CHAPTER 4. MIRACLES (CONT'D)

I am continuing on the posting of the miracles that have occurred in my life.  In my previous post, I described how I got selected to the Navy Science Assistance Program (NSAP).  This was a miracle in itself.  I really had no idea of how I would fulfill the expectations of me in this position.  I explained these feelings in my previous post.  So, here I was, the first few days on the job, and a miracle happened.  I also include in this post, some significant events which occurred during my 2 years at COMSUBPAC.  I hope you enjoy this story.

MY FIRST WEEK AT CONSUBPAC (August 1982).  I arrived with my family in Hawaii in early August.  I started working with Dr. Kranz right away.  He introduced me to numerous military members of the staff as well as several other civilians also assigned to COMSUBPAC.  These civilians were not part of the NSAP program but were on temporary duty from the Naval Undersea Systems Center (NUSC).  During this first day of Joe showing me the ropes and the many introductions to the staff members, the thought of failure haunted me.  What especially created knots in my stomach was when he told everyone that I was Dr. Janota’s replacement.  I know I cringed in horror each time he did so.  (Read my previous post to see why being compared to Dr. Janota made me ill.)
Then, the first of many miracles happened.  It was about mid-morning on Tuesday, only my second day on the job.  Joe and I were talking at his desk when a young lieutenant came into our office looking very agitated.  He said “Joe, you have got to help me.”  Joe asked what was wrong.  Here is what the lieutenant said.  At the morning operational briefing to the admiral, the admiral announced that the Governor of Hawaii had asked him if he could help him with supporting the OTEC program (I will briefly describe OTEC below).  The admiral asked how he could help.  The governor said that engineers designing the seafloor portion of the OTEC system needed to know what the seafloor looked like so they could have a better idea of how to design the system.  They asked if the admiral could make the DSV Turtle available to them to visually inspect the bottom where they wanted to place the structure.  Well, the DSV Turtle was designed to be a rescue vehicle (for the submarine crew) in case a submarine had a tragic mishap.  The admiral did not know that if he granted this request if he would be providing a joy ride for these guys at the navy’s expense.  He then turned to the young lieutenant and tasked him to look into this and report back to him by next Friday’s morning brief.  Well, the lieutenant had no earthly idea of how to answer the admiral’s request.  After listening to this story, Joe told him that he didn’t have a clue of where to begin either.  I had been sitting there quietly, and then I said, “Maybe I could help”.  The lieutenant, who had not yet even looked at me, turned to me and said “Who are you”?  Joe introduced me to him.  I told him and Joe that I had been recently working with scientists from LSU and Texas A&M on placing oil rig structures on the bottom in the Gulf of Mexico.  I could ask them and see what they think.  The lieutenant said, “You can do that?  Can you have something by Friday morning?”  I said that I would try.
At this time, I think it would be valuable to know something about OTEC.  OTEC stands for Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (See Figure 17).  To be honest, I had heard about OTEC but knew little about it.  It was technology that had been around for many years, and it involved creating cheap energy by exploiting the temperature differences between the ocean surface and the ocean floor.  Hawaii is an ideal place for this technology to be exploited.  Huge water depths are close to the Hawaiian land mass (hence the necessary temperature differences are available), and a minimum of cabling to shore is needed because of this proximity. 
                       
                Figure 17.  Schematic of OTEC Concept

      SEE FIGURE 17 BELOW

In addition, outside of windmill farms and solar paneling, the oil resources necessary for Hawaii’s energy needs have to be transported by ship to the islands and is expensive.
As soon as the lieutenant left, I phoned Dr. Joe Suhada at LSU.  There was a 5-hour time difference between Hawaii and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but he had to work late that day and I caught him still at his office.  I explained the situation to him and asked what the oil companies would do.  Joe said that he would call Dr. Bill Bryant at Texas A&M and discuss it with him.  Before noon on Wednesday (the next day), I had a response from Dr. Suhada.  Essentially, he told me that the oil companies would never send people down for a visual inspection.  They had much cheaper, less dangerous, and more effective ways to get the information needed.  They would use high-resolution photographic cameras, high frequency side scan sonars, and sub-bottom profiling systems.  Well, I took this information and wrote up a 1.5-page report for the lieutenant recommending that the admiral not honor the governor’s request.  The lieutenant was extremely grateful for what I did.
Later that day, an enlisted yeoman came to my desk and asked if I was Dr. Tooma.  By now I was getting tired of correcting them about being a doctor, and I said that I was he.  He then told me that the admiral wanted to see me at 3:30. I showed up on time and was invited into his office.  ADM Bernard Kauderer immediately got up from his desk, walked over to me, and shook my hand.  He asked me to sit on his couch so we could talk.  He commended me for the work I had done on the possible use of the DSV Turtle.  The lieutenant had told the admiral that I had prepared the report.  Once again, someone had passed the credit to me taking none for himself.  ADM Kauderer welcomed me to the staff and was very gracious.  In fact, he told me that he was having a “little” party at his house on Saturday, and he hoped that Sylvia and I could attend.  This was pretty heady stuff to me.  Here was the commander of all our submarines in the Pacific asking me to attend a party at his house.
What just happened in the first week of my assignment at COMSUBPAC?  I was convinced that I offered nothing at this new job.  I felt that in short order I would be sent home packing with my tail between my legs.  But through some miracle, a very unique and specific opportunity was dropped into my lap.  It was just what I needed to get my confidence up and help me be productive.  In the next few days. I was constantly approached by military staffers and the civilians on the staff asking me for my advice on environmental matters.  It was soon thereafter that I was the Environmental Advisor to the admiral and not “just” the Acoustic Advisor.  If this story does not fit into the miracle category, then nothing does.  In the next two years at COMSUBPAC, God continued to watch over me in unbelievable ways.
As an interesting aside to this story, I found out that ADM Kauderer had honored the request by the governor.  I couldn’t believe it.  Hadn’t I recommended that the admiral say no?  I was told that admirals get the big bucks for making decisions like these.  They have to make hard decisions.  By granting the governor’s request, ADM Kauderer was putting his career on the line.  If a submarine went down and needed the Turtle for rescue when it was supporting a civilian need, it would not have been good for him.  But often politics drive decisions.  Since the state of Hawaii strongly supports the US military, ADM Kauderer felt it was worth the risk.

