 Yeah, meeting the military in Hawaii, I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech at the two o'clock block here on a given Thursday. And today we're going to talk about the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum with Chuck Merkel. He's a retired Navy Submariner, which is entirely appropriate, isn't it? Hi, Chuck. Thank you for joining the show. Well, thanks for this opportunity, Jay. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, they say the Navy is different from all the other services. And part of the reason is it's a space thing, you know? If I know that, you know, my life is between the port and the starboard, I have to get along with people. If I'm on a ship, I really have to get along with people. But that is accentuated in a submarine because port and starboard and submarine is so much closer. You agree with that? Absolutely. It's very tight quarters. There's no wasted space. And everybody on board has to do their job for the ship to accomplish its missions. Yeah, very important. It must be a very interesting experience. In fact, you know, back to the early part of the 20th century when submarines were first, you know, in play, I'm sure it's always been a very interesting experience because you're down there and you can't let the claustrophobia get you. You have to, I don't know if this is the case on modern submarines, but the switch bumps, if you go to the bow fin, which you're the commander of the bow fin right now, aren't you? Right. Chuck has had commands at sea and submarines over a 35 year career, which is really something. And submarines are such an important part of our naval fleet. And what's happening at Pearl Harbor at the sub base there, that's an important part of our submarines as part of our naval fleet. So you've had plenty of time in lots of places in the Navy and I'm just wondering, can you you decided to retire here a few years ago? Why here? Well, I grew up in a military family and we lived up and down the East Coast United States. During that timeframe, the longest I lived anywhere was five years growing up and was down in Key West, Florida. And my blood got pretty thin down there and it was by far my parents' favorite place that the family ever lived while we were in military. So when it came time to where was I going to be home ported, where did I want to get assigned? I looked at the choices available, Hawaii was at the top of the list and was fortunate enough that I was able to get my first sea tour out here and fell in love with the place. I met a local girl and got married and we made it our goal to make this our home permanently. So fortunately, we're able to make that work out. Yeah, it's great. It's great. I mean, I've met a lot of military seniors and I found that the military has a significant presence here in Hawaii in the form of the senior officers who have chosen to retire here. And to me, that's a very important part of the community and that's why I like doing this show. I like talking to guys like you, Chuck. Thanks. Anyway, so the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum, you know, I had when I first saw the name of that museum, I thought, oh, well, they must have a whole bunch of nuclear submarines out somewhere where I haven't seen them yet. But it's not true. What is in the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum? Well, the centerpiece of our museum is the World War II Fleet Submarine, the both in and then where our campus is about three acres. We've got a number of outdoor artifacts from World War II and into the current era. And then in the museum now, we have three galleries. The first gallery is a World War II gallery, which obviously covers covers that period of history, where most people probably don't realize our submarine force was only two percent of our Navy during World War II, but it accounted for almost 60 percent of the Japanese merchant ships that were sunk during the war. That success came at a tremendous price, though. We lost 52 ships in over 3,500 minutes. So that gallery talks about the history of the force during that timeframe and pays a tribute to those submarine sailors. Our next gallery is Cold War Gallery, so we talk about how really the two biggest developments during the Cold War that impacted submarines was nuclear propulsion and then the submarine launch ballistic missile and how those contributed to those two technologies contributed to keeping the Cold War cold as it were. And then our final gallery is our modern gallery where we look from the end of the Cold War in 1989, 1990 to present day and how our submarines have continued to contribute to the defense of our country. I think that's very interesting. I hope you don't mind. I'd like to unpack each one of those galleries with you. I've seen the bofin. I've been on the bofin, and it's just remarkable how the bofin is a sort of combination of materials. The actual rope on the bofin, which plays a part in the way the submarine works. I forget exactly where the rope was, but it's very small, intimate, if you will, and the racks are very close to each other, and it would give you claustrophobia. On the other hand, it was a fighting ship, and it sunk its share of traffic in the Pacific, I'm sure. Yes, it did. I think she was in number 17 or so in terms of ships sunk in tonnage sunk during World War