For the Guys in the Boomers:

I spent July 4, 1976, with my family on the lawn at Quinnipiac College in Connecticut, watching fireworks. We went home and watched the Tall Ships in Boston Harbor on the television. I was in first grade, and we commemorated the Bicentennial in my class by staging a musical production about the Declaration of Independence, me costumed in the mop cap that my mom sewed for the presentation.


My husband-to-be-in-the-very-distant-future spent that July 4th somewhere in excess of 200 feet in depth, somewhere in the North Atlantic, on the U.S.S. Nathan Hale, a Lafayette Class Fleet Ballistic Missile submarine. That was the day Allen received his dolphins: the pin with the paired fish that marks a submariner as Qualified in Submarine Warfare-- on the 200th birthday of the United States of America.

(My first true love, by the way, was also a submariner. I was five. He served aboard the Nautilus, whose home port was down the road in New London, and he was my uncle’s godson. He babysat me and my siblings, and spoiled us all rotten. I adored him. I wanted to marry him.)

For me, as a kid, being a submariner seemed glamorous and exciting. And you got to eat all the soft-serve ice cream that you could eat—how great was that?

My submariner-turned-husband Allen confirms the presence of the soft-serve ice cream machine, as well as an all-you-can-drink soda fountain— with no diet drinks. Eating ice cream and drinking sodas as one of your few forms of entertainment doesn’t seem quite as glamorous as I thought when I was a kid.

I guess when I think of those who served on this Veteran’s Day, the image that instantly comes to mind is a soldier dodging enemy fire in some foreign land. The danger, the threat of death, seems obvious and tangible in that mental picture—you can see the bullets and the bombs. The scene is a visual reminder that real men and real women endured much, risked much, and sacrificed much in the course of their duty.

But enduring much, risking much, and sacrificing much was not necessarily limited to those servicemen in real, honest-to-goodness combat situations.

Today, I am thinking of my husband and his comrades aboard those submarines, patrolling the oceans with a full arsenal of nuclear warheads at the ready—whose job it was to stand ready to deploy those bastards if the orders came.

Looking back at the complete f**king insanity of the Cold War, it seems obvious that the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction was, as the acronym aptly describes, completely MAD. First strike capability, second strike capability—reading up on the concepts in Wikipedia made my brain hurt, as well as pissed me off. Make sure you have enough firepower to blow the earth up, so that no one will blow the earth up. Excuse me?

As awful as it seems now, I suppose that it made sense, in some weird way, back then. And the men and women of the Armed Forces did what they had to do to enforce the policy that was believed to be for the greater good.

For the submariners aboard the U.S.S. Nathan Hale and aboard the other Boomers, staying submerged and out of sight with enough firepower to destroy several large cities-their mere existence a deterrent to aggression by the Soviets- was the right thing to do.

They may never (to my knowledge) have been shot at, but they endured hardships, and they sacrificed.

Utter isolation. No sunlight; no fresh air; no windows. Once the last bit of mold off was scraped off the last piece of fresh food, even lousier food awaited. Day and night ceased to exist, except as designated by Greenwich Mean Time. It was boring, and it was uncomfortable. And there was no way off the boat until the captain decided to surface- if you were sick and needed to be taken off, you had damned well better be on your deathbed.

Most importantly, they lived without knowing whether the call to battle stations was a drill or was the real thing, World War III, until after the exercise was over. They were forced to make routine the sequence of events that would bring on the destruction of civilization.

I really think that this was one of the worst sacrifices that they had to make—sacrificing their innocence, I suppose it was. Attaining the grim knowledge of what they had to do when they were instructed to do it….

When the Nathan Hale was scrapped, Allen said that he was happy to know it was gone. He is proud of his service, knows why it was necessary, and is glad that it is not deemed to be necessary any more. The Berlin Wall has been disassembled for twenty years now, and we all breathe easier. I don’t think that my kids will now the terror that many of us kids felt during the Cold War era, when the Doomsday Clock crept closer and closer to midnight.

So, to my husband: thank you for keeping this first-grader in her mop cap, and all her classmates, safe. Thank you for letting me grow up to take my own first-graders to the park to watch fireworks on the 4th of July.



(Note to my five-year old self: you did get to marry a submariner after all.)