.png)
The Protectors® Podcast
Welcome to The Protectors® Podcast, where the valor meets the storyteller. Hosted by Jason Piccolo, a seasoned veteran and retired special agent, this series is a must-listen for anyone intrigued by the courage and tales of those who pledge to protect us. Beyond the front-line stories of bravery and dedication, this podcast goes a step further, weaving in the perspectives of those who bolster and narrate the protector's journey—featuring a remarkable lineup including New York Times Best Sellers and acclaimed Hollywood actors.
The Protectors® Podcast offers a diverse array of voices, from those who wear the uniform to the authors and entertainers who amplify their stories. It's a unique blend that highlights not only the raw realities faced by our protectors but also how their sacrifices inspire the narratives we cherish in literature and film. Each episode is a testament to the interconnected worlds of service and support, bringing listeners an unmatched depth of insight.
Dr. Jason Piccolo is a retired federal agent, former U.S. Army Infantry Captain (Iraq 2006), and author.
Past Guests Include:- Sean Patrick Flanery - Andrews & Wilson- Mark Greaney- Stephen Hunter- Remi Adeleke - Florent Groberg - Clint Emerson - Travis Mills
The Protectors® Podcast
524 | Henry Rausch | BOOK DISCUSSION | Author of Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War
This podcast episode explores the life of a submariner during the Cold War, sharing insights into the challenges of isolation, situational awareness, and the importance of teamwork aboard a submarine. The conversation unveils personal stories that highlight the unique mental and physical demands of serving in the Silent Service, creating a vivid depiction of life beneath the waves.
• Life transitions from aspiring doctor to submariner
• Experiencing isolation during extended underwater missions
• Maintaining morale through meals and movies aboard
• Navigational challenges in the Arctic
• Importance of situational awareness and mental maps
• Teamwork and protocols that ensure safety
• Reflections on military experiences and writing
Make sure to check out Henry's book "Submerged: Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War" available on Amazon!
Make sure to check out Jason on IG @drjasonpiccolo
hey, welcome back to the protectors podcast. Excellent guest today. Excellent good to talk about submarines. Henry, welcome to the show thank you very much you know that is one aspect of the navy, the army, the marines. Anything I've never got into is like the waterborne operations and specifically submarines. So where did this come from? Like was this one of your first choices when you, when you um, when you were branching?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's. It's not surprising that you don't know a lot, because our motto was, and still is, a silent service. And even today I, you know, I talk to veterans groups and they're like oh, I didn't know you could say that and you know we're really instilled to basically keep our mouth shut. It's kind of an ethos with a submarine force in specific. So it's not surprising at all. You'd say that to answer your question. No, I had no plan whatsoever to go into the service at all.
Speaker 2:I was a, I was a Navy brat, my dad was a chief in the Navy, um, but I, I, I had, uh, I worked hard, I wanted to be a doctor since I was about in fourth grade and, uh, about in fourth grade and I worked very hard and got a full scholarship to Stanford University and I was in the pre-med program and I just planned on being a doctor. And one of the good things about Stanford is you get a lot of opportunities and I was able. I worked in the hospital and worked for a OBGYN, I did data crunching for him and this weird new thing called ultrasound which had just been invented. And, long story short, I figured I would be a lousy doctor and I didn't want to do it and I'd run into other people. I think we're just saying they shouldn't have been doctors. You know they got their MD but then they end up, you know, doing research because they and I realized I didn't want to go that route. So basically I was kind of stuck.
Speaker 2:I had a very high GPA because you have to keep one for pre-med in chemistry, which is very technical, and this was in the early 80s when, you know, ronald Reagan and John Layman were building up the 600 ship Navy and they're expanding a lot and they had a program normally to go, you know, become an officer in the Navy and all services. You know you go through military academy or at least you go to the ROTC. This is a program where basically they took you out of college and sent you to officer candidate school and then, through the nuclear pipeline, there's a new training in Orlando, then there's running a prototype reactor in Idaho and then a submarine school about two years' worth and then in recompense for that you'd spend three years on a boat. So why did I do it? I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time, it seemed exciting, something different than going to grad school. So that's the long answer to your short question.
Speaker 1:Now it's different when you branch out and you actually find what your specialty is going to be and then you have to focus in on it. Now imagine you go, you're going through ocs and then you go you get assigned to a massive vehicle that goes underwater and not many people know exactly what goes into it because it's obviously all top secret, especially back then. How do you prepare your mindset for that?
