Veterans of USS Phoenix reflect on submarine life
Service at sea was about trust and brotherhood
Retired Navy Capt. Pete Lumianski looks on, beaming, as the silver tour bus pulls into the dusty parking lot at Papago Park Military Reservation in east Phoenix. It’s an unseasonably mild June day: 95 degrees, overcast and windy. Papago Park’s red sandstone cliffs, the backdrop, pop against the gray-blue sky.
“The bus is coming in,” Lumianski says to himself, still grinning. He has been planning, awaiting this day for over a year. “Here they come.”
On the bus are a group of veterans of the USS Phoenix — the city’s namesake nuclear submarine. They’re in town on this weekend for a Phoenix crew reunion, planned by Lumianski and other members of the USS Phoenix Commission.
Dust kicks up as 55 or so people file into the mostly vacant lot. Other than the dirt, there’s a fleet of white National Guard buses, cars, Phoenix memorabilia the commission team put up and a blue sun shelter guarding ice cream and water bottles from melting.
The Phoenix is here in the lot, too.
Part of her, at least.
The Navy decommissioned the submarine in 1998 and only a few pieces of it remain: the black 16-ton diving plane, the 15-ton rudder, the 30-ton sail and sail plane. The parts submariners consider most iconic.
The veterans and their families meander about. They, like Lumianski, eye the massive pieces of iron. Everyone sports matching navy blue t-shirts inscribed with the words “Blue 702” — a homage to the Phoenix’s technical name, SSN-702. Nuclear submarine No. 702.
This is the first time most of the former crew members have seen the submarine, what remains of it, in two dec-
ades. This isn’t the Phoenix’s final resting place, though.
Lumianski and other Phoenix Commission members, like Carol Culbertson, have worked for the last 20 years to create a Cold War monument, using the submarine’s remains, at Steele Indian School Park. The monument, once welded together, will suggest a downsized replica of the Phoenix
For now, though, the shipmates look on at the salvaged parts of the boat that once contained their lives.
“Nobody knows that submarines are a family business,” says Alan Mowbray, who served on the Phoenix from 1989 to 1995. Mowbray, who is getting ready to start a master’s degree program in family, children and marriage counseling this August, says everyone in the submarine family dynamic, as in most families, plays a unique role.
Women weren’t yet permitted to serve aboard submarines during the Phoenix’s service, so their roles were back home, as wives, mothers, daughters and sisters, the anchors that kept everything running smoothly, on land.
The men serving on the Phoenix held very specific roles.
Bob “The COB” Saenz, who served on the Phoenix from 1987 to 1989, breaks it down like this: there’s the commanding officer, or captain; the chief of the boat, or COB; officers and enlisted personnel. Saenz was a chief of the boat, thus his nickname.
The chief of the boat and commanding officer are the most powerful people on a submarine, Saenz says. They control different aspects of the boat.
“The best way to explain it is: I let the captain have the boat so he could take it to war,” he says. “And he let me have the crew, to do what’s best to keep that boat at war.”
Saenz, who wearsa silver beard and leather vest, doesn’t beat around the bush. He offers a simpler, slightly more crass explanation of his job title.
“I was the head sonuvabitch in charge,” he says. “This young man” — he points to Mowbray — “will tell you, it was my way or the highway.”
Mowbray laughs. “He made us clean too much,” he says. “It’d be like: ‘We’re clean! We can’t find anything!’ And he’s like, ‘You’re not going deep enough!’”
After retiring from the Navy, Saenzwent on to work as a heavy construction laborer. (”I wanted to work Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, so I could drink beer Friday, Saturday, Sunday and recover Monday,” he says.) Within a year, his supervisors promoted him from a laborer to a project manager to a superintendent to a company vice president.
He credits this to his military resume of “kicking ass.”
Mowbray served with Saenz the first year of his deployment, 1989, which was Saenz’s last year on the Phoenix. And Mowbray speaks highly of Saenz, even though the chief and his no-BS work ethic expected a lot of his crew.
“The truth is, we had a weak COB, when he left,” Mowbray says. “And the crew’s morale went down. A strong COB is vital to crew moral — because the crew doesn’t see him as picking on them. They see him as fighting for them.”
Mowbray says he couldn’t let go of the Phoenix after he got out of the military in 1995. He missed it even more when the Navy decommissioned the boat in 1998.
“I mourned the boat,” Mowbray says. He missed the Phoenix so much, he would sometimes look at it on Google Maps while it was docked, post decommissioning, at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Wash.
Mowbray says seeing the Phoenix “cut up” is bittersweet. He was “just a kid,” at 22 years old, when he started serving on the boat. He says he left the boat, six years later, a man.
Bill Huebener, one of Mowbray’s old shipmates, nods in agreement.
“I miss it. This is bittersweet,” Huebener says. He served on the Phoenix from 1991 to 1995 and now teaches sailors of Navy surface ships how to use electronic navigation. “I never had a bad day. Days working tired you, but you’d look over and see your friend doing something goofy.” That made it worthwhile, he says.
