Once one enters the water-sphere of the earth, a great force will press down on his body, soul and mind. It is a definite, crushing tide of emotion, neither good nor bad, but so powerful in it?s uncompromising, crushing power, that it paralyzes many men who go down for the first time. I too have felt this feeling, at Shipyard3, where I and many others in my unit completed countless submersible drills. I hated that place, from the disagreeable odor of the crates in the pacer facility to the unsocial dockworkers(incomplete shadows of men) , even the shade of reflecting darkness the sea took at midnight seemed to hold a dark premonition. The boathouse was drenched in fear.

If you have never been on a U-Boat, you should, you should feel what it is like to be hit from all sides. Everyone should ride in a U-Boat so they may return and lay their lips on the land that gave them life. Because when you go down to the middle of "land" that no man was made to see, you begin to think, no, not to think, to ponder the world in panicked, stammering thoughts as a madman might talk. There is no peace, for wherever you go, be it down, where the sands outside time conceal invisible secrets or to the surface, through tons of heavy water and iron, there is always a wall between you and the world.

But no matter what terror is experienced through leaving one?s natural sphere of life, combat is always immeasurably worse. The submersible becomes a blind bull, a destructive force not meant to see it?s own end. Attacking nearly blindly from below, the ships fear us and we fear them, and all of us die. There is no celebration after the destruction of a target, just the realization that there are countless targets like it left. The hull of the boat speaks to me, it says it is afraid, so am I.

The unending pressure destroys some people. I used to know a very nervous man who though he saw faces in the water when we surfaced, he was the only one who hated coming up, the rest of us loved moving to the surface of the sea and breathed deep the air of the changing world before we once again moved into the stale atmosphere of the hull. We were completing a tour trip to a bay in north Europe that I am not free to reveal the location of and I watched the man?s mind slowly degenerate until he became a nervous, gibbering wreck. By the forth week of the long-patrol, we were all on the edge when we heard a gagging scream coming from the second under-level. Several lower-level sailors and I rushed into the small bleak room to find the poor man sitting on the floor by a bolted table, in one hand he was brandishing a half-full bottle of whiskey(I still do not know how he got it) and in the other he had a small knife. He would cut into his face deeply with the knife and scream terribly, then he would give a pitiful, long whimper that would slowly transform itself into maniacal laughter. After that he would repeat the process again. Of course we restrained him and took him to the ship-medic. He died later in the night, because he did not want to live.

I am surrounded by a cage of solid-steel beyond which and beyond the range of our guns, there is only a wall of souls, rushing past each other in the murky darkness of the abyss.