Big Red by Waller Douglas C.;

Author:Waller, Douglas C.; [Waller, C. Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Argo-Navis

Occasionally, though, I found openings to bring up some controversial subjects during meals. Before the Nebraska left port, I had sat in the wardroom eating chicken fingers for dinner with Kinman and Habermas. Though the vessel was still tied to the dock, the two lieutenants had the duty that night, so they were stuck on the sub until the next morning, supervising the skeletal crew aboard. They had been telling me Naval Academy war stories, one about how a midshipman had tried to embarrass a Secretary of Defense, who was addressing an Annapolis assembly, with a provocative question about gays in the military.

“What a dumbass,” Habermas had said. He stood up from the table and headed for the wardroom entrance. He had rounds to make in the engine room.

When Habermas closed the door behind him, I decided to try out a question with Kinman, who had stayed behind. “What do you think about gays and women serving aboard subs?” I asked, flipping open a notebook as unobtrusively as I could.

The other crewmen weren’t shy with their answers to the same question. No one minded closet gays serving on board. But if a sailor was openly homosexual, it wouldn’t work, most all insisted. Gays were incompatible with military service, they believed, particularly in this confined space. It would just be one more headache they didn’t need, the officers said.

Women wouldn’t receive a much better reception. The problem was logistics, the crewmen maintained. Tridents simply were not equipped to handle females. The sub’s sailors had just two heads with a total of four showers and six toilets. That was for 130 men. Give the few women who would likely be on board just one of those bathrooms and the number of places the other hundred-odd men had to pee and wash was cut in half.

Women would have to have separate sleeping quarters. But they would also have to be assimilated into all echelons of the sub. Logistically, those two requirements couldn’t be accommodated, the submariners argued, unless all the women were put in the chiefs’ quarters. But the chiefs would mutiny if they had to go back to the crew’s bunk rooms and give up their choice space to the junior women.

Gays aboard subs? The men shuddered at the thought. Women and men stuck underwater in a Trident for three months with no privacy for anyone? Not a good idea. Besides, what wife in her right mind would send her husband to sea with women aboard the sub?

Kinman thought about the question for a few moments, toying with the food left on his plate.

“I don’t follow their argument,” he finally said. “The same argument was made in the fifties for why you couldn’t have blacks aboard. They were saying you couldn’t have blacks and whites working together in the galleys or things like blacks can’t give whites orders.”

Logistics prevent it? “Bullshit!” he said, looking at me intently. “We’re smart guys. This is the greatest navy in the world. If it were a priority to have women on board, we could build another head in the missile compartment.

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