Sunday, as I worked around the house, I turned on The Hunt for the Red October. It’s been at least a decade since I last saw this, and it was a walk down memory lane. This Cold War era movie was one of the first that I owned in my personal VHS collection. (For the kids, that was the format before DVDs, which was the format before Blu-Ray. Ask your parents.) Some amazing person gave that movie as a gift upon my high school graduation, and over the many years that I spent in college, I nearly wore the tape out. In high school and college, I read many of Tom Clancy’s brick-like novels. In the movie, there’s a scene where Jack Ryan, played by Alec Baldwin, consults an engineer to guess what a certain feature on the newest Soviet submarine could be. Gears clicked, and part of my life shifted into focus.
As the scene played out, I got a distinct memory of reading that scene in the book. An engineer helping the CIA struck a note with me. I think that I became an engineer because of that scene in The Hunt for Red October. At that point in my life, I knew I wouldn’t be a soldier. While I had taken the ASVAB and scored very well, I knew that medically I wouldn’t qualify for service. My asthma, which I was told I would grow out of, still kicked up every fall as the weather changed. Once a year, near Christmas, I’d go into the hospital due to asthma. And while I hadn’t yet talked to a recruiter, in the back of my head, I knew I wouldn’t qualify. That meant service wasn’t a possibility. But reading Clancy’s novels which are filled with technical aspects of the military and spying, I saw a way to contribute to my country.
The movies don’t do justice to the technical aspects of the books. I remember consuming them and loving the fact that someone had figured out this new drive. In addition, submarines are impressive vehicles. They were driven by maps, stopwatches, and sonar. Learning about cavitation and how the fluid flow pushed the submarines through the water, nuclear versus mechanical power to drive a ship blew my young mind. Science intrigued me throughout my young life, but I didn’t think of it in terms of practicality. Science was experiments, sending astronauts to space, and vials full of nasty chemicals. But in these books, I saw through the technical details Mr. Clancy put in them. And the possibility of an engineer affecting international politics was too tempting to ignore. Even back then, I was as into politics as I am now, though not the same side.
Watching this movie, I saw the beginning of the path that I’m currently on. The Hunt for Red October started my love of fluid dynamics. Because of that movie, I wanted to study how water moves, why it behaves the way it does. However, when I got to those classes, they didn’t quite hold my interest in the way that structural engineering did. When it came down to it, I liked the structural math better than the fluid math. Still do. But without a doubt, I owe a debt to Mr. Clancy for starting me down this career path. I’ve been a structural engineer in the aerospace industry for over a decade now, and I love my career. Without this book, I’d probably still be an engineer. Something else would have piqued my interest. But in this timeline, I’m an engineer because of The Hunt for Red October.
As a side note, for a few months while I worked at Ford Motor Company, I was working to get a Ph.D. in Naval Engineering. Had I stayed with FMC, I would have enrolled and got a Ph.D. in the very field that started my love of engineering.