II. So definitely the upper end of ships in terms of World War II. And in terms of personal space, there's really not that much difference. The ships have gotten a little bit bigger, a little more comfortable, but the sailors pretty much have the same amount of space today on the modern ships as they did during World War II. Yeah, and I think you learn a lot by visiting the bofin. You make the comparison inevitably between what you've seen in the movies, and the bofin you haven't seen too much bofin in the movies. All the movies are about later versions of submarines, but you get to realize that even in World War II, the idea of a submarine was still somewhat experimental. And we were developing the dive mechanisms, developing storage mechanisms. The diesel generation mechanisms. All of that was under development. And you got to hand it to the people who developed that and risked their lives in that experiment and performed their mission in that experiment. Yeah, it's very impressive. Our submarine force started in 1900. And you already kind of talked about some of the early days. Some of our early submarines had gasoline engines. You begin to imagine gasoline in a closed environment. And the World War II fleet submarine, which is what bofin represents, that class of submarine was designed in the 30s. But we're coming up on, you know, 90 years ago, that people were the engineers were put in pen to paper using their slide rules to calculate how these ships would operate. But, you know, we went into the war. Our policy leading up to World War II was that we did not exercise restricted, unrestricted warfare, which meant if we were going to sink a target ship of some kind, not a warship, a cargo ship that was carrying contraband, you would have to take some measures to take the crew off of that ship before you sank it. But that was our official policy. But I think, you know, when we started looking in the 30s at our war planning and everything, that that really wasn't going to work. There's not much room on a submarine for the crew you've got. How are you going to account for a crew? And if you surface to take the crew off, then you're vulnerable to attack. An airplane certainly can't land and pick up the crew of a ship before it drops a bomb on it. So those those rules of warfare for were becoming outdated by our more modern machinery. So really, I think that the way it was already paved. But when when Imperial Japan attacked here on December 7th, that opened the door and literally that day, the chief of naval operations issued the order to execute unrestricted warfare. Well, my neighbor back, this is 30 years ago, my neighbor here in Hawaii, guy named Bill Kinsella. He was a force striper like you. Oh, man, actually he was an admiral. He retired as an admiral. But during the war, he had command of one of these open class or whatever other class there might have been. It was a tax submarine here in the Pacific and they had some kind of record about how much shipping they sank. He had stories for me. Gee whiz, I tell you, it was all out of a book or a movie. The adventures they had, the challenges they had to meet, and they got back alive. They got back. And that was quite an achievement in those days. Yeah, early in the war, we like rest of our armed forces, we really weren't ready on December 7th to go to war. Our training had been very simplistic and unrealistic. We really hadn't practiced, oh, we're going to go do this unrestricted warfare mission. And our torpedoes had not been adequately tested. And there were a number of defects in those torpedoes that there's little doubt that cost the loss of some of the submarines we lost in the war and probably prolonged the war because we didn't sink ships early on in the war. Took about a year and a half to iron out those torpedo issues and to realize that to employ these ships properly, they really had to spend most of their time on the surface where they had a better, they could look out further on the horizon and use a radar. But it meant that they had to practice being able to submerge from being surfaced to submerge in less than a minute. And when you think about, both in was state of the art for a day, but everything was manually operated. And so when that order for an emergent dive was given, and every man and every compartment had to do their job in order and in the right sequence so that the ship could safely re submerge. And even then, when they came up for air, what have you, or reconnaissance, communications were not all that good. It's not like they could be thousands of miles away from Pearl and pick up a phone and say hi. Right, right. They had to, they had to, you know, we were limited really the long range communications was HF radio, essentially in the AM band. And later in the war they had VHF, very high frequency for low, you know, short range tactical communications. But yeah, once they really, once they left Pearl Harbor until, you know, they started on their way home and gave an arrival report from when they expected to get back to, you know, be at Midway or Pearl or Australia or later in the war, Guam and Saipan, nobody really knew. You know, you didn't know until they got back. So really still they were very independent. Yes, I was going to mention that, you know, it goes back to, I don't know, the 18th century in the British