For the rest of the week, we didn’t know if would be sent to sea that day, the next day, or on our originally scheduled date.  In the end, we left about a week after 9/11 for our six months at sea.

I have a strange relationship with 9/11 because of all of this.  The Hartford left just after 9/11, and we got back to the US it was the end of March, 2002.  We got very little news during that period, we missed all of the memorial events, the unity of the country, and the invasion into Afghanistan.  (Though we were in the Gulf during the invasion, our boat didn’t directly participate.)  By the time we got back, we saw all the flags on the interstate overpasses, the yellow ribbons everywhere, and all of the other signs.  The country had moved in and done a lot of healing in those six months, and I hadn’t been involved.

I was fortunate enough not to know anyone that was killed in any of the attacks.  And with time, my experiences feel like they’ve gotten closer to everyone else’s.  But a six-month hole between my experiences and the country’s collective consciousness is still a strange gulf to bridge.

Setting the scene

There’s probably one in many good-sized organizations… “that guy.” Well, Chris has always been “that guy.” He has always been the odd man out, marching to the beat of a different drummer. He cares about different things, and does things differently to everyone else. It’s not always a bad thing, but it means that Chris is not representative of most Navy officers I’ve ever known.

Also, submarines are very strange places to work. Pack 130 men into a very small space for six months. Then mess with their body clocks by having them work on an 18-hour day (compared to a rational 24-hour day), with six hours on-watch, six hours training/maintenance, and (hopefully) six hours sleep… constantly changing so you never feel fully awake or (sometimes) even fully tired. The norms of human behavior just change when you’re out at sea.

When you’re confined for so long you get bored easily, and the way to be entertained is simply to fuck with people. You’ll do anything to get a reaction out of someone. Once you get that reaction, you know that whenever you get bored you can do the same thing and get the same reaction. Two of the most common ways we would use to get reactions from each other would be by playing off of fears of homophobia and general bad taste. In other words there was a lot of “grab-ass” and disgusting stories (and pornography); all of it to try and get a reaction from other guys on the boat. (Most everyone was immune to the usual “your mom” insults.) As long as you didn’t react you were fine; guys would stop trying and find other things to eliminate boredom.

I explain all of this because Chris just didn’t quite seem to fit in that kind of environment, and also didn’t recognize that people were fucking with him only because he would react. (And it appears that the same problems of not fitting in occured in Iraq, where run-ins with his superiors in Baghdad ended up getting him transferred to another command.)

Melodrama

Most importantly, only think of reading this book if you’re comfortable with melodrama. Below is quite a long quote, but I think it describes exactly what I mean:

Around the base of the statue [in France], the names of various writers, philosophers, and mathematicians from centuries past are inscribed. The names are those of giants like Descartes, Renoir, Sartre, Curie, Fourier, Newton, Shakespeare … every one a genius—someone who had changed the world! As I read the small chiseled names, it occurred to me that the names had been added after the statue was built; it was a work in progress! Encircling the monument, I realized with a sense of amazement that fully half of the space was left blank for more names to be added!

A sense of awe gripped me as the weight of that empty space set in, for in that blank space lay faith in the capacity of mankind—the most powerfully humanistic statement I had ever seen. A tear came to my eye as I stared at the beautiful emptiness of those bronze panels, wondering whose name would come next and what extraordinary thing that person would have accomplished. Then, just as quickly as this audacious faith in mankind had gripped me, the emptiness of another monument seized hold and dragged me down. My spine tensed, the hair on my neck stood on end, and I imagined myself standing once more at attention in the central rotunda of the Naval Academy. On the large memorial to our fallen alumni, several new names had appeared since my graduation, yet the vastness of the empty space seemed unchanged. On that massive wall with movable plastic lettering, the emptiness had become the most salient feature. I realized with a sense of horror that my life had been a pursuit of that emptiness. Until that point, I had struggled to control the things that would prevent the names of my classmates from appearing in that unbearable space. My faith in those white plastic names had dignified my pursuit! But at that instant, I realized that my quest had been hollow because of what lay within the emptiness of that godforsaken wall.