Speaker 2:Well, I tell people, um, basically, you know, first of all that's the first question I get you know, aren't you claustrophobic? And the truth is there's no real test, but if you were, you just wouldn't volunteer for it. So it's volunteer service and, um, I tell people, it's, it's much closer to being the space flight than space flight is. It's, it's much, much more isolating than, say, for example, space flight. We would go on these missions, we would be submerged, usually about 85 days that was about the limit because we'd run out of food. After that we could carry about 90 days worth of food and to do that we loaded the food, kind of like the Phoenicians did it back in the 1400 BC. We loaded can by can through a hatch and until, basically, we only had about four feet of a walking room to spare because we ate our way down through the food, basically until we could walk upright. And by doing that we would have about 90 days worth of food. And it would be a very isolating experience. We would not transmit anything when we were on our mission because that would give our position away, because the Soviets had we credited them with very good DF ability, so even a little burst, they would know it and it would have brought a lot of bad attention to us. Noaa brought a lot of bad attention to us and we wouldn't receive any real information.
Speaker 2:While on the submarine, where we operated was way north. The communication satellites didn't work that far north because they're geosynchronous. We couldn't receive them. So our only inbound information was something called the VLF broadcast. It's around 10 or 15 kilohertz, which is, put that in perspective, it's a lot lower than your AM radio or anything. It's way lower than HF even, but it goes through the earth and that's why it's used for submarines. But the bad part about it is the data rate is very low. It's like slowly typing on a typewriter and we get a couple pages broadcast, maybe a dozen pages.
Speaker 2:That was it. So there's no room for anything but operational traffic. So you know, basically it's imagine I tell people it's like going into a coma for three months and coming back after three months. So you know, oh, you know who won the Superbowl, who's, who's our president? Now what happened? You know all the news that you take for granted. You're completely cut off. You know not saying anything bad about astronauts, but they're. You know, they're talking on the radio, they're talking on the HF, they're getting email, they're talking to mission control, they're making YouTube videos. You know they're very connected, but we were completely isolated.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you brought up the analogy of the space, because to me the ocean is like, to me it is the next frontier. There is so much to the ocean that is undiscovered and you got a glimpse of it. You got to experience the ocean like nobody else has. Yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:Experience, yes, glimpse no, cause we don't have windows on submarines, obviously but, sorry for interrupting, yeah well, that's what I.
Speaker 1:Yeah, there's. There's no, um, there's no windows on subs, but there's other ways to experience that. I'm thinking like sonar and other ways. You actually have to know what's going on around you, and what I meant by that is like, hey, you know what you have to you experience something that not many people have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, thanks for bringing that up. That's one thing I talk about in the book is that you know, submarine is very much a mental activity. It's very different than what you see in kind of the movies, where they have a picture of something happening. They see the otherouts, there are lines on a screen, kind of monochromatic lines, and you build a picture of what the battle space looks like in your head. And a lot about becoming a submarine officer is getting proficient at doing that and being able to take a periscope sighting or interpolate between some lines of frequencies that you see and get a picture of. You know where the submarines are around you and it's not snap your fingers. It takes a while to develop that skill.
Speaker 1:How do you know what's going on around you, Like when enemies because obviously the enemy situation is they're going to have the same capabilities as us. Some men may have more than what vessel you're in. How do you deal?
Speaker 2:with that? How do you work? Yeah, so situational awareness. So we had passive sonar. We wouldn't transmit actively because that would give our position away and, to be honest, with the exception of some front line again, I'm dating myself, this is in the 1980s With the exception of some frontline submarine Soviets, we basically had what's called an acoustic advantage where we could hear them before they could hear us.
Speaker 2:And you know, thank the Lord we didn't get in a shooting war, but if we had, it influenced our tactics a lot. We were basically snipers and they were basically in a bar fight. So basically, we would, you know, our tactics were designed to, you know, slowly or not slowly, but to to track at a distance and then engage you know when, when, when the time came, without you know God, god willing, without the enemy ever knowing, and we had weapons that were designed to do that long range and, could you know, had those capabilities, whereas, you know, the other guys, you know, knew they were at acoustic disadvantage and knew that if they heard us we would have been hearing them for a while. So their tactics evolved. They were basically just like a shotgun just wheel around and get weapons out within 45 seconds. It was very different tactics because they knew they had an acoustic disadvantage.
