Comment by brandmeyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brandmeyer | Hacker News Reader

> The full cycle was 18 hours, which meant the timing of our circadian cycles were constantly changing.

Living on an 18-hour day is rough, but I always felt that the worst part was changing back and forth between a 24-hour day and the 18-hour day. There are a couple of strong feedbacks to help you with the 18-hour cycle.

> The bunk rooms are sanctuaries where silence is observed with monastic intensity.

Not merely silence, but also lighting. The bunk rooms are always lit with dim red lights, and the working spaces are lit to nearly full daylight. On the older boats you would also operate the control room at periscope depth with dim lighting, but newer ships with electronic masts probably don't.

Diet-wise, the ship serves four meals a day, every 6 hours. Midnight rations or midrats is the fourth meal. So in a good rhythm you can eat when you wake up, go on your 6 hour watch, eat once more, work/train for 6 hours and sleep/personal for 6 hours. Eating your prior meal about 12 hours before you wake up also helps keep a decent body clock.

And then there are drills. Simulated equipment failures, fire, flooding, etc.; all of the alarms sound as if it were real, and the crew responds as if it were real (except that no extinguishers are discharged, no SCBAs lit off, no hoses pressurized). Scheduling drills without detrimental effects on the crew's sleep, but still making the drills a surprise and a challenge, is (like the reactor) critical.

Drill days were especially rough. We called them Vulcan Death Watches, although I have heard other nicknames as well.

There's a lot of nukes in this forum, but for the all the non-nukes out there, drills use all three of the ship's shifts. The on-watch shift is normally assisted by the off-going shift in emergencies. The on-coming shift then supervises, runs, and observes the drills.

So one way or another, all three shifts are going to be up and awake during the drill cycle. The typical rotation for us packed 3x 4-hours shifts in to the same time that would normally be occupied by 2x 6-hour shifts. So the pre-dawn shift and evening shift would have both of the off-watch thirds of the crew taking personal time while all three of the morning and mid-day drill shifts have everyone awake.

It more or less takes your body clock and smashes it with a sledgehammer.

It also prepares you mentally for just about anything.

I think you meant "submariners" rather than "nukes." :) Coners (non-nuclear-trained submariners, who stayed in the forward compartment, or nose "cone") had drills too!

"It also prepares you mentally for just about anything."

I bet. Sounds badass!

Makes me wonder why we're having such a hard time accommodating the social distancing rules mandated by the current pandemic. Humans are capable of a lot!

I think it says something pretty impressive about our society that just being cooped up with our families in our McMansions, not being allowed to go out to the bar, seems to be the worst thing that many of my neighbors are capable of comprehending. Our ancient ancestors, many impoverished people around the world today, and some of our peers in jobs a little more extreme than a cubicle farm are making epic efforts on a daily basis, and you are incapable of just staying home for a month?

When you select for capacity for discipline, and then train for discipline, you tend to get discipline.

When you don't select or train, getting discipline is sometimes a smidge more challenging.

There's a lesson to be learned here, but I don't think that this is it.

The nuclear power training program takes about 2 years for enlisted sailors (which I was). Those two years are set up to deliberately filter out people based on their ability to endure various stressors. Academically, the most grueling stage packs a 2 year engineering technology degree into about 6 months. They start the process of flunking people out 4 weeks into this particular stage of training. Overall, roughly half of all the enlistees who start that program end up doing something else for Uncle Sam.

Even after passing through that filtering and training function, life at sea is difficult and occasionally someone cracks. I recall an incident that happened in the mess deck. Its a compact room that can't serve more than a fraction of the crew at any given time, so folks have to go through it in a pipeline. Early in the pipeline, you pick up your silverware. One day, several months into a long deployment, a sailor forgot to pick up his fork. No big deal, right? He asked his shipmate a little ways back if he could pass up a fork for him. So of course, being a tight-knit crew, the shipmate was happy to oblige. But instead of being grateful, Petty Officer Exhausted became enraged, "This is a bent fork! What the hell is wrong with you!?", jumped back in the line and proceeded to assault his buddy! Its a packed space, so several people grabbed both participants and pulled them back immediately. Nobody was injured. A Chief got involved and helped straighten out Mr. Exhausted without ending his career.

Humanity covers a pretty wide spectrum. Each of us is the the integral of all of our experiences leading up to this moment. As something of an introvert myself, I don't mind the social isolation all that much. But I can empathize with my colleagues that are having a rougher time right now. Its better to support each other through tough times than to berate each other for not being tough enough.

Interesting story & perspective, thanks for sharing.

Interesting. To what extent do you think these programs filter a population with an innate distribution to find a subset versus train people to develop these characteristics?

A friend of mine is a nuclear engineer, she's not been deployed yet, but has gone through the same filter process. A similar though less extreme filtering happened in my engineering college, there were 250 people in my EGR 101 class, by second semester EGR 110 had 140 people, and I graduated with a class of 61.

I found this article from earlier this year about the "Fremen Mirage" or hard times/strong men/good times/weak men/hard times trope and thought it interesting. Seems topical.

https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

> To what extent do you think these programs filter a population with an innate distribution to find a subset versus train people to develop these characteristics?

I think the bias is very strongly towards training. The recruiting pipeline sucks up everyone with enough intelligence to pass some standardized tests.

However, everyone who enlists knows that they are going to be facing a hard life. The fact of the matter is that if you are smart enough to become a nuke, you're probably also smart enough to work as an engineer.

The vast majority of enlisted nukes got there in order to get a second chance at life. Most of my shipmates either flunked out of college or couldn't get into college due to shenanigans in high school. I was in the latter category.

It sounds like you have a healthy perspective on things! What is the benefit of worrying about others who maybe don't share it?

>the worst thing that many of my neighbors are capable of comprehending

I know some people who are going out and drinking and hugging (they told me this) in Michigan (we're not supposed to even visit other houses). This is across the entire wealth spectrum.

They have expressed a belief that the virus is not very dangerous, as well as a belief that the government/their neighbors should not be able to tell them what to do.

Being raised in middle america, I strongly identify with the latter sentiment, but not as much as I do with a numbers-based approach to "keeping grandma alive".

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