Joe Inserro: Good News and Bad News

By Ginny Williamson, Honor Flight Chicago Veteran Interview Volunteer

Joseph (Joe) Inserro was born and raised in Providence, Rhode Island until the age of 10.  From there, his family moved to Cicero, Illinois and he settled in Elmhurst, Illinois which he considers his home town.  

Joe attended high school at St. Francis in Wheaton, Elmhurst College, and the University of Illinois in Champaign until 1967.  He later earned his Liberal Arts degree from the University.

His draft orders came in 1967.  A friend of his, who was in the Navy, brought Joe to the recruiter’s office.  There they told him they had one opening in nuclear power so Joe tested for that position.  The recruiter called to say he had good news and bad news.  Good news was that he passed and was accepted into the nuclear program; the bad news was that he had 48 hours to report! The generals wanted to draft men into the Army and not the Navy.  Joe knew that they wanted people to go to Vietnam. At that time, President Johnson was told by his generals that if they gave him 500,000 soldiers, they would win the war.  As Joe says, they still lost.  The month Joe was recruited they recruited more than 38,000 young men.

So, Joe was in the Navy now.  He did his basic training at Great Lakes – boot camp and three electronics schools.  Joe was an Electronics Technician, with a specialty in radar (1967 – 1968). 

Before his nuclear training started, Joe spent a year at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California. Joe waited two months, and then another six months, before his formal training started.  Joe did his TAD (temporary duty) on the USS Halibut and spent five months on the Halibut.

He spent one year in basic nuclear power training – the book learning of nuclear power.  There were about 35 – 40 men in the class.  The nuclear power training included six months learning physics and math.  After the nuclear power training, Joe was scheduled to go to Idaho for his next training.  However, two weeks before they were supposed to go to Idaho, they were told the school was full so they kept them in California.  When he got to Idaho, he got to work on a real nuclear reactor for six months.  

While at Mare Island in California, the Navy sent him to work on the USS Halibut that was in dry dock.  You may have heard of the Halibut.  There is a movie that documents the service of the Halibut, “The Real Hunt for Red October.” That movie was about the search for a sunken Russian submarine off the coast of Hawaii.  The Halibut was the boat that found the submarine.

When they found the submarine, the CIA came in and contracted with Howard Hughes.  Hughes was involved with the search and recovery of the Russian submarine.  They used a whole clamp (like a big claw), went down about 10,000 feet, and retrieved about 2/3 of the submarine and nuclear missiles.  There were still Russian bodies in the submarine.  The US government learned a lot about that submarine, and returned the bodies to Russia as a gesture of good will. 

While working on the Halibut, Joe asked questions that were top secret.  His chief gave him odd jobs. He said they wanted to keep him occupied so he wasn’t asking so many questions, like: ‘why do you have a photography studio on the ship?’; ‘what is an aquarium?’ This was a spy submarine after all.  “They wanted to get me away from that as far as possible.”  The crew of the Halibut got citations for their work retrieving the Russian submarine.  They made modifications to the Halibut and went out again.  

The Halibut tapped the Russian military phone lines between Moscow and the Kamchatka Peninsula.  The Russians were sending military conversations. It was in the sea of Okhotsk – the far eastern coast of Russia, about 125 miles from the Kamchatka Peninsula.  The Russians had communication lines at the bottom of the sea there.  The US Navy had someone going in there every two weeks to monitor.

While in Idaho, Joe worked on a nuclear reactor learning how to operate it and fix it.  The Navy had three reactors in Idaho Falls:  the USS Nautilus, a S1W; the Enterprise, a A1W; and the S5G – USS Narwhal (this is the prototype that the Navy has out there today).

Note: Before sharing information about the work he did on these submarines, Joe met a friend, a young officer, who works on submarines today to check with him and confirm details he is sharing here would no longer be top secret. 

Joe commuted to his assignment in Idaho, a 60-mile bus trip from his apartment to the base.  They did shift work – seven days on, three days off; five days on, two days off; three days on, one day off.  They worked straight through on these days in rotating shifts with the 400-600 guys out there (guys working on the three prototypes and the instructors).  There were about 150-200 guys per reactor.  Joe worked on the S5G Narwhal, a state-of-the-art submarine prototype.  It is the prototype for the submarines today.  The S9G is out there now.

Joe was in Idaho with his wife.  One night when he came home from work, his wife was sitting on the couch; she had been in labor for over 10 hours.  When his son was born, Joe went to work that morning.  His chief asked him, “Why are you here?”  Joe told the chief that he wanted the day off when his wife comes home from the hospital.  He was home for that full 24 hours, and then home every night after that.  

Joe and his wife, Karen, met in Chicago, between high school and college.  They met at a party with some of Joe’s and Karen’s friends from high school. While at Great Lakes, he commuted home on weekends.  Joe and Karen married when they transferred to California.  

Joe met a lot of great people during his time in the Navy.  One of his friends who went to submarine school with Joe was an E6 hospital Corpsman.  The Corpsman made five tours in Vietnam and earned six purple hearts for his wounds while saving the lives of Marines.  “The man is a real hero!!!”  He invited Joe to go drinking with him, to the Marine barracks.  They ordered a beer, and almost immediately the Major came down to join them.  Next thing Joe knew, “I’M buying drinks for these two guys!”

