A submariner's bed is called, for some reason, a "rack". It is the only haven, the only place in which a person can expect to be left alone with his thoughts. A little more privacy comes with seniority, but very little. Even our skipper had only a curtain across his stateroom doorway for privacy. And our skipper's stateroom was not large enough to house a federal prisoner by today's standards.

In my training days I spent a couple of months aboard USS Pomfret, similar to all the other converted World War II "fleet boats" of the day. My rack on the Pomfret was in the forward torpedo room. It was the uppermost rack, hung by chains from some hooks attached to the frames of the pressure hull. Like all other racks aboard, it was made of welded steel, with a foam rubber mattress, and minimal springs. It was above several stowed torpedoes, and there was a large electric motor that shared some of the rack space with me. When I was flat on my back, there was enough room to lift my right arm two feet above my rack. But due to the shape of the pressure hull, I could only raise my left arm six inches. This meant that I could lie on my left side, but not on my right side.

When we were running on the surface, the Bow Planes Tilting Motor with which I shared my rack was not a problem. When we submerged, it got fairly loud. And the sound was not a constant hum. As the bow planes moved, the motor made strange groaning sounds, very loudly.

In addition to sleeping, I did some reading in my rack. It was not ideal, but I could sometimes read an entire novel without leaving the rack.

Entering the rack required some athletic ability. It helped that I had worked on the high bar in my gymnastics class in college, and that I had run obstacle courses during my military training. I had to reach up and grab miscellaneous parts of the overhead, or ceiling, to lift myself as if I were doing chin-ups. Then I rotated my trunk, tucked my knees into the fetal position, and snaked my legs between the pressure hull and the Bow Planes Tilting Motor to get into my rack. From that position, it was just a matter of wiggling and creeping backwards until I was squarely in my rack. Getting out of bed was simpler, except that I was not always as coordinated when I first woke up as when I retired.

Of course, if the torpedomen were working on a torpedo, then I had no place to sleep at all.

Later, in a similar submarine that took us on a training exercise from Submarine School, I had an almost identical rack in the after torpedo room. There was less room in this rack, and if I wanted to roll from my back to my stomach, I had to get out of bed and get back in the other way. It was inconvenient.

My stateroom on the Odax was much more civilized. When I first arrived, I got the top rack of three. This was very nice, because for the first time in my submarine experience I could pull a curtain across the entrance to my rack and be hidden from view while I slept, or read. The stateroom was shaped like this:

        -------------------------------------------
       |                                           |
       |                                           |
       |                                           |
       | (Pillow)     Racks, three high            |
       |                                           |
       |                                           |
       |                                           |
       |---    Rack opening    --------------------|
       |_                        |                 |
Pullman| \                       |      Lockers,   |
sink-> |  |     Deck             |      three      |
       |_/                       |      high       |
       |                         |                 |
       |___                   ___|_________________|
                Doorway

This arrangement was quite convenient for running on the surface, because I could count on the lockers to keep me from falling out of bed so long as the rolls were less than twenty degrees or so to port. When the seas got rougher than that, I slept with my head at the foot of the rack, to lessen the chance of falling out of the top rack onto my head. When the boat was rolling that much, some of the sailors actually tied themselves to their racks to keep from falling out of bed.