People sometimes ask me what it was like being in the Navy. As anyone who has served in the military likely knows, there is no single easy answer to that question. For me, it was a mix of frustration, hard work, and personal empowerment, which began with my freshman year at the Naval Academy. As we adjusted to our new lives in the military, we were reminded frequently about the commitment we had made to our country and to the people we would lead. Whether we would be directing ships at sea or leading Marines into combat, we all would one day have a vital role in defending our nation, even if it seemed relatively small, and the training we undertook at the Academy was preparing us for those roles. Yet, even late in my time at the Academy, despite all the training I had done and the weeks spent among ships, aircraft, and Marines, I still had trouble imagining what form my role would take. Being the kind who usually blended into the crowd, even at the Naval Academy, I never imagined myself in one that could be considered unique.
When I received news that my first duty out of the Academy was on USS Virginia (SSN 774), it nearly sent me into shock. Virginia was a brand-new, state-of-the-art attack submarine—the lead vessel of its class—scheduled to launch in late 2003. We had begun to learn about this new “boat” during my freshman year at the Academy, but the details were limited. Construction on Virginia was initiated in 1998 in response to the increasing cost of the Seawolf class of submarines. This new design was a less expensive alternative, and the new vessels would be more capable of operating in littoral areas, close to the shore.
When I arrived at the sub in the building yards of Groton, Connecticut, I was given a tour by a pair of junior officers who had arrived a few months before I had. I tried to make sense of my surroundings as we climbed through the boat’s innards, but they were so jammed with workers, test gear, and construction equipment that it was hard to move, much less identify the various parts. Other than the obvious ones, like torpedo tubes or the crew’s bunks, I recognized almost nothing. Over the next couple of years, I would learn the function of every pipe, valve, and electrical panel I saw that day. The boat was impressive, but it was hard to imagine it being ready for a mission at sea, and almost as hard to believe I’d ever know enough to help drive it.
Virginia was put to sea in the summer of 2004, and as is often the case, it got under way without the most junior crew members, who were not sufficiently qualified to help drive the boat, including me. We had been left behind so there would be sleeping capacity for engineers, testing personnel, and of course, the VIPs in a very crowded boat. While I knew I was perhaps two months from finishing my first major qualification, which would allow me to begin contributing on the watch rotation, it still seemed a lifetime away. Even as I watched the boat pull away from the pier on its historic voyage, I still felt like little more than a spectator. This was my first of many lessons on the importance of qualifications, but I had not fully embraced its significance. I was still more a midshipman than an officer.
In November 2005, when I pinned on my gold-plated dolphins, signifying the completion of officer qualification, I had been in the boat for nearly eighteen months. This was long past the normal completion time, and my enthusiasm for my assignment had faded significantly. Although we had spent a good amount of time at sea during the preceding year and had even conducted a brief tactical mission, the first for a Virginia-class submarine, my qualification for the most rewarding watch position at sea was immediately followed by another long year in the shipyard. I had trouble staying focused on my work and even had to redo one of my final qualification boards with the captain. I was bitter, discouraged, and at that point in my submarine career, I wanted little else than for it to be over.
To some people, my frustrations seemed unwarranted, and for good reason. After all, I was a member of the first crew of this first-of-class submarine. My name would be listed with all the other “plankowners” on a plaque that would remain on board the ship until it was decommissioned. I had seen and participated in testing exercises most submariners never experience in their entire careers, including unusual and dramatic tests of the propulsion plant as well as firing the ship’s first torpedoes at sea. Yet it was impossible not to think of other junior officers in the submarine force like my own roommate, who was helping lead his boat on a long and technically challenging deployment that would take them under the polar ice and around the world. Meanwhile, I was stuck in a shipyard in New England, trying to pass qualification boards I knew I was smart enough to pass. Beyond my personal development, I was also having trouble identifying the contribution I was making to this ship and its crew and to the Navy in a meaningful way. I wanted to serve, to have some impact on national security; that was why I had joined.
