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Iron Curtain Submarines Cold War submarine and naval history. Declassified photos, rare footage, secret missions and stories from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

**BERLIN, 30 APRIL 1938** # BRITISH SEA MONSTER ATTACKS GERMAN U-BOAT!**A twenty-year-old mystery. What is the British A...
12/10/2026

**BERLIN, 30 APRIL 1938**

# BRITISH SEA MONSTER ATTACKS GERMAN U-BOAT!

**A twenty-year-old mystery. What is the British Admiralty concealing? Why does London remain silent about the true fate of UB-85?**

*From our Naval Correspondent*

Twenty years have passed since the German submarine UB-85, faithfully carrying out her duty in waters infested by the enemies of the Fatherland, fell victim to an occurrence so extraordinary that British propaganda has preferred to conceal its true circumstances ever since.

On the night of 29–30 April 1918, our gallant submariners encountered an adversary unknown to any naval regulation, recognised by no military manual and, apparently, absent from the official lists of His Britannic Majesty's Royal Navy.

From the black waters of the Atlantic there emerged a monstrous creature whose membership of the known animal kingdom must be regarded as highly questionable.

According to accounts attributed to those involved, an enormous head, covered in horn-like projections, rose above the submarine's deck. Two gigantic eyes, resembling powerful electric searchlights, glared at the German sailors. From its gaping jaws protruded teeth of terrifying dimensions. Mighty appendages wrapped themselves around the steel hull.

Kapitänleutnant Günther Krech and his men did not falter.

Lacking any specialised equipment for dealing with prehistoric sea monsters, the German sailors opened fire with their personal weapons. Despite its apparent injuries, the creature continued its assault until at last it released its grip and disappeared beneath the waves.

By then, however, the submarine had suffered damage which reportedly made further diving impossible.

The following morning a British patrol vessel appeared.

The British sailors, who had taken no part whatsoever in the struggle against the unknown beast, immediately claimed the destruction of the German submarine as a triumph of British seamanship!

How characteristic of British naval glory!

Where the German sailor battles the very forces of Nature, the British officer arrives afterwards to enter a victory in his service record.

But let us ask the question which London so carefully avoids.

**WHENCE CAME THE MONSTER?**

Ancient Germanic and Scandinavian traditions speak of the Kraken — a gigantic inhabitant of the deep, capable of dragging entire ships beneath the sea.

Modern science has confirmed the existence of enormous cephalopods.

Yet no naturalist has satisfactorily explained how an unknown marine creature happened to appear precisely in the path of a German submarine, nor why its assault should have coincided so conveniently with the arrival of a British warship.

A coincidence?

The British Admiralty is remarkably fond of that word whenever circumstances become inconvenient.

We do not suggest that British scientists have succeeded in taming a prehistoric monster.

Nevertheless, has Britain not claimed dominion over the seas for centuries? Does her Admiralty not expend enormous sums upon secret experiments, the purposes of which remain entirely unknown to the British taxpayer?

Today London assures the world that UB-85 was defeated by an ordinary patrol vessel.

Tomorrow British historians will doubtless declare that no monster ever existed, and that thirty-four German submariners were merely suffering from an unfortunate excess of imagination.

We are well acquainted with the value of such explanations.

The British lion is an exceptionally courageous animal — particularly when the danger has already passed.

**A MYSTERY WHICH SCIENCE CANNOT IGNORE**

There remains, however, one circumstance which should trouble every honest investigator.

How could a German warship, constructed by the finest engineers of her age, be rendered helpless by a creature whose very existence British science refuses to acknowledge?

There is no answer.

The Admiralty archives remain silent.

The British newspapers remain silent.

And the naval experts who are usually so eager to attribute every misfortune of German arms to technical shortcomings have suddenly discovered the virtues of discretion.

Twenty years ago, a British captain entered the capture of UB-85 in his ship's log.

But if the German submarine truly fell victim to a sea monster, to whom does the honour of victory properly belong?

