I reported aboard USS TIRANTE (SS-420) on February 22, 1961.  The boat was in the shipyard in Portmouth, Virginia at the time.  While in the yards, our CO, LCDR W.D. Benson, made a wood carving of a Tirante fish from our boat's emblem and had a couple of bronze casts made of it.  One of these casts he had mounted on a plate and bolted to the boat's bow, where it remained on our transit back to the boat's home port of Key West, Florida. Needless to say, when the other boats (and the dive school) at the base saw that figurehead they couldn't resist trying to steal it.

At that time, there were security concerns at the sub base about Communist Cubans trying to sneak in and sabotage the boats.  Every boat was required to string rows of lights along the Main Ballast tank tops each night (we called them "Castro Lights") and an extra Topside Watch was stationed aft.  Some boats even stationed a watch up on the snorkle mast with an M-1 carbine.  All this helped us to protect our figurehead from those who wanted to steal it.

One night we were tied up alongside the sub tender, USS Bushnell.  We'd recently returned from a trip to Gulfport, Mississippi, where we'd been tasked with taking reservists out for ops.  We arrived there not long after Hurricane Carla had bounced along the Gulf Coast in September 1961.  Everyone was sitting in the crew's mess shooting the breeze and suddenly the boat was rocked by explosions in the water.  The word was passed to "Repel Boarders" and we all rushed topside to see what the hell was going on.

Arriving on the bridge, we saw two crew members already there and we asked them what'd happened.  They told us that one of the roving patrols on the main deck of the Bushnell had seen someone in the water and had thrown a couple of hand grenades in the water to blast them out.  Plus, the procedure at that time was for sonar to ping a couple of times to try to drive anyone in the water to the surface.  Our duty sonarman had done that.

Someone on the Bushnell's main deck yelled down to us that they'd seen a guy climb out of the water and crawl underneath our superstructure.  So immediately a couple of guys with .45s went under and searched around.  No one was found, but they found a heaving line, a pair of flippers, a scuba mask with masking tape covering the shiny metal frame, and the Tirante figurehead.

The next day, the XO and COB conducted an investigation into the incident.  I was called in as someone who might know who did it because the scuba mask found was identified by others who'd been interrogated as being similar to one they knew I had in my locker in the submarine crew barracks.  As a young MMFN, I gulped and told the XO that I knew nothing about it.  Someone must've stolen the mask because our lockers were shared and my locker-buddy might've left it open.  Plus, I told him, why would I do something like that?  During that Gulf trip, I'd gone AWOL after getting involved with a sweet young lady in one of the bars between Gulfport and Biloxi and when the Tirante fish theft incident happened I was aboard because I was still serving my two-week restriction.  I couldn't have gotten the mask because I hadn't left the boat during my restriction to go up to the barracks.  This apparently satisfied the XO and the COB and I was exonerated.

It was finally revealed that one of our crew members, who was UDT-trained, was pissed at the Old Man for some reason and wanted to get back at him by stealing his precious Tirante fish and leaving a ransom note in the Old Man's stateroom as to where it was located. The guy had unbolted the figurehead and gotten it into the water with no problems.  This got the Topside Watch at the time in a little trouble for not noticing the guy doing this, but the CO let him off lightly because the brow from the tender was installed aft of the sail instead of forward, where it normally would've been at a pier.  And, for some reason, we didn't have an extra Topside Watch stationed forward to watch out for Cubans (or diving school people).  I guess it was decided that the watches on the tender's main deck would be enough.

When the guy who'd taken the figurehead tried to hide it in one of the Main Ballast Tanks, he was stung by jellyfish inside the tank.  He then hauled the Tirante fish out of the water (with the help of a compatriot), stashed it under the superstructure, put his dungarees on, and hauled ass with his buddy up to the bridge before the crew got there.  But, he had been seen coming out of the water and that's when the tender pukes took action.

Both guys were taken to Captain's Mast and busted to E-1.  They also spent 30 days in the base Brig.  Not long after the guy who took the Tirante fish into the water got out of the brig he disappeared from a nearby beach.  He'd told some buddies he was going snorkling and when he didn't show up for muster a search was conducted for him. They found his clothing at the beach he supposedly was at.  Plus, he left his ID card with his clothes.  I never heard if the guy was ever found before I left TIRANTE in March 1962 to head to Nuke School.