He's heard whales, too, and dolphins, and “all kinds of what we call ‘biologicals.' ”
So said the Kalispell landlubber turned submarine driver, a 40-year-old graduate of Flathead High School who, come Friday, will be named commander of the USS Alexandria.
The technology, in fact, is the reason Doyle made his
way from the mountains of Montana to the depths of the world's oceans.
“I had no inkling at all to go into the military,” the 20-year Navy veteran said. “I just wanted to be an engineer.”
He had the grades, he said, had worked hard up to his graduation from Flathead High in 1985. And his first year or so at Montana State University was no different than that of hundreds of other engineering students.
Until, that is, the Navy sent him an invitation. It wasn't much, he said, just a card in the mail, “but it got me at least interested in going to see what a submarine looked like.”
What the heck, he figured, it's a free trip to Seattle.
He had a couple of distant cousins who had signed up for military duty, and his dad - longtime Kalispell surveyor and contractor Bill Doyle - had pulled a brief National Guard hitch back before Doyle was even born.
“But I had no military history,” he said. Just a love for elegant engineering.
“Those ships were so amazing,” he said of that college trip to Seattle. “The technology is tremendous; they're just flat-out engineering marvels.”
Suddenly, the engineer's life behind the desk seemed not so appealing. “I wanted to go see the world.”
And so Doyle signed up with NUPOC, the Navy's Nuclear Power Officer Candidate program. It started with a rigorous interview before a four-star general, then got tough.
He went back to MSU under strict orders to put his nose to the academic grindstone and to keep it there. In turn, he received an enlisted man's pay for going to school, and accrued military time while in the classroom.
While others were drawn to the military from a sense of patriotism, or an ideology, or a family history, or a lack of better options, Doyle went in eyes wide open for what it could provide him in the way of engineering challenges.
“The technology, that was the hook,” he said. The rest of that military stuff, well, that came later.
After college, Doyle was routed into the Navy's training pipeline, submerged in officer's school and commissioned an ensign in 1989.
Then a year of nuclear training, essentially a master's degree in nuclear engineering except without the paperwork, then to submarine school, finally to the USS Birmingham.
Based out of Pearl Harbor, the Birmingham was a middle-aged sub back in the fall of 1991, and Doyle's job was to help keep it up and running. He worked in the engine room, in the nuclear propulsion room, even drove the sub a bit.
“We used the atom to make heat,” Doyle said, used the heat to make steam, used the steam to turn turbines, the turbines to spin the propellers.
“It was all dials and meters,” he said, technology now replaced by computers and plasma screens.
Doyle left the Birmingham a full lieutenant three years later, the equivalent of a captain in the other armed service branches. From there back to the classroom, to oral and written exams, to a hitch in Washington, D.C., to a Master of Science degree in engineering management.
In 1997, he stepped onto the USS Henry M. Jackson as chief engineer, living undersea for two months at a stretch.
“You turn submarine-white,” he said. “Your skin gets used to the fluorescent lights, and you have to watch out when you get back into the sun, or you'll fry.”
His upbringing in Flathead Valley winters, he laughed, “probably prepared me pretty well for that.”
Big as it is, a nuclear sub gets mighty small after a couple of months, and so “you make private places, like your bunk, where you're inviolate,” he said. “It's something you get used to.”
The sub was a ballistic missile boat, sneaking around the world armed to the teeth, hiding out in strategic spots. They kept sharp, he said, by running exercises and training constantly, all the while watching and waiting.
The Alexandria, by contrast, is a fast-attack sub, a “hunter-killer,” in Doyle's words, a machine equipped for strike missions with, among other weapons, an arsenal of Tomahawk missiles.
But it can lay low, too, doing surveillance and reconnaissance without so much as vibrating the political web top side. “We can listen to things they wouldn't do if they knew we were there,” he said.
And listen to other subs doing the same, part of the anti-submarine warfare waged constantly beneath the surface. Because several Persian Gulf countries now have subs, he said, as does China and many other countries.
Doyle left the Henry M. Jackson in 2000, enrolled in the Naval War College, picked up another master's degree - this time in national security studies. He worked as a squadron engineer, then took over as second-in-command on the USS Springfield.
After two years on board, he left early in 2005 to complete the Joint Forces course, a prerequisite for his recent work in the Pentagon, on the Joint Staff.
Today, given the choice between the politics of the nation's capital or a couple of months undersea, “I'll take 60 days underwater, hands down,” Doyle said.
Which, fortunately, is exactly what he's getting.
The Kalispell engineer for whom “there's no substitute for driving a ship” takes over as commander of the Alexandria on Friday.
“She's a great ship,” he said, a sub that's been around the world a couple of times already, that's surfaced through a couple feet of pack ice in the Arctic, “which is something I've always wanted to do, but never had the chance.”
He'll have the Alexandria for about three years, more than half of which will be spent beneath the surface, if all goes well.
“Before,” he said, “there's always been somebody standing behind me. Not this time. In this job, there's nobody watching over my shoulder.”
And he wouldn't have it any other way.
“I've been working for this for 18 years,” Doyle said. “Right now, I'm focusing on the next three years and making the most of it.”
He'll play with all that technology that hooked him in the first place, and he'll watch the “biologicals” through the windshield of sonar. He'll peer through the periscope at the dolphins that turn flips in the bow wave, and listen for snapping shrimp and rogue nations alike.
He'll marvel at the whales, ancient mammals he's “got nothing on in terms of ability. Even with all my technology, they still go deeper and move more efficiently. And they probably have better sonar systems than I do.
“But not much better. We're catching them there.”
Just as the military life is catching Doyle. Now 40, the commander is no longer so taken by the big boats and their high technology.
“For me, now, what really makes that thing operate are the guys on board,” Cmdr. Doyle said. “That's what makes it special. They are true patriots, and it's been an amazing thing to serve with them.”
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com.
|
 |
 |
Add your comment now! Write your comment in the form below.
(Email address is for verification only. If you'd like to email a story, look for the link above)