To the Royal Navy?

Or to the Kraken?

We trust that the honourable gentlemen of the Admiralty will raise no objection to the institution of a special decoration for their distinguished underwater ally.

**THE ORDER OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE FOR THE KRAKEN!**

Naturally, the creature should also receive British citizenship, a naval pension and full membership of the Officers' Club at Portsmouth.

Indeed, we should not be altogether surprised to learn that the monster is already on the secret payroll of His Majesty's Government.

In which case, we can only express the sincere hope that, upon its next encounter, the beast will be sufficiently well trained to distinguish a German submarine from a British destroyer.

*The Editorial Office reserves the right to return to this mystery when the British naval archives are finally opened. Until that day, London's official explanation appears to us scarcely less fantastic than the legends of the ancient mariners.*

Herr Goebbels himself has warned that the British ruling classes have long since sold their souls to the Powers of Darkness, betraying not merely the German people but their own ancient A***n-Germanic heritage. These godforsaken Anglo-Saxons, having apparently exhausted the possibilities of conventional naval warfare, now seem prepared to enlist the assistance of creatures from the very depths of Hell. It is therefore with admirable foresight that German scholars have been despatched to the remote mountains of Tibet, under the patronage of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, to investigate the supposed origins of the A***n race and recover whatever ancient wisdom might be required to confront this infernal Anglo-Saxon conspiracy. Whether the expedition will uncover the secrets of mankind's forgotten ancestors or merely establish that the British Admiralty has already recruited the Kraken remains to be seen. In either case, one trusts that the gentlemen of the expedition have been provided with suitable scientific instruments, adequate provisions and, above all, a sufficiently large fishing net...

Coming this evening: a hilariously bizarre tale of a German U-boat, a monstrous Kraken, and a conspiracy that would have made even Dr Goebbels proud.
But for now, consider this: what if the Royal Navy had a secret ally lurking in the depths of the ocean

If you ever get the urge to throw a successful conference on saving humanity from its own stupidity, pick a spot with th...
11/10/2026

