Sea Stories

On October 27, 1962 – called Black Saturday by the Kennedy White House – the USS Cony surfaced B-59, a Soviet submarine. Gary Slaughter, a 23-year-old U.S. Navy officer, studied the sullen face of Capt. Vitali Savitsky, his sworn enemy, at a distance of only 200 feet. His mission? To dissuade Savitsky from launching a torpedo – with a nuclear tip that could have precipitated an all-out nuclear exchange that would have destroyed the world. Other vignettes include: A boiler explosion kills two sailors aboard a destroyer where Slaughter served as engineering officer; A perplexing situation develops in the Engineering Log Room when a naïve Yeoman uses his initials, FRT, to reclassify hundreds of Navy documents; In an apparent suicide attempt, a sailor, fueled by too many beers, jumps into the icy waters off the coast of Portland, Maine.