Marseilles High School dropout finds career in U.S. Navy’s ‘silent service’

What was the reason a Marseilles High School dropout wound up on the other side of the world, fighting the Cold War beneath the polar icecaps in multimillion-dollar submarines before finishing his career as a highly decorated U.S. Navy veteran?

The desire was for better food. What he got was the adventure of a lifetime.

Daniel Higgins was, by his own admission, “not stupid, just uneducated” in 1956 when he dropped out of Marseilles High School on his 17th birthday. Soon after, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, which gave him the education that took him all the way to the rank of master chief petty officer upon his retirement in 1985.

“It was the stomach of a growing 17-year-old boy that got me into submarines,” Higgins said, “that and a little bit of luck.”

Somewhat bored with small-town life, Higgins never liked school and found that once he enlisted, that was exactly what was waiting for him. The battery of tests that new recruits took showed he didn’t qualify for any one specialty, so he was assigned directly to a destroyer escort in Key West, Florida.

“I loved it,” Higgins said. “A couple old-timers took me under their wing, showed me how to do my job – anything from operating a lathe to working with boilers, turbines and pumps – and gave me more information than I probably would have learned in school.”

One of his daily duties was to run submarine sailors out to their ships so they could take lessons on the use of sonar equipment. When he saw that they were “throwing out better food in the dumpster than I was eating,” that was all a growing 17-year-old needed to put in a request to go to sub duty.

“The chief petty officer told me I didn’t qualify to hang with those guys, but I talked him into sending the request anyway,” Higgins said. “He did, and they waivered me the eight points that I needed from the general test and the math test.”

Because he had been short on points, the Navy sent him to work on the USS Ranger, a new aircraft carrier being commissioned in Newport News, Virginia, for nine months before sending him on to sub school. That assignment on the Ranger turned out to be a blessing, as he “learned more there than I would have at school for the machinist rating I ended up with. By the time I finished up that year on the aircraft carrier, I was ahead of the game, really.”

Higgins finished submarine school in 1958 and was put on his first sub, a leftover World War II diesel sub in San Diego. He continued to learn, but shortly thereafter, found an opening for advancement when “they were looking for a lot of bodies” to go to nuclear power school for the fledgling nuclear submarine program.

“I reenlisted to go to nuclear power school, but only after they waivered me another 12 points,” Higgins said. “I’d never qualify for it today because I didn’t have the math. I wasn’t any smarter than anyone else, but they needed people, and I was in the right place at the right time.”

In Connecticut and Idaho, he learned on a prototype how to operate the nuclear plant “for real” and was assigned to his first nuclear sub, the USS Shark, a brand-new fast-attack sub docked in Newport News. It was aboard the Shark that he first got to see the world.

“The Shark turned out to be quite an adventure for me,” Higgins said. “It was the fastest sub we had at the time. … They used us in the Mediterranean Sea for a while. Because they wanted a base for ballistic missile submarines there, we hauled around all the VIPs – presidents, kings and queens, generals and admirals – gave them the full roller-coaster ride to show them it was safe.”

After operating out of France and Italy, the Navy finally built a base in Rota, Spain, to test the 41 new subs built “in a pretty short period of time.”

Meanwhile, with the U.S. worried about the USSR’s nuclear bomb testing, the Shark was sent to do “a little spy work in some of the cold-water areas.”

At one point, Higgins and the crew were only 35 miles from a 1-megaton nuclear blast – so close the mushroom cloud was visible through the periscope.

Because the Soviets were spying on the Americans, too, they sometimes would build fake appendages out of cardboard and wood to make the Russians think the U.S. had come up with something new.

“It was quite a cat and mouse game,” Higgins said. “The Cold War, not everybody knew what it was, I don’t think, or what it all meant, especially the silent service. Not a lot of swag, either. We were just doing our job.”

Later, Higgins was transferred to a job teaching welding at a submarine base before being stationed on the sub USS Thomas Jefferson at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

“The Jefferson was riding the waves right underneath some of those Russian ships heading for Cuba,” he said. “We didn’t know what we’d do about it, but we were there reporting everything because we knew they were up to no good.”

Promoted to chief petty officer, Higgins was assigned to another fast-attack sub docked in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the USS Jack. The Jack was a sister ship to the Thresher, which experienced uncontrolled flooding and was crushed deep under the sea in 1963, and the Scorpion, which sank under mysterious circumstances in 1968. And there were other mysteries, as well.

“You’ve seen the movie, ‘The Hunt for Red October?’ The guy that wrote that should have gone to jail. I don’t know where he got all that information,” Higgins said. “In fact, the House of Representatives had a hearing about that. There was speculation that there was a Russian sub that sank. We raised it, but it disappeared, and the CIA has it stashed somewhere. All speculation, you understand.”

Higgins later served on the USS George Washington, the first free ballistic missile submarine. When it failed a nuclear reactor safeguarding test, Higgins was sent to Scotland to fix it.

“Who do they send? Not one of the brilliant guys. The high school dropout,” he said. That earned him the Navy Achievement Medal, and he was made lead petty officer for the machinery division and master chief all on that trip.

After one more assignment as the senior shipping superintendent aboard the USS George C. Marshall, Higgins applied for fleet reserve, basically retiring, in 1985. Having the equivalent of three years of submerged time under his belt, he received a certificate from the Secretary of the Navy and another Navy achievement medal.

Higgins then went to work for General Electric, helping build new turbines, and later contracted to work on air compressors as a project engineer and maintenance supervisor for Ingersoll Rand. He also worked for a company that helped develop fuel cells for the Apollo and the Space Shuttle programs.

On the personal side, Higgins’ first marriage failed because of his long deployments, but he and his second wife were together for 50 years, operating a 1,000-acre family campground in Connecticut. They lived on a 10-acre property in Bosra, Connecticut, with their five children before she died a year ago.

Higgins has since moved to Micco, Florida, and occasionally will wander back to his hometown of Marseilles to check in with old friends, swap stories with fellow veterans and play a little liar’s poker with them.

“In all, I had at least three years submerged time,” Higgins said of his Navy career. “I was never bored because I was always busy. There were never enough people doing the job I did.

“It was a great career for a kid – a dropout from little Marseilles.”