If you ever get the urge to throw a successful conference on saving humanity from its own stupidity, pick a spot with the right scenery. On October 11th, exactly forty years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan met in exactly that kind of setting—on a wind-swept Icelandic island. Picture this: two gentlemen, keeping their fingers on the red buttons for the entire world, sitting in the cozy Höfði house in Reykjavik, sipping the local throat-burning wh***ey and gazing thoughtfully out the window. And out there, beyond the glass, loom dormant, smoking volcanoes, dropping a fairly unsubtle hint about what our planet will look like if these two don't hash out a deal right now.
And they certainly had something to hash out, because the universe had just dropped a very fat hint the day before. Literally just days before the politicians started exchanging historic handshakes, the K-219 went to the bottom of the Sargasso Sea with highly expressive special effects. And that was far from the only incident—the ocean depths by that time had started looking suspiciously like a high-tech scrap yard, where the superpowers regularly deep-sixed their multi-billion-dollar Doomsday machines along with their nuclear loadouts. While down in the salty deep, ordinary sailors were pulling off the impossible trying to prevent a meltdown, up on the beach [on shore], the diplomats suddenly realized: this grandiose nuclear circus might just finish off the audience before the main show even begins.
Staring out at the harsh Icelandic landscape and sipping wh***ey, the leaders figured it was time to close up shop. And that's when the thing began that historians, with straight faces, call the "era of disarmament," but which any sane observer would consider a grand bureaucratic st******se. Yesterday's sworn enemies, who had spent decades preparing to turn each other into radioactive ash, suddenly started paying social calls to inspect each other. Stern American gentlemen with clipboards wandered around top-secret piers out in Gadzhievo, politely inquiring what was hidden under the tarps, while our guys poked around the Pentagon's stashes with the exact same deadpan expressions. The mighty "Yankees" [Project 667A SSBNs], the recent terror of the seas, were sent to the breakers—they were literally given surgical operations, ruthlessly cutting out their missile "turtlebacks" and turning ocean-going predators into harmless transport barges. The Americans, with no less enthusiasm, chopped up their own bombers and boats, as if they'd started getting paid by the pound for scrap metal.
Culture immediately caught this wave of universal fraternization, deciding that the end of history had arrived. The air smelled of something sweet, and Klaus Meine from the Scorpions, happily squinting, whistled about the "Wind of Change." Over in our neck of the woods, Viktor Tsoi, glaring sternly from under his brow, demanded changes so convincingly that the whole country picked up the tune in chorus, without really understanding where that locomotive was rushing. Everyone genuinely believed that all we had to do was saw off the missiles, and the last fences would fall, eternal prosperity would arrive, and the old top-secret bunkers would be refitted into warehouses with free ice cream. Humanity decided that the scary fairy tale was over, and ahead of us were only the final credits rolling to a beautiful song.
And now, exactly forty years later, we are sitting smack in the middle of the very era we were singing so desperately about. The boats were safely scrapped, the turtlebacks sawed off, the joint commissions drank all the tea on the bases and went their separate ways to write memoirs. And we found ourselves in this amazing time where the old rules were canceled, and they forgot to write the new ones. We live in a world where there's more information than sense, and instead of a solid, understandable nuclear threat, we're seriously afraid that a smart algorithm will put us out of work, and a smart electric kettle will leak our secrets to the net. As the classic would say, there is nothing more dangerous to a man than the fulfillment of his deepest wish. We demanded changes so loudly that the universe, with a smirk, dumped a whole dump-truck full of them on our heads. And now we stand in the middle of this noisy celebration of life, dusting ourselves off and trying to figure out: either we were singing the wrong song, or that great wind of change turned out to be just a mundane draft.
It’s obvious that neither Gorby nor Reagan were actually drinking wh***ey. And it's true! What bitter historical irony: at the exact moment when the fate of the world depended on whether two men could just understand each other on a human level, their status demanded they be textbook boring.
It was the fall of '86. Mikhail Sergeyevich was at the very zenith of his anti-alcohol campaign, the people had already dubbed him the "Mineral Secretary," and vineyards all over the Union were splintering under the axe. What wh***ey could there be—the table was undoubtedly set with protocol mineral water and tea in boring cups. Reagan, meanwhile, out of his old habit, was most likely crunching on his favorite Jelly Belly jelly beans that he carried around in his jacket pocket. The two most powerful men on the planet were sitting on the threshold of a nuclear apocalypse, chewing jelly beans and washing them down with Narzan [mineral water].
But think about how things might have turned out if they had actually locked the door of that Icelandic mansion, kicked all those advisors with their apocalyptic charts out into the passageway, and simply pulled a bottle of good, aged single-malt out of the cabinet. Picture it: no ties, no cameras, none of this strained political pharisaism.
"You know, Ron," Gorbachev would have said, staring at a smoldering cigar. "I had a boat sink on me the other day. Good men died. Let's wrap up this circus."
"You've got that right, Mikhail," Reagan would have answered, sliding his glass forward. "Splash a little more in there. My hawks over at the Pentagon have been chewing my ear off with their 'Star Wars' too. Let's just live."
Maybe then this so-called "wind of change" wouldn't have turned into such a destructive draft, blowing out the load-bearing bulkheads, but a normal, fresh breeze. Because when men hash things out dry, strictly by the book, they make bureaucratic decisions: saw it up here, blow it up there, sign the transfer-and-acceptance act over here. But if they had just had a drink like regular guys, looking out at those same Icelandic volcanoes, they might have agreed not just to tear down the old world, but to build a new one. Understandable, solid, and with a human face.
But alas. The mineral water and jelly beans did their job. The treaties were signed with dry, squeaky pens, the boats were chopped into razor blades strictly according to the regs, and now we live in a world dreamed up by politicians who were absolutely sober, yet had absolutely no idea of the consequences of their actions. It really is a shame. Sometimes a bottle of good scotch can save humanity a hell of a lot more reliably than a briefcase full of diplomatic notes.

