Setting a Sub Standard

As a young Friar, I was able to combine a pair of asthmatic lungs, physical ineptitude and general nerdiness into being a kid who breathlessly awaited his permissible bicycling range to expand enough to include the public library.

Among the many books I checked out -- they had a whole room devoted to nothing but children's books! -- were the adventures of a red-headed submariner called Sailor Jack. Written by Selma and Jack Wassermann in the 1950s and 1960s, the books covered a number of Sailor Jack's adventures. The series actually spanned several reading levels. A couple were obviously for beginning readers, based on the extremely large type size and limited vocabulary. One, Sailor Jack Goes North, detailed the sub's mission under the Arctic ice pack to be the first submarine at the North Pole and was aimed at a lot higher grade-level. It paralleled the real-life voyage of the U.S.S. Nautilus, the first submarine to make a submerged transit under the polar ice cap. The Wassermanns, together and separately, also wrote several books on education and another series about a mischievous monkey named Moonbeam, but the former had no pictures and the latter seemed silly.

Sailor Jack comes to mind when reading Dangerous Ground, the first of Larry Bond's two books focusing on young submarine officer Jerry Mitchell (The other is a previous Friar read, here). Not because Bond and unlisted co-author Chris Carlson write like the Wassermanns, but because the straightforward submarine adventures they've made are just plain fun, like good ol' Sailor Jack and his crewmates.

Mitchell is a jet pilot when an accident injures his wrist just enough to keep him from being able to properly work cockpit controls. Rather than leave the Navy or take some surface ship assignment, he wrangles a berth in the submarine training program and finds himself assigned to the U.S.S. Memphis just before it heads out on an unusual mission. Mitchell already has a steep mountain to climb to get up to speed in how to be a submarine officer, and he's not helped by Captain Hardy, a micro-manager whose demands for perfection make Mitchell's hard job even worse. But the captain himself is under the politically heavy thumb of a woman scientist at whose request the president himself has ordered the Memphis to conduct a search for nuclear waste dangerously near Russian territorial waters.

Bond paints no deep characters here, although he does try to offer some personality for most of them. A few of the other submarine officers tend to blend into one another, and some of the character development happens a little too fast and a little too conveniently as we near the end of the story. Bond and Carlson do cram their book full of technical details about Navy procedures and submarine operation, but since Mitchell is learning this the same time we are, it fits with the story. It may not interest everyone, but those details were fascinating to me and more than covered some of the plot's weaknesses.

I guess I read the Sailor Jack books a good dozen times apiece, at least, fascinated by the submerged world of the submariner then as now. I remember being upset that my mom wouldn't let me check out all 13 the library had on the shelf at a single time. Bond and Carlson put together a great old-fashioned submarine thriller that made me hope they put to sea with Lt. Mitchell again sometime soon.