When I enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1965, I looked forward to becoming part of a close-knit crew and being on a ship as much as exploring the exotic destinations we’d visit. As it turned out, it was a good thing that I was comfortable with the constraints of shipboard life, since the highest adventure of my Navy stint involved three days stuck in a vessel at the mercy of an unforgiving ocean.
After basic training in San Diego and electronics school in San Francisco, I requested submarine duty — mostly because I was curious about this unique part of the Navy. I was assigned to the USS Tiru 416, a World War II-vintage diesel sub. I joined the sub and crew in Hawaii as Tiru went through months of overhauls, upgrades, exercises and training.
We departed for Brisbane, Australia, on Sept. 26, 1966, prepared to participate in large-scale, international naval exercises in the Coral Sea. We had no training for what the real challenge would be.
The warm Aussie reception we received in Brisbane on Oct. 12 was a heady experience for a young sailor like me. Tiru was the first U.S. submarine to visit Australia since the defeat of the Japanese, and our 80 enlisted men and officers were treated like returning heroes. We were shown around by locals, invited into homes, celebrated in bars and taken to parties by our new friends. After three days of fun, we headed out for nine days of allied exercises at sea. All went well and the partying resumed once we were back in Brisbane on Oct. 26.
By the time we said our goodbyes and departed for the Philippines on Nov. 2, crew and officers alike were exhausted from all the revelry on land and lax discipline on the sub, which had included ignoring the normal prohibition against civilians on board. As we surface-sailed beyond the Great Barrier Reef the next night, Nov. 3, everyone was asleep except for someone presumably awake in the sonar room and three of us up on the observation platform — myself and another enlisted man named David as lookouts, and a lieutenant as officer of the deck.
The weather was fair and the seas calm. We were traveling at a moderate 12 knots per hour (about 14 mph).
Sometime after 9 p.m. (2100 naval time), David and I became puzzled by what we were seeing in the distance, beyond the range of the floodlight on the tower behind us. There was a horizontal strip of gray far out in the water, with darker strips above and below.
“I think there’s something in front of us,” I said. We looked through binoculars but couldn’t tell which parts were water and which were sky, and whether there was a low fog obscuring things or perhaps a band of bioluminescence in the water.
It didn’t take long to get an answer. Suddenly the entire sub shook violently as the bow ground onto Frederick Reef. The grinding lasted for nearly a minute before Tiru stopped dead in the water. The collision damaged our sonar equipment and outer hull, but our inner “tube” was intact. We remained stuck on the reef for three days, taking depth readings and attempting without success to free the sub by repeatedly reversing the engines.
During one of the depth readings I was on the deck, holding a line out to a dinghy that had David in it, when a huge wave snapped the line out of my grasp and washed him and the dinghy over the reef into a shallow lagoon. He spent a rough night in the company of sharks and sea snakes before an Australian ship rescued him.
Swells grew rougher and Tiru listed to starboard, still stuck on the reef. Life inside the sub went on much as usual. We did give some thought to the idea that sulfuric acid in submarine batteries could spill out and potentially combine with seawater to form lethal chlorine gas. We tried not to think about the nuclear-head torpedo on board.
On Sunday, Nov. 6, the civilian tug Carlock arrived and towed us off the reef. Tiru was taken back to Brisbane for temporary repairs — and we received another enthusiastic welcome after the grounding had made news around the world. About 10 days later, we headed out under our own power to Guam to provision and unload the nuclear torpedo that wasn’t allowed in Japan. Tiru spent several months at the U.S. naval base at Yokosuka for repairs, during which I explored as much of Japan as I could.
I left submarine service once Tiru got back to Hawaii, looking for a different on-board experience that included more above-water views. I spent the remainder of my four years in the Navy on destroyers and then at China Lake, Calif. I accumulated a few more entertaining stories from those experiences, but nothing that can top being in a sub that ran aground.
You may wonder what happened to the captain and Tiru. I was among those called to testify at a court-martial, but — as is so often the case in naval matters — there was no public announcement regarding the outcome. As for the submarine, it was decommissioned in 1975 and sunk as a torpedo target off North Carolina in 1979. I’m glad to have outlived her.
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