Speaker 1:Now, morale wise this is one thing that's always been in the back of my head too is if you're in such a small vessel and do you call vessels submarines, or Subs yeah, or boats usually Boats yeah. Let's say you're in a boat and you're eating your way to space. You're getting enough space to actually move around and to function out there. But how do you keep the morale up? Especially as an officer, you have to keep your troops, like any solid officer is going to keep their troop morale up. How did you do that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so the two biggest things from my experience that affected morale were, you know, food. You know the submariners eat really well. It's kind of a tradition that we get good food, and mealtimes were the one time you could sit and relax and chat. Both, you know, officers and enlisted. We ate the same food, by the way, it wasn't a separate mess, we ate in the wardroom, obviously, but it was the same food. And then, you know, we had movies, and you know there were. So those were kind of the two highlights of the day. You know mealt times and movies.
Speaker 2:Um, a lot of hijinks went on on the boat. You know people playing practical tricks. I, I talked about that in the uh, don't give too much away, but I mean I talk about, uh, there's a lot of funny stuff we used to do, you know, like a steel, uh, one of our exes, uh, his son, to give him a pound puppy, which is a puppy back then a doll, um, you know, dog doll, whatever, and and basically the crew kidnapped it, dognapped it and gave him a ransom note on. You know magazine papers that had cut out just like you see in the movies, and they had listed demands. You know they wanted, you know extra ice cream at dinner and two movies. You know after Med Rats and everything. You know after med rats and everything. So, to answer your question, you know playing hijinks and stuff and just you know taking advantage of the time you know, like movies and meals when we had it.
Speaker 1:You know you might not have had a problem with claustrophobia, but have you ever had anybody you worked with? You know an officer enlisted. All of a sudden they just freak out and do you have any? What's the parameters for taking care of that situation?
Speaker 2:I never saw that on the two submarines that I served on. I have heard stories of where that happened and you know it's very sad and you know there's a corpsman on board that assesses the. You know the fitness of everyone on board to do their duty and the corpsman gets involved. You know, thank the Lord, we were never in an environment where we had to maybe come off station because there was a medical emergency, either physical or mental, like that. But that would happen.
Speaker 2:I suppose you'd have to. You know, counterbalance that with the. You know the value of the mission you were on and take measures. But you know, thank the Lord, I was never in that, in that situation. And tell you the truth, by the time you get to that point, people are pretty well screened and if they can't cut it, you know they're not going on the run with you and you know like there's no secrets. You know they're literally there's a hundred men on board. Back then it was all men, not being sexist, but now now we have women in submarines but everyone knows each other's secrets and nobody.
Speaker 1:There's no secrets on a submarine whatsoever yes, think of how do you screen people. Do you have to, like, see a shrink is there? Like I mean, obviously you know it's just it's got to be different screening than any other vessel, boat or anything else it's got there.
Speaker 2:If there was. To be honest, if there was, I can't recall it. I don't recall any specific test being taken or anything. I think part of it's just the nature of the screening process to determine whether or not you have the intellectual skills to go on the submarines. The officers every single officer on a US nuclear submarine is nuclear qualified, with the exception as fly officer. We call them the CHOP.
Speaker 2:And in order to get into the program to begin with, you go back to the naval reactors and interview with the director of naval reactors. Back then it was Rickover. I missed Rickover by two months and I was interviewed by Admiral McKee. There's, you know, kind of horror stories about the interviews Admiral Rickover would give you know prospective officers. But that screening process is very rigorous. It's probably one notch below being screened for becoming an astronaut. Between tours on my submarines I was teaching at ROTC Naval ROTC in UCLA and my main job was to get people to volunteer for the submarine force and everybody I would put up failed the interview, with the exception of one person. So it's very difficult, so it's a very high. Screening to begin with is part of the answer.
Speaker 1:Now I'm reading the description of your book, and the book's out now. It's called Submerged Life on a Fast Attack Submarine in the Last Days of the Cold War and you talk about traveling under ice. Now, talk about now. This is one thing. It's like, hey, even if you freaked out or anything, there was a massive emergency. It's not like you could just pop to the surface. So that must have been an interesting time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that that's really that's one of the two big differences with just normal submarine ops operations is that you don't have that luxury to to go up to periscope depth and run the diesel if something happens to the reactor. The other is the nature of navigation up there is really really different than it is, you know, down at lower latitudes.
