Sub Stories come from my six years in the US Navy and in particular the four years I served as a nuclear qualified sub mariner. The Navy arguably gave me much in terms of technical training, experience and self confidence. But as I discovered recently when I volunteered to assist as a tour guide for the USS Blueback, now a floating museum, there are skeletons in my closet.

These are stories, both the good and not so good from that time, and the meaning I make from them.

I recently started volunteering as a tour guide on the USS Blueback, now a floating museum operated by the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in Portland Oregon. The Blueback is currently the most modern submarine on public display.

A friend of mine had been nagging me for about five years to do this. A few decades ago, I spent four years assigned to a Lafayette class nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine, logging seven patrols and more than a year and a half cumulatively under the North Atlantic Ocean. While I don’t typically talk much about my Navy experience, I am still intrigued by the machine, and as my friend would tell me, I have stories about that machine that others find interesting.

When I embarked on the Blueback for the first time however, I experienced a strange sense of déjà vua, a disquiet that lingered. Submarines have a distinct smell, some combination of hot insulation, sweat, food and sanitaries that have simmered in a closed environment over time; not unpleasant, but distinct.

The sense of smell is said to be our most powerful trigger of vivid memories. The most vivid and recurring of my memory triggers occurs outside in the rain, when the smell of dampness mingles with diesel, from a buss for example, and for just a second I am transported back topside to Holy Loch Scotland, and I automatically look down expecting have to step over four inch mooring lines crossing the deck. The disquiet I experienced upon embarking on the Blueback was similarly vivid, though less specific.

To try to make sense of this disquiet, I started to write these stories down. While I consider the Navy to have been good for me–it gave me a set of skills and instilled a sense self confidence I rely on even today–it was not a good time. There are things to admire about the way the Navy does things, the training and qualification, operational procedures and development of teamwork, and the ability to quickly develop young naive sailors into competent operators of highly technical systems are examples of the strengths of that model. But the disquiet evoked by the smell of a submarine reminds me of the many aspects to be critical of.

Everything I’ve learned about management and leadership in the nearly 30 years since I left active service tells me that the Navy was, and perhaps still is, stuck in a 19th century mindset.

These are stories from that period of time, the lessons I learned, both positive and negative, and how I believe they relate to modern management principles today.