Customer Reviews

Spy Sub: A Top-Secret Mission to the Bottom of the Pacific

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

I was a "khaki" (an EOOW) on a 637-class boat in the Jimmy Carter years, with service that included two special operations, a Presidential Unit Citation and an 18-month nuclear refueling overhaul. I often still wake from uncomfortable "submarine dreams" even now, some twenty years after I left the service to go to graduate school. This is the book I will give my son to show him what it was like down there.

Ignore the junk on the dust jacket: it has almost nothing to do with the book and its strengths. "Spy Sub" has much more in common with "The Cruel Sea" (Nicholas Monsarrat's classic story of WWII convoy duty) than it has in common with "The Hunt for Red October", and what it has in common with Monsarrat makes it far more authentic than the Clancy novels. If you're thinking about signing up for sub duty, then you need to read this book to see what you're heading into.

If you're looking for a fast-paced, Hollywood-style "space opera of the undersea", however, this is definitely <<not>> the book for you. Read Clancy's "The Hunt for Red October" and "Red Storm Rising" instead, if that is the case. You'll be entertained a lot and even informed a little. I enjoyed them, too. Just keep in mind that Clancy is a fiction writer whose professional task is to focus on the glamorous and ignore the rest.

Of all the submarine books I've seen and read, "Spy Sub" captures the stone cold sober reality of service aboard a nuclear submarine the best. It shows what it;s really like aboard a nuc boat most of the time, even on a spec op: studying, qualifying, standing watch, performing mountains of required preventive maintenance, keeping your temper in tight spaces, standing watch some more, noticing patterns before they became problems, fixing things that broke, going back on watch yet again, studying to qualify for the next higher watchstation on your off time, and just generally tending to the part of the mission that is your job, so the ship can do its job. Most of it isn't at all glamorous, and almost all of it is very hard work.

I'm not at all surprised that Petty Officer Dunham went on to medical school and a successful career as a physician after he finished his tour of sub duty. The men in dungarees I served with stood head and shoulders above most of my university classmates, and I watched many of them go on to spectacular careers in civilian life. If you read this book carefully and think about it, you will understand why that was so. There is no other experience on this planet that rubs your nose in the details of physical (and psychological) reality quite as thoroughly as service on a nuc boat. The only other experience that might come close is service as an astronaut on an Apollo moon shot.

It's not for everybody. But it's an unbeatable education. Read this book to see why.

There are a lot of great submarine stories to read and this is one of them, unfornately it's just not told in the book. I never give up on a submarine book and I kept toughing it out untill the end ...hoping there would be some substance but it never happens. You keep thinking it's building up to a great finish but the last chapter is a give up and then it's over. Do yourself a favor.......do like the author did, skip this one.

Anyone hungry for disclosure of super-secret details of cold war sub missions will be disappointed. The author acknowledges that he was a nuclear reactor operator and knew virtually nothing about the missions of his sub, the mysterious, one-of-a-kind USS Halibut. However, Dunham provides an insightful, human picture of what it's like to earn one's dolphins, graduating from the "non-nuke puke" status of a freshman submariner. He describes well the rituals, difficulties and patterns of a life spent underwater, with no view of sunlight, for two months at a time. For that, he deserves great credit.

The author of this book was a crew member on a nuclear powered submarine. Throughout the book, he provideds lots of detail about his personal life. I would have been more interested in more specific information about his submarine, and the mission which becomes the central focus of the second half of the book. The author appears to feel duty-bound to maintain thirty year old secrets concerning his former submarine and its equipment. Why write a book with such limitations at all?

For 20 years as a sub nuclear plant operator, I had tried unsuccessfully to give an accurate picture of what the submariner's lifestyle at sea is like to my friends and family. It is so different that few civilians can relate. In "Spy Sub", the author has masterfully brought to life the day-to-day routine of submariners during the cold war.

Many reviewers here have commented on the lack of technical detail on the specific mission of the 'Viperfish' (aka 'Halibut'), but they have missed the purpose of the book. Dolphin wearer's currently defending us in the world's oceans will appreciate Dunham's sensitivity to the need for ongoing secrecy on highly classified missions. Don't read this book for that type of classified information, but rather for what I can attest to is a true understanding of the submariner's life at sea.

Read Clancy if you want a great made-up thriller with a cool story line. Read Dunham if you want an insider's view of real life during the cold war for a tiny, but highly specialized, highly successful, and vital segment of our national defense.

Served aboard HALIBUT 1964-1967. Had little clue of it's chief mission at the time of my service, so the book was revealing and insightful to me and to my family and friends who had been listening to my stories lo these many years. It was I who was overboard and reading a chapter about my own experience told by someone else, was chilling, and brought back memories of my own fears as well as the tenacity and expertise of the Captain and my shipmates, who refused to give up thier rescue efforts, until I was safely brought back aboard. I would recommend this book to other sub sailors and thier familys.

The actual text of this book begins on page 13, but by page 21 I had lost interest. After having read the poor reviews here, I knew going in that the book may be a bit lacking, but what killed it for me was the author's description of having gone to the library to find out what a "viperfish" was, and then describing the creature. Since we all know by now that the boat was in fact the Halibut, this obvious, unneeded lie in a 'secret mission' story (one that is no longer as much so) is certain to make any reader question whether or not what he or she is reading is distorted, hidden fact, or outright fiction.
I would instead recommend a book such as Red Star Rogue. While that book itself is poorly edited, the story is fascinating.

Since the ship was operating before the destruction and recovery of the soviet sub, one has to presuppose another mission for it. Since understanding the characteristics of the Soviet ICBM force was of strategic import to the US the entire gamut of technology was deployed to gather data; air, ship, space, and now it seems possibly, undersea. In the book The Universe Below : Discovering the Secrets of the Deep Sea, they mention that one of the functions of this ship was recovery of test ICBM RV's reentry vehicles. (Maybe that author had better friends in the declassification section.) In the 60's the Soviets assumed that once their RV's landed in mile deep water no one could recover them. So they never went after ours. I assume we were recovering ours, to keep the soviets from getting them, but mostly theirs, to understand their rentry characteristics (accuracy, range, decoy characterstics, target ids, etc.) If that was the original target for the sub, it fits the size of the payload doors, and nicely complements some of the other collection techniques in use. It would be interesting to note where the impact areas of the long range tests of the Soviet ICBMs were. I always thought they were on the Kamchatka Peninsula. If they were in the Western Pacific this could be a likely scenario

This is one of the best books I've read about life on a nuke sub. I did 12 years as a nuke, and this is pretty accurate. The title is bad, but who would buy "The boring months interrupted by an exciting fire or flood I spent on a nuclear submarine". Problem is, that's what it was. Wouldn't trade my experiences, but only the officers & spooks knew what we were really doing.

This book should be titled "My experiences as an enlisted submarine crewmember in the back of a boat which I had no idea what the mission was." I had just finished reading "Blind Man's Bluff" (now that's a good book), and thought, based on the title and editorial reviews at Amazon.com, that this book would provide additional details on the mission of Halibut in the search for the sunken Russian Sub.

It provided none. Thinking back over the book, I don't believe there were more than five sentences in the whole book relating to Halibut's mission. If you want to read a book about a young enlisted man's journey through the submarine service (and I have the upmost respect for every man in that service)it is an okay book. If you are interested in the recovery of the Russian sub, it is an absolute waste of money.

The book's cover statement: "The most secret things that the US does...This book belongs in a vault." That is an absoulte lie and as misleading as anything that has ever come out of the Clinton Administration.

I hope Dr Dunham is more honest with his patients than he is with prospective buyers of this book.