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Henry Rausch, "Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War" (Independently Published, 2024)
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- [00:00]
Gregory McNiff
This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers.
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Henry Roush
We were returning home and one of the flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew. I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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Gregory McNiff
That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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Henry Roush
These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight.
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Gregory McNiff
Deck will stick with us forever.
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Henry Roush
That's how good leads the way. Hablas espanol spries du Dzoic?
- [00:33]
Gregory McNiff
If you used Babbel, you would Babbel's conversation based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about.
- [00:41]
Henry Roush
In the real world.
- [00:42]
Gregory McNiff
With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com Spotify spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may.
- [01:00]
Henry Roush
Apply A KFC Tale in the Pursuit of Flavor the holidays were tricky for the Colonel. He loved people, but he also loved peace and quiet. So he cooked up KFC's $4.99 chicken pot pie. Warm, flaky, with savory sauce and vegetables. It's a tender, chicken filled excuse to get some time to yourself and step away from decking the halls. Whatever that means. The Colonel lived so we could chicken KFC's chicken pot pie, the best $4.99 you'll spend this season.
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Gregory McNiff
Prices and participation may vary while supplies last. Taxes, tips and fees extra. Welcome to New Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Gregory McNiff, and I'm excited to be joined by Henry Roush, the author of Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War. The book is self published and came out in December of 2024 and is available on Amazon. Henry Roush served as a submarine officer for 22 years, retiring in 2005 from the Naval Reserves as a commander. He and his wife live in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, above the Shenandoah, a river along the Appalachian Trail. When not riding, he works in the satellite industry and enjoys hiking, swimming, kayaking and skiing. Henry is also an avid pilot with more than 35 years of flying experience and over 4,000 hours as pilot in command. I selected Submerged because it provides firsthand insight into the operational, culture and psychological dimensions of life aboard a cold war fast attack submarine. The book weaves together engineering detail, leadership challenges and human vulnerability and growth in a way fuel naval accounts ever do. And frankly it was just really a fascinating read about a very unique experience with very talented individuals. With that, thank you Henry for joining me today.
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Henry Roush
Oh, thank you. I'm glad to be here.
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Gregory McNiff
Henry, why did you write Submerged and who is the target audience?
- [02:53]
Henry Roush
Yeah, so I wrote Submerged Short and Sweet for three reasons. One, in my personal life I would talk about friends and colleagues and I found out they really had no idea about what life was like in a submarine. The fact that we breathe carbon dioxide at about 6,000 ppm, which is about 25 times what the rated what you and I breathe right now, nobody really had any idea about that. So that was one reason to let people know. The second reason I wrote it was kind of Cassidy and Amber. That was a period of history. It's changed a lot. We have different submarines now, completely different. They operate very differently. They don't have periscopes anymore to speak of. They don't have the same control systems. Ours was a very manual way and I really wanted to just lock it in stone, just describe how things were. Kind of like not to make myself out to be a great author, but kind of like two years before the mass did that with Richard Henry Dana. He kind of wrote a book about. He graduated from Harvard and wrote a book about going to se on a whaler. And now whenever you want to read about that time in history, you read that book. You know, it kind of set he said it in Amber and I tried to do that. And third reason I did it, I wasn't really satisfied with a lot of the books. The memoirs I had read by senior officers out there, I felt they kind of candy coated, kind of whitewashed it and made things seem a lot better than they really were. And I wanted to kind of kind of put out there, you know, kind of the real thing. And I've got a lot of feedback from a lot of different officers and enlisted men and sailors saying that I really told the way it was. So those are basically the three reasons.
- [04:40]
Gregory McNiff
Excellent, Henry. It's clear the book, there's a lot of personal development and I guess detail about your growth there, particularly you and your relationship with your wife. The book begins as you're almost newly married, but I want to start Almost at the very beginning, you talk about being burdened with nightmares. And maybe I'm overstating that. I think you actually say dreams, but they sound more like nightmares. Could you talk about that? And again, we're talking about experiences over 30 years ago. And has this book been some sort of catharsis for you or how do you think about that?
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Henry Roush
Yeah, the book hasn't really been a catharsis. I just set out to write a good story, fundamentally. I mean, you know, the accounts I write in there about having, you know, troubling dreams are true. And I'll tell you, like I said, I've gotten, you know, hundreds of emails from people and they tell. A lot of them say the same thing. They say, yeah, you know, I had those same things. So, you know, it was a common thing. I don't know about submarine force or what, that a lot of them are very common, too common, where you just wake up, you're on either your old boat or a boat that's like it, and something isn't exactly right. And there was always kind of a feeling in the back of your head. But, no, rest assured, I don't really have it. I had those for a while. And I'll tell you, writing it, you know, that. And I talk about this in that book, it kind of brought them back. Not in a bad way, just almost in a fond, nostalgic way, quite honestly. I mean, you know, at one level, you know, there are tough times. We kind of miss them, too. And so it's kind of neat to wake up somebody, you know, you hadn't seen for 40 years, you know.
- [06:15]
Gregory McNiff
Oh, absolutely. The first chapter of your book, I think, chapter one, A crucifixion to a new atomic God. And it's quite a vivid description of, I guess, a radioactor poorly managed or something goes wrong. Could you talk about that?
- [06:32]
Henry Roush
Yeah. So that was. It's. I don't name in the book. I steered away from every single bit of jargon. That's one of the chief frustrations I had with a lot of memoirs I'd read. There's so much. You tell it written by our military officers because they got like, you know, mandatory dozen words of jargon per page, and I stayed away from every single bit of jargon. That was SL1. It was a reactor made by. Operated by the army, actually. It was made for their remote bases, like in the Arctic and the Antarctic. And it was very simple. And that was one of his design's flaws. It just had a single rod to control the reactivity in it. And it's very sad. You know, part of a design flaw. They were able. They were doing maintenance on it and able to just pull the rod straight up too far. And it got way too much reactivity and created not a nuclear explosion, but a steam explosion. That. It's very sad. The man was leaning over the rod when he did it. So it just shot it straight up like a rocket and impaled him on the containment building 75ft above and killed the other people around as well. They had a bury in lead line caskets because they were so irradiated. And I talk about it because we did the bus that took us out. All these reactors rotted in the Idaho desert. And they were put there for that reason that in case there was an explosion or mishap, it wouldn't contaminate a lot of people. And we drove by it. They had sealed up the entire building. I think it's been demolished now. But back then it was still there and it was all sealed up. It was still too radioactive to go near. And, you know, every time he drove by it, you know, you thought, wow, you know, better not screw up. That. That could happen.
