Spy Sub: A Top Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific Review

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(More customer reviews)I was a "khaki" (an EOOW) on a 637-class boat in the Jimmy Carter years, with service that included two special operations, a Presidential Unit Citation and an 18-month nuclear refueling overhaul. I often still wake from uncomfortable "submarine dreams" even now, some twenty years after I left the service to go to graduate school. This is the book I will give my son to show him what it was like down there.
Ignore the junk on the dust jacket: it has almost nothing to do with the book and its strengths. "Spy Sub" has much more in common with "The Cruel Sea" (Nicholas Monsarrat's classic story of WWII convoy duty) than it has in common with "The Hunt for Red October", and what it has in common with Monsarrat makes it far more authentic than the Clancy novels. If you're thinking about signing up for sub duty, then you need to read this book to see what you're heading into.
If you're looking for a fast-paced, Hollywood-style "space opera of the undersea", however, this is definitely the book for you. Read Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and "Red Storm Rising" instead, if that is the case. You'll be entertained a lot and even informed a little. I enjoyed them, too. Just keep in mind that Clancy is a fiction writer whose professional task is to focus on the glamorous and ignore the rest.
Of all the submarine books I've seen and read, "Spy Sub" captures the stone cold sober reality of service aboard a nuclear submarine the best. It shows what it;s really like aboard a nuc boat most of the time, even on a spec op: studying, qualifying, standing watch, performing mountains of required preventive maintenance, keeping your temper in tight spaces, standing watch some more, noticing patterns before they became problems, fixing things that broke, going back on watch yet again, studying to qualify for the next higher watchstation on your off time, and just generally tending to the part of the mission that is your job, so the ship can do its job. Most of it isn't at all glamorous, and almost all of it is very hard work.
I'm not at all surprised that Petty Officer Dunham went on to medical school and a successful career as a physician after he finished his tour of sub duty. The men in dungarees I served with stood head and shoulders above most of my university classmates, and I watched many of them go on to spectacular careers in civilian life. If you read this book carefully and think about it, you will understand why that was so. There is no other experience on this planet that rubs your nose in the details of physical (and psychological) reality quite as thoroughly as service on a nuc boat. The only other experience that might come close is service as an astronaut on an Apollo moon shot.
It's not for everybody. But it's an unbeatable education. Read this book to see why.

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