With apologies to Chuck E. Cheese, the thread title summarizes nuclear submarine training. My spouse observes that the sub force is populated by very bright people of limited social proficiency yet with an exhausting stamina that wears others down before it wears them out. She also wants to thank the board for letting me post this work of occupational therapy.
Unlike the British Navy (or StarFleet!), where officers can specialize in deck or weapons or engineering, the U.S. submarine force still requires every officer to go through nuclear power training. (Even naval aviators have to endure it before they can command aircraft carriers.) This emphasis can lead to a lack of shiphandling & weapons skills. The nuke mindset also tends to drive away many candidates while attracting some who may lack the emotional & empathetic skills to be truly inspirational leaders-- although there are exceptions. But if the situation calls for a dangerous & highly-structured environment with strict procedural compliance, broad technical skills, Vulcan-like logical analysis, and iron endurance... cool-- let's run engineering drills, too!
Nuclear training takes a year, and here's the first six months. I was considered a marginal performer so I was encouraged to study at least six hours a weekday and 20 (twenty) hours on weekends. I was usually in by 6 AM, on break around 3-5 PM, and back at it until 11 PM. (Not much time for housekeeping & exercise, let alone personal hygiene or a social life.) Exams were two-hour essays with all calculations shown & explained. Submarine students had also been paid a $3000 bonus and were constantly [-]spending it on caffeine[/-] threatened with recoupment if they flunked.
After Orlando I drove to the [-]frozen, blasted Arctic wasteland[/-] resort town of Ballston Spa, NY to qualify as Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW). Its reactors were all land-based prototypes of what eventually became classes of submarine & ship reactor plants. The site literally operated 24/7. IIRC students worked 8 AM - 8 PM for seven straight days and then took a day off. They shifted to swings (noon - midnight) for seven more straight days, took two days off, and then did seven lovely days of mids from 8 PM to 8 AM before getting four days off. I was one of the lucky ones living only 10 minutes from the plant. The Idaho Falls prototype had to bus its students in from an hour away, and a few hardy souls "saved time" by backpacking in their food & uniforms and just living at the plant's bunkroom for the seven days. Once you were a qualified EOOW (about five months into a six-month school) you could cut back to the staff's eight-hour days, but you also attended additional classes at odd hours.
Prototype's bi-weekly exams were four-hour essays and qualification was a two-hour oral board before a half-dozen senior staff. You were expected to be under constant mental stress and performance pressure, especially on watch or at a board. Another plant developed an innovative method of putting students under stress during the boards. They literally splashed an ensign with a dilute solution of gasoline in water (just enough for the smell) and then-- as he answered questions & drew diagrams on the board while drip-drying-- they struck kitchen matches. The ensign passed and kept his mouth shut but the [-]smell[/-] word eventually leaked to the press. Other than that scandal, several of my classmates overworked themselves into the hospital (one for a weekend of suicide watch), but almost everyone graduated and received a second bonus of $3000.
After nuclear training, submarine school was a three-month party. We learned basic submarine design & operations but usually had our homework done before the day's classes ended.
Reporting aboard your first sub as an ensign earned you the designation of "FLOB"-- free-loading oxygen breather. Within a week you were expected to justify your existence (and sub pay) by qualifying as a supervisor of the ventilation lineup for charging the sub's battery. As the most junior officer, you were voluntold to do this lineup whenever the battery needed charging-- at LEAST three times a week anytime of the day or night, import or at sea. You were also handed a foot-high stack of qualification cards for EOOW (usually on a different reactor from prototype), Engineering inport Duty Officer, Diving Officer of the Watch, JOOD, OOD, Ship's inport Duty Officer, submarine officer, and even command. You were expected to qualify EOOW in 4-6 months, OOD within 12 months, and be wearing your gold dolphins by 18 months. Sleep, leave, and liberty were optional motivators. Spouses & children were either an inconvenience or a retention incentive.
Like Gumby, my first sub was a boomer so I was also expected to qualify at decoding nuclear release orders and ripple-launching ICBMs. Weapons drills were usually evenings & weekends (can't interfere with engineering drills!) so by 9 PM you were usually quite happy to trade nuclear Armageddon for a nap before you took the midwatch. (At sea it was considered funny to trick the newest crewmember into believing that a launch drill was actually the real thing.) The rest of the U.S. military's efforts notwithstanding, I believe that we pissed-off nukes with our hair-trigger reputation were a powerful deterrent to Soviet aggression.
As you qualified (and forever after) you trained incessantly and ran drills. Every weekday morning was generally three hours of engineering drills followed by several weekly afternoons of engineering training seminars. (Weapons drills & ship's drills filled the "spare" afternoons and many evenings.) This routine also continued import unless you were in drydock or other really nasty maintenance. Your CO would scram the reactor anytime, day or night, and you'd have to recover it within an hour (usually within 15 minutes) or the entire crew would have to help you fix your mess. Other times you'd have to fight shipwide fires, evade torpedoes, and conduct missile attacks-- sometimes simultaneously and so frequently that it became reflex. By the time I'd been aboard my attack sub for a year, I could take the crew from "deeper than 800 feet" and significantly "in excess of 25 knots" to periscope depth within 20 minutes. In an emergency I once did it in six minutes. For real bragging rights we did it in total darkness wearing emergency air-breathing masks. I could operate all of the dozen officer-permitted features of the Type 18 multi-purpose periscope with my eyes shut.