Instead of faith in the capacity of mankind, that emptiness chanted in an austere, commanding tone the insidiously pessimistic dogma War will never end … War will never end! WAR WILL NEVER END!!! “SHUT UP!!!” I shouted in anger at the cold, blackened wall. My voice echoed in the hall as though I were standing alone within a canyon. Suddenly tears were streaming down my face, my fists were clenched, and I howled, “I will not follow you anymore! You can’t have my life!” I sobbed, exasperated and purged. The albatross that hung from my neck broke loose and fell into the sea. I knew what sort of monument I wanted my name to be inscribed upon, and that knowledge carried me forward with a newfound sense of hope.

If you managed to survive reading that quote, you see exactly what I mean. If you couldn’t survive reading that quote, I would avoid the book.

Cheating in the Navy & on the Hartford

The biggest controversy to come out of Chris’ book was his accusations of wide-spread cheating on the Hartford. Overall, this is absolute horseshit. I don’t ever remembering receiving answer keys to any of my nuclear exams before the exam. And I’m pretty sure I passed mine on the first try.

What I think happened is that other guys on the boat recognized that Chris was struggling with the exam. (The book mentions it took him five times to pass it!) The choices for the Navy then are to either kick Chris off the boat and off of submarine duty, or to help him pass the exam so he can at least be evaluated in the context of actually doing the job. Some guys just aren’t good test-takers, but are solid nuclear plant operators. It appears that while Chris could barely pass a test and couldn’t lead a watch team, he could operate a reactor plant safely. In my mind, that’s much better than washing someone out of submarines, wasting a lot of the Navy’s time and money, when it wasn’t really necessary.

Chris extrapolated this to believe that everyone on the boat was receiving exam keys and cheating. That’s certainly not something I ever witnessed. What he experienced was someone who was a bit of a rock getting help. And after doing so, he proved that he could actually do the job.

Were the exams too tough? Possibly. But if that’s the case, I don’t blame the boat, I blame the Navy’s nuclear community and Naval Reactors for putting into place a system that sets unreasonable standards. Was it too each to cheat if you wanted? Yes, but unless the Navy develops Navy-wide exams and hold exams that are proctored not by the boat but by the squadron (the commander of ~5-6 submarines) the current system is the best there is.

Other Hartford stories

Did pressurized septic tanks spray in the galley? Yep, it happened. (Though it’s not as bad as it seems.)

Did Chris have some legendary run-ins with the crew? Oh, yeah. Perhaps the most legendary was the one he describes in Chapter 1, where one of the enlisted guys in the engine room wagged his genitalia near his face when Chris was leaning down to read some electrical meters. It was early in Chris’ tour on the boat and as he writes in the book, “I completely lost control.” That set the tone for a lot of his interactions with the crew for as long as I was on board.

At one point in the book he described how he had to call the senior enlisted supervisor into the engineering control room to enforce discipline. If you know how to lead a watch team, that never needs to happen. (You also learn what’s serious, and what is people trying to fuck with you, and how to ignore the latter.) You earn the respect of your team, and it sounds like Chris had difficulty with that.

Iraq

The problem I have with Chris’ description of his time in Iraq is that I’ve already read “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” and “Fiasco”. (Both of which I highly recommend, by the way.) He does capture the daily inanity of working as a junior officer on a major command staff, but a lot of this part of the book was a bit boring because it was just from his single-person perspective. It’s more personal, but very limited.

If you read “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” or “Fiasco” there are a lot of stories and perspectives from people across the government and military, and they are woven together into a compelling story that’s really powerful. Chris’ story is interesting, but doesn’t really add anything to the body of work about how screwed up the Iraq war had gotten.

Summary

Part of me really liked this book because it brought back a lot of memories of my time on the Hartford. Thinking back, this was a very formative period in my life, and it’s pleasant to revisit (some) of those memories.

But mainly I was really frustrated reading this book, because it reflects the perspective of an oddball outsider. In the grand scheme of history it might be useful for family history to be written by the black sheep of the family, but it doesn’t do much for accuracy of that family history. Those of us who were there know how to filter the author’s offbeat perspective and understand what’s behind it, but for any other reader it’s just not what I would call an full version of the truth.

The result?