Two WatchesDedicated to all XOs...Before you read this story, I want to say one important thing. I have immense respect ...
09/10/2026

Two Watches
Dedicated to all XOs...
Before you read this story, I want to say one important thing. I have immense respect for my XO, Pyotr Nikolayevich, and my Skipper, Igor Kurdin, with whom I had the privilege to serve. But this tale is not about them at all, and contains no hidden hints. I thank God that fate brought me together with these men and that I had the chance to serve under them. It’s just that in the Navy, as in life, there are no two identical characters or two identical destinies. Each is its own story...
The story itself:
Thank God, not all retired officers who read my sea stories consider me a sellout bastard and a joint agent for the State Department, Mossad, and the NKVD all rolled into one.
Some send me direct messages. They correct me. They argue. They remind me of things I’ve already managed to forget. And sometimes they send their own stories.
One of them was told to me by a guy who left the Northern Fleet in the early nineties as a Senior Lieutenant [Lieutenant (j.g.)]. A story about his XO.
I won't name names. Not because it’s some big secret, but because a man has the right to be remembered not by his last name, but by his deeds.
On the boat, they quietly hated this XO. Especially the junior officers. As it turned out later, they hated a man they barely knew.
As was often the case on "boomers," the XO came from Weapons. On their missile boat he had once come up through the Weapons Department and had grown into the XO's billet as a man who knew the service from the inside out. Therefore, it was especially tough for those who served in that same department. The narrator was the Fire Control Officer in Weapons—a young Lieutenant (j.g.) for whom the digits in the tables represented calculations and data prep for a missile launch. For a regular XO, all this fire control wizardry might have been a thick enough forest that a junior officer could sometimes hide in it behind the word "system," a printout, or a smart-sounding term. With this guy, that didn't work. The XO himself came from there. The moment you'd say: "Commander, the fire control system..." he would cut you off:
"The system doesn't report to me. You report to me. Where'd the number come from?"
And then began what the whole crew called by various names, but never a kind one.
The XO entered the control room not as a human being, but as a surprise inspection. The Officer of the Deck (OOD) would snap to attention before he even realized why he was doing it, the Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW) would start staring at his panel as if seeing his own reactor plant for the very first time in his life, and the junior officer would instantly remember everything he hadn't done over the last three days. The XO would grab the logbook, flip through a few pages, and ask quietly: "What is this?"
It was exactly that quiet "What is this?" they feared most of all. It was usually followed by an investigation revealing that the entry was made twelve minutes late, the signature looked like the dying cardiogram of an octopus, and the guy who signed it, based on the totality of the evidence, shouldn't have been trusted with an electric kettle, let alone strategic missile weapons. Finishing up in the conn, the XO would head through the compartments. Under the deck plates, there'd be a drop of oil. In the bilges—a rag folded in a way that violated his concept of the universe. In the galley—a knife out of place. With the missile techs—log entries that could be interpreted two ways, and on a ballistic missile sub, he firmly believed, the only thing that could be interpreted two ways was a joke. Everything else had to have one meaning, one digit, and one signature. It felt like God built this boat in six days, and on the seventh, He sent the XO to inspect the work.
Junior officers caught the worst of it. A seaman's mistakes could still be written off to youth, natural stupidity, and the inevitable limitations of the conscript pool. A Chief was forgiven a lot for his time in service, his gray hair, and his ability to fix gear that industry didn't even manufacture anymore. But a lieutenant had voluntarily entered the academy, studied for five years, received his shoulder boards, and therefore consciously forfeited the right to be a du***ss. The narrator caught it double exactly because the XO saw him as one of his own—a missile tech—and gave no discounts for age or inexperience. Sometimes it was useful. Sometimes it was unfair. Sometimes it was just humiliating. Behind his back, the junior officers called him names that made the XO's perfectly decent actual last name look almost affectionate in comparison. He himself, it seemed, understood how he was viewed and had no intention of fixing it.