To improve your quality of life, you had to train your subordinates or you'd never get out of three-section duty. This put a certain relentless pressure down the chain of command. "#$^ing non-quals" were expected to be eternally on station to obtain practical experience and qualification signatures. Failure to maintain progress meant you were a "dink" and sometimes even restricted onboard import. My progress was reviewed daily by other lieutenants before I was "allowed" to watch the evening movie. (It wasn't a privilege worth pursuing.) On my first sub, even after I was wearing my dolphins, we held Saturday-morning interviews with the CO. If I was ready to knowledgably and articulately discuss a topic about qualification for command, he might sign it off. If I wasn't ready then he'd review my division's equipment deficiency logs or even (*shudder*) offer to let me help the XO on "special projects". With those incentives I qualified for command way ahead of the pack.
At the end of the first sea tour, certifying as Engineer Officer was a two-day affair at Naval Reactors HQ in Washington, DC. You started in homeport with a "review" school for six weeks of 12-hour days (or longer). You'd read the entire Reactor Plant Manual (a six-foot stack), research the answers to arcane nuclear trivia, and get [-]passed around[/-] guest interviews with COs of other submarines or squadron staff. After six weeks [-]of verbal abuse[/-] you were judged as [-]needed back on the duty roster[/-] marginally ready. The exam's first day was a five-hour essay followed by three separate interviews with the NR staff who'd just graded your exam. Any knowledge deficiencies on the exam would be thoroughly [-]wire-brushed[/-] explored during the interviews, with bonus rounds for shaky performers.
It wasn't all endless drudgery-- at sea, on Friday nights we'd eat pizza and play poker. Squabbles would break out over probability analysis or game-theory betting strategies. We had fun with our own projects, too. One of my more analytical shipmates won a brand-new Camaro in a contest guessing how many packs of cigarettes it would hold. He rented the same model of Camaro, obtained the specs on its internal volume, spent a few hundred bucks on identical cigarette packs, and analyzed various configurations. His guess was only a few packs high-- but his packing was better.
Applying Dilbert-like efficiency, we focused on our goals and we optimized. You learned to push through the pain/fatigue/hunger to get things done. Evolutions were endlessly rehearsed. Drill critiques went faster by noting only the deficiencies, so sat performance was not considered worthy of mention. If an evaluator even tried to say "He did a good job of..." he'd be shouted down with "No positive comments!" and told to move on or be quiet. You perpetually prepared for the dreaded annual Operational Reactor Safeguards Exam (which could shut you down if you violated reactor safety) and the two-week countdown exerted extraordinary efforts (even by our standards). Inspectors only needed two days for the record reviews & drills (they went 20 hours/day) so you didn't bother to sleep. Life sucked so badly that you encouraged your crew with [-]clichés[/-] slogans like "Life sucks pretty badly now, but it'll get better after the ORSE." (Translation: Never.)
To improve the speed & legibility of emergency comms, you learned to use only a few dozen approved terms for standard orders & reports. Sometimes you couldn't clearly hear your watch team's actual words but you could tell the status by the speed, tempo, and cadence of their reports. Officers somehow learned to timeslice two conversations at once while acknowledging watchstander reports. Hand signals were considered very cool. I've multitasked it all for years but I still don't understand how I do it, and it still bugs the heck out of my family.
On my final tour I was the command's director of firefighting & damage-control training. We put crews in a simulator, set it on fire in accordance with procedure, and expected them to extinguish the flames in accordance with procedure. If that went well then we put them next door in the wet trainer to patch the damaged piping and stop the flooding before the water got chest-high. One of my instructors actually had a heart attack during an especially skill-challenged firefighting class, but our corpsman and our EMT kept him alive. The students had managed to pass.
The training lasts a lifetime and I'm endlessly hypercritical of myself, my own worst enemy. I've been ashore for 15 years and retired for six, but until last year I'd get nightmares and wake up shouting orders. I still occasionally lock into to a project to the point of obsessive exhaustion. I'm perpetually being asked "Yikes, didn't that hurt?!?" My watchstander's situational [-]paranoia[/-] awareness still lingers-- I sleep lightly and I'm very sensitive to noises that no one else hears. Like Dilbert I reflexively question every assumption, which also drives my family nuts. When I review an incident with our teenager, the critique continues until she [-]runs screaming from the room[/-] identifies the root cause of the deficiency and implements corrective action (to be reported & tracked to completion). I track a lot of data because if it isn't logged then it won't happen. I can't watch a speaker without grading their presentation and its training value. I can't watch a movie without feeling vaguely guilty. I have a hard time relaxing and enjoying the sight of just about anything. I usually mentally assess its material condition and its readiness-- even at the beach. I can't turn my brain off and I usually don't fall asleep until I'm exhausted, yet I'll twitch wide-eyed awake in the wee hours of the morning.
But I'm recovering.
Gumby, you'll have to tell us if this lifestyle carries over to civilian reactor operator training...
Constant stress is normal for most of us in the military - and sometimes people get lucky/smart when choosing a good mate.
