Somewhere Under the Atlantic
a submarine wife's page, from St. Marys, Georgia

Hi  ·  Blue and Gold  ·  Familygrams  ·  Who Helps  ·  Patrol Tips  ·  Homecoming  ·  My Familygrams

Hi, I'm Joann

I'm 25 and I'm a teacher's aide in a first-grade classroom here in St. Marys, which means I spend my days tying shoes, wiping noses and listening to "Green Eggs and Ham" read out loud very, very slowly. I love it.

My husband Dustin is 26 and a sonar technician on a ballistic-missile submarine out of Kings Bay. We got married in 1997, about a year after we met at a friend's barbecue in Jacksonville, where he told me what he did for a living and I said, "So you just... listen? For a living?" He said yes, and he was very good at it, and then he proved it by remembering everything I said that whole night.

Right now he is somewhere under the Atlantic, or maybe not the Atlantic, I honestly don't know and that's the point. He's in the middle of his third patrol since we got married. Our dog Ping (get it? sonar?) and I are holding down the fort.

I made this page because when Dustin left for his first patrol I didn't know ANYTHING. I didn't know what a familygram was. I didn't know who the ombudsman was. I didn't know I wouldn't hear his voice for more than two months. I made just about every mistake you can make, and some of them are pretty funny now. So this is everything I wish somebody had handed me at the pier.

Important: you won't find the name of Dustin's boat on this page, or any dates, or anything about where they go or what they do. I don't know most of it anyway, and what I do know stays in my head. If you're a sub wife, you know why. If you're not: it's for their safety, and it's not optional.

Blue and Gold: how it works

Ballistic-missile submarines are built to stay at sea as much as possible. So each boat has two complete crews, called the Blue crew and the Gold crew. They take turns. One crew takes the boat out on patrol for a couple of months, while the other crew stays home, trains, and takes leave. Then the boat comes back in, there's a short stretch where the crews switch over and the boat gets fixed up, and the other crew takes her out.

What that means for families is a very regular kind of crazy. Your sailor is gone for a patrol, then home for about as long, then gone again. When he's home he still goes to work and to training, but he comes home at night, and he's there for birthdays and ballgames. When he's gone, he's gone.

Compared to the surface Navy wives, we get some things easier: our sailors are home for a big chunk of every year, and the schedule is pretty predictable. And some things harder: no port calls, no phone calls, no letters from them, nothing, for the whole patrol. The whole idea of the boat is that nobody knows where it is. That includes me.

Familygrams

So how do you stay in touch with somebody hiding at the bottom of the ocean? You don't, mostly. The boat can receive messages, but it doesn't send them. So the one thing you get is the familygram.

A familygram is a short message from you to your sailor. You get a small number of them per patrol, there's a strict word limit, and the ombudsman will give you the exact rules for your boat. Your familygrams are sent out to the boat, and your sailor gets them a few at a time. He can't write back. Not one word, until homecoming.

And here's the big rule: no bad news. None. Your sailor can't do anything about a problem at home, and he can't call, and the last thing anybody wants is a sonar tech worrying about the transmission in the middle of the ocean. So familygrams are only for good news and love and silly stuff. Real emergencies, like a death or a serious illness in the family, go through the Red Cross and the command, never through a familygram. The command knows how to handle those. Let them.

How to write a good one:

• Count your words. Then count them again. On my very first one I was three words over and it came back to me. I cried. Over three words.
• Be specific. "Everything is fine" is boring. "Ping ate your flip-flop, the left one" is a whole movie in his head.
• No questions he has to answer. He can't. It'll just bug him for weeks.
• No bad news, and no "good news" that's secretly bad news. "The car's fixed now!" means the car was broken. He'll figure that out.
• Nothing about the boat, the schedule or homecoming dates. Ever.
• Use your inside jokes. A word or two that only he'll understand can say more than the whole rest of it.
• Spread them out. Don't use them all in the first two weeks. (Guess who did that on her first patrol.)

I put my own familygrams from his first two patrols on their own page, with what I learned from writing them.

