This picture of a Submariner in his rack on USS Henry M. Jackson (SSBN 730) got me thinking about how much I used to love my rack on the boat.
A Submariner's rack is a place of safety; a place where he can get a few minutes to himself. Sure, it's a place to rest ("Joel, come sleep in me" my rack used to call when I finished an especially tiring day) but it's also a place of refuge in a small tube filled with 130 smelly guys. We had this one JO on Topeka could could, literally, spend 18 hours in the rack on Sundays when there was nothing going on. Another guy tried to float a leave chit in the middle of deployment to spend an entire day in his rack. (Got disapproved.)
How much did you love your rack? And do you have an especially humorous or poignant stories about submarine sleeping spaces?
Update 1625 15 Jan: For non-Submariners reading the comments who wondered what it meant to "pin" someone up is their rack, a reader sent in a photo from USS Sturgeon (SSN 637) in the early '80s:
More Sturgeon photos from this era can be found here. Remember, current day Submariners shouldn't do this, because it's considered to be "hazing". (And, let's face it, it's unsafe if someone were left like that and there was fire or flooding.)
