The Hot Rolls That Never Made It to the Oven
Where I Was on September 11
I joined the Navy on October 12, 2000. That same morning, the USS Cole was bombed in Yemen. Sailors had gathered on the mess decks for chow when the explosion tore through the galley, killing seventeen crew members, including Culinary Specialists at their stations. I watched the news break on a waiting-room television while I sat with a group of strangers waiting to be bused to Great Lakes to become Sailors.
We had been a peacetime Navy for a long while. I did not yet understand that I might be thrown into a fight so soon. I certainly could not have guessed what would happen eleven months later.
On September 11, 2001, I was aboard the USS Annapolis (SSN 760), serving as Galley Watch Captain. The boat was off the Atlantic coast running its Tactical Readiness Evaluation, the inspection that decides whether a submarine is ready for its scheduled deployment. Inspectors were aboard, grading us on drills and war-game scenarios. New to the Navy, I was fascinated by how much training it took just to leave the pier.
My Chief and first Navy mentor, Michael Ellis, had put me in the galley for the evaluation on purpose. "Good food puts the evaluators in a good mood," he told me. After more than twenty years in the Navy, he was convinced they graded more collaboratively when the meals were right. So I was rolling out two hundred portions of Hot Rolls, the Navy's tried-and-true dinner roll, a crew favorite straight from the oven, when the 1MC crackled.
The 1MC is the submarine's intercom. When it comes on, everyone stops, goes quiet, and listens. Our captain, Commander David Bartholomew, said: "The World Trade Center and the Pentagon have been attacked. This is not a drill."
Shock. Eerie silence. Fear. Anger. Prayer. All of it hit us in the space of a few seconds.
Working beside me was a Food Service Attendant, a new Sailor doing his sixty days in the galley, as every new submariner does, washing dishes and loading stores before moving to his rate. His father was a New York City firefighter. He did not learn for days that his dad was safe. Some of his father's friends never came home.
The Annapolis turned 180 degrees and ran for Groton. We were told to load ninety days of stores and every weapon we carried. It was clear we were no longer in a simulation. When we tied up, everyone with a phone tried to reach home. The base was locked down. Marines and Sailors manned the gates in Humvees with .50-caliber guns in the turrets. Patrols walked the piers around the clock with M16s and 9mms. Our personal communications stayed down for days.
We were glued to the television, watching Ground Zero, hanging on every word from the President and the Secretary of Defense, knowing it would shape what we did next. A few days later Billy Graham addressed the nation with a message of hope and healing. I remember looking around the mess decks at my shipmates, atheist and agnostic, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist, all sitting together, all clinging to that hope and wanting answers.
We deployed. We did what we had to do.
Months later I visited Ground Zero. Standing there, the emotions flooded back, and something settled in me. The long months at sea, the twenty-four-hour shifts when I was both Galley Watch Captain and Night Baker, none of it had been pointless. I had played my part. On a submarine at war, the food was sometimes the only morale we had, other than each other.
The crew of the Annapolis had a bond I have never experienced since. Most of us still keep in touch twenty-five years later.
I spent the next two and a half decades cooking for Sailors, and I now spend my days helping service members turn that work into credentials and careers. It all traces back to a galley off the Atlantic coast and a pan of Hot Rolls that never made it to the oven. Feeding people well is not a small thing. On some days it is everything.
