Just the thought of serving on a submarine gets my claustrophobia up and running. After doing a few walkthroughs of subs in naval displays/museums i have no clue as to how you can spend months couped up on these things,if some one told me that i would be spending the next 5 months on a sub and shooting myself was the only other option i would be hard pressed to make a descision.
Funny you should mention that.
One day we got underway for a six-month deployment. I checked the chart that night before hitting my rack and saw that we were going west ahead of schedule.
When I got up a few hours later for my morning watch, I discovered that we were racing east as fast as we could and that I'd be taking care of a personnel transfer later that morning.
It turned out that one of the crew was suffering an abrupt attack of appendicitis. That's bad enough but "fortunately" it happens frequently enough that we're all accustomed to dealing with it.
However in his case it turned out that for most of his career (he was easily at least 16 years into it by then) he'd been dealing with claustrophobia. Despite his phobia the attraction of sub pay was so strong that he would handle the problem by staying up until he was absolutely exhausted and then crashing for a few hours until the fear awoke him. Ironically, in a casualty he was one of the coolest and most collected individuals I've ever served with-- able to do three things at once while still keeping up morale and helping serve up his share of black humor. I can only imagine what claustrophobia did to his mental & physical health during "routine" operations, but when he was incapacitated with appendicitis and doped up on the related antibiotics/painkillers he was really in a bad way. Our corpsman was riding the ragged edge of keeping him conscious to monitor his condition while trying to dope him enough to get him to settle down. We had to strap him into a collapsible stretcher and maneuver him out through the hatch (25" in diameter, at least a 10-foot vertical trip) with a hoist line to get him topside. And then we spun around and hauled our assets back to WestPac at speeds considerably "greater than 25 knots".
His appendix was removed with no issues, he was medically disqualified from submarine duty, and he finished his career on submarine tenders & shore maintenance facilities with no further problems. He's doing fine today, but I'm sure he spends all his time in wide-open spaces and lets someone else [-]clean bilges[/-] crawl under cars for oil changes.
I know that I tell a lot of sea stories, but most of them are considered run-of-the-mill for a typical submarine career. However even among submariners this one generates a long period of silence followed by a couple introspective comments along the line of "No sh!t" and "Gimme another beer, please..."
I have to admit that when I was on sea duty I was totally oblivious (or blissfully ignorant) to the hundreds of pounds of sea pressure squeezing every inch of the hull at every moment. I didn't really mind having to contort into small enclosed spaces with 100+ of my new closest personal friends, along with all their personal idiosyncracies and varying standards of humor/hygiene, and even today my spouse assures me that I still have no concept of personal space. It was considered a weapons officer's rite of passage to crawl 20 feet into a 21" diameter torpedo tube to cut loose a torpedo-guidance wire that was trapped in the muzzle door, allowing an invigorating spray of seawater to wash over you through the fouled seating surfaces as you tried to cut the wire and not your fingers-- I was more concerned about having my manhood impugned than I was about running out of breathing air. But every year or two we'd get someone who'd never really had to deal with a certain set of shipboard conditions (like a real no-foolin' fire or flooding casualty) or who simply got pushed a little past their limits once too many times. I got one of my jobs because my predecessor couldn't handle the [-]incessant bureaucracy[/-] stress of caring for nuclear weapons-- when he started coughing up blood, no one objected to him quitting.
The Army has recently discovered antidepressants for keeping their troops on the front lines, but the submarine force has been doing it for years...
