Silence at Truk

On a cold January morning, Monday, the 24th, in 1944, the war arrived quietly in northwest Ohio.

It came folded in newsprint.

The Bryan Democrat carried a small headline that did not shout and did not explain much: Former Bryan Man Aboard Submarine Listed As Missing. Beneath it was the name Marvin Leroy Maier, twenty two years old, a son, a husband, a sailor. He had last written home to say he would be leaving port soon. Now his parents had received a telegram from the War Department. No details. Just the word missing.

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41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Benjamin Franklin SSBN-640

She was built to disappear.

Not in the romantic sense, not like a magician’s flourish or a ship slipping into fog for the sake of poetry, but in the colder, more disciplined sense of Cold War necessity. USS Benjamin Franklin was designed to vanish into the acoustic shadows of the ocean, to become a rumor instead of a presence, a probability instead of a target. That was the deal struck between the Navy and history in the early 1960s. If the submarine could not be found, then war itself might be kept at bay.

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41 Cold War Sentinels – USS Alexander Hamilton SSBN-617

The USS Alexander Hamilton entered the Cold War quietly, which was the only acceptable way to enter it. When her keel was laid at Electric Boat in Groton in June 1961, the United States was still learning how to live with nuclear weapons without letting them consume every waking thought. Strategy had moved beyond bombers and bravado. What mattered now was endurance. The Hamilton was conceived as a patient thing, meant to vanish beneath the surface and stay vanished, carrying consequences that no adversary could afford to ignore. She would become one of the Forty One for Freedom, a fleet built not to fight wars, but to prevent them by making certainty impossible.

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