Most of the time you'd have been ok, but if you were homeported out of somewhere like Norfolk where there is about a 7 hour surface transit to the dive point, and it was rough that day, you would have heard a lot of gross-out shit from the other guys ... submariners can be some twisted, sadistic bastards (I mean that as a compliment to us, btw).
Yeah. I had such an evil tongue I had to give up smack talking for Lent one year and just kept that. After I was out, I found a smack talking buddy while a computer consultant for Computer Sciences Corp and we let in a marine just back from Iraq.
He felt really out of place with civilians so I invited him to hang with us and he immediately wanted to be part of talking smack… well, we let him observe for about a day and a half when I thought… let’s baptize this marine.
I lobbed what I thought were a few soft volleys…
Well… the marine started to cry (just wet eyes and sniffles) and my partner at the job looked at me like I’d just suggested bringing back the Holocaust for funsies. It broke up the smack group basically.
Worse, on my internal “smackmometer”, I’d maybe gone two out of ten.
I told my wife what happened (not what I said) and the whole fam thought it was a joke and kept poking at me so I’d talk smack at home.
Finally the wife wouldn’t let up and I said, “okay, here’s something that barely is a 1”… aaaaand she immediately started crying and was wounded for a few days even as she knew intellectually how much I’ve always adored her.
It was early in the year and I prayed about it and decided to give up smack for Lent and never went back to it.
All that to say that I don’t need rough seas to make grown men throw up or cry and anyone who relished in getting me woulda gotten it back tenfold.
I’m glad that didn’t happen because anytime I hurt someone, always inadvertently even when talking shit, I felt horrible afterwards.
So yeah… to indicate how much of an about face I underwent, even before quitting smack talk, I’d thought about going to Lutheran seminary.
TL;dr guys woulda got me and the comeback woulda at the very least caught me administrative action and someone (or someones) woulda beat my ass… lotta people THINK they have an evil tongue. They don’t. It’s like being Edward Scissorhands. I’ll leave it at that