In those days every ship of our capability in what was known as the retaliatory forces—variously submarines, cruisers, destroyers, frigates—had a fixed target city—or cities, depending on the number and type of missiles carried—and was deployed in one of nine bodies of water: the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, the Norwegian Sea, the Barents Sea, the Mediterranean, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the North Pacific, and the Sea of Okhotsk. The Navy had used the waters of the world, free and unsovereign to all under ancient laws of the sea, effectively to surround the enemy on virtually all points of the compass. We felt actually lucky to have a city at all. The total capability had become so considerable that there were not enough cities to go around so that there developed something of a continuing bureaucratic battle in the armed services for target cities. Not only that, there was further such bureaucratic fighting within the services themselves for the assignments. In the Navy, for example, one ship alone, the nuclear submarine USS Ohio, carried an even two dozen multiple-warhead missiles—enough in one vessel to obliterate every major and medium-sized city on the enemy’s surface. And the Ohio was but one of ten Trident submarines with seven of these on patrol in the North Pacific at all times; not to mention other missile-armed submersibles regularly patrolling other seas, all within range of targets. So that there arose a competition even within the Navy itself—for example, between the admiral in Washington commanding submarines and the admiral commanding destroyers—as to the allocation of cities.
The submarines, perhaps fairly, considering their relative invisibility, got most of them, but a few were reserved for the guided-missile destroyers, of which we, the USS Nathan James, were one. There were compelling reasons. Despite all our famous technology, unlike surface ships there was a good deal of unpredictability attached to communications between distant nations and their submarines. True, much progress had been made of late with VLF (very low frequency) channels, but the problem was still there. No one in far-off national command centers could be certain of reaching across long waters, then down into the deep to a submerged submarine, and especially in atmospheric conditions made twisted, distorted, as conflict would of a surety do. Why our ship was in the Barents in the first place could be said in a single word, one of those strange and omnipotent words, quite awful but apparently essential, which in the latter part of the century seemed eerily to change and darken the very nature of language itself. Redundancy. Redundancy, survivability, options, backups: These, not without cause, considering that the enemy was guided by the identical nomenclature, became the operable terms; if one system failed there would be another which would work. But perhaps the most mandatory reason of all for including surface ships in land-attack forces was the following: The submarine went principally armed with the ballastic missile, the surface ship with the cruise missile, which though slower was much more marvelously versatile; infinitely more accurate, far more difficult of detection; the fact furthermore that, due to limited magazine space, submarines could not carry anything like the quantity of missiles of a surface ship. Altogether, there was no escaping the fact that surface ships embraced many factors of reliability in regard to reaching target not present with the submersible fleet. All the same, considering the competition for them, we counted ourselves fortunate to be given a city. Its name was Orel, situated at latitude 36°00’ N., longitude 53°10’ E., 1,040 miles from the cold shores of the Barents Sea.
On our ship—and I have an idea that something of the sort was true of other vessels—the city that was assigned us became over time as familiar to us, almost in a familial sense, as is a “sister-city” in the kind of relationship that cities of different nations sometimes have with one another, in those cases most often because there is something to connect them—a city in Michigan, for example, keeping up a relationship with a city in Holland from which many of its citizenry had originally come, exchanging visits and holding welcoming festivals over the years and the like. We exchanged no such visits, but nevertheless the relationship became a strong and binding one on our part. We came to think of it as “our city” and grew to know it quite fondly. At first we knew little more than the population—311,656 by the latest available census, but in time we picked up, accumulated, in the nature of a research hobby, a good deal of information concerning it. The fact that its name translated as “eagle” and that it had been established in 1564 during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. Its status as the district capital and an important railway junction, situated at the confluence of the Oka and Orlik rivers. Its principal industries—manufacture of agricultural and roadmaking machinery and of food products. The item that the city boasted a small but exceptionally fine ballet company. Actually, in our case, as in most, the target of course was not the city itself but the installation located near it, in this instance the even dozen SS-18 missile silos, housing the great “heavy” ten-warhead ICBM, set not far beyond the city’s perimeter on the road to a place called Spasskoye.