In 1969, from Idaho, Joe shipped out to the submarine base in Connecticut for submarine school.  There he received orders to a submarine.  Because Joe was exposed to radiation in Idaho, he wore contamination clothes and then was in a clear plastic suit that was impregnated with lead.  Because of the exposure, the Navy could not send him anywhere for three months. Because he was doing nothing for those three months, he spent that in Connecticut “doing stupid things.”  One of his jobs was to chip paint off an 80-year-old destroyer.  Another time, Joe and other guys were working on a Boston Whaler that was used by the Seals, when they were doing a training swim. 

Joe was eventually assigned to the USS Thomas A. Edison, a Polaris submarine.  The boat was in Rota, Spain.  The USS Thomas A. Edison had two crews:  one crew would serve on the boat while the other crew stayed home in New London, Connecticut.  When the other crew came back, Joe and his crew would fly over to Spain.  This was the routine for three years, from 1970 to 1973.  The boat would leave Rota, Spain, go to the Atlantic, through the Strait of Gibraltar, then to the Mediterranean.  

In this three-year period, the Polaris submarine had the nuclear warheads: 16 missiles which could carry 10 independent hydrogen bombs.  A total of 160 warheads, each warhead equal to 20 megatons of TNT.  “If that isn’t scary enough, there were 40 other boats just like mine.  Each had these missiles and warheads.”  Joe said he did not know if there were other Polaris submarines in the same area as he was, though.  

There were three ports that these boats were assigned as home ports: Rota, Spain by the Mediterranean Sea, closer to Russia; Guam, which covered the Pacific; and Holy Loch, Scotland, by the Baltic Sea, again closer to Russia.  

“We didn’t know where our missiles were going.  They didn’t tell us that.  Maybe the captain knew or the weapons officer knew.  When we went out to sea, they sent us tapes that told us where we were going and we programmed each of the missiles.”

Joe recalls one time, for a three-day period, they were at “Alert 1” – 15 seconds from launching.  They were at “ultra quiet.”  When the crew was on watch, no one talked, did not make any noise.  They would get up, eat and went on watch. When they finished their watch, they went to sleep. He had a lot to think about: “If we fire our weapons, there would be nothing to go home to. My family would have been the first to be attacked.”  His family lived in Norwich, Connecticut so the Russians would have come after them because they had the nuclear submarines there in Connecticut.

On the boat, Joe’s watch was in maneuvering, where all the equipment is run out of in the submarine.  Maneuvering had three watch stations:  one controlled the throttles that controlled the amount of steam that went into the engine room; the second was the electrical plant operator, who controlled all the electrical; and Joe, the guy in charge of running the nuclear reactor.  He had to keep the average temperature of the water in the nuclear reactor to 480 degrees.  There were four that would push the water through the reactor and then there were four main cutoff valves that would go down and shut off the water. If there was a reactor leak, Joe could shut off the water to contain the leak.  

Joe shared that Admiral Hyman Rickover – known as the “Father of the Nuclear Navy” – built the Nautilus.   He recalled that Admiral Rickover would mess with the minds of his officers.  He had a big office in the Pentagon.  All new officers had to go and meet him there.  Admiral Rickover had a chair across from his desk – the front legs were two inches shorter than the rear, forcing the officers to sit at attention.  He wanted to see how they would react.  Joe met Admiral Rickover two times, once on his boat.  

There was a situation once, when Joe and his crew got back off of patrol.  Admiral Rickover met the crew along with three commanders.  Joe and the crew had to shut down their reactor which meant that the boat had to be taken out of service.  When Admiral Rickover came over, he turned toward the enlisted men first.  He told Joe’s chief officer that “we are going to have to have a talk before I leave.”  The chief knew Admiral Rickover that well that he could talk to him directly.  The crew were shocked that their chief and the Admiral knew each other so well.

Joe and his crew would do three months on and then three months off while serving on the USS Thomas A. Edison.  For the three months off, they had 30 days R&R, and Friday mornings they were home by noon.  The rest of the time off they received training on equipment, to keep them current; or they might have attended a seminar.  

On one of the times Joe returned from patrol, Joe’s family met him when they left the boat.  His wife was nine months pregnant, and their daughter was born at midnight that night.  During this time, Joe was on R&R so he was “all in” for those 30 days (simply having to call in 5 days a week).  

After three years, his enlistment ended and Joe retired, as an E5.  He became a civilian.  Went into insurance saying, “I’ll give it two years and if I don’t like it, I’ll go into the nuclear program.”  He must have liked the insurance business, since he has been there for 51 years.  

During his service, Joe was awarded the Submarine Dolphin Medal, National Defense Medal, Good Conduct Medal and the Nuclear Deterrent Patrol Pin, which got him into the VFW.  “You have to have been in some type of combat. We were out there with the missiles.  We could do more damage than anybody.”  

Joe recognized that he was steered into certain situations.  Six years in the Navy, he knew he did not want to spend the rest of his life in the Navy.  “I was making $7,000K.  They offered me a $10,000 bonus to stay in another four years, and get to an E6.  I knew I didn’t want to make a career out of it. I was ready to get out after five years, nine months, 27 days.”  The day he got out of the Navy was his birthday – “the best birthday I ever had.”

When Joe got out of the service, he went to college, for a liberal arts degree.  “I had no idea what to do with my life.  It wasn’t until I got out that I wanted to go into the insurance business.  A friend opened that door for me.”

Joe and Karen had two kids:  boy – Anthony (serving as his Guardian on this Honor Flight), and girl – Dana.  These days, Joe is a VFW member – on the board of the post for the last 6-7 years.  Their local post merged with a bigger post.  Ambassador with the Naperville Chamber of Commerce, and Ambassador with the VFW Chamber of Commerce.  

Welcome aboard, Joe. Enjoy your day of honor.  And thank you so very much for your years of service.