Ohio Thoughts on the Greeneville Submarine Tragedy

To the Editor:

Just exactly what were civilians doing at the controls of the nuclear submarine USS Greeneville when it sunk the Japanese fishing trawler and killed nine vocational high school students? The official Navy inquiry has begun. Rest assured, its findings will completely ignore what civilians were really doing at the controls. 
That’s because those civilians weren’t trimming the rudder a couple degrees, or jettisoning ballast under strict supervision of a trained officer. The civilians on the Greeneville performed exactly the same function that civilians perform at the controls of any number of Navy warships: insuring support for a madly bloated military budget. 
After the Ehime Maru tragedy, my hometown paper ran a sidebar about two Toledoans who had similarly thrilled at controlling a 360-foot nuclear-powered sub armed with a hundred atomic weapons. The two were among 20 local dignitaries who wined, dined and sailed aboard the USS Toledo (SSN 769) in 1997. Asked for their comments on the sinking of the Japanese ship, one of them, a former city councilman whose teenage son joined him on the Toledo, reassured us that “the chief of the boat was right there with us.” Added the other, “they were telling us what to do.”
Five years before their little junket, when the USS Toledo was just beginning its billion-dollar construction, a wholesome young Navy Lt. Commander in dress whites stood before the Toledo City Council. He presented a small model of the sub to the mayor and invited all to join him on the city’s namesake when it was commissioned. The mayor joined in the chorus of oohs and ahhs, and later placed the model prominently in his office. 
A relentless Navy PR barrage followed that City Council presentation. Crewmembers were flown back to visit city schools. Others adopted pen pals. News stories on the sub’s construction appeared regularly in the media; one in 1995 was particularly ironic. Just after the local anchorman reported that the newly-elected Gingrich House of Representatives planned to reduce a federal budget deficit by cutting the school lunch program, up came footage of six junior high school boys smartly saluting the model of the USS Toledo they made for physics class. Not mentioned in the report were two possible math class applications: the sub’s construction cost alone would fund the entire school lunch and breakfast program for all of Ohio for five years, and Toledo taxpayers annually sent twice as many dollars to the Pentagon as they kept locally to run their entire city. 
When commissioning day finally rolled around, airwaves and newspaper pages were glutted with stories covering every possible angle of the death ship’s construction and launch. Elected officials and civic leaders oohed and ahhed via satellite in front of the real thing. 
As a Navy hospital corpsman during the Vietnam war, I saw firsthand the real purpose of military hardware. Later, as an elected official, I saw firsthand what happens when the Pentagon fattens at the expense of our cities. Former President and Army General, Dwight Eisenhower put it well: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
The sanitized thrill of momentarily controlling a nuclear sub has nothing to do with the realities I’ve seen or the world Eisenhower described. It has everything to do with perpetuating a myth that benefits Pentagon planners and military contractors. 

–Mike Ferner
US Navy Hospital Corps:
1969-1973
Toledo City Council: 
1989-1993
Toledo, OH