Subversion: A Shocking True Story of Corruption and Redemption in the Nuclear Submarine Force and the War in Iraq

In Subversion, Lieutenant Christopher Brownfield recounts how a true believer in the power of the U.S. military loses his faith during the War on Terror. As an English major trained by the navy to supervise nuclear reactors aboard Cold War submarines, Brownfield constantly finds himself at odds with the establishment, asking the kinds of questions that good little officers should never ask. . .

After years of waiting for Osama bin Laden to hop aboard a rubber raft with WMD, Brownfield puts down the rose colored periscope of the submarine force and volunteers for duty in Iraq. At the height of the insurgency, he joins a special operations unit charged with coordinating the coalition's strategy for Iraq's electricity and oil.

Subversion is a shocking true story of corruption, incompetence, careerism, and redemption in the post 9/11 military that leaves the reader wondering who the real subversives are: guys like Brownfield or those who led us all astray. . .

1

In the Belly of the Beast

"Awoooooogaaa! Awoooooogaaa! Dive! Dive!"

That was what I heard in my head every time we dove the USS Hartford below the waves. I pretended to hear that sound with a sense of wistful nostalgia as I surveyed the seascape through my periscope, cherishing every last second of sunlight before the optics dipped below the water and we descended into the utter darkness of the ocean. The real sound of the Hartford's diving alarm, however, was no cause for nostalgia. Rather than the unmistakable tone of World War II Klaxons, the Hartford's aural signal to "take her down" more closely resembled a wounded chicken. "Baawwkk! Baawwkk! Dive! Dive!" was the sonic reality in this modern marvel of engineering. And so it came to pass that I settled for driving a nuclear warship that executed its primary design feature with the undignified sound of common poultry. It was this sound that first clued me in to the fact that life on a submarine is decidedly not what it used to be.

"Smith! Put your balls away! How many times do I have to tell you to keep your dick in your pants while you're on watch?" I yelled across my small elevated desk from the stool where I sat, supervising the men who controlled our ship's nuclear reactor.

"But, sir, it's hot in here...and besides, you know you like it," replied Petty Officer Smith, the overweight, smelly, and highly intelligent sailor who knew exactly how far he could push it before getting fired (and liked to prove so on a regular basis). The fat-ass winked at me.

"Whether I like it or not is iiii-fucking-rrrelevant! Stow your cock! End of discussion," I growled, slamming the heavy Reactor Plant Manual I was reading down on the metal desk. I said "End of discussion," but my rant was just getting started.

The Maneuvering Area, as it is formally known, is a room the size of a walk-in closet where more than five hundred gauges, meters, indicator lights, switches, and every other bell and whistle imaginable reside. It is the principal location from which three highly trained nuclear operators and one supervisor keep constant watch over the most important parameters of the ship's nuclear reactor plant. The late Hyman G. Rickover, Father of the Nuclear Navy, to whom The Simpsons' Montgomery Burns bears a remarkable resemblance, believed that the Maneuvering Area was sacred. The Reactor Plant Manuals use the word "inviolate" to describe Rickover's expectation of formality within Maneuvering's boundaries. And yet this was a typical day in Maneuvering, when a watch-stander, tired and hot, decided to unzip his trousers and brandish his genitals. Let's get something else out in the open--none of us actually enjoyed Smith's awkward testicular presence, but it was unusually hot in there and we couldn't really blame him for wanting to air out. Somewhere in nuclear heaven, Rickover was beginning to vomit.

"Listen up, fuckers." I continued my rant, annoyed.

"I used to be a fucking gentleman before you pricks corrupted me!"

The ghost of John Paul Jones was nowhere to be seen.

"Did you say you were fucking gentlemen?" interrupted Jenkins, another petty officer (and petty wit), who never missed an opportunity to make someone else look stupid.

"No, shit-scrap!" I shouted, eliciting chuckles (any novel permutation of basic vulgarity was enough to make them giggle). I was still annoyed, but they'd found the chink in my armor. With my momentum fizzling, I recommenced my rant. "As I was saying, I used to be a gentleman, and I'll be god-damned if I let you knuckleheads wag your dicks around in Maneuvering on my watch! Let's have some fucking professionalism!" I breathed deeply while dismounting my soapbox, but the bastards had done me in. I choked back a laugh but was unable to conceal my smile. The troops spotted my break in character and howled with delight. Smith zipped up his pants, sheepishly admitting defeat.

"Does it get any lower than this?"

"Technically, sir, we can go down another four hundred feet."

"Shut up, Jenkins."

"Aye, aye, sir."