Navy when you got your, when you opened your orders after leaving Port, Commander, you know, took off the wax seal and all that. They gave you a very broad mission, you know, and you had no choice to argue with it. On the other hand, they had no further input because you were at sea already and as the commander of that vessel you did what you felt was right and you had so much power, you had total power over that submarine or that in that case it was a sailing ship. But I wonder if, you know, if the submarine being distant, having communications issues, you know, it's a different kind of command. You were in command submarines. It's a different kind of command than a surface vessel because you don't have the same kind of connection. You're underwater a lot of the time with the command back home. Right. No, it's, yeah, it's, it's, there's obviously more modern means of communication. So it's a little quicker these days, but still, you know, when you're down under underwater, you're, there's no direct path. So it may be several hours before you would get an order or be able to make a report much shorter today. And there's more expectations of communications today, but you can be alone and unafraid. I was going to ask you about afraid, you know, it seems to me whether you're around the bowfin or you're around a modern attack submarine with every piece of technology that, you know, that the, that the tech industry and the Navy can devise, you still are in a dangerous situation and you don't know if it's going to save you. Am I right? If there's a little bit of that, you know, and I've always been asked, you know, how could you, I'm not sure, you know, people have said, I'm not sure I could serve or I'd be scared. I never felt that. Always had great confidence in, you know, that the ship was well built, well maintained. Operators were well trained. You had to have faith in all your operators and, you know, as a captain, you're ultimately responsible for that training for your crew. Make sure that they're ready to do their job. So, you know, once you're, once the lines are cast off and you're underway, everything happens because somebody on board your ship is doing their job. You can't take for granted that you'll turn the light switch on and your light will come on in your office or your statement or that you'll be able to go to the bathroom and flush the toilet or then take a shower or wash your hands or brush your teeth or any of those things. Somebody's keeping the waste tanks empty and keeping the water tanks full and keeping the lights on and there's always activity in the galley. There's four meals a day, every six hours a meal. So, there's always something being cooked and, you know, all those things that are happening and so there's always, and you learn not to take any of it for granted because the minute that you do, that's the thing that's going to bite you. Yeah, well, that must have been accentuated in the time of, in the second room, if you will, of the museum where you have the Cold War, where you have the game playing with the Russians and the Russian submarines, where you had the entry of nuclear under Rickover. I can hear the sound of the sonar beeping as we speak, I can hear it. And it was also very dramatic, very romantic, very dangerous, especially when you have, you know that a few feet away from you is a nuclear reactor. You've been that experienced. I mean, how do you feel about, can you feel the little particles? No, you can't. No, it's there, it's well designed, the operators are well trained, always felt completely safe with the nuclear power plant. And I think a lot of people that Cold War era, folks don't realize it for 60 years. Continuously, we've had nuclear powered ballistic missile submarines on patrol in our oceans, ready to defend our interests, to deter aggression against our country over 60 years. And to this day, in the Atlantic and the Pacific, there are ballistic missile submarines out there, their exact position known only to those men on board those ships, men and women now. And they're there hoping that that message never comes. You know, and then on the other side, our fast attack submarines were out there to put our enemy's ballistic missile submarines at risk. So those two things. So you have two kinds here, one is you have the ballistic missile submarines, which are dedicated to ballistic missiles. And you have the attack submarines that attack the other guys ballistic missile submarines. Yeah. Right, and to protect our aircraft carriers and all those sort of things. Yes, fast attack submarines. Well, you were in the Navy, at least a part of that period, and you saw that technology develop. I always always found that a great expression of American technology that we can make submarines that did all those things and that we could do it in relatively short time. I guess that's why Rick Over was such a hero, because he could move mountains to have the Navy change its science and its organization to make room for nuclear. Yeah, that was a pretty amazing development. Basically, late 40s is when his office was stood up, and by 54, 55, we had our first nuclear-powered submarine in the Nautilus underway, and the legacy is tremendous. Well, let's move to room three. Oh, sure. I have a personal interest in room three in the sense that I covered the USS Greenville