Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
What really happens when civilians enter the tight confines of a vessel of war? The Navy captain who wrote "Run Silent, Run Deep" gives his account.
Feb 23, 2001 | Did the civilians aboard the USS Greeneville distract crew members and inadvertently cause the collision that killed nine people aboard Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru?
It seemed easy to draw that conclusion after the latest announcement from the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the accident. The agency revealed Wednesday afternoon that the Navy had notified its investigators that the submarine's fire control technician said he was unable to do his job because the control room had become overcrowded with civilians. That technician's job is to plot sonar data on a large paper chart used by the captain and crew members to make navigation decisions.
The revelation was no small matter, coming as it did after the Navy had revealed earlier in the week that the Greeneville had detected the Ehime Maru an hour before it accidentally sank the boat, which was carrying high school students.
As a result of the accident, President Bush has ordered a temporary suspension of civilian ride-alongs on submarines and other Navy vessels. And Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is expected to issue a moratorium on allowing civilians near the controls of any military vehicle. He is also expected to call for a review of safety procedures for carrying nonmilitary passengers.
Though critics have questioned the safety of the ride-alongs in the wake of the Feb. 9 accident, others remain supportive of the Navy's program, which they believe fosters better relationships with civilians, shedding light on the inner workings of our national defense while at the same time building public support for it.
Among those who support bringing civilians aboard Navy vessels is retired Capt. Ned Beach. A Navy legend, he served in the service for several decades, and his bestselling book "Run Silent, Run Deep," a classic novel about World War II submarine officers, has become an important part of the canon of naval literature. Hollywood liked the novel, too: In 1958, Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster starred in a silver-screen adaptation.
In a phone interview Thursday from his home in the Washington neighborhood of Georgetown, Beach defended the Navy's policy of allowing civilians on its nuclear submarines and proffered a new theory for the cause of the deadly accident.
Following the accident, many are questioning whether civilians should be taken on Navy submarine cruises. What are your thoughts about these trips?
I have no doubt that the business of taking civilians on a cruise does have an impact on the crew. It can't be avoided. Of course, the officers in charge do their best to instruct the crew on how to handle these people. By and large, they've been successful. This, however, is an example of where it apparently wasn't.
A submarine crew member has gone on the record saying that the civilians on the USS Greeneville kept him from doing his work in sonar plotting, which is essential to submarine navigation. Based on this information, what exactly do you think might have happened?
Chances are that this sonar man is a young guy, probably in his very early 20s. Here you've got a young kid who's trying to do his job, and he doesn't realize he's being blocked. He may feel it, but he doesn't do anything about it. You work around it. That happens 100 times a day for everybody. Here's a case where just out of the confluence of circumstances, it happened to come at just the right time and place for it to be, perhaps (we don't know that for sure), a contributing factor to the crash.
But here's another possibility that I haven't seen reported: The fishing boat has a sonar system that is built for the purpose of detecting schools of fish and determining where the fishermen should drop their hooks or nets. If this trawler were out with a bunch of young kids trying to find the fish, they might have misread the sonar and mistaken a submarine for a school of fish. It is conceivable that they wouldn't have realized that what they had actually detected was a submarine.
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