With the Skipper, everything looked completely different. The Skipper, a Captain, was a calm man with the kind of power that doesn't need to prove its existence every day. He could walk into the control room, look at the gauges, and say: "I don't really like the look of the tertiary loop," and a few minutes later everyone who could possibly dislike it in a professional capacity would be gathered around the tertiary loop. The XO beside him became emphatically strictly-by-the-book: "Aye, Skipper." "Yes, sir." "It will be done."
When the Skipper told him in front of everyone: "Stop busting their balls, they’ve been on their feet for two days straight," the XO would snap to attention and reply: "Aye, Skipper. Stop busting their balls." And he would say it with such a serious face that even the greenest lieutenant understood: this was theater. Between the Skipper and the XO played out an old game of authority and subordination, understood by both of them. The crew read that. What the crew didn't read was that the XO was playing exactly the same game for them, too. The role was simply memorized flawlessly.
The Lieutenant got to see his other life the year their crew was being decommissioned and disbanded. The early nineties in general were a time when the verb "disband" was heard almost more often than the word "serve." Boats were pulled from service, units were downsized, officers were dragged off to new billets, and the country they had sworn an oath to was itself starting to resemble a ship where orchestras were still playing on the upper deck while down below someone was busy cutting the bulkheads with a torch.
They offered the young officer a chance to stay. They considered him promising: he was good with the hardware, understood electronics, had a working brain, and his subordinates respected him. The Skipper talked to him. The zampolit [political officer] also had the mandatory chat. Then both of them apparently decided that the final argument should be the XO, and asked him to talk to the man the Navy didn't want to lose.
The XO called him in after hours.
"Planning to leave?"
"Yes, sir."
"Yes, or 'Yes, sir'?"
The Lieutenant paused.
"Yes."
The XO looked at him for a few seconds, and the lieutenant mentally braced himself for the usual ass-chewing: the oath, duty, the Motherland invested money in you, an officer has no right. But the XO only asked:
"Are you busy tonight?"
"No."
"Then come over to my place. I don't want to talk here. And you don't have to wear your uniform. The wife will force you to eat anyway."
Refusing the XO was harder than resigning from the Navy, so that evening the young officer showed up. The XO lived in a typical garrison apartment block—just like the rest of them: a narrow stairwell, the smell of boiled potatoes and wet kids' clothes, a sled under the landing, someone's boots outside a door, a radiator that produced heat only on paper. The XO's wife opened the door, a small woman in a house cardigan. Seeing the guest, she smiled:
"Ah, it's you. Come in. He said you'd drop by."
The mere fact that the XO spoke of his subordinates' existence at home without using profanity seemed highly suspicious. The host himself was sitting in the kitchen in sweatpants and an ironed t-shirt. Without his tunic, his belt, and the control room, he unexpectedly turned out to be just a forty-something guy with a tired face. He stood up, helped his wife clear the extra dishes from the table, kissed her somewhere near the temple, and said:
"Just don't throw us a banquet. We need to talk."
"I know you guys. 'Talking' with you always ends in starvation by midnight."
She set down a skillet with fried potatoes, some herring, and a kettle. The Lieutenant, out of habit, declined the food.
"You're not giving a brief," the XO said. "Eat. Otherwise tomorrow you'll start telling people I starve my officers, too."
And then the truly unbelievable started. The XO didn't ask about the service. How was the wife? How was the kid? Did he stop getting sick after that bout of bronchitis? Was there still a draft from the window in their room? Where did his wife plan to work if they left the North? Did they have anywhere to go? Who would help them out at first? He remembered things the Lieutenant had once mentioned in passing and had long since forgotten he’d even said. On the boat, this man could publicly inform him in the morning that with his level of organizational skills, it was dangerous to let him manage a public restroom, and then in the evening, he was asking if they had moved the crib away from the cold wall. The young officer sat there feeling a strange sensation: as if he had been lied to for months, only he couldn't figure out where exactly—on the boat, or here.