- [08:16]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, that was quite a vivid description. Straight out of the gate, Henry, we'll talk a little bit more about your personal life, but just for the audience. Unlike most of the sailors you met on the submarine, you didn't go to the U.S. naval Academy. You went to Stanford. You had a different experience. You. You talk about hiking and traveling the world and I think some adventures in Turkey. I want to ask you why you joined the submarine service. I guess two questions. Why military? Out of Stanford. You were one of the very few. Why the submarine service? And if I understood properly, a submarine service that would go to the North Pole. So that's like a three part question. Could you maybe talk about that?
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Henry Roush
Yeah. So the short answer altogether, kind of the short answer wraps up all three. It just sounded like I'm going to have to admit it. I thought about in the book. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
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Was kind of at loose ends. I had planned on being a physician. A doctor. That's why I didn't come from a very wealthy family at all. I studied hard and got a full scholarship at Stanford. And I planned on being a doctor. But in the course of my studies and working with doctors and all I realized I didn't want to be one at all was to tear down this wall. Mr. Gorbachev. And there were all kinds of innocence. There's Abel Archer. We came very close to nuclear war that hardly anybody knows about. There was another time the Soviet saw what looked like a launch from us and thank the Lord, just a single lieutenant colonel decided not to launch against us. There was a shoot down a Cal 007. So all these things were happening and the US was building up a big submarine force to 100 fast tack submarines had about 50. And to do that they needed to expand their officer corps. And one of the ways they did that, they created this program where they take people out of college, you know, and just sent them to Oster Kennedy School and sent them through the, the training pipeline instead of the normal acquisition programs for the service academies and then rotc. And this was like a third, you know, a third acquisition source. So long short of it. You know, these guys came to me and it sounded like a good idea. And I didn't know.
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Gregory McNiff
There's no guarantee that makes perfect sense. I want to briefly move to how a nuclear submarine works. You spend a fair amount of time describing that process in the book. Maybe for layman, could you compare it to a diesel submarine or, you know, you effectively have a nuclear power plant in these submarines. Could you briefly talk about how that works?
- [10:49]
Henry Roush
The plant that I trained on was the very first plant ever created for a submarine or any warship really. It was built for the Nautilus and we had the land based prototype, it was called, that we trained on up to that point. During World War II and into the early 50s, submarines were diesel power. They had to come up to periscope depth or service every couple days to run the diesel and charge their batteries. So there were more kind of like surface raiders that could submerge for a period of time. Nuclear power changed all that. They created the first true submarines that could stay underwater indefinitely. That's in quotes, you know, is obviously, you know, you'd run out of food, right? And that, that was really a limiting thing that kept us coming back in was we'd run out of food. We could carry about 90 days of food. And to do that we had to load up kind of double layers of cans through all the passageways, kind of eat our way down. But eventually we'd have to come in for food.
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Gregory McNiff
And I should ask off the bat, the reputation as the food on the submarine is better than standard Navy fare. Is that accurate?
- [11:59]
Henry Roush
So I've never been stationed to a surface ship anywhere else with submarines. So I can tell you. Yeah, I'll tell you what. And that's one of the things, you know, I talk about like, why do I write the book? You know, one of the things, you know, not to throw anybody the bus, but, you know, I've read a lot of books, you know, from other, you know, military officers. You would never know. There's a list of guys in the Navy when you read their book, because it's all about, you know, them. And in mine, I really try to kind of give shout out to everybody, really. One of them especially is the cooks. Just did an incredible job, you know, with what they had to work with. You know, we'd run out of fresh food after about two weeks on a long run. And, you know, they. They put together incredible foods, especially with what they had to work with. And you consider they're getting four meals a day out to us. I, I just, I, to. To this day, like, they're. They're my heroes. Cooks. I got to. Oh, yeah.
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Gregory McNiff
No, I mean morale. I mean, it's just amazing, like you said, what they do, and I want to talk about that too.
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Okay. Thank you for the description. Nuclear submarine. How. How has it evolved over the last 30 years? I mean, Henry, if you were called back in service today, could you. Could you step on a sub without missing a beat?
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Henry Roush
Not at all. And that's, like I said, one of the reasons I wrote it, I wanted to cast that period Amber. It's. It's very different in a number of specs. For one thing, the role has changed a bit after the Cold War. Asw, while still important, was not the only role. The submarine force, to a large extent, reinvented itself as a strike force. And you see that now with this attack, we had sat in Iran, you know, converted Boomer with. Converted. With Tomahawks, you know, launches. Tomahawks. We didn't really have that capability on the boat I had, did not have that capability. We just, we had, you know, torpedoes and a couple, you know, anything we can get out through a torpedo tube. But that was it. The new ones are much, much more capable. To give you an idea, my boat displaced a little over £4,000. I'm sorry, 4,000 tons. The. The new boats are coming out, displaced over twice that. And they've got arrays of vertical launch, you know, Tomahawks available. So one, they're much more of a strike platform than ours was. Ours was strictly, like I say in the book, in peacetime, intelligence gathering and wartime, you know, sinking shipping. The other thing has changed. The control system has changed a lot. We was, you know, ours, you know, was a nuclear submarine, but a lot of the, it was kind of like a diesel boat with, you know, a lot of the stuff from The World War II boats, you know, tacked onto a diesel propulsion plant. You know, everything was very manual. We had periscopes, we raised. You look through the eyeglasses. We had helmson plainsmen, we had chief of the watch who controlled the ballast control panel, which is where all the pumps and the valves, the control openings into the ship were diving offset. A watch would give instructions to those three men. None of that exists anymore. We don't have that at all. We've got pilots and co pilots. It's a computer kind of fly by wire system. They use a joystick, not giant control yokes like, like we're used to. Navigation is done, you know, primarily with a lot of electronics. I don't even know if they have paper charts. All ours was paper charts. It was, you know, not like I said it would be much more easier, I got to tell you, for somebody from a diesel boat to walk onto our boat than it would for somebody from, you know, my time to walk onto a current Virginia class.
