Yesterday, on 02 July 2019, the world was shaken by a dramatic news, a fire took place at the Russian Nuclear Submarine named Losharik and 14 submariners (most of them was senior and professional) has died. The news was shocking not only because of the casualties, but also nuclear leakage concerns at Baltic Sea. Though Norwegian authorities explained that there’s no serious contamination at sea, this kind of news makes us nervous because of bad memories of the Chernobyl disaster.
Anyway, we want to focus on a different subject. When we published the news about Losharik at our portal, www.navalpost.com, we got interesting feedbacks from submariners from different nations, even from rivals of Russia. They were all in a mourning mood, extremely upset and praying for the submariners who died at the accident and for their families.
To be honest, it could be hard to understand for an ordinary person why submariners around the world reacted in this way, but if you work on a submarine it’s different. No matter which nation they belong to, submariners share the same destiny at sea. All crew should be extremely professional, because there’s no excuse for any mistake if you are working at deep below of the ocean. If an accident happens, it’s not easy to survive, despite the grown technology and sophisticated submarine rescue systems.
Submarines are very strategic weapons for countries. They always bear risky missions, such as crossing the enemy lines and gathering vital intelligence, attacking very strong task groups which contain high-value units. Sometimes they could be sacrificed and left to die because of the country’s expediency. We have Russian submarine Kursk example before, in which submariners perished because of the concerns over the discovery of their national secrets by other countries. Besides, all of these missions don’t let them to come to the surface for many times, a submariner could live without feeling the wind on their face for a month. All of these missions are quite risky, that’s why before a submarine leaves the port, crew says goodbye to their families like last time in their life because there’s always a possibility of not coming back.
This issue combines all submariners’ destiny together. Even though they have different countries’ badge on their uniform, or speaks different languages, eats different kinds of foods, they endure the same obstacles when at sea. Because of these issues, when they hear that a submarine was sunk anywhere in the world, they could breath hardly, maybe cannot eat anything because of what they heard, sometimes a piece of tear appears on their tired eyes. We saw this picture when Argentinian submarine ARA SAN JUAN was lost at sea last year, at South Atlantic ocean. San Juan was a trending topic on Twitter for days, and all of the submariners whom I know of was praying for the crew.
This commitment of submariners to each other is really something to admire. We understood from this subject that no matter which country they belong to, no matter what religion they believe is not important, hard conditions bring hearts together.