Some of the setbacks for me and my peers in Virginia had to do with the practical difficulties of being on a new-construction ship. Training the crew required some creative adaptation. To put this in perspective, it is hard to learn how to navigate a boat out of port when it is still bolted to the pier and covered in scaffolding, and it is nearly impossible to qualify to operate a piece of equipment when it hasn’t yet been installed. Most of the time, we used computer simulations and props to create scenarios we might encounter, which reminded me of some of the absurd things that we were told at the Academy as part of our military training. A classic example was the repeated notion that returning late to Bancroft Hall, the Academy’s dormitory, was akin to missing a ship’s underway movement, as if an eight-wing building would break from its moorings and set sail without us. The training lesson was to get us to appreciate the importance of timeliness, and more important, the consequences of being tardy in the Fleet. To the midshipmen, it was a joke. While I knew that the implications here were much more serious than they had been back at the Academy, it was still difficult to keep my focus day to day when my training scenarios were so far from reality.
Another year passed, but by then things had changed considerably, for me and for the boat. Virginia had completed all of its initial testing at sea and was eight months or so into a follow-on effort to inspect, repair, and upgrade its thousands of major components. The shipyard, in its furious effort to finish projects on time, was constantly scheduling one work activity on top of another, many of which were in direct conflict. While one system was being reassembled, another was being torn apart; one worker was asking to weld in a given space, while another was asking to do work with explosive gas only a few feet away. Through all of this, the ship’s reactor plant was shifted from one unusual lineup to another to support work on its multitude of propulsion and electrical components. There were pumps running on power supplied by temporary cables, cooling systems running on temporary refrigeration units outside the boat, and many other strange setups.
One day, I was assigned to be the acting engineer on the boat while the captain was away. The shipyard planned its usual symphony of chaos, which included atypical alignments of the reactor coolant system for maintenance and tests. We proceeded to carry out the plan we had been handed, but as things tend to happen during shipyard testing evolutions, I was faced with making a choice about how to realign the plant’s systems. I thought about the risks of two paths we could take and made a call to the captain. He reiterated an option we had considered earlier but because of the unique conditions I had thought might conflict with an obscure part of Navy engineering procedures. He was silent for a moment, but then said, “You’re right, Lucas, we can’t do that. Let’s go with your proposal.” It was a simple exchange of words, but it signified that I had independently reached a conclusion about a complex problem that the captain hadn’t thought of first. Suddenly my contribution seemed clearer. Even more important, this man, who less than a year earlier hadn’t seemed to trust me to do much of anything without supervision, was entrusting me with the safety of the entire crew. It had been a meeting of minds, and I was finally one of the minds, rather than just a follower or spectator, and there would be more moments like this during the remainder of my time on Virginia. They were moments of empowerment and personal reward and the feeling that I could still do something valuable. More important, I learned to focus less on my individual tasks and goals and more on the collective goals of the boat. This attitude served me well in the shipyard but would be even more important at sea.
By the time the boat was approaching the completion of its overhaul period in early 2007 and a third round of sea trials, the crew had not been to sea in over a year. Because of this hiatus, we once again had to undergo a thorough test of our ship driving and operational skills. This time around, I was no longer an unqualified observer but an active participant. At this point, we had only three qualified officers of the deck who had enough experience to stand watch during sea trials: a department head, another experienced junior officer, and me. This meant that I would finally have an opportunity to act in one of the most vital roles an officer can provide on board a ship at sea, in a dynamic and rapidly changing environment that is far removed from the relatively static conditions of the shipyard. All I had to do to secure my spot was to take an exam on my knowledge of ship driving and to demonstrate my abilities in an observed drill.