It was not that we needed any of these facts (except the last-named) in connection with our mission but rather that man being an inquisitive creature, it was natural that that curiosity in this case should be directed toward the one place on earth with which we were so inextricably linked, the city that indeed constituted the entire reason for our existence, though none of us had ever seen it or in all probability ever would. Except, by pure chance, one member of our ship’s company, Lieutenant Thurlow, our navigator. Thurlow had undertaken Russian studies as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and had been in Orel once after Michaelmas term. As we patrolled, now in the Norwegian Sea, now in the Barents—thirty days in those often turbulent waters before being relieved by our sister ship, the USS Cantwell, and heading back to our base in Norway for ten days of liberty and upkeep before once more standing out to sea and returning north to station—we had many random conversations on Orel, with Thurlow telling us all he knew, and otherwise wondering, picturing in our minds, what the city that lay beyond those dark waves might be like on a given day, the people going about their business, market days on a summer Saturday, a church scene on a January Sunday with people approaching the church in astrakhans, bundled up as in a Tolstoy novel, and shaking the snow from their garments before entering to worship. Thurlow even furnished us with its name and description: Church of the Archangel Michael, located on a street interestingly named Sacco and Vanzetti. I think the loneliness and isolation of duty on those bleak and tossing waters also assisted the Orel studies by giving us something to be interested in. Thurlow’s freely proffered elucidations included the particular that local enthusiasts were accustomed to call the city the literary capital of Russia and that many of the streets were named for writers and poets who indeed were born and lived there, including Turgenev, Andreyev, Bunin, Granovsky, Fet, Prishvin, and Leskov, the last named setting forth the claim that the city “nourished for the motherland more Russian writers than any other Russian town.” To few aboard were these names known except, by a certain number, that of Turgenev; Thurlow then going on to elaborate on the considerable Turgenev family estate, now a national shrine, and the datum that it lay forty miles north of the city at Spasskoye, where the writer grew up and, returning after years abroad, there accomplished some of his more illustrious writing including the completion of Fathers and Sons; the navigator fluently mentioning a letter penned by the writer in France to a Russian friend, “When you are next in Spasskoye give my regards to the house, the grounds and my young oak tree—to my homeland,” adding offhandedly that he had observed on his own visit to the estate that Turgenev’s oak tree was still to be seen. As a consequence of this tutelage, we went so far, at the navigator’s instigation, as to procure this author’s works for our library and enough of the crew, men and officers alike, read them as to make me feel safe in asserting unreservedly that the Nathan James numbered in her company more Turgenev scholars than any other vessel on the United States Navy’s entire roster of ships.
As to our ship’s strike capability, ourselves alone carrying weapons able to erase millions of souls, we scarcely ever alluded to the fact, much less discussed it. To converse on such a matter: there are things that to discuss seems an exercise in puerility before immutable fact, unalterable by men. One might as well have discussed why stars exist—or, perhaps more aptly, why wars. To do so is not the habit of sailors. Our ASWO (anti-submarine warfare officer), Lieutenant (jg) Rollins, happened to be a ballet aficionada. Once Rollins did comment briefly that a famous dancer by the name of Kalganov whom she had been fortunate enough to see perform in Houston, Texas, during a leave in her home state, had for a number of years lived in Orel as a member of its celebrated ballet before defecting to the United States and remarked oddly, “I’m glad he’s not in Orel anymore.” It didn’t seem to occur to anybody where this famous dancer now was, New York, or that all of the earth’s seas flow two ways. On a rare occasion someone might mention that if we had this almost affectionate relationship with Orel, surely one of theirs had a similar relationship with, say, the American city from which the speaker came, say Boston. But that sort of parenthetical interjection in our Orel conversations was a seldom thing, almost never picked up, certainly not encouraged. We preferred to dwell on the characteristics of Orel. It sounded altogether an interesting city. Not a hand aboard but who would have liked to have shore liberty there.