The Silent Anguish of Trapped Men

“Picture yourself: You’re in this boat on the bottom of the ocean,” said Clayton Decker, who has been there, with the oxygen running out, watching the taut faces of friends who know they might die. Some just give up and crawl into their bunks. “You just go to sleep, and it’s an easy death. You kind of go into a coma. They say you don’t even get dizzy.”

Decker lived through it 56 years ago, in a crippled U.S. submarine off China during World War II. Men anguished over a brutal choice: try an improbable escape from 180 feet down or surrender to a more peaceful death.

“You just figure, ‘When is it going to happen?’ ” said Decker, now 79, who viscerally understands the plight of Russian submariners who sit all but entombed in steel 500 feet below the frigid waters of the Arctic Circle.

Being trapped in a disabled sub, as more than 100 crewmen of the nuclear-powered sub Kursk found themselves Sunday, may be one of the most wrenching ordeals imaginable, a test of mettle that almost defies comprehension. In one form or another, it has inspired any number of books and movies, including “Das Boot” in 1981 and this year’s “U-571.”

The cruel elements of confinement and dwindling oxygen create the possibility of a slow death of a type that submariners invariably discuss among themselves, usually in the abstract. Few actually endure the experience.

Whether rescue teams had much chance of saving the Russian crewmen remained unclear late Monday. The sub lay hundreds of feet below the surface of the Barents Sea off the coast of Norway. Officials were only beginning to release sketchy details of the crisis. Some said they believed that the Kursk was involved in a collision on a training exercise, while others said there might have been an explosion. The sub’s reactors were shut down, and Russian rescuers were diving near the vessel. Reports indicated success in reestablishing a supply of power and oxygen--a development that could perhaps sustain the crewmen for weeks. While that boded well, and while rescue technologies have substantially improved, the problems in carrying out a successful evacuation in deep water remain formidable.

Historically, far more men have died in downed subs than have survived. There are phases to their struggle: initially, frantic handling of mechanical problems and strategizing, followed by quieter moments of grim contemplation.

‘They Knew Their Number Was Up’

As the hours go by, men get headaches. The diminishing oxygen makes each gasp harder to draw. Thinking becomes muddled, but they may face that impossible decision: stay aboard, protected from the crushing ocean depths, or risk an agonizing death with their lungs exploding in a desperate swim to the surface called a “blow and go”?

Clayton Decker’s story is especially unusual because he got out alive. He was a machinist mate, second class, aboard the Tang, which exploded and sank in 180 feet of water off the coast of China. It was sunk by one of its own torpedoes, which ran errantly in a circle, hitting the 300-foot sub in the stern. All but nine of the 87 men aboard ultimately died.

Decker still breathes hard, more than half a century later, talking about the scene in the forward torpedo room, where 29 men were trapped, many of them seriously injured.

“Those poor guys who were not physically able . . . they knew their number was up,” Decker said in a phone interview from his home near Denver.

Sudden heavy damage to a sub may complicate the question of survival by causing heavy injuries, he noted.

On the Tang, men were hurled against the steel walls and equipment of the sub, in some cases breaking arms and legs. Others were badly hurt as the craft began to take on water and go down.

U.S. submariners are trained--as their Russian counterparts presumably are as well--to make difficult, instantaneous decisions while their craft is sinking or on fire. Steel hatches are immediately closed, no matter who might be doomed to drown on the other side. As seawater began to flood in through the open top hatches of the Tang, two men dived headfirst from an upper-level “tower” down into the control room before it was sealed off.

One of those men suffered a broken neck, the other a broken back, Decker said. They were brought forward to the torpedo room, where the sub’s escape chamber was located, but it was understood that they would go no farther. They silently endured their own thoughts while Decker desperately awaited the chance to exit, going up a buoyed line with the aid of emergency oxygen bags known as Momsen lungs.

“I said, ‘There’s got to be a way out of this son of a gun, and I’m going to make it,’ ” said Decker, adding that all his thoughts were focused on his family--his wife, Lucille, and 2-year-old son. Reflecting on loved ones--a wife one might never see again, children one might never watch grow up--is one of the inevitable obsessions of being down there.

The five men who escaped from the Tang’s torpedo room--four others survived from the bridge--are believed to be the only individuals who ever escaped on their own from a sub on the sea floor, Decker said.

Only afterward did his survival instincts subside enough to allow him to grieve for his fellow crewmen, he said.

The remote odds of becoming trapped is a specter that hangs over every submariner. And every submarine ordeal has its own dynamics.

Jim Bush, then a Navy lieutenant, found himself not sunk but still trapped 200 feet below the surface in international waters off the coast of Siberia in 1957.

The Cold War raged. Bush’s submarine had entered the area to monitor movements of the Soviet fleet. The U.S. World War II-vintage diesel submarine was soon surrounded by 10 Soviet warships. One Russian officer dropped three hand grenades into the water, a signal indicating that the Russians knew the submarine’s location and wanted it to surface. They gave the signal several times.

But Bush’s captain was determined not to surface. For 30 hours, Bush said, they remained at 200 feet. All the men grew quiet. Emergency lanterns only dimly lighted their quarters. Carbon dioxide levels eventually rose to 40 times normal, he said.