Speaker 2:That's one thing. Well, I know people like kind of surprised when I tell them about that. You know, for one thing, gyro compasses don't work beyond about 88 degrees north because they need the earth to spin and the earth doesn't spin enough above 88 degrees north. And the other thing is directions. If you think about it like you said, I'm heading west. You know I'm heading northeast or whatever. When you say that that's an angle to a meridian and that makes sense when you're down here I live about thirty nine degrees north, whatever. You know they're roughly parallel, right. But when you get close to the pole you know you head west and you take a step off the meridian you're on and you're not heading west anymore because the angle you make with the meridian you're on, then when you take a step off of it is different, it's something southwest. So consequently, we had to create an artificial, basically coordinate system. We would slide the North Pole down the international dayline down to the equator and call that the North Pole. So when we're at the North Pole, our system thought we were at the equator and the computers handled that. And I talk about in the book.
Speaker 2:One time I was involved, you know, tangentially with actually damaging that inertial navigation system. And then we went to the North Pole so it was like, oh geez, I hope we didn't break it, that we won't get back. There was a boat actually that that happened to. They lost their inertial navigation system and you think you know just something, like you know heading in a direction. Well, you're submerged, there's no star to steer by. So basically they just kept the rudder midships and just went in a flank bill a high rate for 30 hours or something and ended up on the right latitude, but 140 degrees off in longitude. That's how serious it is if you lose your inertial navigation system.
Speaker 1:Yeah, talk about ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong part of the world. You know, especially with, you're always being hunted. That's one thing about submarines. You're always being hunted. So you always wonder like what could? It's a Cold War, but people don't realize that the tension in the Cold War was incredible. We never knew Like I remember the 1980s, we never knew when there was going to be. You know the next thing the nuclear war was always on its back. So when you're in a submarine and you end up in the wrong place at the wrong time in the wrong part of the world, it may spark something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I talk about that in the book Asha on on the on the ice run. Um, there was one time I'll never know this day what it was Um, and let me preface my remarks saying that my book was. I had because I had a security clearance. I had submitted to the DOD officer office a pre-publication security review and it was vetted and approved with some redactions, mostly dealing with the operation of nuclear reactor. So everything I'm saying has been cleared. There was one time when, coming back from the poll that you know, we got some very strange sonar signals and to this day I don't know what that was. You can read about in the book, but it really kind of bugs me. You know who's to say what it was. But you're absolutely right, we had a kind of sense that we're at the wool store the entire time. It was, it was not a game, it wasn't training, it was kind of the real deal.
Speaker 1:It's one of those realizations and I think a lot of people get this when you're in a service and you're in some sort of conflict or you're near it that if it's your time, it's your time and there's really nothing you can do about it. And I'd imagine if a sub got hit it would be over pretty quick. I can't imagine, you know, taking on water and getting hit would be devastating impact right away.
Speaker 2:That's actually kind of a saving grace. Now, obviously, you know not to be too morbid, but basically, like you're familiar with a diesel engine, right, diesel engines work. They don't have spark plugs to fire the cylinders, they just work by compression. Basically, if there were flooding on a submarine at depth, it would basically be like a cylinder in a diesel engine. There's enough, you know, flammable fumes in there with diesel and whatever, that the sudden compression would heat it. You just explode and, just, you know, die instantly.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying that's good, but I'm saying, you know, it's probably better than drowning. I don't know, but the larger point we generally don't think I don't know, but the larger point we generally don't don't think I mean, obviously the main thing is it's very rigorous life being a submariner. For one thing I talk about in the book, you know you don't just say hey, bob, would you do this? Whatever, it's very strict. You know. Repeat backs. You say you know, take manual control of steam generator level. You know, maintain level between X and Y. You know, and he repeats it back to you verbatim, nothing happens on a submarine without. You know, verbatim, repeat backs. You know, just because you can't afford to make a mistake and misunderstand somebody.
Speaker 1:You know, that's the thing is about the protocols, the SOPs it's there. Protocols, the SOPs, it's there. So everybody can actually fall down on someone else's job if they really really needed to, because there is a standard operating procedure available.