- [15:31]
Gregory McNiff
And I want to ask you how dangerous was radiation exposure for you or for anyone who's on a sub for three months at a time?
- [15:39]
Henry Roush
Yeah, excellent question. These, these, these submarines are, these plants are designed just so, so well, the short answer is not dangerous at all. You know, give you like kind of numbers. You know, we have this unit, a rem, you know, basically that, you know, a REM is called. It's a unit of radiation exposure. Radiation equivalent to man. One rem, you know, one hurts you. Pretty much the standard in the civilian industry. You can, you know, take exposure of 5 rem a year maximum. Ours to give an idea, we, we didn't use rem, we use millirem. We'd measure this, you know, on, on a, on a daily basis. We had little dosimeters and measure it once a month. We get on the average about maybe 10 millirem on a given month. So a little over 100 a year. Put that in perspective, depending on where you live in the United States, you might get 300. If you live in Denver, you get two or 300 a year just from the sun. So you get actually less radiation exposure on a day to day basis than living in Denver is one way to put it. Now, obviously doing maintenance or something. The exposure were higher if you went into reactor compartment, but that was very tightly controlled. The U.S. navy nuclear program is really second to none of the.
- [16:56]
Gregory McNiff
Okay, I want to talk about your time in school. I think you were out in the, maybe it was Iowa or the Midwest for the actual facility training. But then you moved to New London, Connecticut, which you described as the physical and spiritual home of the submarine force. How was that experience?
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Henry Roush
Yeah, so we're in Idaho and like I said, that's where they put all the test reactors, the beginning raptors. So if they blew up, they wouldn't irradiate too many people. And then we went to New London, Connecticut. That's, it's, it's called New London Submarine Base, but it's in Groton. But yeah, it really is that, that, that's the, the kind of, the heart of the submarine force. And you're really instilled upon that when you go there. The streets and the buildings are all named after these mostly World War II heroes. People that a lot of them gave their lives, you know, during, during the war. And I talk about that, you know, the history of a submarine force and it's really a kind of a. Not necessarily sobering, but it really makes you think, you know, that you're, you know, you're going there where, you know, the submarine force came, that really. I talked about this. The book Submarine Force was very instrumental in World War II.
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Gregory McNiff
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- [19:16]
Henry Roush
My name is Percy Jackson.
- [19:17]
Gregory McNiff
Getting in trouble is like breathing for me. The hit series returns to Disney and Hulu. The danger the camp is under is greater than you can possibly imagine. For the key to our survival, three of you must quest to the Sea of Monsters. Let's go do the impossible.
- [19:36]
Henry Roush
Percy.
- [19:38]
Gregory McNiff
Percy Jackson and the Olympians new Season 2 episode premiere December 10th on Disney and Hulu. Learn more at disneyplus.com whatson.
- [19:48]
Henry Roush
And Doug.
- [19:49]
Gregory McNiff
Here we have the Limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual.
- [19:59]
Henry Roush
Fascinating.
- [20:00]
Gregory McNiff
It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [20:04]
Henry Roush
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera.
- [20:07]
Gregory McNiff
They see us. Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty.
- [20:10]
Henry Roush
Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings Very underwritten by.
- [20:14]
Gregory McNiff
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates excludes Massachusetts.
- [20:16]
Henry Roush
Moving on.
- [20:18]
Gregory McNiff
You describe the Air Force. You talk about each military branch having its own personality on base. And you describe the Air Force as, quote, a golf course and occasionally a Runway. Is that just typical, you know, typical humor between the branches?
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Henry Roush
Yeah, of course. Yeah. There's always a good, I'm sure they have their own appellations for us as well. There's always a good humored, I'll tell you, funny. Like when I was stationed in Charleston.
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Our neighbor in the apartment complex worked at his Air Force officer, you know, first tour. Like me, I was first touring my boat and yeah, I come home just beat up. Sometimes I'd be crawling through tanks or something, you know, my khakis would be ripped and torn and stained and he'd come home pristine and I used to give him craps. Oh, you got paper cuts today. Wow. But you're always going to have that between the services and within a service between different warfare communities, you're going to have that perfect.
- [21:16]
Gregory McNiff
Something I really thought was interesting is, quote, the mental gymnastics of driving a submarine. Could you talk about that 3D awareness, the pressure, the cognitive load. Your superior is watching over every detail and frankly, you're being graded in real time. Could you talk about the, you know, the mental ability to do that and the pressure that is on you?
- [21:36]
Henry Roush
Yeah, well, it's, yeah, pressure, obviously, but also just, we actually call it mental gym. And it was just exercises to do calculations in your head, you know, for two reasons. One, you know, sometimes electronics goes out, but the other two, just to develop that sense of knowing, you know, what the right answer approximately was. So if the electronics, you know, gave you a Wrong answer. You wouldn't just blindly follow it. So mental gym, you know, we would have to. We had a simplified table, the sine table we'd memorize because it's all, you know, submarine involves a lot of trigonometry to figure out firing angles and ranges and things like that. So we'd memorize that and we'd, you know, actually walk in and I'll give you, like, he'd say, like a typical exercise. He'd say, you know, you're on course three, three zero at 10 knots. You've got a target bearing 040. On course one seven zero, he's doing 15 knots. You know, calculate a firing solution for your torpedo. That'd be a typical. And you'd have to do that all in your head, not writing anything down and calculate that and write a number down and go on to the next one. We do that like, you know, 10, 15 problems every morning just to test.