incident for PBS back in 2001. And I think it was called the something services building right outside Makalapa Gate, fleet services building of some name like that. Fleet and family services, maybe? Yeah, it's a building right outside the gate, and it's where the press gathered, and I was representing PBS for that. And we covered the court of inquiry, Navy court of inquiry that looked into that. And in doing so, we could understand what was going on on these submarines. They also give us a tour of one of the sister ships to the Greenville, which is identical in many ways to the Greenville, and we got to know all about it. What I found interesting was the technology. I found interesting, the one thing that sticks in my mind, was the court of inquiry met on that. And they used the term, it was a central standard in their evaluation of what happened on the Greenville. They used the term command climate, which they thought, and there were four or five admirals from various places in the world who came to be this court of inquiry. They thought that was really critical. And that sort of helps me understand what it's like to be the commander of a submarine, what it's like to be a crew member of a submarine, and what it's like to see them work together in the control room. I was in the Coast Guard, I never saw that so much as I did in the Greenville investigation. Can you talk about that? Sure, I mean, I've kind of already said a little bit that every crew member on board has to do their job to the best of their ability for the ship to succeed in whether it's just simply getting underway, going out, submerging for the day, surfacing and coming back into port. And you've got to allow your men and women now to be able to speak up when something isn't right. You've got to train them to recognize those indicators of whatever watch station they might be that there's something wrong, the ship standing into danger and they can't have any fear of being suppressed when that, it's when they raise their hand. Because the first time that then happens that you shut a sailor down like that, that's not only you haven't just shut that sailor down, you shut down anybody that saw it and then a submarine gonna hear about it because that goes through the whole crew. When you've got 130, 140 people on board your ship, there's no secrets. And so, I say, you know, when 9-11 happened and when I was in command, we were on our way to Bahrain. We had left Singapore on the 6th of September and we were on our way to Bahrain for a port visit, about a 10-day transit. And we were on Bahrain time, just shift time zones and that sort of thing. When you're underwater, you can make the time of day any thing you want. Nobody's really gonna know, right? So we were on our, you know, we were on the time zone for the port we were headed to. So it was really just after dinner when we came up to communication step that night and immediately knew, you know, something serious. We didn't know what exactly had happened but we knew something was very serious. We were where our nation needed us to be and it was time for us to go do our job. And, you know, it had to depend on every crew member. So in a bad of an eye, a 10-day transit turned into a 10-week underway. So instead of 10 days, we were underway 70 days. And if we didn't have our food loaded right, if we didn't have our repair parts, if we didn't have all the materials we need to keep the ship running, we wouldn't have been able to do that. And the same again then in early, in late 2002 or I guess September 11th, 2002, I was back home at Pearl. We were in a maintenance period for the ship and I got called up to my boss's office and he said, you need to be ready to deploy the Monday after Thanksgiving. So before I left his office, a group of people had sat down in there and we mapped out where we were and where we needed to be on the day after, the Monday after Thanksgiving and we had a new schedule. And I walked down, assembled the crew at quarters and told them what was happening. We were supposed to deploy in the spring of 03 and we now had our schedule. Now ultimately we didn't, we were ready. We were ready to go the Monday after Thanksgiving that was, but it wasn't really until right at middle, middle of January then we left here. And we left Hawaii and three weeks later, we were in a northern end of the Red Sea and we transited 10,000 miles in three weeks. And ultimately we didn't pull into port until just before Easter, we pulled into a port Perth, Australia. We'd been underway 80 days and we'd steamed 25,000 miles. We'd launched 25 Tomahawks. Those sorts of things don't happen unless you let your people do their jobs. Yeah, and unless everybody is prepared to have things change, everybody is prepared to meet the mission no matter what, there's a certain dedication involved when you're underwater and you don't know exactly how long or what you're ultimately going to do. It's a very interesting experience I'm sure. Well, yeah, I always felt the submarineers were the cream because of that. And I also felt that if you're in that very small space like that, you get to understand relating to people. And I guess that's part of being, certainly part of being in the crew, but also being in the captain, you have to understand the relationships in the crew. You have to make sure everybody is talking