Even so, some of the men smoked. That in itself was difficult--they had to hold a match to the cigarette and inhale, or else the cigarette wouldn’t stay lighted. Crewmen felt increasingly sleepy and short of breath. They endured their headaches and struggled to stay awake.

“It’s very oppressive,” said Bush, who retired as a captain after 26 years in the Navy. “You get punchy, then logy.”

It was too dark to read, and no one--not even the notorious chowhounds--wanted to eat.

“It was terrifying,” Bush remembered. “You are in a tomb. . . . You are thinking you are going to die, you are thinking about your family--about how you are going to miss them and they are going to miss you, and how much you want to get back to them.”

Experts in stress say the reactions of the trapped Russian submariners may be quite different, depending on their training and shared background.

Submariners of all navies have a reputation for being close knit, perhaps in part from working in tight quarters at depths where some degree of danger is a constant.

Training hammers home the essentials of survival. The men practice deep-sea escapes. They know every aspect of operating their complex machines, especially in emergencies.

In the event that some men do break down emotionally, they are probably sent to other areas of the boat to maintain the morale of the group. “It’s almost like a dike springing a leak,” said Charles Figley, director of the traumatology institute at Florida State University in Tallahassee. “You have to shore it up.”

A Dangerous Feat of ‘Free Ascent’

The options facing the trapped Russians would appear to be few. They can await rescue from above or, if all efforts fail, attempt an extremely dangerous feat of “free ascent.”

A “blow and go” involves exiting an escape hatch and ascending without the aid of any equipment. The term comes from the counterintuitive technique involved: As they head for the surface, the men must constantly expel air, keeping their noses and mouths open. If they don’t, the expansion of air inside them caused by changing pressures can literally blow up the air sacs of their lungs.

There is also a danger of the bends, a condition induced by a rapid decrease in air pressure that causes nitrogen bubbles to form in blood and tissues, leading to convulsions and, in severe cases, death.

And in the Barents Sea, the water would be very cold--yet one more factor that would make survival improbable.

Those facts would probably churn within the minds of crewmen desperate to get out, said author Sherry Sontag, who conducted extensive research on submariners for a nonfiction book she coauthored, “Blind Man’s Bluff,” which explores submarine espionage.

“It’s like being on the top floor of a hotel fire--when do you jump?” she said.

“The idea of trying a free ascent would scare the hell out of me,” said Bush, who survived the long wait below the Soviet ships. “I’d rather stay and die.”

But Decker, who escaped the crippled World War II sub, recalled men who thought different. Two crewmen on the Tang blew themselves out of the escape chamber even before the officer in charge distributed the inflated Momsen lungs, a clunky device that hasn’t been used since World War II.

They were never seen or heard from again.

“They flooded [the chamber] and went out without even using a buoy or anything,” Decker said. “They just wanted to get out of that [vessel].”

During that sea-bottom ordeal, the heat of the cramped bodies inside the Tang was almost overwhelming, he said. “Sweat was just running off you . . . like you were sawing wood,” he said.

More Like Frigid Interior of U.S. Sub

But the situation aboard the Russian submarine would undoubtedly be much more like the frigid interior of the Squalus, an American submarine that went down in May 1939, off Portsmouth, N.H.

Twenty-six of those submariners died. Carl Bryson, now 82, was one of those rescued by means of a diving bell. The Navy machinist mate spent 35 hours inside the dark vessel, 260 feet down.

“Ice formed inside, and we had only flashlights,” Bryson said. “We put on what clothes we had, lay down, rested, tried to sleep, huddled together and tried not to burn any more oxygen than we had to.”

The Squalus was a new sub undergoing tests when water began pouring in through the ventilation system.

“We were scared but not hysterical,” he said. “Everything happened in seconds.”

The diving bell brought up three or four men at a time. Bryson, one of the last to surface, said he and other survivors have met over the years at reunions. Most are now dead.

“We don’t talk about those hours,” he said. “We talk about other things.”

As news of the Russians’ ordeal spread Monday, the crippled sub was a hot topic of discussion on Internet chat sites.

Such an unfolding tragedy seemed to touch a deep chord, raising unanswered questions about how each of us would handle the strong likelihood of death, according to psychologists.

“It brings to mind the Titanic--people essentially on a doomed ship,” said Ellin Bloch, a psychologist at the California School of Professional Psychology in Los Angeles. “It’s that fear of being buried alive--only it’s underwater.”

At the Horse & Cow, a San Diego dive catering to submariners or wannabes, the plight of the Russians dominated the barroom chatter. The feeling was one of deep empathy, and pessimism--knowing the dangers involved.

“It’s all that everyone is talking about here,” said owner and bartender Mike Looby, who summed up the dire opinions of those drinking around him by saying, “It’s going to take more than luck this time.”

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Anatomy of a Rescue Option

One rescue technique involves lowering a pressurized capsule called a “rescue bell” onto the hatch of the crippled submarine. Another method would require the trapped crew to swim through torpedo tubes into the sea--risking injury or death from the extreme depth and frigid water temperature. Shown here is how a rescue bell is used:

Source: U.S. Navy; researched by JULIE SHEER / Los Angeles Times