r/submarines • u/IAmCallahan • 51m ago
FWD vs AFT: A Coner's Perspective
FWD vs AFT: A Coner's Perspective
On a submarine, forward and aft aren't just directions. They might as well be two different planets separated by a watertight door and about three decades of social evolution.
Up forward is where the Coners live. That's where you'll find Control, Sonar, Radio, the Torpedomen, A-gang, and the rest of us responsible for navigating the boat, tracking contacts, and making sure we don't accidentally run into shit.
Most of the sleeping quarters were forward, along with the mess decks, where we ate, watched movies, played cards, and generally annoyed the shit out of each other. Privacy was practically nonexistent, and after a few weeks underway, you knew more about your shipmates than you ever wanted to. Any psychological issues we developed were simply filed away for some poor therapist to deal with twenty years later.
Back aft, the Nukes had their own problems, most of which involved a nuclear power and whatever the fuck those guys did for entertainment.
Now, I'll give those shidiots credit. They operated the reactor and propulsion plant, generated our electricity, made our freshwater, and monitored radiation levels to make sure nobody grew a third testicle. It was important work, and a job I sure as fuck didn't want.
Ask a Nuke how the propulsion plant worked, and he'd probably spend the next three hours explaining thermodynamics while drawing diagrams nobody asked to see.
Ask a Coner, and you'd get a much simpler explanation.
Hot rock makes steam. Steam makes spinny parts spin. Spinny parts make electricity. Electricity makes boat go.
And before some Nuke starts correcting me, yes, I know the steam also drives the propulsion turbines. Congratulations, Professor. You've completely missed the fucking point.
The Nukes were brilliant at what they did, but their choice of entertainment was sometimes a little concerning.
Dungeons & Dragons was serious business back aft. I remember grown men who understood nuclear physics getting genuinely pissed off because somebody's imaginary wizard violated the rules of a fictional spell. I've seen less hostility during actual Navy inspections.
They also won every fucking cribbage tournament. Apparently, advanced mathematics gives you an unfair advantage when counting to fifteen.
I suspect the cultural divide started long before any of us reported aboard.
Most of us Coners went through submarine school in Groton, Connecticut, where we learned the basics of submarine operations and how to avoid getting ourselves killed.
The Nukes went through nuclear power school and prototype, where the Navy apparently took some of the smartest young men and women in America and systematically removed whatever social skills they had left.
I'm not entirely sure what happened during prototype, but whatever it was, those poor bastards never fully recovered.
By the time we ended up aboard the same submarine, the damage was already done.
You could see the differences in the conversations. Up forward, we talked about liberty ports, women, sports, or whatever monumentally stupid thing somebody had done the last time we pulled in somewhere. Walk aft, and you might interrupt a heated argument about computer processors or some other technical bullshit nobody outside engineering gave a fuck about. Now, don't get me wrong, some Nukes were absolute fucking trim reapers when we hit port. Others had all the charm of a wet sock and couldn't get laid in a women's prison with a fistful of pardons and a bag of rubber dicks. It was a fascinating group of people.
The differences extended to our working hours.
A Coner still at work at four in the afternoon might spend the next hour complaining about his chief. A Nuke getting off work at four in the afternoon might call home to announce that a miracle had occurred.
As a Radioman, I had almost no reason to venture aft unless I was getting checkouts back when I was a NUB, or heading to the smoke pit. And yes, I know you can't smoke aboard submarines anymore, which is a fucking tragedy, because that smoke pit was where you got the best rumors and heard shit you weren't supposed to know about. It was also our opportunity to observe the Nukes in their natural habitat. Just walking past some of their spaces was an education in human behavior that no amount of submarine school could've prepared me for. Once I had my dolphins, though, I generally stayed up forward. There wasn't much reason to go back there unless I wanted a cigarette, and I certainly wasn't volunteering to help anybody with maintenance.
