisible elephant that was hard to ignore.

One day, in a tight passageway, I was standing with a junior officer as sailors squeezed past, doing their job. My hands were down at my waist, trying to take notes as we talked.

Apropos of nothing, the officer says, "By the way, Chuck, when guys rub up against you like that, it doesn't mean anything."

Until then I hadn't even noticed. Now it meant something. All that rubbing.

Another day, on the mess deck after lunch sailors were sitting around, talking about the problems of allowing women to serve aboard submarines. One man said it would only be a matter of time before two people fell in love, somebody ended up pregnant, and they'd have to scrub a ninety-day mission to return to port.

To this I said no way. I'd been on board long enough to see how cramped their life was. No way, I said, could two people find the room and the privacy to have sex on board.

And another sailor crossed his arms over his chest, leaned back in his chair, and said, "Oh, it happens!" Loud and clear, he smirked and said, "It happens a lot!"

Then he realized what he'd said. He'd acknowledged the invisible elephant.

Every man in the room was glaring at him.

What followed was the longest moment of angry silence in Navy history.

Another time, I was asked to wait in a hallway, across from a bulletin board with the day's announcements. The first item was a list of new crewmen and a note to welcome them aboard.

The second item was a heads-up that Mother's Day was coming.

The third item said that "personnel self-harm" was at an all-time high aboard submarines. It said: "Preventing self-harm of personnel aboard submarines is the Navy's highest priority." Creepy Navy-talk for suicide. Another invisible elephant.

The day I left the Kings Bay Naval Base, an officer asked me to write a good piece. I stood, looking at the sub for the last time, and he said fewer and fewer people saw the value in the type of service he valued most.