The day when those bastards with the unshaven smiling faces hung from the limber holes aft of the forward engine room exhaust, hauled your dripping wet, worthless butt up the tanktops, and the Old Man pinned Dolphins over the pocket of your wet dungaree shirt… Your life changed.
You had no idea how that piece of silver-plated metal would alter the world you would live in.
All civilizations have their milestones. In some African tribes they pin all sorts of hell on prospective 'Qualified' warriors… The poor bastards have to tapdance barefooted over a hundred yards white hot rocks… Wear a hornet's nest like a hat, kill a panther with their bare hands and have a witch doctor stitch their scrotum to their knee with a wild boar tusk. Then, after a three-day dance with his drunk as owls buddies, the lad becomes a warrior… Which means he's eligible to kill and eat his enemies and become the Secretary General of United Nations.
I think it is called 'the rite of passage.' Having your skipper pin Dolphins on you is such a rite and it brought with it a set of unrecorded obligations that you didn't fully understand and obligations you knew nothing about at the time. Hell, you could fill all the planets and the Australian outback with the stuff nineteen-year-old non-rated kids didn't know.
First, the unwritten law requires that you never pass up a lad hitchhiking wearing silver fish… You can be flank haulin' up the highway, ten guys packed in a VW bug… And you'll burn flat spots in your tires to pack one more boatsailor in. Why? Because he's a damn submarine sailor. If you pass up a sub sailor the Goddess of The Main induction visits you in your sleep and removes two of your indispensable major internal organs with a rusty electricians knife. Never, ever pass up a man wearing Dolphins… Tape the bastard to a fender if you have to… But never pass on by a qualified boat sailor.
Never leave a boatsailor sitting in a gin mill broke and nursing an empty glass. Tuck a five in his pocket… Buy

(DOLPHINS Continued on page 5)

(Continued from OCTOBER FURY ; page 1)

tile Waters) was a junior officer in 1962 on Newport, RI-based USS Blandy (DD- 943), a Forrest Sherman Class destroyer.  As Electronics Materials Officer he had a ringside seat during the Crisis as USS Blandy hunted Soviet submarines and inspected Soviet freighters as they withdrew from Cuba with ballistic missiles.

OCTOBER FURY'S unique contribution to Cuban Missile Crisis history is the story, based on Huchthausen's interviews with former Soviet submarine officers of four Foxtrot submarines attermpting to deploy to the Cuban port of Mariel.  The Foxtrots are supposed to pioneer the route and establish a permanent base for follow-on deployment to Cuba of Golf Class strategic missile submarines, creating a perpetual anti-shipping and strategic threat 90 miles from the United States. 

Unaware of the additional Soviet deployment of land-based ballistic and surface-to-air missiles, bombers and other forces to Cuba that will soon trigger the Crisis, the Project 641 class Foxtrots depart the Kola Peninsula on October 1, 1962.

Just before they sortie each Foxtrot is issued one nuclear-tipped torpedo, said to have both submerged and surface detonating capability.  With only one non submarine special weapons officer assigned, the regular crew is untrained and nobody is certain whether they can fire the nuclear torpedoes without destroying their own vessel in the process. 

The submarine captains have conflicting oral and written orders that seem to grant authority to fire the nuclear weapons without instructions from Moscow if the submarines come under U.S. Navy attack.

By the time the submarines near the Bahamas the U.S.-Soviet face off over Cuban-based nuclear weapons has commenced. 

On October 15 the Foxtrots receive new orders that cancel the voyage to Cuba and deploy them instead to combat patrol stations: three of them northeast of Cuba in the Atlantic and the fourth southeast of Cuba in the Caribbean.

(Continued OCTOBER FURY  on page 4)