On the morning of my drill—which would simulate our initial departure from the Groton shipyard and our surface transit out to open ocean—I was the first to arrive on the boat’s bridge. It was early, still dark, and the January wind whipping off the Thames River stung my face as I awaited our captain and the senior officer who would observe my performance. I did not know whether my hands were shaking because of the cold or because of nerves. In most cases I could depend on the expertise of the watch team to make up for any mistakes I might make, but in this case I was on my own. Once the others arrived, I initiated our computer-based transit, and things began to go downhill quickly. I had a hard time determining what was supposed to be simulated and what I was actually supposed to perform, such as a real blowing of the ship’s whistle to indicate our getting under way from the pier. The observers kept interjecting into the simulated scenario, and by the time our imaginary crew member went overboard signaling the start of a drill, my head was spinning.
Even after a year of developing a newfound sense of confidence and establishing my merits as a competent leader, I still could not wrap my head around the task of demonstrating my abilities at sea while standing on a ship that was tied to the pier. After the drill, the captain called me into his stateroom and explained that he couldn’t put me on the bridge for our outbound transit after such a harried performance. While this did not come as a surprise to me, I was deeply disappointed. Fueled by an unremitting determination to rebuild my image and earn back the trust of my superiors, I was considerably more focused from then on out.
We then ran a fire drill, which I had done many times before. As is usually the case, it isn’t the repetition of something previously rehearsed that impresses the judges the most, it’s how things are handled when they go wrong. As we were reaching periscope depth during the drill, the video system for the periscope froze, essentially rendering us blind. Almost instinctively, I unhooked the air hose for my breathing mask and rushed to the back of the control room to start the alternate periscope imaging device, all the while screaming orders through my mask. It probably looked ridiculous, but it was Oscar-worthy compared to my bumbling performance on the bridge. It sufficiently impressed my observers to get me back on the watch bill.
A few weeks later when Virginia was put back to sea, I was in control as officer of the deck, getting ready to direct its first submergence, a milestone following such a long shipyard overhaul. After a few initial tests in the depths, we conducted a surfacing, and I prepared to take over the watch from the bridge. When I reached the bridge in the early hours of the morning, it was snowing heavily, something I had never experienced at sea. The water was strangely calm for winter in the North Atlantic, and the wind gently swirled the snow around the sail and the bridge cockpit, some of it brightly lit by the masthead light above my head and intermittently in bright orange pulses by the submarine’s ID beacon. I could hear nothing but the wind, and except for the lookout behind me, I was alone. Beneath me, 130 sailors were operating the Navy’s newest national asset, a vastly complex machine that would eventually take its crew around the world in the silent depths of the sea. I had never felt such a powerful sense of responsibility in my life.
By the time I left Virginia to attend graduate school at Georgetown University, we had been to sea twice more. On our final return to home port, my father was on board as part of a three-day family cruise, a rare and unique event for a submarine. Seeing me issue orders and manage the watch team in a way that showed confidence, and the evidence of what I had accomplished in the nearly nine years since he saw me off on my first day at the Naval Academy, made him appear to truly appreciate how far I had come. It was a great capstone to my service in the Navy to show him this unique trade, submariners at sea, especially on this first-of-a-kind ship. The road to qualifying as a submarine officer was among the hardest I had ever traveled, but I am grateful for every moment. I had the chance to work with some of the most dedicated and professional individuals I’ve known, both officers and enlisted personnel, while contributing to jobs that, even if they seemed small on their own, added up to a lot.
Of most importance, I learned to set aside the doubts about my own abilities, get past my hindering anxiety, and do the job for which I was trained. My task was made challenging by technical complexities rather than the visceral dangers that many of my classmates from the Academy would face in other branches of the service, especially those in active combat. I’m certain that the way that we developed as leaders in these jobs, no matter where or how, has prepared us to make truly meaningful contributions to the country. We’ll do it in different ways, both as civilians and as military officers, but we all have the potential to do great things that can improve our society and honor the sacrifices made by many over the past decade, including some of our own classmates. It all started with learning how to salute and how to put on a uniform on Induction Day at the Naval Academy. The valuable lessons that followed will stay with us for a lifetime.