When they got to the main point, the XO immediately laid out the tactical situation.
"The Skipper and the zampolit asked me to talk to you. They don't want to lose you. Neither do I. You could make a good officer. Not a 'decent' one, a good one. Now tell me why you're leaving."
The Lieutenant began to explain. The crew was being disbanded. The new duty station was unknown. The wife was tired of the garrison life. The kid was growing. The money was okay, but they’d started delaying the paychecks. But it wasn't even about the money. He increasingly caught himself thinking that he no longer understood where the service was heading, or whether the straight line upon which careers were built just yesterday even existed anymore: Ensign, Lieutenant (j.g.), division officer, department head... The rungs were still there, but it felt like someone had carried the ladder out of the house.
The XO listened calmly. He didn't interrupt, didn't argue. Then he poured himself some tea and said:
"Alright. So what do you want from me? For me to talk you out of it?"
"I don't know. You're the one who called me in to talk... But since the conversation went there, I'd ask for your advice, I guess."
"It's a bad time for advice. Today I'll tell you: stay, the Navy is eternal. And tomorrow we wake up—and half the fleet is gone. Hell, not just the fleet... Sometimes I get the feeling that they aren't just decommissioning our crew, they're scrapping the whole damn country. They put the Union into the shipyards and they're cutting it up into sections. Let's just hope they don't cut the reactor compartments out of our boats cleaner than they cut the republics out of the country."
He chuckled, but there was no joy in it. Then he turned serious.
"If you want to serve—stay. I'll help you any way I can. You've got room to grow. You understand the gear, you handle the men fine, your head isn't just for decoration. But if you don't want to—leave. Just don't leave out of resentment. And don't stay out of fear. The dumbest thing you can do is live someone else's life just because you were too scared to change course when you had the chance."
"Would you leave?"
The XO thought about it.
"Me? No. It's too late for me. And besides this nuthouse, I probably don't know how to do anything else anymore."
From the other room, his wife chimed in:
"Don't be so modest. You don't know how to give orders at home either."
The XO smiled. He didn't smirk, like on the boat, but actually smiled.
"See? An objective performance eval from my duty station."
At that moment, his youngest appeared in the kitchen—a kid about twelve with a notebook in his hand. His wife immediately remembered the thing she had apparently been saving all evening for her husband's return.
"Oh, by the way. Have a word with the heir. An 'F' again."
The XO looked at his son.
"For what?"
"Math."
"Be specific."
"Decimal fractions."
"Fractions... and decimals at that—serious business. Nations have fallen apart over less. Bring it here."
He opened the notebook and didn't raise his voice once. Didn't ask why he hadn't studied. Didn't inquire what his son planned to become in life with grades like that.
"Look. This here is one box. Whole. One. Got it? Like one boat."
"Got it."
"Now I divide it into ten equal parts. One piece, how much of the box is that?"
"One tenth."
"Right. And so you don't have to write 'one tenth' every time, smart people invented the decimal point. They write it like this: 0.1. Read as: zero wholes and one tenth. The decimal point is like a bulkhead. To the left of it is the whole, to the right is what they sawed off of it."
He pushed one piece aside.
"This is 0.1. And this?"
He pushed four more aside.
"Five pieces. 0.5. Half. Your favorite fifty kopecks. You had a ruble, 50 kopecks is 0.5 of a ruble. Got it?"
"Yeah."
"Now watch this magic trick. What happens if you add 0.5 to another 0.5?"
"One."
"Exactly. 0.5 plus 0.5 is 1.0. One whole box. Half plus half is always a whole. Whether it's sugar, money, or torpedoes. We’ve got ten fish on the racks. One fish is 0.1 of a loadout. Five fish is 0.5. And ten fish is 1.0. A full tactical loadout. Only you can't have zero-point-five of a person, clear?"
"Clear."
"And which is bigger, 0.2 or 0.8?"
"0.8."
"Why?"
"There are more pieces there."
