SSBN. ETV. Will not respond to questions about sensitive or classified subjects. My views are my own and I do not represent anyone.
Hi there!
Edit: since this has been asked several times:
SSBN stands for “submersible ship, ballistic missile, nuclear powered”. That is, the same overall type of ship as the Red October.
ETV stands for “Electronics Technican, Navigation”, because N was already taken by Nuclear Electronics Technicians. I work with everything from interior communications and announcing circuits to Electronics, shipwide atmospheric monitoring, navigational inertial gyroscopes, strategic nuclear missile navigation, and tank level indicators to basic underwater submarine navigation using the voyage management system and even helming the ship itself.
How is food handled/stored? Given you can be out for months I assume this is actually very crucial and critically handled? Does it taste worse than what is served in the regular meal halls?
We have fresh food for the first two weeks. After that, it’s all taken from the Dry Stores, Chill Box or Freezer. That being said, it’s actually rather high quality meals, compared to other branches and the surface (except Air Force and Space Force, they’re special cases). We get hot dogs and chili on Wednesdays at the lunch meal, burritos on Tuesdays, burgers and fries on Friday lunch meals, and pizzas and wings on Saturday dinner meals. Breakfast is usually pancakes or waffles with bacon and eggs and occasionally sausage gravy on biscuits or toast. Other dinners can rotate between meatloaf, peas, and mashed potatoes, and pork chops, asparagus and bread rolls.
That being said, it really depends on the cook on duty in the galley. We had one cook that could not follow a recipe card and made decisions that ended with mixing 10 minute rice with 30 minute rice and trying to cook them both for 20 minutes, or trying to substitute spaghetti sauce with ketchup. That went over about as well as you’d think.