The first time a sailor wagged his testicles before me as I knelt to read an instrument gauge, I completely lost control. It quite literally flew in the face of every example of professionalism that the Naval Academy had trained me to uphold. I was so angry by the overt harassment and the indignity of stumbling face-first point- blank into another man's balls that I threatened to have the pervert taken to captain's mast, the navy's version of a court-martial at sea. While morally and legally correct in that course of action, I know in hindsight that it was the wrong way to handle things aboard a real submarine.

When the hatch of a submarine shuts, the vessel becomes its own little universe, with a very different set of rules. Bollocks to Einstein-the modern submarine redefines relativity. In that universe one should never admit one's weaknesses. Aboard a submarine, to reveal that a particular thing irritates you is to invite repeat occurrences of that irritant ad infinitum. It was a mixed-up maxim, a Kantian kerfuffle that promised, through the miracle of socialized military medicine, to make our lives nasty, brutish, and long. For example, when our ship's executive officer (XO) divulged that he was "somewhat of a homophobe," our fellow officers responded by taping pictures from gay porn magazines onto the ceiling above his stateroom bunk. The first time he lay down to read and looked up at the pictures, he ran screaming through the door in his skivvies. The man's public display of hairy near-nakedness opened the field for more comments-nothing was off limits, except the captain himself. Days later at sea, several members of the "all-balls" crew sent the man anonymous love notes and signed pictures of shirtless male models posing on sports cars, all graced with loverly terms of endearment and XOXOXs. One envelope was even sealed with a lipstick kiss. I don't know which man brought the lipstick aboard, and it's probably better for some questions to remain unasked.

But just as the XO had erred in admitting his fear of homosexual behavior, it was my mistake to admit that the sight of another man's penis in close proximity to my face was...well, odious.

"You should have just grabbed it," my colleague Jake opined after my first encounter. Jake was always the pragmatist.

"Or pretended that you liked it or something-that would have freaked him out. Now every enlisted man on the ship knows that you can't abide cock."

I thought about it for a second and agreed that Jake's tactic of carpe scrotum was indeed a better alternative than threatening the sailor with penal action. A thorough hand-washing would've been required, of course.

"Think about it, Chris," he continued. "If you had simply grabbed his sack and dragged him around the ship like a fleshy little puppet, nobody would have ever fucked with you again-you would have been a god."

Jake was right. I could have been a god. We paused for a moment, lamenting the lost opportunity for ultimate respect, albeit respect bounded in the nutshell of that horribly finite space. And so it came to pass that instead of being a god among the sailors of the Hartford, I writhed within my mortal coil, a prick supervisor, irritated by the sight of other men's schlongs. From that point forward, in accordance with standard submarine practice, I saw, unwillingly, more schlong than any other officer aboard the ship.
 

Please recall that this is a family story. It's true that I've seen more of certain tiny things than I'd ever hoped for in life, but every family has its quirks. I don't recall my less gentlemanly shipmates with any particular fondness, but I can no more divest myself of their underwater antics than disown my brothers. The experience was all part of growing up in that strange watery world. Welcome to my home.

The modern nuclear submarine is the most extreme machine on the face of the planet. By comparison, space shuttles and fighter jets and even armored tanks are fragile and basic. The vacuum of space is nothing compared to the cold, crushing pressure of the deep. The thrust of an afterburner is nothing compared to the silent force of atomic engines. It is a well-known fact that a nuclear submarine is capable of traversing the depths of the oceans to strike practically anywhere with lethal precision. It is far less well known that the nuclear submarine can create and maintain its own atmosphere. Now, at the dawning of the third millennium, it is strangely novel to recall that the nuclear submarine-equipped with a hundred-ton backup battery- was the first hybrid vehicle that could sustain its environment and mission independent of oil.

Energy has always sharpened the cutting edge of violence, especially in the world's navies. In the first millennium, Greek Fire swept the Byzantine navy toward stunning victories. At the beginning of industrial modernity, Roosevelt's Great White Fleet circumnavigated the globe on coal. But the greatest shift in the forces of violence that energy brought to the world came in the discovery of oil. More than any other source of power in history, oil-the most efficient, mobile, and useful energy source-empowered nations to seek and maintain control. It was a legendary American admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, who coined the term "Middle East" in his monumental geo-strategic book, The Influence of Seapower upon History. But it was the British who learned seven years later the influence of oil upon empire.

By dint of capitalist zeal, a British prospector unearthed the massive oil reserves in "petroliferous" Persia. Like an explosive gusher of crude, the discovery of oil propelled the ancient homeland of the Zoroastrians (who worshipped burning oil seepages) to the forefront of the twentieth century's greatest power struggle. American ...