In one hospital:

• 10-day infection rate went from 11% to ZERO
• Prevented 8 deaths
• Saved $2million in costs

Across ICU’s in Michigan:

• In three months cut infections by 66%!
• Typical ICU cut infection rate to ZERO
• In 18 months, prevented 1500+ deaths
• In 18 months, saved $175,000,000

These are amazing results, and his book on checklists, “The Checklist Manifesto,” was recently published. Click below to order it from Amazon.

This book is inspiring, educational, engaging, riveting and fascinating. It’s extremely well-written, and is a fairly easy read. I’ve never written a blog post immediately after finishing a book, but I am now because not only is it GOOD, but this book is IMPORTANT.

Dr. Gawande led a huge study of a “safe surgery” checklist, a simple set of steps to be checked in each surgery. It was used and studied in eight hospitals: four in the developed world (US, UK, etc.) and four in the developing world (Tanzania, New Delhi, Jordan, Manila). Thousands of patients were studied for months before and after checklists were implemented. The results?

• Rate of complications fell by 36%
• Deaths fell by 47%
• Infections fell by nearly half
• Even in advanced hospitals in developed world, complications were decreased by one-third

I mean…. WOW! Cutting infection rates and death rates in surgery by half (with marginal differences between developed and developing countries) is simply incredible.

But here’s a choice quote from the book:

Take the safe surgery checklist. If someone discovered a new drug that could cut down surgical complications with anything remotely like the effectiveness of the checklist, we would have television ads with minor celebrities extolling its virtues. Detail men would offer free lunches to doctors to make it part of their practice. Government programs would research it. Competitors would jump in to make newer and better versions. If the checklist were a medical device, we would have surgeons clamoring for it, lining up at display booths at surgical conferences to give it a try, hounding their hospital administrators to get one for them – because, damn it, doesn’t providing good care matter to those pencil pushers?

Checklists are powerful, and not just for surgery. Gawande writes about data from investment managers and venture capitalists that shows that those that use checklists are much more successful than those that don’t. They’ve been used in aviation for 70+ years, ever since airplanes became so complicated as to be dangerous without checklists. The modern construction industry uses checklists to ensure their projects are safe and properly constructed.

I’m very familiar with checklists; operating a nuclear reactor in a US Navy submarine means you live with checklists in everything you do. But I accepted it without too much thought since we had no idea there was any other way of running such a complicated machine. It’s amazing to me that other complex professions don’t also use the same procedures.

Checklists are threatening to many people and professions. Using them implies that professionals don’t know what they’re doing, that they don’t have the ability to do their jobs. Even with the results described in surgery above, many surgeons still don’t use them. (Despite the fact that they continually prove to save patients’ lives, everywhere.) As Dr. Gawande describes above, if the same results were achieved through a pill or machine, doctors and hospitals would be racing to adopt them!

Dr. Gawande goes into real detail not only in what makes a good checklist and how to develop them, but also why they work. They work by simply making sure that key simple steps are accomplished, and by freeing your brain from concerning itself about the easy stuff (since the checklist will catch anything you miss). This frees the brain to think about the hard stuff, and able to deal with complications more directly. Good checklists also make communications easier, so that when things do go wrong, the experts involved can address them more directly.

Fundamentally, time after time, in study after study… checklists WORK.

Summary

This is a hugely important book, and I honestly can’t recommend it more highly, It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, if you deal with or manage complexity, you NEED to read it.

If you want to efficiently improve your performance or your teams’ performance quickly and substantially, a checklist is your way to do it.

The Hartford looks like it’s in pretty bad shape. Here are photos from the NavyTimes.com:

This one shows the sail bent over at an angle:

This shows the damage on the front of the sail, but you can also see where the bottom of the sail has pulled apart from the hull after being bent over:

I can only imagine two scenarios about what happened. #1- The Hartford lost depth control and/or got sucked up in the wake of a big surface ship. (Unlikely but has happened.) #2- The Hartford was on its way to periscope depth and didn’t hear the New Orleans or realize it was as close as it was. Since the NavyTimes article quoted the Navy as saying the Hartford was “submerged but near the surface” it sounds like #2 is the right answer. Unfortunately this is not hugely uncommon; going to periscope depth is the most dangerous thing a submarine does regularly.