- [22:51]
Gregory McNiff
Towards the later part of the book. You talk about going to the North Pole. How difficult is it to navigate under the North Pole and break through the ice? It seems particularly operationally unique.
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Henry Roush
Yeah. So navigating there, it's difficult in a few respects, one of which is.
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The idea of a heading. Like a direction doesn't exist up there like it does down here in the lower latitudes. And the reason it doesn't, if you think about it, a heading is just an angle to a meridian. A meridian is a line of longitude. Like here I'm in around Washington D.C. we're about, I don't know, 75, 80, 80 degrees west. Right. That's a line of longitude. Well, line of longitude, they all come to a point up at the North Pole. So the closer you get to North Pole, the more curved they are. And so because of that, like here, if you walk at an angle to line a longitude, it'd take a long while before the latitude you're on would form a different angle. Whereas if you're near the North Pole, the instant you step off that line of longitude, the angle changes and the angle is your heading. So you can't really use like east, west, north, northeast, northwest like you do down here. What we would do, we would use an artificial reference system. We would rotate the.
- [24:12]
North Pole down on the international date line to the equator, and we would call that the North Pole. So then we'd have charts that showed when we're at the North Pole, we'd really be at the equator, which worked fine. We had, like, kind of a translated coordinate system, use the inertial navigation system to do that, to navigate. And that really became our only heading reference. Because another artifact operating near the pole is our gyrocompasses do not work above about 88 degrees north. And the reason they do not is because gyro compasses need gravity, which you have, but it also needs the Earth to spin. And the Earth is not spin at the north pole. So above 88 degrees it would crap out. And our single heading reference would just be the inertial navigation system. So that was navigation. As long as you have your inertial navigation system, it worked fine. There was a case of one boat that lost theirs that tried to go south, ended up kind of on the right longitude, but way, way, way off in longitude. I'm sorry, right on the right latitude, but way off because they had really no heading reference. There's no way to know how to steer. You know, remember, you're, you don't have a reference to a compass or to the stars or anything like that. There's no GPS down there, so there's, there's no way to tell which way you're steering the boat even. It's, it's interesting as far as surfacing under the ice, you know, we did it 13 times on my boat. It's a defined procedure. Our boats were built to do that. The later class was not and, but ours were. It was very robust system. We could rotate the fairwater planes straight up so they cleave through the ice. We had a normal blow system. We could dial in an ascent rate and we cut a hole in the lookout puka and put a camera that would look face up so we could watch the under part of the ice and watch as we hit. The other thing I'd like to talk about, and I talk about in the book to a good extent, is.
- [26:09]
When you're up near the ice cap, there's a lot of these things called pressure ridges hanging down below. And the reason there are is because the polar ice is not monolithic. It's giant sheets of ice that are all moving on top of each other and getting squashed underneath. And it sends this ice both up in the air and also down in the water. And the deepest pressure ridge ever recorded, I was told in training, was 169ft. And so when you're up near there, you had to be up there to copy the VLF broadcast. And you also had to be up there to surface, obviously. And it was a fraught experience because we had under ice sonar that could see ahead. But it Was very, very short range. So we'd have to creep along and be very careful. And we couldn't just turn willy nilly around the ice keels, the pressure ridges either, because if we did, we'd, you know, not get anywhere. Want to lose sync on the broadcast. So we had like, it goes out in kind of a cone of sound. And we had a certain range where if the ice keel faded at a certain range, it would pass maybe a few feet over our sail. We wouldn't have to turn. So it was really kind of nerve wracking being up there. You'd have to watch the. We'd have two men up there, one as officer deck in charge of the keel, you know, the deck, the overall supervision of the ship, and the other just in charge of the. The bell and death orders. And his eyes would be pinned to this under ice sonar. And if you saw a keel that stayed on the sonar after that danger range, we'd have to turn or else smash into the keel, which obviously wouldn't be good.
- [27:49]
Gregory McNiff
Could you talk about how a marriage, I guess, adapts to this kind of career? I mean, you, you're pretty candid about as you start a family. You know, I think the first attempt at that, your wife and the second birth, there's some, you know, uncertainty over are they healthy. And the submarine has a certain code that they don't disclose information to keep you focused on your job. Could you, you talk about navigating those dynamics?
- [28:15]
Henry Roush
Yeah, it wasn't. I wasn't concerned with their health or not concerned they were alive. Yeah, they won't, they won't, they won't tell you if they died on you, because.
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That'D be bad to tell somebody, especially in my position.
- [28:31]
Your loved one died. So that's something you go and know. And the larger answer to your question, like how do you navigate those dynamics or how do you grow into that? I think either have it or you don't. I think a marriage is either. I don't think, you know, it's anything one develops and it's just, you know, relationship between two people, if they, they can put up with that, you know, luckily my wife was able to. I saw a lot of good men get out of the service whose, whose wives could not, you know, they could not navigate that. It was too much. And it's quite a lot to ask for. You know, just go away from three months being no communication whatsoever. You know, anything that happens, you have to deal with. Done. I say on your own. Obviously submarine force is very tight in the community. The wives helped each other a great deal. Especially the captain's wife was kind of like the informal kind of head of the wise group and would make sure that somebody ran out of groceries or his car was stuck. They would look out for each other for sure. And I don't think it'd be possible for us, what we did, if the wives didn't look out for themselves like they did.
- [29:41]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, no, I was struck at one point he was amazed that your wife was able to fix his car. I mean, she really, you know, she really knew how to manage.
- [29:49]
Henry Roush
Oh yeah, that's so funny. That's. That, that's a true story I put in the book. Yeah, like it's after, you know, I think I'd be tired of that. But I, you know, I was definitely off driving boats and yeah, I was off on a business trip and I come back and my, my neighbor could not believe it. You know, he, you know, and she just, you know, fix that. Like. No, I, I think she ended up swapping out a battery from one of his working vehicles to, to his non working vehicle. And he was, you know, completely blown away that anybody would do that. It wasn't mechanic one, but it was my wife for, for two. Yeah, but that just goes to show you, you know, there's, you know, when that stuff happens, you just got to deal with it. You can't be like, oh, you know, call my husband, whatever. Wow.