Messing around was a critical part of submarine life. An “art form,” really, according to retired Capt. Jim Ratte.
“You’re always playing practical jokes on each other, always pushing people’s buttons,” he says. “And if you weren’t the type of person that could take it and push it back? You were in trouble.”
Ratte, who now serves as a minister, was the Phoenix’s last commanding officer from June 1996 to July 1998. He and his crew took the Phoenix on her final deployments and prepared her for decommissioning.
He also pushed some major buttons. It’s now the day after the visit at Papago Park. It’s a cool, slightly humid evening, thanks to an early summer rain, and the veterans are gathered outside at Aunt Chilada’s restaurant in north Phoenix, in the shadow of Piestewa Peak. They’re drinking beer and eating chips and salsa at a reunion and reception.
Lumianski and company again peppered plenty of Phoenix memorabilia throughout the venue: photo albums, highlighter orange seasuits, newspaper clippings, a book by Arizona Republic cartoonist Steve Benson. A somber place setting for the three Phoenix veterans who have passed away since their service.
There is a stage at this reception. At one point, the chief of the boat Ratte served with, Chuck Harris, mounts it. He’s going to tell a sea story, he says, taking the mic.
“Where are you, Cap’n Ratte?” Harris, who enlisted in the Navy straight out of high school, hails from the mountains of North Carolina and speaks with a Southern drawl. Ratte starts snickering. He already knows the story Harris is going to tell.
Harris continues. “Get up here, sir. Don’t make me tell you twice!
Ratte obeys. Before he leaves, though, he steals Harris’ punchline. “I made him wear pink underwear,” he says.
“He called me up for a picture,” Harris says, watching Ratte approach the stage. “Someone from the Phoenix Commission wanted a picture. And he made me wear pink underwear!”
Harris holds up a photo. On the left side is a young, mustached Ratte wearing boxers, smoking a cigar. And on the right, sure enough: a young, apparently unenthused Harris wearing the pink underwear. Ratte, along with the rest of the group, starts cackling.
“Cap’n, I’ve posted this photo for 21 years at home in what I call my goat locker,” Harris says. “But that’s your picture.” He hands Ratte the photo.
But wait, he says. There’s one more thing. He reaches behind the podium on the stage and grabs something. The underwear.
“And here’s your underwear, too! Tomorrow night, I suspect you’ll be wearing ‘em!”
The veterans holler. Ratte hops off the stage, cracking up. He walks back to his seat, bearing his award.
“This is how much power a CO has,” Ratte says. “You can tell another man to put on pink underwear and come and take a picture that’s used as an advertisement that he’ll see the rest of his life. That’s how much power you have.”
Though joking around was a central aspect of survival, when the submarine got underway, trust was equally, if not more, important.
Trust was the reason shipmates could live and work, for months at a time, in a windowless tube crammed with 100 other people. The submariners, living a reality marked by high carbon dioxide and low oxygen levels, along with sleep deprivation, trusted each other with their lives. They lived this tired, cramped reality while operating a nuclear-powered war machine.
They weren’t just shipmates, at that point. They were family.
“That term ‘shipmate’ means you will do anything for that person, whatsoever,” Ratte says. “That you will sacrifice your life, you’ll help them out of a jam, you’ll be there when they call. There’s a lot of deep significance, when you call another person shipmate.”
Your shipmates had to trust you, Ratte says, if you ever wanted to get your silver dolphins — the pin the Navy awards sailors who have proven themselves qualified to serve on a submarine. The dolphins showed to other submariners that you made it through your first deployment on the boat.
More so, they demonstrated you were a shipmate, a brother, who could be trusted.
“The guys on submarines? They wear dolphins,” Saenz says, referring to the insignia worn by qualified submariners. “And by the virtue of those dolphins … they’re the best guys in the world. They would give their life for me, and I would give my life for them.”
Ratte says he’s still close with Harris, his chief of the boat. Harris served as a literal and figurative guiding compass for Ratte.
“I get lost all the time, everywhere. I get talking, I get lost,” Ratte says. “So (my family), they’re always telling me, ‘How were you ever in charge of a nuclear submarine? How did you ever get where you needed to go?’ Then they’d stop and say, ‘Oh, that’s because you had Chuck Harris to take care of you.’
“That was my wife, my kids, my mom, my dad, my brothers,” he said. “They all would say the same thing. Chuck Harris got hold of all of them and just brainwashed them!”
The sense of family extended beyond the crew. The men aboard the Phoenix adopted their shipmates’ wives, parents and children, too.
Harris says families back home are a top concern when you’re getting your crew underway on a months-long deployment. He, as chief of the boat, ensured wives and kids had everything they needed, in case of emergency. Powers of attorney, contact information, payroll information.
“Because I’m gonna take their husbands away from them for quite a while,” Harris said. “So you always worry about families.”