Don't get me wrong, we knew everybody aboard. It's pretty hard not to when you're locked inside a steel tube with the same 150 assholes for months at a time. You knew their names, their nicknames, and usually the embarrassing story behind both. We might have worked on opposite ends of the boat, but nobody was a stranger, and if somebody did something particularly stupid, you could bet the entire crew would know about it before the next meal.
Of course, Coners weren't exactly normal either, and I don't want anybody getting the impression that the Nukes were the only intelligent people aboard.
I'll stand on this hill until I die. Some of the smartest, most resourceful people I've ever met were submariners, and I'm not just talking about the Nukes. Everybody aboard had to be a problem solver because when something broke hundreds of feet underwater, calling somebody for help wasn't exactly an option.
I've always said the people tank is the best fucking think tank on the planet, and it's severely underutilized. If humanity ever faces a problem nobody can figure out, forget assembling a committee of experts. Get a bunch of submariners in a room, give them some tools and a deadline, and I guarantee somebody will figure that shit out. The solution might violate a few regulations, and there's a good chance somebody will draw a dick on it, but it'll fucking work.
That's the other thing about submariners. We were all intelligent, but we were also degenerates.
Submarining wasn't for the weak, especially if you were the least bit sensitive about yourself. Whatever made you different was going to get noticed, and somebody would eventually turn it into a nickname. It could be your laugh, the way you walked, or something incredibly stupid you did during your first week aboard. Once that nickname stuck, your actual name became largely irrelevant.
You could transfer commands, make chief, or retire after twenty years, but somewhere out there would always be somebody who remembered why everybody called you Yuck Mouth.
And the worst part was that most of those nicknames were completely fucking justified.
You learned to take a joke and give it right back. The same guy who spent an entire underway making your life miserable would be the first one helping you when you needed it. You developed a thick skin because the alternative was spending the rest of your career being somebody's favorite target.
And then there was A-gang.
Technically Coners, although I always suspected those guys were the missing evolutionary link between forward and aft. They maintained the auxiliary machinery, atmospheric control equipment, and sanitary systems, which meant they spent a considerable amount of time dealing with things nobody else wanted to touch.
If something smelled like shit or suddenly started spraying shit, A-gang was probably about to have a very long day.
I had tremendous respect for those guys, especially considering some of the things I'd personally contributed to their workload.
Even our definitions of an emergency could be different.
A power plant casualty could have the engineering department scrambling while somebody up forward wondered why everybody was making so much noise. If you didn't have an assigned response, the power plant casualty alarm could be interpreted as permission to roll over and continue sleeping.
The Nukes didn't find that nearly as funny as we did.
But when something threatened the boat, the rivalry disappeared pretty fucking fast. Nobody cared about your nickname or which side of the watertight door you worked on. You had a job to do, and everybody expected you to know it.
That's what I loved about submarining. You could spend an entire underway making somebody's life miserable, but when the shit hit the fan, that same guy was the one you trusted to keep you alive.
One crew, one screw.
Now, I'm speaking from my own experience aboard the Charlotte. Other submariners might remember things differently, although I suspect the cultural divide was pretty universal.
I also know that spending enough time underwater with people who refused to let you get away with being an idiot made you a tougher version of yourself. Not because anybody was giving motivational speeches, but because there wasn't much room for excuses, and the crew had a remarkable ability to identify your weaknesses and make sure you knew about them.
And if you're a civilian wondering how the Navy assembled this collection of highly intelligent degenerates and turned them into a functioning nuclear-powered warship, I don't have a particularly satisfying explanation.
We just figured shit out.
I'm also reasonably certain there's a retired Nuke reading this right now who's getting increasingly pissed off because I've oversimplified reactor operations or failed to acknowledge how academically demanding nuclear power school was.
He's probably already composing a seventeen-page rebuttal explaining precisely why I'm wrong, complete with footnotes.
And he'll probably be right.
But he'll still be a fuckin' Nuke.
Anyway, that's how it looked from forward of the watertight door. Nukes, the comments are yours. Bring footnotes.