- [30:30]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah.
- [30:30]
Henry Roush
No.
- [30:30]
Gregory McNiff
Shout out to your wife, can I will be there. There she is. Definitely.
- [30:36]
Another part of this story is seeing your sub for your first time. And I'm jumping around here with the chronology, but could you talk about that, that time you see your first ship and you know, you're being introduced to the people. How exciting is that? What's going through your head?
- [30:48]
Henry Roush
Yeah, well, that was. Yeah, in the book I talk about, you know, I met her actually out in the Mediterranean at this. There's a little fortress island called San Stefano. And you know, it's where we refit. It's off of another island called La Maddalena, which is off of a bigger island called Sardinia, which is off the. Of. Of Italy. And you know, at the time, I, I can't speak to it now. I think they still use it for refits, but it was mainly the, the refit spot. You go on a med run and about Midway you'd stop in and, and resupply and just get your head back on straight and you know, fix all things that were broken and. Yeah, it's quite something. You know, it Was it. It didn't look like a pretty recruiting poster picture, I'll tell you. It was. Had rust streaks. It had like growth. It was, you know, had. People were like welding on stuff. There's sparks or like people are painting it. And it looked kind of like not a scow, but you could tell I've been kind of, you know, rolled hard and put away wet, as you said, you know, that it had been through some stuff. And I get on board and you know, got basically brought through the boat, you know, very quickly. And some, you know, talk about hastening a little bit. You know, there's kind of tradition sometimes, you know, there's a lot of fun with people. Like they, they bring them through everywhere. They don't need to just to make their lives miserable. That didn't happen with me. But, you know, the, the duty officer, you know, brought me through a boat and showed me, you know, where I was going to live and everything and. But it was still pretty sobering, you see, you know, I talk about the boat. There's a lot of things that, you know, this, this, this fails, you know, it'll flood the boat and if this fails, it'll create an explosion. If this fails, it'll, it'll catch fire. So there's no candy coating, I'll tell you.
- [32:27]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, no, that's. I think it, I think it was Danny who's walking you through this and even training to use the toilet. I mean, it was like everything had a very little margin of error and you should not screw up. Could you talk about the pressure to pass your quals?
- [32:41]
Henry Roush
Oh, yeah, yeah. So qualification. That, that's, that's a big thing. Not just, you know, for everybody on the boat, not, not just officers. It's, it's really the, the mark of a submariner. And you know, to put this perspective, there's, you know, 100 men, you know, usually sometimes we carry more if we're on a mission. But 100 men, and that's, that's all there is. It's very complex system and it's, it's a system that, you know, is such a. It's impossible for, you know, just like one person know one thing and another person know his business and a third know their business. It has to be that you really know the entire boat to a pretty good level of detail. It took.
- [33:19]
It took me 18 months. It took some people a lot longer. Depends. But basically it's process. You learn every single system on the boat. You have what's called knowledge factors where you have to Give a checkout. It's kind of like an apprenticeship system. There's no book. You know, you just sit down with somebody and go over and they can ask you anything they think is relevant on that system. And then you have practical factors which is you do something like take the both periscope depth, bring a evaporator online, something like that. And you show that you know how to, to operate the equipment. Yeah. So the culmination of that, you get your. We call them your fish, your dolphins. They're not dolphins. They're mahi mahi fish. I think mahi mahi are also called dolphin fish. Maybe that's why they call them dolphins. Yeah, I'm not, not 100% other, other submarine forces actually have dolphins. But there, there you go. But yeah, so we're. It's, it's quite, it's. It's kind of the goal of everybody comes on board the boat to qualify. And the other thing too is you're kind of useless to your fellow comrades until you're qualified. Until you can stand a watch. I talk about that. So there's a big press to qualify quickly and do it fast so that all kind of rolls into it.
- [34:32]
Gregory McNiff
Yep. No, that pressure was obvious in the book. We talked a little bit about hazing.
- [34:39]
Henry Roush
The main thing I was not used to, I'd never been on a sports team. I had never been in a frat. I'd never been exposed to that environment. I was very much a loner and I did not react to any of that very well at all. Now, you know, that's more same on me than anybody. But no, I was not singled out at all. I do think that the guys that came up the academy, you know, they, you know, were kind of used to all that hazing business and they took it in stride. But I did not. It was an eye opener for me.
- [35:10]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, I almost feel you had a certain advantage sufficient as you are. Is that fair, do you think?
- [35:15]
Henry Roush
Well, that was definitely my attitude back then. I'll tell you how much true it is now. I'd have to think about that. I mean, I think there is something to be made that, you know, when you go to, into the military, either into service, academy or even just enlisted, when you're 17 or 18 years old, you're very malleable. You know, your mind isn't formed yet. And so, you know, you're a lot more susceptible to being, you know, given a certain worldview. Whereas, you know, at that point I was 22 years old. I already been through, you Know, not the end of the world, but I've been through a lot. Like, I said, I had, you know, had my hijinks, you know, done in Turkey, which you probably best left not elaborated on, and done a lot of crazy stuff. So, you know, I wasn't about to accept anything at face value. Whereas I think it's 17 or 18. I would be more amenable to that. I think that that's the main point I was making.
- [36:07]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah. I have to say, there are a few times where I think you spoke back where they were so shocked. You know, there was one time where I. One of your commanding officers said, would you treat your buds like that? And he said, absolutely not, but I'd have no problem letting you, you know, no problem letting you end up like that or something. So I was always surprised. I think you gave it back once or twice to your commanding officers. I. I found that interesting.
- [36:30]
Henry Roush
Well, he wasn't. He just. Just. Just for the. The record, he wasn't the skipper that. That was one of the department heads.
- [36:36]
Gregory McNiff
But.