Speaker 2:And the other thing to follow up on that. You know there's a process called qualification on submarines. You know it's very kind of an ethical moment in a submarine's life when you know it takes. It took me 18 months, it took, takes some people much longer. For officers, a list of guys usually takes a year to be qualified. Submarines that wear the you know what we call the fish, the dolphins, and that you know you're you're, you're really kind of cross-trained. I'm not saying you could just walk into somebody else's shoes or watch station and take over, but you definitely know how to rig every compartment on board that submarine, for you know different events. That's one of the things. You know where all the major damage control positions are and you got a very good idea of how everything works and how everything connects. So it's not that everyone could like do everyone else's job, it's not to that level, but it's to the level that, um, you know you, you and, and we're kind of a brotherhood, you know everyone trusts each other.
Speaker 1:You know, by virtue of having that qualification, Now, when you get out of the service, when you jump into the pilot seat, you know, that's one thing I was reading about. Your bio is now you're a private pilot.
Speaker 2:You know, I don't think that's a coincidence. So basically my career path, I I did two tours, one as a junior officer on uh, one fast tech submarine. Then I taught at ucla, uh at the rotc. I taught weapons and engineering there but my main job was to get people to volunteer for a subservice. And then then I served as a weapons officer on another submarine and then about the halfway point, right when I was teaching at UCLA, the Cold War or the Berlin Wall fell. And then subsequently, soon thereafter, the Soviet Union fell and we had staffed up to build a force of about 100 SSNs and we dropped that to about half. And so the chance of you know, I didn't want to wait around, you know they didn't really need me anymore. So I got out at the kind of the halfway mark in my career and served the rest of time in the reserves and ended up retiring as a commander.
Speaker 2:But I've often reflected upon this commander. But, um, I've often reflected upon this that I don't think it's coincidence that I bought a plane right after I got out, because the two disciplines are very similar. You know you cannot have oh I thought. You know I thought does not exist. You know the people have a. Oh, I thought you know, I you know, I assumed whatever. You know there's a pyramid of people. They're not on that pyramid. You know they fell off the pyramid. You know because you have to. It's very similar rigorous discipline flying a plane as it is driving a submarine.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I thought about it. There I go. I thought now you haven't been stuck in my head, but it's like you know, you can't make a minimal mistake in either one of those responsibilities. So, it's definitely interesting responsibilities.
Speaker 2:So it's definitely interesting. Yeah, so my my career path. Like I said I, the book talks about a month through the whole training pipeline and it starts out in there's a we had they call them prototype reactors. Where they're? They're nuclear reactors out in the Idaho desert that we used to train both officers and enlisted in the engineering spaces and you qualify as an engineering officer. Watch there and one of the things talk about the seriousness of adhering to protocol and what you're about.
Speaker 2:Every day we would drive by, the bus would take us. It was about 50 miles away from town and the bus would take us in every day. It was about 50 miles away from town and the bus would take us in every day. It's about an hour and a half to get out there and it would take us by this reactor that had blown up in the early 60s that you know it's kind of a design flaw. The operator had pulled the head, was manually fitting the control rod and pulled it out and was leading over at the time and it caused the reactor to develop like 6,000 times rated power in less than a second and flashed all the water in the steam and impaled him on the containment enclosure building 75 feet above the ground. It just stuck right through them and killed everyone else as well. So that really gets your attention. And we saw, you know, movies of the aftermath, that in the in the nuclear power school, that it's serious as a heart attack. You know it's real life, yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, to turn on to a lighter note, man, I can't even imagine. Now you've gotten the writing book You've been writing for a while now, do you have another book planned in you?
Speaker 2:I do, I, I I wrote another book actually about my, you know, flying misadventures. Uh, I call it the how to hotwire an airplane, and it's uh about, uh, a guy who's kind of uh, he's a Vietnam vet, you know, and it's kind of based on my dad was a Vietnam vet and a lot of the people I grew up with, you know the, the, the men that you know, kind of I would grow up with it, you know they're all had, I would say, not not saying any way, but had some level of PTSD to, to, to one level or another. You know you, you don't, you don't go to war and come back. You know 100%. And it's about a guy who you know, is kind of haunted by his experiences. He kind of redeems himself by flying, you know, undocumented immigrants across the border checkpoints in Texas, and hilarity ensues. It's kind of a funny book. But we'll see. But to answer your question, yeah, I'm working on that right now. That's pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Well, everybody Submerged Life on a Fast Attack Submarine and the Last Days of the Cold War is out now on Amazon. Make sure you check it out, henry. I appreciate you coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. Thank you for the opportunity.
.jpg)