"Good job. Not hopeless after all. And the teacher gives you an 'F'. Who are we supposed to believe?"
The kid laughed. A few minutes later they were dividing sugar, apples, some hypothetical money, and, naturally, torpedoes. For some reason, the XO didn't bring missiles into his home schooling. Then the son asked:
"Dad, what if I get another 'F'?"
"You'll fix it."
"And if I don't fix it?"
"So what?"
His wife appeared in the doorway.
"See! That's why he isn't afraid of you. If only for once you talked to him the way you talk to your lieutenants."
The XO put his palm on the back of his son's head.
"Seryozha, an 'F' is not a hull breach. No one's going to drown from it. If you want to go to college later—you'll have to study. If you don't—don't go. You'll be a carpenter, a driver, a janitor. A sailor, if you absolutely can't think of anything else. Honest work doesn't shame a man. Just decide for yourself what you want, and do it right. And the main thing—stay a decent human being. The rest can either be fixed or survived."
"What about a 'C'?"
"A 'C' even more so. Half the country was built on 'C's, son."
His wife shook her head.
"If only you talked to your officers like that."
The XO looked at the guest, then at his son.
"Seryozha doesn't have a nuclear reactor right behind his back."
"Your lieutenants have something more important than reactors too... for example—families..."
He didn't answer right away.
"I know."
That short "I know" is probably what the Lieutenant remembered best of all. Not because the XO suddenly became a kind boss after that. The next morning he walked into the control room as the exact same man the crew had known for years. Found an error in the log, ripped into the OOD, crawled through the compartments, dug up something that wasn't supposed to be there, and then got to the Fire Control Officer. The Lieutenant once again listened to a lecture on how computing equipment does not relieve an officer of the obligation to think with his own head. No miraculous transformation occurred. It’s just that now, one man on the boat knew: this harshness was not the entirety of the XO's personality. Perhaps it wasn't even the main part of it. It was a tool that he, for some reason, considered absolutely necessary on a ship where a mistake could genuinely cost far more than someone's ruined mood.
The Lieutenant made his decision anyway. He left the Navy. The XO didn't try to talk him out of it anymore. When he ran into him in the headquarters corridor some time later, he only asked:
"Is your decision final?"
"Yes."
"Then don't look back. If you look back after every course change, you won't get very far."
Life then sorted things out rather ironically. The Navy lost a promising officer, but the man didn't go under. His technical education, his habit of understanding the hardware, and his distrust of the phrase "the computer calculated it that way" turned out to be in demand on the beach [on shore], too. Years later, that same Lieutenant became a lead electronics engineer at an IT company involved in developing and programming equipment—what they now call hardware. He no longer had reactors behind his back, nor missile flight assignments, but the habit of double-checking a digit before saying "the system spit it out" stayed with him for the rest of his life.
Many years later, he wrote to me not about the boat, not about the missiles, and not even about why he left. He told me about the XO he had once almost hated. An annoying thing happens as you get older: people who, when you were twenty, were so easily sorted into "good" and "bad," suddenly stop fitting into those two boxes. Understanding doesn't mean forgiving—some of those ass-chewings from that XO were unjust, some words humiliating, and adult wisdom isn't obligated to retroactively turn being an as***le into a pedagogical method. But a man is rarely equal to his worst role. On the boat, that XO considered it his duty to be the one they feared; at home—the one you felt safe beside. The crew saw his first life and took it as his only one. His family lived with the second and, quite possibly, didn't fully comprehend the first. And he himself walked between them every day—from the kitchen table to the conn and back—and, maybe, had long since stopped asking which of the two faces was real. Because, most likely, both were. It's just that one of his watches began the moment he stepped over the hatch coaming of the boat, and the other—when he opened the door to his own apartment. And it remains unknown which of the two was harder.

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