- [36:37]
Henry Roush
Yeah, but I think he was, because I don't, you know, I don't think, you know, he was used to that in the academy. Like I said, bullies never. They're always kind of surprised when some. When their victims lash back at them.
- [36:48]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah. No, it's kind of like they met their match. And you. I mean, you. And you're canned about this in the book, a certain amount of anger or chip on your shoulder. I think you were the oldest of five, and you talk about your family upbringing there. So it was fascinating to see that dynamic, another dynamic. And we talked about this formally or informally before the interview began. Like, nobody says, great job in the Navy. I mean, you have a nice quote that says, listen, you did a good job, but I can't fix that. I mean, like, you're not getting a gold star for doing your job, but you screw up one time, they let you know. And I think one of the first instances, you talk, and I have to say, you're really candid in the book. I mean, you did this 22 years, and you rose the top of your profession. I'm sure you're excellent at what you did, but you do spend a lot of time talking about some of your mistakes and what you learned, which I found really valuable, one of which is this check valve. And I may not have that right, but you were basically managing men who should have done this properly, and they didn't. And you got called on the carpet for it. And I think you even said there was like shame, you know, you felt like, wow, this is never happening again. Could you just talk about that? Like you screw up on a sub, they let you know and it just doesn't happen again. How is that process?
- [38:01]
Henry Roush
Well, yeah, I mean everyone's depending each other to do their job and basically that's in the book I talk about. That's kind of the, there's one instance where we went to sea with way too fewer there were ph meters than we should have and it was my job to make sure they're on board. I don't think I completely realized sure realized that afterwards. And that was part of the learning experience. Yeah. I try to be very honest about it just because you know, like I said, like, you know, not, you know, I think it's a very boring story if, if you walk on board and you got everything wired from the get go. Right. And I, I've read a good number of those stories and they're very frustrating. They, they don't read very credibly to me. So yeah, so I, I, and, and, and, and you're right that the whole book is kind of a narrative, kind of a growth, you know, that, you know, learning that and maturing and realizing, you know, the world doesn't revolve around me, so to speak. So I'm glad that came out.
- [38:57]
Gregory McNiff
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Henry Roush
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Henry Roush
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Gregory McNiff
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Henry Roush
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- [40:26]
No, it definitely did, I should say. You use that phrase, and I want to get to that Road to Damascus moment, which I thought was fantastic. Before I do, brief side note, on books that might not be pertaining reality accurately, you eventually go visit the Naval Academy and you, quote, attempt to run the seawall. Could you talk about what that meant for you before you got there? And then when you actually, you know, discovered the reality of what the seawall is at the Naval Academy?
- [40:54]
Henry Roush
Well, just in a larger, you know, and, you know, other. I'm sure maybe category grads could consider this unfair. And that's fine. But my definite impression once I got there was that there are a lot of people kind of doing silly things just for the silliness of it, just because they were told to do it. They're. They've got some kind of big pole in there. It's a grease pole they have to climb to graduate to next class, which just struck me as kind of silly. And then there's a quote unquote seawall, which is really just a bunch of riprap that it's one author written about how exciting it was to run that. And it's just kind of funny actually, because I was reading that book, actually when I was at Oster Kennedy School in Newport, Rhode island, which as it happens, does have a real seawall. It goes out about a half mile into Narragansett Bay. And so I read this, I'm like, I'm gonna try that and I'll go out and I tried it once and nearly killed myself because this thing goes out, you know, the. Back then October, the, the wind and the waves were coming over there pretty good, very slick. There's huge boulders, you know, just every which way. And I nearly slipped and, and you know, broke all kinds of bones doing that. And I get to the Academy, it's just this little rip rap, you know, it's nothing really. So, you know, I mean, is that fair? I don't know. Everyone's going to have their own perspective. But, you know, not to make too much of a point of it. But my impression was that like, I had done like real serious things, like, you know, all those, you know, kind of climbs I did in Turkey and whatnot. And, you know, they had a lot of made up stuff like climb a grease pole. I'm like, why? You know.
- [42:32]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, that's interesting. Monikers and nicknames are huge on submarines. You got the nickname Spin Tight could you. Could you explain what the thought.
- [42:43]
Henry Roush
That's a generic nickname to anybody who basically. And that's. That's the credo, right? You do not show any weakness. Do not show. Not just in submarine force, I think all over Navy, you know, everyone's testing you. And, you know, if you show any, you know, you get upset about anything, they'll just find that and dig into you. And they. They found out and they dug into me. I'll tell you. Yeah, but like I said, my perspective was that, you know, I wasn't like, I'm doing you a favor. But, I mean, my perspective was that, you know, I don't want to hear it. You know, just. And I'm not so sure all that hazing is actually all that good. I mean, you know, the end result. I talk about in the book, like, I kind of sped through my calls just to get the pressure out. But in retrospect, I think I would have been better served to have gone more slowly and learned them better than buzzing through quickly. So, you know, there's probably a happy medium there somewhere. I'm not sure if it's, you know, something tells me now we have women on board some tells me it's a lot more sedate and professional than it was back then.
- [43:44]
Gregory McNiff
I should have mentioned this earlier. Bringing the submarine to periscope depth, that was another.
- [43:51]
Exercise where I thought, how hard can that be? But in fact, you know, I mean, there have been numerous accidents, both the U.S. navy and Foreign navies hitting something above, hitting another ship. And it doesn't seem nearly as easy as a layman would imagine. Can you talk about what's involved bringing the sub up to periscope depth?
- [44:08]
Henry Roush
Yeah. The reason it's not, on the face of it, you know, as long as it's making noise, you could hear it. Right. And that goes. That works. Except when it doesn't. And then when it doesn't work is if you have what's called a strong layer. And a layer is kind of a technical term. Basically, you've got. The temperature of the water varies as you go from the surface down to the deep. And the way it generally varies, it actually gets warmer when you first go from the surface down to. It depends on where you are, the season, a lot of things. Roughly 100ft. Roughly. It'll get warmer, and then it'll start getting colder. So basically, sound acts just like you do when you're driving. Say when you're driving.
