In 1987 The Bangles were capturing the airways of the world with their music. Ronald Reagan was in the White House winning the battle for the soul of the human race and crushing the Soviets, and the crew of Ranger 12 joined me under the ocean. I would return to the surface, they are still lost all these decades later.
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The first paragraph might sound disrespectful to the crew of the mission, but it was part of the joking back and forth between the submarine riders and the flight crew of the era that “there were a lot more airplanes in the ocean than submarines in the sky.” We busted each other’s chops all the time back in 32 Division: where the riders, flyers, and skimmers came to roost between deployments. The humor of that statement left when I found out about the death of my friends CTI3 Patrick Price and CTI3 Craig Rudolph a few weeks later. (I’d love to link pictures of them, but the web wasn’t around yet. I can still picture them in my mind. Forever young.)
I’d been out on a mission on a submarine with a detachment of people who knew the air crew. We’d been a tad bit busy, and we had not received word of the crash that killed our friends. But the dark depths we’d just left were the grave of our comrades. When we found out, weeks after the deaths and the memorial service, we held our own impromptu memorial at the enlisted club in Naples, Italy.
The Cold War wasn’t all that cold for the people who flew the missions from carriers, or who rode the submarines. Nor was it cold for the men on the DMZ in Korea, or the plains of the Fulda Gap in West Germany. It was hot. Shots were fired, people hacked to death with axes, and planes plummeted to the bottom of the sea with the crew still strapped in their seats. We lived in a Europe racked with terrorist actions. It impacted our lives directly.
Today, 28 years later, people in the United States think that terrorism is something relatively new. Not for us. We all had stories about places we’d just left being blown up. I can count two different places that went bang within 24 (or 2-4) hours of my departing. It was a tense time for everyone. Every mission we went on, surface/subsurface/air, could be the one that started WW III. Sound like an exaggeration? Not to us: we were the guys who collected the intelligence that war decisions would be based on back in Washington. If we hit the panic button, bad things would happen to people as a result. Consequently we trained hard, we treated every single trip as a wartime event. We had fun like all young men like to (it was just men back in the 80’s) but when things got tense, we hunkered down and did our best.
I remember Craig as a quiet guy who was a good student. He sat across the aisle from me in class for the final part of our spook training. He had a partner in crime in another student (who didn’t complete the training pipeline: about 40% drop rate at that time) and so our contact was somewhat minimal. He went to flight school and I went to surface school.
Pat was the quintessential southern gentleman. I remember him as a friend of everyone. He was the guy who would hold the door open for you in a driving rain even if he didn’t know you. There was a smile in his eyes whenever you talked to him. He was in love with his wife. He loved to fly, and I know he’d think it funny and touching that the gymnasium at the Defense Language Institute is named in his honor, yet there is nothing about him on the webpage for the facility: not even a picture. That’s sad. He was a good looking young man.
This weekend marked that anniversary for the people who were friends and relatives of the crew of Ranger 12. I’ve written about it before, I’ll write about it again. Those deaths were part of the sacrifice made to keep a nation free. The deaths of my friends and classmates on Ranger 12 were the last Cryptologic Technicians to die during the Cold War. I know it’s not how some would view the military during the Cold War era, but they were brave young men on the front lines of a struggle for the soul of mankind. If you doubt their integrity, loyalty, or zeal for the mission, I pity you.
Freedom isn’t free. RIP, shipmates. I still miss you.
LT Stephen H. Batchelder
LCDR Ronald R. Callander
AT2 Richard A. Herzing
LT Alan A. Levine
CTI3 Patrick R. Price
LT James D. Richards
CTI3 Craig H. Rudolf
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If you have a photo of the crew members (any of them) or a picture of just Pat and/or Craig, please contact me privately. We have a DLI contact who will get that web page updated with info if he can. joseph AT commotioninthepews.com Thanks.
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Ranger 12 Memorial
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