No Ordinary Joes by Larry Colton Page A

he heard a dull explosion.
    Not positive if they’d scored a direct hit, Grenfell cautiously brought his ship closer to the surface. There was no submarine in sight, no propeller sounds or sonar. It’s not known for sure if the torpedoes worked; there is speculation that I-173 tried to dive but forgot to close its hatches, thus flooding the ship. In any case, the submarine disappeared from radio traffic forever, making it the first major Japanese warship sunk in World War II.
    Chuck’s reaction surprised him. He expected to feel a sense of revenge, and in fact he’d shouted and raised his fist in triumph when he heard the explosion, until he visualized the Japanese crew in their control room, doing the same job he did. Surely they must have heard the swishing sound of the torpedo approaching, and surely for an instant before the explosion they knew what was about to happen. Rationally, he knew they were the enemy and needed to be eliminated. Still, it bothered him.

6
Bob Palmer
USS
Tuna
    W hen Bob dropped out of Medford High to join the Navy in September 1939 just before Germany invaded Poland, it was not for duty and country. He wanted to get away from his stepmother Cora and from the pain of the breakup with his sweetheart Barbara Koehler.
    Initially, Bob thought joining the Navy was the greatest thing that had ever happened to him. At boot camp in San Diego, California, he loved everything about it: the playing of taps in the evening, the colors, saluting the flag, and even all the marching on the Grinder, which is what the recruits called the marching compound. Sometimes in the morning when they raised the flag and played reveille, he’d feel so much pride that he got tears in his eyes. For the first time in his life, he felt he belonged. He liked the simplicity and regimented routine. His life had purpose. But by the time he finished boot camp, he was beginning to have doubts, thinking the only skills he’d really learned were how to march and how to peel potatoes. When he was assigned to the USS
Wright
, an aging World War I mother ship to seaplanes, he had hopes of working as an airplane mechanic, but in the three months he’d been at Pearl Harbor, all he’d done was scrape paint from the hull of the old ship. About the only thing he felt good about was all the letters he’d written home for his crewmates. It surprised him how many of them didn’t know how to write.
    Then one day the ship’s executive officer asked if anyone on the crew could type. Bob was the only person who raised his hand; in his junior yearhe’d taken a typing class, thinking it might be a good way to meet girls. The officer instructed him to step forward.
    “You just volunteered,” he said.
    The next day, Bob reported to the USS
Tuna
, a submarine, and was assigned to be the man in charge of clerical duties, the ship’s yeoman, or as crewmates often called the position, “first pussy.” And that’s how he became a submariner.
    Bob quickly regained the sense of purpose he’d initially felt when he joined the Navy. He liked his crewmates on the
Tuna
. What struck him most about this crew as compared with that of the
Wright
was how much smarter the men seemed. They could all read and write, and they were good at mechanical and engineering problems. Plus, there was a camaraderie and togetherness that he hadn’t felt before. It wasn’t something the crew talked about, it was just there.
    He admitted, however, to being nervous on his first training dive. It was his first time aboard a sub. The ship plunged downward at a steep angle and there was a lot of clanging and banging, the sound of rushing air, and the sight of men furiously spinning valves. It was the noises that scared him most. As the ship’s yeoman, he had the sense that he was just along for the ride, a reluctant passenger on a scary ride at an amusement park. He felt the ship throb, almost like it was groaning. He held on to the desk in his little cubbyhole of an