- [44:53]
In your car and you let the right wheels get onto the gravel, the car Tugs to the right because it goes where the wheels are slower and sound operates the same way it goes where it goes slower. So if you have a noise source above this maximum point, we call the layer, let's say layers at 100ft that day, the sound will tend to go up. And the stronger that angle is from the. That the sound velocity profile makes from the surge temperature to that maximum point, the more tendency it will be to go up and not go down. So that has the effect of hiding anything that's making noise like another ship from you below. So it was, you know, how uncommon? I don't know all the statistics, but it was not uncommon to go up and find something up there a lot closer or something there that you didn't even know about because, you know, the strong layer hid that noise source. Like a ship.
- [45:47]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, Like I said, that was another one where I thought, wow, this is far more challenging than I would imagine. You referenced giving the enlisted men their due. Could you talk a little bit more about your relationship with the enlisted men on the sub?
- [45:59]
Henry Roush
Yeah, so my dad was master chief in the Navy. Right. So I was very used to, you know, that part of the hierarchy and stuff. So, you know, they, you know, one, the chiefs didn't intimidate me as, as much, you know, maybe as somebody else necessarily because they're basically just like my dad. Right. I had a very, yeah, I'd say excellent rapport. I mean, you know, not. Not to generalize. Some people that came from maybe another commissioning source, you know, kind of had a. And I've heard this. It's not just for me, you know, officers that come from other commissioning sources maybe have kind of a holier than thou attitude. But, but, but I never did. You know, I worked with them. And in general, I'll tell you what, I. Throughout my career, you know, I kind of. And not, not just in my career, my civilian career too. I've kind of got this leadership attitude. Like, you know, everyone's good at something. Just find out where they're good at and put them there. And I'll give you an example. Like one time One of my XOs was on me. You know, the chiefs were just writing, you know, not, not the great. You know, evals are very important. You have to write evaluations on all your men and, you know, they weren't Right. Very good evals. Right. Then not the keyword and tricky phrases is in sense. It's like, you know, why don't they do this? And I went to the chiefs and says, like, you Know, just give me, you know, give me what you think of these men. Right on crayon. I don't care. Like, you know, I went Stanford. I'll write for you. You know, you guys, I was trying to tell the xo, like, these guys, you know, didn't go to college. You know, they were turning wrenches. You know, when you're in college, you know, they're not writers, but, you know, they're really good at what they did. And I was like, I can write. You know, I'll write tree vows. He just do. And, you know, he had a different attitude, like, well, they should learn how to, to write. I'm like, I don't care if he can write. Just. Just keep me out of the poop and I'll write the dang of vows.
- [47:46]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, it's funny, I think you talk about maybe a little tension between the enlisted men and the junior officers, but it seems like ultimately there is mutual respect on both sides there.
- [47:57]
Henry Roush
Moving to the other thing, I'd like to point out that it's very different than other forces. I mean, yeah, there is hierarchy there as rank structure, but, I mean, you're all together, right? I mean, how much hierarchy? You're back on watch with these men. And I have these vignettes in the book. You talk about everything with them. I mean, they're your colleagues, right? I mean, there's not the separation that you find in, say, in, you know, for good reasons. I think in the infantry or something like that, you're a lot closer. And the other thing, too is, you know, most of the illicit nukes have all been to college. You know, I mean, they're just as educated as you are. Yep.
- [48:39]
Gregory McNiff
No, I mean, it's amazing how, again, their role and how they make this, you know, the submarine just run the way it does. On that mutual respect category, one of your best friends is a boomer sailor, whereas you're a fast attack. Could you just briefly talk about difference there?
- [48:56]
Henry Roush
Well, we were talking about that. You know, like I said that, you know, get down to rivalries, you know, down. Down to the Nth degree. Right. Yeah, there's. So there's this good, good natured rivalry in the submarine force between boomers and fast boats. You know, they had the, the blue and gold crew, two crews for one boat to, you know, it's a national asset, needs to be at sea as much as it can. So they have two crews, one crews off all the other ones, you know, at sea, and then, then they swap. You know, we call ourselves the Black and blue crew, because we. We were gone a lot.
- [49:25]
It's just a very good natured rivalry. It's not serious in any. And actually, if you spent an entire career, my next boat would have been on a boomer for sure. Because Navy tries to mix it up and give you equal experience.
- [49:40]
Gregory McNiff
And Henry, for the audience benefit, Boomer is sort of the third leg of the trident, right? Like, they are the ones with the nuclear missiles that are always out to sea, either, you know, either the. The blue crew or the gold crew.
- [49:54]
Henry Roush
Exactly. Yeah. Boomers slang for. I think they're called fleet ballistic missile. That's probably where the boomer comes from. But you're absolutely right. They're. They're the missile firing boats. Yeah, perfect.
- [50:05]
Gregory McNiff
What is a reactor scram? That seems like a really serious thing on a submarine.
- [50:10]
Henry Roush
Yeah. Scram is. I talk about in the book, it. You know, it's. It might be, you know, apocryphal, but, you know, maybe it stands for safety control rod Axeman. I don't know if that's true or not. The idea was that crow rods were, you know, on pulleys, you know, with rope. And if there were a problem, there was a guy with an ax to cut the rope to let the rods drop. I don't know if that's true or not, but basically it's when the rods go in the holes, you know, unless you're trying to put them there, it's generally a bad thing, especially when you're at sea.
- [50:41]
Gregory McNiff
Henry, what happens if there's a fire on a submarine?
- [50:45]
Henry Roush
Fire is.
- [50:47]
Every submariner's worst nightmare. There are a lot of things you can recover from, but one of the things happens very quickly is you can't breathe, and it fills up with smoke and you can't see. So you can't see. And even a tiny little fire, you can't see and you can't breathe. We've got a air pressure system through the different submarine forces do a different way. So we have like an air pressure system through the entire boat. You need to get up to periscope depth very quickly and ventilate the shit and gas out of the. Out of the ship to, you know, obviously you fight the fire too, but you get that out, and it's made harder. You know, all things I talk about, you know, going to Paris, God, it's made that much harder because you're doing it with these big masks on that kind of look like firefighter masks, you know, it's not, you know, you can't see Too great. You can't talk too great through them either. You know, it's very hard to hear what people saying. Very hard to see stuff. And, and, and also everything is covered with black smoke. So you can. So it's a very, very dangerous. Probably one of the, you know, it's probably the most likely times. The most dangerous thing could happen on a submarine is a fire.
