Navy Veteran · 6 Years · Qualified Submariner & Sonar Technician · Author of "A Submariner's Tale"
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Rob Robertson served six years in the Navy as a sonar technician, a qualified submariner who spent four and a half years aboard the USS Louisville and six months on the USS Pasadena. He enlisted at twenty-four, partly because The Hunt for Red October made a sonar tech's job look like the coolest thing he'd ever seen, and partly because, as a lifelong Star Trek fan, a submarine was the closest he'd ever get to a starship.
He pulls back the curtain on a world most people never see. What sonar actually looked like, a green screen out of The Matrix, and what it sounded like, whale song on the midwatch. Why a submarine crew is considered at war from the minute it dives until it surfaces, running in a steel pipe packed with a nuclear reactor and salt water where nobody is ever really off watch. And how a crew keeps itself sane on a boat 360 feet end to end: frozen pillows, weights hidden in a bunk, an eighth of an inch cut off a chief's belt every watch so he thinks he's getting fat.
The second half of Rob's story is harder. He came out beat up, with a broken back, torn knees, and separated shoulders he calls workplace injuries, not battle wounds. He struggled to readjust, and he was told when he left that he wasn't VA eligible. What followed was a fifteen-year fight to be believed and get care. Rob recalled that a judge found the VA had not properly considered the evidence he provided. He wrote a book about all of it, A Submariner's Tale, so that one veteran somewhere might know they are not alone.
Rob had a good story to tell, and the submarine part of it pulled back a curtain on a world most of us never get to see. Frozen covers, weights stacked in a guy's bunk, cutting the chief's belt an eighth of an inch at a time so he'd think he was getting fat. That's the stuff that makes you laugh. But there's a second half to Rob's story, the fight he's been in with the VA for fifteen years over what he calls workplace injuries, and the book he wrote out of all of it.
What stayed with me was how much he wanted his story to help somebody. That's really the whole point of this. Another veteran's experience, close to a lot of ours, and worth capturing so we can help each other out.
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