TWO YEARS AT COMSUBPAC (1982-1984).  Instead of being a horror story, my two years at COMSUBPAC turned out to be extremely exciting and unbelievably rewarding.  Again “coincidences” and “just so happens” continued to occur.  For example, the Soviet submarine threat in the Arctic Ocean was growing at that time, and countering that threat was a high priority problem.  Environmental issues abounded.  I had a very strong level of experience in the arctic.  In fact, I had co-authored a classified paper on detecting submarines in contact with the underside of the ice.  When I showed the intelligence officer on the SUBPAC staff my test results, he immediately wanted me to show the data to his superior, the Third Fleet intelligence officer.  Soon I was designing a 2-submarine test in the arctic for an upcoming deployment.  This test involved 2 nuclear submarines, a remote sensing aircraft, 2 manned camps on the ice, and a Coast Guard icebreaker.  Wow!  I was working with several other agencies in designing this test, but I was the guy on the SUBPAC staff coordinating the test.

SUBMARINE MINE AVOIDANCE TEST (1984).  Another important program that I got involved with was submarine mine avoidance.  Sea mines are a serious threat to a submarine, especially in narrow straits.  The question put to me was how can we avoid mines in a minefield?  How we addressed this question is presented below.
        Whenever you can utilize systems that are already onboard a naval ship, that is a great plus, especially on submarines where space is just not available for a new system.  To detect mines in the water column, a high frequency, high resolution system is required.  It just so happens that the nuclear submarines in the US Navy all have such a system; the BQN-17 secure fathometer.  The thought was that this system could be trained to look forward (instead of downward) and possibly “see” mines.  To test this theory, we used the USS Houston, an SSN often used for research projects.  We established a dummy minefield in the test area near Pearl Harbor, and we conducted a series of runs through the minefield.  We started the test around 9:00PM.  We knew exactly where the mines were located (geographic location and depth) but we could not detect one mine with the BQN-17.  We ran lines with all kinds of tactical changes but could not detect the mines.  We were totally discouraged.  At about 7:00AM, we decided at the last minute to do one more run.  Near the end of the run, we heard a weak sonar return.  We all stood up and wondered what that sound was.  Was it a mine?  Or was it something else?  Before the run was over, we received another blip, and both were right where the mines were located.  We were all very excited and began to plan another track line.  On our next series of runs, we detected more and more of the mines with clearer and louder sonar returns.  Soon, we were able to navigate around the mines with ease.  The BQN-17 worked!
During analysis of the test results, we found out that another oceanographic test was being conducted close to where we were operating.  We requested access to their data.  Upon analysis of their data, we found that they had collected samples of the Deep Scattering Layer (DSL).  The DSL is a layer of very small fish that have swim bladders which scatter sonar energy.  This layer is shallower at night and deepens during the day.  What was happening during our test was that during the night, we were operating in the DSL, thereby rendering our sonar useless.  When daylight occurred at dawn, the DSL deepened so that it was below us.  As it deepened, our sonar performance got better and better.
We now had something to report to the admiral.  When we told him of the affect the DSL had on the sonar, he asked the question that admirals seem to ask.  “How can I tell if I am in a DSL or not?”  He then said, “I won’t take my submarine into a minefield unless I know the answer to that question.”  Well, the answer to that question is another story which I was not involved in.

I need to add here that this mine detection experience plays an important roll in my first book "The SOOF" which is due out on 5 June.  Be sure to purchase a copy to find out how I used this experience in my book.

I included this last story, not because I was near death or because it is humorous in some way. [ But the coincidence that another agency was conducting tests near our area and just happened to collect the DSL data we needed to solve our problem, seems like a God-incidence to me.  Also, our last minute decision to make one more run seems like a miracle to me.]  But it does show what kind of issues I had to deal with the 2 years that I was assigned to COMSUBPAC.  Those 2 years, August 1982-August 1984, were the most exciting and rewarding years of my professional life.  Upon my completion of my 2 years at COMSUBPAC, I was awarded the Meritorious Civilian Service Award from ADM Austin Scott, who was COMSUBPAC when my tour ended.  This award is the second highest award a Rear Admiral can bestow upon a civilian.  And to think that I was sure that I would be an utter failure back in 1982.  God does work in mysterious ways.
 

     Figure 18.  Receiving the Meritorious Civilian Service Award from ADM Austin Scott

     SEE FIGURE 18 BELOW
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     Figure 17.  Schematic of OTEC Concept

     Figure 18.  Receiving the Meritorious Civilian Service Medal From ADM Austin Scott.  That is Sylvia, my proud wife.