- [51:53]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, no, absolutely. You refer to the Navy promotion system as a multi level marketing arrangement. Could you talk about that?
- [52:03]
Henry Roush
Well, yeah, for, for officers, it definitely. I mean, basically you got round number six junior officers. You got three department heads, one XO and one co. So, you know, of those six junior officers, you need three of them to stay up to become department heads. And of those department heads, you need at least one, actually maybe two, because they jigger the time. So the XO usually spends 18 months, two years, the skipper spends three months. So basically you need three people to go from Jo to department head. You need two people to go from department head to XO. And then, you know, it's kind of one for one. But obviously you don't want it one for one because some people maybe might not make a good skipper. So it's a little bit less to make skippers. So, yeah, there's a winnowing process and it's very much up or out too. If you don't make your next, you know, grade, you're out. Yep.
- [52:58]
Gregory McNiff
I want to hit what I think the real crux of the book is this Road to Damascus moment. You've been demoted again. You're not told why, from officer of the deck to junior officer of the deck. And I think your initial attitude was F, you guys. Like, I'm gonna barely do this. And I think your friend Jeff is actually in charge of the submarine. I don't want to say driving it, but like, emotionally, it really was a moment of growth for you. Could you just talk about how that sort of encapsulated your whole experience? Basically, it's not about you.
- [53:28]
Henry Roush
Yeah, yeah, it's exactly how I wrote in the book. Yeah, it was very much my initial reaction was, screw you. And then I realized, you know, wait a minute, you know, and, and first of all, being JOD was not such a big demotion anyway, really, because we all, you know, we'd rotate back and forth and do various watch stations during a given run. It was very juvenile, you know, and I hope, hope it comes across that way. It's completely juvenile to, to have that attitude. And it really crystallized that quickly. I realized, you Know, what the heck am I doing? This is crazy. Yeah, so yeah, I hope it came across that way. It was very juvenile, but I really learned like. Oh, wait a minute.
- [54:05]
Gregory McNiff
Yeah, no, it absolutely did. And I'm gonna, I should say you quote Shakespeare and you quote Machiavelli in your book and I'm gonna throw the Machiavelli quote back at you. That which is gained with difficulty is retained with ease. Is that how you would describe your experience?
- [54:19]
Henry Roush
I think so. And I think you're going to find that, you know, you talk to other people who've served in the military and some haven't gone through a hard route and things aren't as hard to them anymore. And I'll tell you what, another fellow that I work with right now read my, my book and he said, oh, that's why you're so calm on everything. It's like, yeah, because it doesn't seem that such a bad thing compared to what I've been through. Yeah, I think that's very true. Yeah.
- [54:42]
Gregory McNiff
No, I mean just. I know we were talking before the interview began. I mean you were getting yelled at for stuff that wasn't your fault and then no one would apologize. I mean just the level of expectations for these young men, it really is impressive. And I'll close with this question even so your words are there's more of a paperwork culture and a cover your ass culture today. Would you still recommend the subservice for a young man or woman looking for a real experience that will teach them to be part of something larger?
- [55:10]
Henry Roush
Yeah, thanks for asking that. And just to clarify a little bit like that was my impression immediately during the 90s on my second boat was that, you know, it really did change the idea. You know, the attitude we did had since we were at the wolf store on my first boat, less so I think that was a, you know, I think that's always there going to be underlying schism between peacetime and war. We were very much on a wartime floating in the 80s, you know, in a lot of regards and that that changed a lot.
- [55:36]
I would absolutely recommend it for a young man or a woman to go into submarine force officer enlisted. It doesn't matter given it. And you asked me, you started this why did I write the book? And I said people don't know about boats and I'd like to expound a little bit. They don't know about how vital submarines are today for us. Give you some numbers. So basically we have about 50 fast tack submarines right now. Not kind of the Boomers, they have a separate mission. About 50 fast boats, round numbers 30 are on the Atlantic coast, 20 on the Pacific. Of those 20, any given time, usually a third are on station, maybe a little bit more. Eight max, are on station, okay? So that. Those seven or eight crews, you know, what is that, maybe 150 on these bigger boats? Now you're talking a thousand men and women, okay? That is the line we have. You know, God forbid, if there were a war against China, here's how serious it is. You know, the. The service ships are very good. You know, we've got, I think, two carriers in the Caribbean right now, you know, because it's a very benign environment. Right. Nobody's going to take out a carrier in the Caribbean. Well, China has these missiles, these hypersonic missiles that go very fast, like 7. Mach 7 or 6 or 7. There's no way to defend those. You know, that would. One of those would just take out a carrier, forget about it. They have a range about 1200 miles right now, is what I understand. You know, that that goes out, you know, during a serious shooting war. There's no way a carrier could go west of that line without being subject to these missiles. Really, the only thing, or any surface ship for that matter, the only thing we have to carry the fight to the enemy in a. In a war like that would be submarines, and there's not very many of them. You know, any given time, there might be seven or eight on station out there. So, yes, it's a deadly serious. It's, you know, we've kind of gone back now. It's, you know, during the 90s, maybe, things, you know, winnowed down a little bit. We got rid of a lot of boats, but now it's. It's, you know, if we could. We're limited right now by industrial capacity is the only thing I think we've got the wherewithal and the motivation to build more if we have the industrial capacity to do so. I'd highly recommend. You would not regret it.
- [57:52]
Gregory McNiff
Henry, thank you very much for your time today and thank you for your service.
- [57:55]
Henry Roush
Thank you, sir. Thank you for having me.
- [57:58]
Gregory McNiff
Absolutely.