Interviews recount sub crash aftermath
By Dan Nakaso and David Waite
Advertiser Staff Writers
The USS Greeneville had just smashed into the Ehime Maru fishing boat, sending dozens of Japanese fishermen into the water, when frantic sailors asked their civilian guests whether any of them spoke Chinese.
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Moments later, they returned to where the guests were huddled in the torpedo room to ask whether any spoke Japanese.
Visitors who were aboard the USS Greeneville when the fast-attack submarine collided Feb. 9 with the Japanese fishing vessel Ehime Maru are ferried to shore aboard a small boat after disembarking the sub.
"Apparently they had a language problem," said Michael "Mickey" Nolan of Hawai'i Kai, one of 16 visitors who came aboard the Greeneville on Feb. 9 for a seven-hour demonstration of the prowess of fast-attack submarines. "Apparently, the people who were now, I guess, in the life rafts — they were trying to communicate with them and no one spoke English."
The National Transportation Safety Board interviewed the civilians in the days following the crash nine miles south of Diamond Head. The NTSB released transcripts of the interviews yesterday — the day after the Navy concluded a 12-day court of inquiry into the collision at Pearl Harbor. The three admirals who presided over the court are expected to make their recommendations to Adm. Thomas Fargo, commander of the Pacific Fleet, within three weeks.
The interviews add little toward finding out what caused the Greeneville to rip through the hull of the Ehime Maru as the submarine performed a dramatic "emergency blow" maneuver that sent it rocketing toward the surface.
But they offer a clearer picture of both the efficiency and concern of the Greeneville's crew in the moments and hours after an accident that strained U.S.-Japan relations and called for U.S. apologies from President Bush on down.
"It's like everybody just kind of sprung into action to handle whatever this emergency was," Nolan said.
Two hours after the crash, the Greeneville's captain came down to the ship's mess and told the visitors the sub was going to remain at the crash site overnight to conduct search-and-rescue operations.
Some of the passengers were already getting seasick. One woman cried. Susan Nolan, Mickey Nolan's wife, felt a sense of panic, a fear that the collision had somehow caused a leak in the submarine's nuclear reactor.
"I couldn't see any reason except that we were nuclear, like we were radioactive," she told the NTSB. "... And I got really upset, too."
But Waddle or Capt. Robert Brandhuber, the chief of staff for the Pacific Fleet's submarine force, assured the visitors that nothing was wrong with the Greeneville, Nolan said.
Crewmen gave up their bunks, which the visitors realized was a sacrifice. The crew showed them the movie "Erin Brockovich" and served them dinner.
Ever since the cruise began, the civilians said, Waddle and his crew had been both friendly and professional.
Sailors let some of the visitors crawl into a torpedo tube to write their names on the sides. That way, they said, their names would rub against any torpedoes fired by the Greeneville crew.
But everyone's demeanor changed at the moment the Greeneville crashed into the Ehime Maru.
Waddle said: "What the hell was that?" and immediately had the guests escorted to the ship's mess and then to the torpedo room in case the mess needed to be used for first aid.
"There was just dead silence," said Michael Mitchell of Irving, Texas, who was on board with his fiancee, Helen Cullen. "We were all in shock. ...Everyone was devastated."
Susan Schnur took one look at Waddle and knew something was terribly wrong.
"His face turned white," said Schnur of The Woodlands, Texas.
Her husband, Tony, an investment manager who formed an oil and gas company, provided a graphic description of the sound generated when the Greeneville collided with the Ehime Maru, saying "... it was like a big, old 55-gallon drum that somebody took a ball bat (to) and smacked the side of."
Tony Schnur and others told investigators they could see the Japanese training vessel sinking rapidly on closed-circuit TV screens scattered throughout the submarine.
"It looked to me like a little fishing boat," he said, "like something you would go off Galveston ...for a three-hour fishing junket kind of thing."
Schnur remembers, too, the admonition Waddle gave his crew over the submarine's PA system several hours after the collision.
"He said, 'I don't know what this will bring, but you are one of the finest crews I have ever worked with. You know how we operate on this ship. Our code of conduct here is safety, honesty and integrity. You know, this incident will be fully investigated. We must tell the truth.
" 'Remember what you saw, remember what happened, do not embellish. Tell the truth and maintain your integrity.'"
Schnur told the NTSB he was concerned about his own legal liability as a result of having been among the group of civilians aboard the Greeneville when the accident happened.
He said he had already consulted a lawyer to ask: " 'Could a grieving Japanese parent sue civilians?' and the answer is, 'Yeah, anybody can sue anybody.' "
Catherine Graham Wyatt of Golden, Colo., worried that she and the other civilians may have distracted the crew in the minutes leading up to the collision.
"Were we a distraction?" Wyatt asked the NTSB interviewer. "It's weighing on my conscience."
Carol Brehmer of Overland Park, Kan., recalled getting seasick not long after the submarine left Pearl Harbor. She was escorted to the cabin of Lt. Cmdr. Gerald Pfeifer, the sub's executive officer, and was given Dramamine, crackers and a glass of water.
She stayed in his cabin about an hour and the ship's doctor checked on her periodically.
After she felt better, she rejoined the others in the control room as one of the Greeneville's periscopes picked up something on the surface.
"We did see a vessel out there that we focused on,'' Brehmer told the interviewer. She said the sighting occurred while half the group of civilians were eating lunch.
Lunch was served just before the Greeneville undertook the emergency surfacing maneuver that sent it toward the surface and into the hull of the Ehime Maru.
But based on images she saw on the video monitors of the sinking Ehime Maru, Brehmer concluded it was not the same ship she had seen earlier through the periscope.
Her husband, Jay Brehmer, told investigators he did not see the Ehime Maru actually slip below the surface.
"I saw it taking on water. I watched the monitor for only maybe a minute," Jay Brehmer said. "But within that minute ... it was going down very quickly."
