Dick Shoemaker puts finishing touches on a model of the USS Tucson. The city's namesake vessel is based in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

photos by lindsay a. miller / Arizona Daily Star

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Lots of people worry what the neighbors think. Brad Braastad isn't one of them.

First, he installed a mailbox shaped like a yellow submarine at the end of his driveway.

Now the 84-year-old Navy veteran and his pals are building a replica of a nuclear sub in the backyard of his South Side home.

"The neighbors think he's crazy," joked Braastad's buddy, Carle Blackwell .

"They think I've spent too much time underwater," chimed Braastad, who actually spent much of his 25-year military career below the sea.

Beyond the mirth, serious work is under way for the group of former submariners who are trying to get some respect while living in a waterless part of the world.

Their latest effort is 21 feet long and looks like a huge black cigar with a bronze propeller. It's a scale model of the USS Tucson, a nuclear submarine based in Hawaii but named after our desert municipality.

"A lot of people in Tucson don't realize that there is a U.S. submarine named for our city," said Braastad, founder of the local branch of U.S. Submarine Veterans Inc., a national group for those who served their country in the deep.

Fewer still know that there is a local group — the USS Tucson 770 Club — that exists to support the crew members of the city's namesake sub.

Braastad and his comrades have raised and spent more than $11,000 crafting the replica submarine, using an old Air Force F-4 Phantom fuel tank obtained from a local salvage yard.

Hundreds of hours have gone into sanding, scrubbing, and painting the hulking creation. Organizers plan to put it on public display for the first time next weekend.

After that, they'll enter it in parades and other events to try to raise awareness of the military contributions of submariners.

In a landlocked town like Tucson, lots of folks are in the dark about submarines, said group member Tom Patterson, 63, who served eight years in the Navy in the Vietnam era.

"People here hardly know anything about submarines," Patterson said.

Among the little known facts:

● Submariners are among the most heavily cross-trained personnel in the U.S. military. Each must know how to do everyone else's job in case of an onboard emergency. A nuclear-reactor operator, for example, also must know how to fire a torpedo, send a radio message, contain a leak or trace an electrical problem.

● Serving on a submarine is always voluntary. Candidates are assessed for claustrophobic tendencies and must undergo psychological testing to see if they're suited to living underwater in close quarters.

● Submarines often are referred to as "The Silent Service" because they operate surreptitiously. Much of their work is classified and intelligence-related: for example, tapping into the underwater telephone cables of the former Soviet Union during the Cold War.

● Submarines are painted black for the same reason soldiers in Iraq wear desert camouflage. Underwater, a black sub blends in with surroundings to help avoid enemy detection.

The first U.S. submarine was used — not very successfully — in the Civil War era. By 1900, the Navy had a version that held six crew members and had a 45-horsepower steam engine. It dived to a depth of 75 feet.

By comparison, modern subs are nuclear-powered, hold more than 100 crew members, and can travel more than 800 feet below the sea's surface — the precise depth is classified.

"Submariners have performed valiantly throughout their history," Braastad said. "But most of the time, nobody realized what they were doing."