This Week's Speaker

After a nice introduction by Phil Zepeda,  Phil Clintworth our guest speaker started his program with the dive signal from a submarine. (Remember the old war movies with the loud warning and the words Dive! Dive!) Phil is retired submarine captain with 29 + years of active duty with the Navy. He is past commanding officer at the Naval Base at San Diego.

 

While he was the C.O. at the Naval Yard he was able to be part of the making of the movie The Hunt for Red October. The movie was based on a novel by author Tom Clancy. Phil presented some interesting background on the author, actors, and departments of the Navy that were involved in making the movie. Along with the back ground information Phil also had slides that complemented the background information he had. Some points of interest were that before Tom Clancy became a well known author he was an insurance salesman. He typed the entire book out on a typewriter. The U.S. Naval Institute was the 1^st publisher for the novel and it was also the 1^st time that the Naval Institute had published fiction.

 

The movie TOP GUN was a factor in recruiting people for the Navy so the Navy decided to use this movie as a way to recruit for the submarine division. Technical advice, consulting and submarine familiarization was given by not only our presenter but by other officers as well. Phil had slides of several of the actors involved including Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, and Fred Thompson. He also had pictures of the sets used by the director to aid in filming. In some of the underwater filming of the “dog fights” between subs Phil explained that in real life that subs don’t usually get any closer than a mile and that for them to get any closer was like driving white knuckled on ice. He went on to explain that there really was an incident during the cold war that author Tom Clancy had researched and based his story on. He concluded his program by telling us that only 2 submarines have been lost at sea since World War II.