Submariners Find a Home Above Water

SAN DIEGO —  Happy hour is underway at the Horse and Cow, and the subject is submarines.

The subject is always submarines at the Horse and Cow, a drinking, pool-playing, jukebox-listening, sports-TV-watching establishment just outside the rear gate of the former Naval Training Center.

In an era of niche businesses, the Horse and Cow may be the niche-iest. With its distinctive decor and gung-ho attitude, the Horse and Cow caters to members of a select and highly secretive fraternity: sailors of the U.S. submarine fleet.

The Horse and Cow is one of the few bars to proudly advertise itself as a dive, with the pun fully intended.

Surface-ship sailors, Marines and even civilians are welcome at the Horse and Cow, but they are never allowed to forget that they are but visitors in someone else’s domain--in this case, three oddly shaped, dimly lit rooms with well-trod floors.

If outsiders are inclined to forget their whereabouts (and manners), reminders include the submarine banners, submarine pictures, submarine memorabilia, submarine graffiti (“Best Sonar Shack In the Navy”) and submarine gear and a newly arrived submarine toilet behind the bar.

And if all else fails, a submarine klaxon erupts periodically with the ear-shattering sound of ooooo-gah ooooo-gah.

After four decades of owning submariner bars in three Navy towns (including the last eight years in San Diego), the Looby family knows the secrets of putting on a submariner bash deluxe.

On Saturday, the Horse and Cow will host a belated Christmas bash for homesick submariners, complete with a visit from Santa, $1 shots of a secret and particularly lethal house mixture called “nuclear waste,” and the usual fare of cheeseburgers, fries and hot wings. Plus country-Western music played at a raucous level.

“When I was first in [the Navy], all I heard from the old salts on long deployments was Horse and Cow, Horse and Cow, Horse and Cow,” recalled Rod Pavlak, a senior chief petty officer stationed in San Diego. “Horse and Cow is famous. It’s a place where you can cut loose, hoist a few and tell a few stories.”

Until recently, the Horse and Cow tradition had gone largely unnoticed by the non-submarine world. Then it was outed in this year’s best-selling book “Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage,” as a place where submariners engaged in off-duty high jinks to decompress from their high-stress job of shadowing Soviet submarines wherever they dared roam.

“There are a lot of sailor bars, but only one real sub bar,” said Sean Keck, a former submarine sailor. “It’s like ‘Cheers’ for submariners.”

Max Monningh, a former nuclear electrician aboard the submarine Seawolf, agreed. “A lot of submariners only feel comfortable with other submariners,” he said.

By nature and nurture, military culture breeds a certain clannishness, with pilots preferring the off-hours company of pilots, Marines of Marines, and tank drivers of other tank drivers, and so forth.

But there is a factor specific to the submarine service that sets its sailors apart even from the rest of the Navy: an ironclad code of secrecy.

The Navy takes the uncompromising position that all details about submarine missions after 1950 are top secret, even in cases where retired submariners from the Soviet Union are gladly chatting away about the chases, confrontations and near-collisions that were commonplace as fully armed submarines from the two superpowers played a daily game of hide and seek at hull-crushing depths.

The publication of “Blind Man’s Bluff” prompted the Navy to require all submarine commanders to remind their sailors that, although the Cold War is kaput, the secrecy code is still in effect, now and forever.

Nothing in the secrecy code prohibits a sailor from pronouncing proudly that he is a submarine sailor--indeed, the Navy has begun inviting reporters along on submarine training cruises. Still, some sailors are not taking any chances.

At the approach of a reporter armed with a notebook, two uniformed sailors left the Horse and Cow at a speed akin to a cruise missile headed for Saddam’s summer palace. Three others, dressed in civilian clothing, remained in place but went into evasive maneuvers, information-wise.

“Excuse me gentlemen, are you submariners?”

“Sorta.”

“Kinda.”

“Depends on how you define the word submarine.”

Alcohol Awareness Instruction

While it would be wrong to confuse the Horse and Cow with a Christian Science Reading Room, it would also be a mistake to typecast it as a brawling-and-boozing sailor haunt like those seen in the movies.

The modern Navy has spent considerable effort to dispel the hoary cliche of the drunken sailor on leave. Alcohol awareness instruction is given to young sailors. If that fails, they are warned that an alcohol-induced incident, particularly off-base, can torpedo their career and benefits.

Police Department records show that in the past year, police have visited the Horse and Cow on only three occasions, all for minor matters, and none for drunkenness, fighting or other antisocial behavior.

Which is not to say that drinking and behavior that pushes the envelope of civilized demeanor does not occur at the Horse and Cow.

It is common for enlisted submariners who have just won their “dolphins”--insignia attesting to their mastery of several competencies--to hie to the Horse and Cow with their confreres. The dolphins are dropped in a large pitcher, which is then filled with every kind of beer, spirit and liquid available.

The new inductee is encouraged by his shipmates to drink the entire pitcher until he reaches the dolphins. Only then is he truly accepted.

And then there is a unique submariner ritual dating back to the days of diesel subs.

To show their moxie, submariners, usually fortified by strong drink, remove their pants and underwear, affix a tail of toilet paper to their bare backsides and light it on fire. Some jump on tables to display their bravado and flaming posteriors.

Memorable Moments

“It can get kind of wild in here when the boats are just back from a WesPac,” said Laura Looby, referring to the six-month deployment to the Western Pacific.

She owns the Horse and Cow with her husband, Mike. Behind the bar, they keep a framed collage of memorable Horse and Cow moments, including particularly flamboyant examples of the toilet paper ritual.

In 1959, Mike’s father opened a Horse and Cow bar in San Francisco for submariners from Hunter’s Point. In 1974, after Hunter’s Point closed, he started a Horse and Cow in Vallejo where it lasted for two decades until subs were transferred as part of the Cold War cutback. Mike and Laura Looby had already opened the San Diego version in 1990 at 2734 Lytton St. in the abandoned space of a notorious and dank sailor bar, just a mile from the San Diego sub base.

Horse and Cow has a mythological pedigree. Neptune, god of the sea, is often portrayed as accompanied by a small horse and a small cow (or bull). In World Wars I and II, merchant sailors, terrified of being sunk by submarines, tattooed a horse on one ankle, a cow on the other, in hopes of ensuring safe passage.

The submarine fleet is not an expanding client base. San Diego once was home to 22 fast-attack submarines; now there are six. Mike Looby has reduced slightly the presence of submarine paraphernalia to avoid alienating non-submariners.

“I’m a businessman,” he said. “I have to diversify.”

Diversity, however, has its limits.

Horse and Cow rules prohibit any kind words for the nuclear missile submarines known as “boomers,” stationed in Bangor, Wash., and King’s Bay, Ga.

To fast-attack submariners, whose duty is to chase enemy boats, boomer sailors are slackers who loll away their days in comfort, waiting for an order that has never come.

Says one graffiti on the barroom wall: “I’d rather have a sister in a whorehouse than a brother in a boomer.”

To the Navy brass, Horse and Cow is not an authorized member of the family. Yet the unofficial ties are strong. When the submarine Pogy was recently decommissioned, its farewell banner appeared at the Horse and Cow just as soon as the official ceremony was completed and the admirals were stowed in their offices.

Beyond succor and sustenance, the Horse and Cow also performs an unofficial educational role, particularly for young sailors unable to remember when the United States and U.S.S.R. were hull-to-hull in every ocean in the world.

“Sometimes one of the old guys who remembers the Cold War will tell us stories,” said one young sailor from Pearl Harbor, perched atop a bar stool, sipping a soft drink. “That’s why we love coming to the Horse and Cow.”