I feel really bad for the guys on the boat. I was on the Hartford when we grounded off of Italy in 2003; it’s an awful experience for everyone, whether you were personally involved or not. It causes a lot of disruption for the Navy and all the people involved. I’m no expert, but that damage is probably going to take a long time to fix.

[UPDATE]: More photos here from the Navy. The sail is pretty trashed. Lots of Navy-specific comments on Joel’s blog here.

[UPDATE 2]: Commenters on Joel’s blog have written that the Hartford experienced an 82-degree roll! If that’s even half-true (and it may very well not be) it’s amazing that only 15 people were hurt.

My old boat (the USS Hartford, SSN 768) sailed across the Panama Canal a year or two after I left; I’m still a bit jealous that I missed it. Going through the Suez wasn’t nearly as interesting, and I did that twice.

This Thursday, May 22nd a very unique art exhibit will open in New York City. It features art from Iraqi artists, most of whom cannot even be publicly identified for their safety. It was a Navy Lieutenant serving in Iraq that found this art and worked to bring it over to the United States to exhibit and sell for the artists. I served with that Lieutenant, Chris Brownfield, for about two years when we were both stationed on the same submarine. He’s a very unique guy, as this initiative suggests!

From 2006 to 2007, a military liaison officer in the U.S. Embassy of Baghdad worked on the sidelines to develop relations with the artists of Baghdad. Under extremely unlikely circumstances, several of Baghdad’s artists trusted this military officer to share their art with the world. It is the first collection of art in the United States comprised entirely of works from wartime contemporaries of Iraq. The scope of the exhibition is unprecedented, including works on Iraqi refugees, the children of war, genocide, and an Iraqi perspective on Shock and Awe.

The exhibition is taking place at the Pomegranate Gallery on 133 Greene Street in SoHo (see map here). The opening reception runs from 6-8pm on Thursday May 22nd, and the exhibition will be open through June 21st.

Jake Halpern wrote a great article about the exhibit in New York Magazine. He even managed to speak (via phone) to a couple of the artists involved. One of my favourite parts of the article describes how Chris had to pull rank with the military postal clerks in order to send the 100+ paintings back to the US!

If you can’t make it to the gallery, Chris has also produced a book that includes much of the same artwork. It’s tri-lingual in English, French and Arabic. You can buy it from Amazon.com here: Oil on Landscape; Art from Wartime Contemporaries of Baghdad.

If you live in or near New York City, I hope you get a chance to drop in on the exhibit; it should be interesting.

While a cadet at the US Military Academy, aka West Point, he dated the commanding officer’s daughter!!

WOW!!

For a 19/20-year old cadet to date the daughter of the three-star general that ran West Point must have been one hell of a pressure cooker. But not only did he date her, he married her two months after graduation!

Colour me amazed…

Path101 aims to build “a place for career discovery – a site where you can learn about all sorts of different career paths.” This is more than a networking site, more than an educational site, more than a recruitment site, and in fact manages to combine all of these to help people make wise decisions about their professional future. (At least, that’s what I understand they’re trying to do.)

If you’re reading this, you likely know that I spent six years in the US Navy as a submarine officer. (The examples I use below are very Navy submarine specific… my apologies to the Army/Marine Corps/Air Force folks out there.) This site could be very powerful for ex-military members, and put them on a path for a very successful post-military career. Here are some of the issues that military people have entering the wider job market:

• You develop a great network in the military. It can be extremely powerful, but for most people it is very informal.
• “Military experience” is way too broad. To adequately figure out what someone’s training is best suited for, you need to drill down to their designator/rating/rank.
• Military members have excellent training and a great work ethic, but that’s very hard to translate into civilian terms.
• The military is typically the only real professional experience ex-military members have when entering the job market.

After that email conversation, I started thinking about those issues, and how a site like Path101 could solve them. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became, largely because it could finally put some data-driven specifics behind what is commonly a very informal process. Here are some of my thoughts:

How a site like Path101 could help the military-to-civilian transition

First of all,

it could help formalise your network!! This is one of my biggest regrets in my military career. In the military, everyone is moving all the time and in the last few years I’ve already lost track of a number of great people I served with. Everyone in the military should use LinkedIn (or similar variant, though I don’t know of a better one) to keep in contact with friends, shipmates, supervisors, etc. Virtually no one does this now, and that’s really too bad. Most ex-military people I know would bend over backwards to help out someone they served with or a friend of someone they served with… you form lifetime bonds in the military. (See this post as an example.)