to each other and they're not walking around Haput or anything and they are, they're going to cooperate no matter what. It's an interesting social experience, social experiment. Yes. Yeah, so in the case of the Command Climate issue in the Court of Inquiry for the Greenville, a bunch of things happened and or at least came to the attention of the public and for that matter, the newspapers. And I thought it was very interesting that this was a test of the, what they call, Distinguished Visitor Program, which was very important at Pearl Harbor. Abel Fargo was in charge of the larger command and the Navy was really discombobulated by this event because they had been lost of life because it was iconic. It was Japanese citizens and all. Right off Waikiki and OG was all these iconic things were all in a confluence like that. Was this known around the Navy? Do people talk about this? They learn about this? Did you know about the Court of Inquiry? Did you know what they were doing? Well, certainly. Well, I was in command of the, I had taken command of the Key West in November of 2000. So I had been in command about three months when that happened. I was actually, Key West was in port here in Pearl Harbor with it during a maintenance period. And I was actually in San Diego meeting with members of the carrier strike group staff that I was going to deploy with later in 2001. And I was in my hotel room. I had come down with a bug of some kind and I was talking to my wife on the cell phone, looking forward to getting on the airplane in the morning and then come home. TV was on CNN and I saw the flash to, they had a submarine on the surface and pretty early on. So this was Friday evening for me in San Diego. And immediately then my ex-O tried to call me and left a message saying that there had been this collision. And then my father called. He was in Texas, an entire senior chief in the Navy. He called me and wanted to check on me because all he had heard was that there was been a submarine and a collision in Hawaii. And when I was ex-O, he had ridden the Tony. Our last underway was from San Diego up to Fugit Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton. And we did a tiger cruise where you take family members and it was three or four day overnight trip. Both him and his younger brother went and we had the captain's couple of his brothers and father and crew members had fathers or sons. So the very last surfacing we did with the Tony was a emergency surface, which is just what the Greenville had done when she had her. And I was talking to my dad. His only underway on a Navy ship, even though he served 20 years, was that underway with me on the Tony. He said, you know, I watched you guys when you were getting ready to do that. And in my mind, I didn't think that could have happened to you, but you know, I just wanted to make sure. So of course we all, you know, I knew Scott Waddle. I didn't know him well, but I never served with him directly, but knew him and, you know, nobody would ever wish anything like that to happen to anybody. It was a whole bunch of things, so unfortunate things that happened all at the same time. And as fate would have it, it resulted in a possible, the worst possible result. One thing that came up, and I wanted to just point this out with you, is that submarines have weapons. Submarines are tactical or larger nuclear equipment devices. And so there's a lot of security around submarines. I mean, even the specs of a submarine, about how far it can dive, how fast it can dive, how fast it can come up, all these specifications, the submarines all classify. That was one of the issues in the Greenville case. And, you know, you're always working within this loosely book of highly classified top secret information, because you're carrying weapons that are top secret. It must add a certain amount of tension to know that you have the weapons and the classified information aboard. Yes? There's a little bit of that, I think. I think, you know, the procedures are in place. I mean, I think everything is safe and secure. It's stable as long as you maintain it within the specifications. And that's not difficult to do. Certainly, you know, having, I think probably the thing that, you know, some of my other counterparts probably feel the same way was, you know, is when we started to really put rounds in weapons and chamber bullets, those were the weapons I really worried about. Is that as young men and now women that were having these weapons? And, you know, that unfortunately has come to pass here what a couple of years ago now or a little over a year ago now with on the shipyard here. Yeah, right. You know, that one is that those were the weapons I really worried about. And, you know, it has unfortunately has come to happen a couple of times. Yeah, yeah. We live in transitional times. So let me ask you, so we've looked at each one of the three rooms, if you will. What have we missed, Chuck? I mean, is there more beyond this? What comes to mind if you wanted to tell a prospective visitor or a repeat visitor what to look for at the museum? Well, I think that we've gone back and looked and there's certainly room for expansion in that modern gallery for the future looking forward. There are things in there. A lot of interactive things. We've designed a lot of exhibits for children and students