Who helps

The ombudsman. Every boat's crew has an ombudsman. She's a volunteer, usually a spouse herself, appointed by the commanding officer, and she's the official link between the command and us families. She has the real information, so you don't have to rely on rumors (and believe me, there are always rumors). She can help you find the right person for almost any problem, and she's who you call in an emergency. She also keeps things confidential. Get her number before your sailor leaves, write it on the refrigerator, and put it in your purse. Ours has done it for four years and has three kids of her own and I don't know how she does it.

The wives' club. Our crew has a spouses' club. We call ourselves the Dolphin Ladies, after the submarine pin our guys wear, though we do have one husband, and he's a good sport about it. We have a potluck once a month, a phone tree, a babysitting swap, a meal list for anybody who has a new baby or a surgery, and we make the homecoming banners. My first patrol, I didn't go, because I didn't know anybody. That was my biggest mistake. My second patrol, I went, and I met Erika, who was on her first patrol and crying in the parking lot, and Jackie, who brought a seven-layer dip that I still dream about, and Vicki, a chief's wife who has done eleven patrols and knows absolutely everything. Those women got me through.

The base also has a family service center with counselors and classes, and the chaplain's door is open. Use them.

Patrol tips from a semi-expert

Before he goes: make sure you have a power of attorney, know where all the important papers are, know how to pay every bill, and know the name of a good mechanic. Have him show you where the water shut-off is. Do it while he's still here to show you.

Stay busy. Take a class, join the gym, go to church, volunteer, learn to quilt, repaint the bathroom. Empty evenings are the hardest.

Write a letter every day. He can't get them out there, so I write one every night anyway and put it in a shoebox. At homecoming I hand him the box, and he reads them all over the next few weeks, a few at a time, like a book about the time he missed. He says it's his favorite part of coming home, after me and the cheeseburger.

Car trouble WILL happen. It is a law of nature. The day after the boat leaves, something in the car will make a noise. Have a mechanic you trust picked out ahead of time. Learn to check your oil and change a tire. (My first patrol, the battery died in the school parking lot and I had to get a jump from the principal. In my good skirt.)

The house will break too. My first patrol, the garbage disposal jammed and I tried to fix it with a butter knife. Don't do that. There's a little hex key that came with it. Vicki showed me.

Holidays alone. Don't spend them alone if you can help it. Last Thanksgiving four of us Dolphin Ladies pooled our kids and our side dishes at Vicki's house and it was one of the best Thanksgivings I ever had. We set four empty chairs and toasted them.

Don't count the days. I counted every single day of my first patrol and it made it feel like a year. Now I count Fridays, or paychecks, or the Kisses in the jar. Smaller numbers, sweeter math.

Keep it quiet. Don't tell people on the phone or in e-mail or at the grocery store when the boat left or when it's coming back. I told my mom the date on the phone my first patrol, and the ombudsman very gently explained to me why I shouldn't have. I felt about two inches tall. Now I just say "soon."

Let yourself have bad days. I cried in Wal-Mart in front of his cereal once. It's okay. Then get up and call one of the girls.

Homecoming

You'll get word about when the boat is due back through the ombudsman, and not before, and it can change. Don't buy a nonrefundable anything.

When the day comes, we all wait together with our banners and our kids and our signs and our new outfits that we bought two weeks ago and tried on six times. And then they come off the boat, all pale and blinking in the sunshine, and you're looking at every face trying to find the one, and then you do. I'm not going to try to describe that part. You'll see.

Some things to know: he'll be pale. He'll want real food: Dustin always wants a cheeseburger, a big salad and a gallon of cold milk, because fresh stuff runs out early on the boat. He might want to sleep for a day. The house will feel a little crowded for a week, because you've been running everything your way and now there are two of you again. That's normal. Go easy on each other. Let him take back the trash and the lawn, and don't hand him a list of everything that broke the minute he walks in. (I learned that one too.)

And then in a couple of months, he goes again, and you start a new jar of Kisses.

More for Navy wives

The Navy Wife's Survival Guide is by Tina, a Navy wife in Norfolk with eleven years, six moves and three kids under her belt. Her husband is on a ship, not a boat, so her deployments are different from ours, but her tips on getting through a long one, care packages and moving are wonderful. I love her paper chain idea. I just use chocolate instead.