Fundamentally, you never know when you’re going to leave the military. To have a successful career, you need to constantly network. In this sense “networking” doesn’t mean kissing ass to get people to like you, it just means keeping track of people that you want to stay in touch with in your career. Already there are military groups on LinkedIn, such as (for me) the Gold Dolphins group and blog, to help take advantage of these relationships.

Secondly,

it could help show military members what they can specifically do based on their experience. Path101 is building what they call the “Resume Genome Project” which aims to take millions of resumes/c.v.’s to help you figure out what people with your background have done with their careers. Eventually this tool could be very powerful for military members looking to transition to the civilian world. If the resumes of other ex-military members were coded with the correct designators/rates/etc., you could see exactly what every ex-submarine officer did in their career after leaving as a JO, after leaving as a DH, after leaving as an CO/XO, etc. Nuclear Machinist Mates could see where all MM(N)’s went after they left the Navy. A Marine Corps MOS 0369 could take a look at where his training and education has fit best for others that have left the Corps.

This information could be invaluable to people leaving the military. I would predict that many submarine officers go to business school or law school, a lot of aviators go become corporate pilots, and submarine supply officers become international arms dealers. (Only slightly kidding on that last one!) But smart people are data-driven, and it would be VERY interesting to see the results of a Resume Genome Project for the military. The military tends to be very insular, and if people are only familiar with what their immediate friends and colleagues do after they leave the military, they may be missing out on a wealth of opportunities available for people with their training and background.

Finally,

Path101 could serve as an excellent knowledgeable and unbiased career advisor. For the vast majority of people leaving the military, it’s the only real professional experience they’ve ever had. Going back to university career advisors (for those people whom that’s even possible) is useless because they have no idea of what to do with military experience. While the military does provide transition assistance, having a source of unbiased advice would be extremely useful. People could use forums to help each other explain their military experience in civilian terms, teach people about unusual jobs/industries that come up in the Resume Genome Project, and more.

I personally believe that the military career advisors suffer from a lack of quality data, and thus tend to funnel people into the kinds of careers that are easy to funnel people into. Certain employers historically hire ex-military at much higher rates than other employers. (To me, that smells like untapped potential for a lot of employers.) If you have quality information on what people with your military background have done once they’ve gotten out and had a chance to connect with them and learn more about different opportunities, the career choices people make could potentially be very different.

Summary

The military is an amazing, life-changing experience for virtually everyone. It is a great career opportunity, but it can be difficult when transitioning back to the civilian world. I think Path101 could grow to be a great resource for military members as they look to leave the service. Having data and opportunities at their fingertips will allow them to make more informed and better decisions about their future. I really look forward to what Charlie and his team are building.

Last week they were preparing for a war-gaming exercise with the USS Hartford (SSN 768), another Groton-based submarine, in which they planned to fire 12 exercise torpedoes.

[snip]

There is no comparison acoustically between a Virginia-class submarine like the Virginia and a Los-Angeles-class submarine like the Hartford, Hurt said. He refers to other classes as “Brand X.”

“In the submarine world, if you’re the quiet guy you’ll come out on top all the time,” he said. “Acoustically we’ll tear them up.”

This kind of thing was always fun, even though we were all pretty knackered by the end of it. And based on the improvements in submarine technology, I think the Hartford will likely get a thumping from a Virginia crew that’s been training their asses off for this.

I really wish I could get a tour of a Virginia-class boat sometime; though I’ve seen simulators of some of the panels both forward and aft, it would be great to see the real thing and talk to the crew to see what the new stuff can really do.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…

- A Tale of Two Cities

I recently saw a video that reminded me of some of my more fond memories of the boat… watching dolphins play in our bow wake. This video is from the USS Wyoming (which has a higher sail than the Hartford, we were a bit closer to the surface) and is something that many submariners have seen at least at some point in their careers.

So here’s a little taste of submarine life.

Dolphins playing on the bow of the submarine USS Wyoming

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