to come in to engage them in science, technology, engineering, and math concepts so to stimulate those things. We've got a couple of innovation carts. We've got things like we've got some at these carts. We also have like Lego and connect kits. So kids can come in and build things and they can take a picture of it and they can text that or email it from here. So there's a lot of that. And then leaving the final thing as you leave the museum, there's a memorial wall. And that memorial wall is made up of the pictures of the more than 4,000 men who died while serving in our submarine. That's on your website, isn't it? I've seen that. Yes. So it was one of our staff members here at the Bofinn. It was his dedicated efforts that's collected all these pictures where I would expect we'll see some more now. Even when we went to press on that, since then we've received some pictures. So I think there's some that are still there. There's also an interactive kiosk where you can do a search and you can pull up information about each one of those men. And it's not very well known, but really the first submarine that the United States lost was lost off of Honolulu Harbor in 1915 with 21 men. So we have a memorial to that submarine here in the museum. That was a failure of the submarine in some way? Yes. It was in one of the early designs. And you know, there wasn't a sand island then. Pearl Harbor wasn't really fully open by that point. So our submarines were operating out of Honolulu Harbor and it was lost in 300 feet of water just so you know how quickly the water gets deep out here. So it wasn't very far away. When it brought some water in, I think probably what happened was the battery, you have seawater mixed with the battery chemistry, you get chlorine gas. And that probably is what overtained the crew. Even then you had to be familiar with all kinds of mechanical and physical issues and technologies. And of course, now you have to be familiar with the nuclear aspect of it, which requires a lot of study for sure. And one thing that strikes me from what you said is that the United States Navy has been in Pearl Harbor since 1850. That's when they first had a presence there. So the United States Navy is inextricably intertwined with these islands from way back in the time of the monarchy. So I guess the last thing I'd like to ask you about is the Navy itself. The military has been that issue, I suppose in general during the Trump years. Certainly the National Guard was at issue in the Capitol insurrection a few weeks ago. And I wonder what, I really wonder what young kids, including the kids come around to your museum, think about the military now. And I wonder what they think about the Navy, as opposed to the other services. I always favored the Naval Services Check because I am a person who has been in a naval service. But I wonder what you would say to kids these days about a career in the Navy, a career in submarines? Well, I think it's incredibly, it's challenging, but it's very, very rewarding. There's very few places that you can go to work for at the age of 24, 25, where you can be in charge of a multi-billion dollar warship and be the officer of the deck, given the orders on where that ship goes and driving that submarine to accomplish a mission. I don't think there's any other place that offers that sort of thing to somebody young. And I would say, I'm probably fairly typical when I joined the Navy, I didn't really think it would be a career. I was out of money at the end of my sophomore year in college and honestly, I wasn't sure that I was going to be able to complete my degree in time. But the Navy offered me this opportunity. And the payback was three years. And at the end of that three years, when I went to my shore duty at the first assignment, I was pretty well sure I was not going to stay. I was going to do that shore duty tour and get out. But the captain there in Idaho was a very good man. And he took a personal interest in me and two other guys and a few years ago, he'd confided in me and he said, my biggest goal while I was there as the captain there in Idaho was to keep me and those other two guys in the Navy. And all three of us stayed in, went on the command submarines and do those things. So he, you know, he really, he laid it out on the table. He showed me his letter of resignation. He showed me his job acceptance offer at a commercial nuclear company. And I had all this, we were ready to go. I had a young family just like you. But, you know, at the end of it, it just didn't feel right. And I liked the closeness, the sense of accomplishment, the challenge. It's kind of, it all wrapped, it's all wrapped up into that ball. And, you know, after sitting and talking with him quite a bit and then talking over with my wife, we decided that I'd stay in. And here we are. It's funny how you remember those events, those meetings, those individuals who helped you make those decisions for the rest of your life because they're turning points in your life. And although we don't have time for my turning point, it was not dissimilar. So I appreciate your, your sharing, Chuck. Chuck Merkel, he's the executive director of the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum at Pearl Harbor. And we all like to have his job and his career. Thank you so much, Chuck. Thank you very much, Jerry.