Poets And Loved Ones Of Lost Seamen Recall The Tragic Loss Of The Thresher

By Patricia Daddona, New London Day, September 13, 2004

            Groton - Forty-one years ago, Kirsten Babbin of Waterford lost her 22-year-old fiancé, Don Dundas, when equipment failure sank the USS Thresher, killing all 129 crewmen on the submarine.

            A year later, poet and former Navy pilot William Meredith stood on a rock near his Uncasville home on the Thames River, ruminating about the Thresher commander, whom he had known. It was there, said Richard Harteis, Meredith's partner of 33 years, that the first lines of Meredith's poem "The Wreck of the Thresher" began to take shape.

            Anger, said Meredith and Babbin, still marks their memory of those deaths, at times outweighing even grief.

            On Sunday, poets, submariners and relatives of the lost crewmen paid tribute to the memory of the Thresher at the Submarine Force Museum here. Harteis unveiled a series of etchings that Bulgarian artist Stoimen Stoilov created as companion pieces to the poem. Meredith, who taught for nearly three decades at Connecticut College, is also celebrating his 85th birthday.

            For two years, the USS Thresher conducted trials of new technology aboard the 3,700-ton nuclear-powered attack sub, according to an online Navy library.

            After the tragedy, which occurred during deep-diving tests 220 miles east of Cape Cod, the Navy determined that once the vessel's pipes failed and it lost power, it could not blow ballast tanks "rapidly enough to avoid sinking."

            Sitting with a crowd of about 60 people, Babbin waited impatiently for speakers to get to the reading of "The Wreck." After her fiance's death, she shunned public memorials, she said, and only this year attended the annual remembrance ceremony for Thresher families and veterans in Portsmouth, N.H.

            "I never went to any of the services they had," Babbin said. "I was angry, just devastated."

            Finally, Connecticut poet laureate Marilyn Nelson began reading "The Wreck of the Thresher" for its author, who suffers from aphasia caused by a stroke in 1983.

            Though Thresher Lt. Cmdr. John Harvey was not a close friend, Meredith said, the poet felt the loss deeply. "Crushed" is the verb that courses through Meredith's mourning, the crush of people, water, or "any ship," until "the noise of a boat breaking up and its men is in our ears."

            Powerless to avert "some will ... done past our understanding," his sea-brothers somehow teach him not to be ashamed of living, but rather "study.../how the heart, when it turns diver, delves and saves."

            The Pulitzer Prize winner's poem is the title piece of his fourth book of poetry.

            "To hear somebody of his quality acknowledge the men who died, and hear it read by someone of her quality, it's just very touching," Babbin said.

            Before reading "The Wreck," Nelson offered her unpublished poem, "Written in Clouds," which she wrote for a friend, a Marine who served in Vietnam. She spent many "harrowing sessions" listening to his stories, plumbing his yearning to keep alive the memories of lost comrades, she said.

            "Is anyone ever ready?" she wrote. "Do you get an explanation? An apology? Or does the water that was you - that was 70 percent of you - re-enter the cycle and shed your name?"

            Michael J. Kindle, Groton City councilor and fellow submariner, called loss by another name earlier in the ceremony when he said, "The pinnacle of bravery is expressed in death. Those submariners on the Thresher, although I knew none of them, I felt like I knew all of them, because I know what we do."