by Burke McKay

Created on: October 26, 2008

The orange sky and deep grey clouds marked the ending of a clear fall day in New England as a young Second Class Missile Tech walked onto the pier burdened with his sea bag and orders. The bright lights, already on, would soon obscure the encroaching night at Sub Base, New London. The first thing this young Missile Tech noticed was the bow planes protruding from the wart on the nose of the USS Daniel Webster, his assignment, his duty, his boat.

He'd learned about SSB(N)'s in Sub
School almost a year earlier, but to be this close, to see its smooth shape almost motionless in the rippling waves, he had to stop and ponder the moment.
The sail rose from the body without the adornment of fairwater planes common to all other Poseidon class submarines.
Behind the sail were the missile hatches, those sixteen fateful doors that, when opened on any patrol, signaled the simple and profound fact that his country had suffered a nuclear attack from some enemy; now there was no country, no home to come home to. Within he felt a stirring in his heart, nineteen is too young for this responsibility.

Consumed by the enormity of the responsibility ahead, he barely paid any attention to the rest of the boat. Theory had just become fact, concept now manifest in hard steel reality. His mind wandered briefly to his hometown, Oak Ridge, TN, the atomic city, Manhattan Project, and home.
Reality took another, unexpected step; what enemy would profit by destroying his hometown?

Standing there, consumed by a question I wished I had never asked, the answer came. As surely as the splashing waves, the ebb and flow of the tides, and the falling of night, it came. The only answer that really makes sense, the only country on Earth whose sole profit would be keeping it out of enemy hands; I looked at my hands, trembling, and prayed. In front of me a sleek, quiet, machine designed to carry the most powerful weapons of the day, and my job was to maintain those weapons, and should the need arise, to launch them at whatever selected targets.

For the next four years I would be attached to the USS Daniel Webster, SSB(N) 626. There were good times, and bad, but always the memory of that evening, and the revelation I didn't want to know. It wasn't so much that it would be my fingers that pushed that final button that would wipe out my hometown, but that it could be.

That evening was thirty four years ago, but haunts me to this day. A responsibility too great for a nineteen year old, or any age.

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