Tim Martin’s Navy career began with a piece of advice from a high school math teacher. It was 1963, and the Las Vegas teenager and son of an enlisted Air Force man, had done something almost unheard of: he’d earned appointments to West Point, Annapolis, and the brand-new Air Force Academy all at once. His teacher, a retired Army colonel, told him the Naval Academy would give him the most choices. He was right. A year later, the Navy parked one of its first nuclear submarines in Chesapeake Bay for the midshipmen to tour, and Tim walked off the boat knowing exactly what he wanted to do with his life. He loaded up on reactor physics, passed the famously brutal interview process of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear Navy, and joined the most secretive community in the American military.
His first boat was the USS John Adams (SSBN-620), a Polaris missile submarine carrying sixteen rockets with ten warheads apiece — 160 atom bombs, more destructive power than everything dropped in World War II, packed into a hull that spent sixty days at a time submerged and silent. By 27, Tim was the engineer officer, responsible for the reactor and everything aft of it, with sixty of the boat’s ninety enlisted men working for him. The job came with stories most veterans simply don’t have: watching Apollo 13 thunder into the night sky through a periscope at Cape Kennedy, a swim call and steak barbecue in the middle of the Panama Canal, and the night his periscope broke the surface at 2:30 a.m. directly beneath two spotlights, earning him the nickname “Dragnet” for the rest of the patrol after the crew discovered he’d dragged a fishing net down with him.
Not every story is funny. Tim’s second boat, the fast attack USS Permit, was hull number 594…the very next hull after the USS Thresher, lost with 129 men in 1963. Years later, at test depth of 1,300 feet, a seawater flange in the Permit’s engine room blew apart: the same casualty that killed the Thresher. The difference was SUBSAFE, the safety system born from that tragedy, and a young watch officer Tim had personally qualified, who hit four toggle switches and stopped the flooding. The Permit also did the work the public never heard about, including trailing a brand-new Soviet missile submarine for 38 consecutive days, completely undetected, and capturing the telemetry of its newest rocket launch with every antenna raised.
Tim left the Navy after eight years, when he and his wife Deanna, married 22 hours after his Academy graduation and now approaching their 59th anniversary, decided four more years underwater was too much time away from their six children. He built a civilian career in nuclear power and today serves on the commissioning committee for the USS Utah (SSN-801), Utah’s namesake fast attack submarine. He is also the first submariner featured in more than seventy interviews on this show — and as he told us at the end of the episode, the hard part isn’t getting a “bubble head” to talk about submarines. It’s getting him to stop.
Listen to Episode 46 of Ask A Vet on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.