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"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
- Thomas Jefferson
"The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty."- Abraham Lincoln
May God have mercy upon my enemies, because I won't.
- General George Patton Jr
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"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
-- John Adams (Address to the Military, 11 October 1798)
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"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment nothing can fail.
Without it nothing can succeed.
He who molds opinion is greater than he who enacts laws.
"-Abraham Lincoln
The Russians did it.
by Major Van Harl USAF
In the US Navy if you are the ship’s captain and you allow your vessel to run aground or plow into another ship, that is the kiss of death to your naval career. But this rule actually only applies to surface warfare ships, meaning the ones that float on the top of the water. When it comes to submarines it would appear the no physical contact between a US sub and the other guy’s sub is not strictly enforced. In fact, it has been an un-official practice ever since we have had a submarine branch of our Navy; if you can sneak up on your opponent and dent his sub first, you could get promoted. Sort of like the modern equivalent of the old Native American practice of counting coupe on his enemy in battle. Touching, (even physically beating) and humiliating your enemy on the battlefield without actually killing them. No bloodshed, therefore no foul and no honor for your enemy.
US nuclear submarines have been playing high stakes “chicken” with the Russian Navy subs ever since the
first nuclear powered sub was
launched in the 1950s. We had
the advantage of superior technology. The Russians had more subs but ours were always better--we thought.
A US sub commander would stalk a
Russian sub to torment the Russian
crew, just because they could.
I lived in Scotland in the 1960s
with my father, the Navy Master
Chief. He was stationed on a
nuclear sub, repair ship. The
rest of the US military may have
been engaged in a “cold war”
with the Russians but the sub
fleet always went to sea as if they
were in a hot war with the Soviet
Union. Our nuclear subs were so good they would drive right up under a Soviet sub and be only feet away from the top of the US sub, scrapping the bottom of the Russian sub. Every once in a while a Russian sub would start to submerge without knowing a US sub was directly below it. So the two subs would collide.
For the US sub captain it was a badge of honor to show up at a US Navy base requesting millions of dollars in emergency repairs to his sub, because he had smacked into a Russian sub while hiding inside a Soviet Navy ship yard. Since this was all top secret and the American public was not allowed to know about the potential world war provoking actions of both countries submarine forces, no one knew just how close we kept getting, to going to war with the Russians, on a daily basis. Submarines are known as the silent service. You cannot hear the subs patrolling underwater and you cannot hear the screams of the sailors dying as their
subs fill with water on their way to crush
depth. But in fact even in the early 1960s
the US could hear both sides’ subs, cries of
pain, as they died in the middle of the ocean.
On Memorial Day in 1968 the Soviet Navy
killed one of our subs deliberately. They
fired a torpedo into the USS Scorpion
SSN-589 and killed the entire crew and
they got away with it. Weeks earlier a
US sub was seen by Soviet agents limping
back to port in need of extensive repairs.
The Soviet sub K-129 had gone missing
at the same time. The Russians had had
enough of the Americans winning at the
game of under-sea chicken, so the Soviets
upped the stakes and just killed one of our subs. We most likely caused their sub to sink, but as a by product of an accidental collision, not a deliberate act of war. What we did not know at the time was a US Navy Warrant officer had been selling top secret code information to the Russians for years prior to the sinking of the Scorpion. On the day the Russians torpedoed the Scorpion, they were reading all the message traffic between the Scorpion and Navy senior leadership. The Scorpion could not get away from its aggressors because the Russians knew every move the US sub was about the make. Scorpion Down, by Ed Offley (special.markets@perseusbooks.com) tells the story of the death of that sub, a story the US and Russian Navies still will not tell. It is a page turner and after you read what horrific damage a US traitor can do to our Nation’s security you may become a fan of water-boarding.
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