Pictured: Pastor Seth Atsma and his wife Jennifer and daughter Anika. Seth served in the United States Navy for 8 years.

Pastor Seth Atsma, who has been serving the Chandler Reformed Church for the past 3 years, is also a veteran of the United States Navy.

Seth joined the navy in 2003. He had graduated from Dordt College earlier that year and was looking for a job in the computer science field. However, that was a time when the computer industry was experiencing a recession and he could not find a job.

“I joined the navy because I needed a job,” Seth said. “Uncle Sam is always hiring.”

Seth had grown up on a dairy farm in Oregon. Both of his parents were Dordt grads, and his grandfather had been a professor there. So going to Dordt was sort of inevitable and computers seemed like the perfect field to go into.

When he could not find a job, Seth visited with military recruiters. His first choice was to join the air force, but when he went to visit with those recruiters, they were getting ready to go on their lunch break and didn’t have a lot of time to talk to him. So he went on to the navy desk and they were more than ready to stroke his ego and tell him what he wanted to hear.

He recalls being told that because he had a degree, he could be an officer and he could work with nuclear power. Because he wanted to be an officer, he should have talked with different recruiters than he did.

Seth enlisted in the navy and soon found himself at Great Lakes Naval Academy. “That was two months of learning how to dress, how to sleep, how to fold your laundry,” he said. “There are three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the navy way. You better be doing it the navy way.”

Seth wanted to get into work with cryptology – making messages secure and breaking enemy codes. He was told that the navy doesn’t really do that. Instead, he was enrolled in Nuc A school in Goose Creek, South Carolina, which is right by Charleston. He would be learning naval nuclear power command.

For the next year (two 6-month long schools) he learned everything there is to know about nuclear power and how to operate and maintain the nuclear reactor in a nuclear-powered submarine.

After a year of training, Seth was ready to put what he had learned into practice. The next step for him was to work on a prototype nuclear reactor in Ballston Spa, New York.

Before heading to New York, Seth returned to the west coast, where he married his college sweetheart, Jennifer Berkompas. They had met at Dordt, where Jennifer was an English major.

They spent their honeymoon traveling across the country to New York, stopping briefly at Sioux Center, Iowa, to visit Seth’s grandparents. When they arrived in New York, they had a few days to get settled into an apartment there and then Seth got busy with his training. Jennifer was forced to find things to occupy her time in a place she was not familiar with, with no friends or family nearby.

Thankfully, there was a lot to do in the New York area and they could spend their weekends sight-seeing and enjoying the New England states.

Seth’s training at the Naval Nuclear Power Training Unit focused on continuing to learn how to operate and maintain a nuclear reactor, this time under the supervision of an expert. The nuclear reactor he worked on was located just outside of town. Ironically, students at one of the prestigious colleges there would protest the use of nuclear power, and all the while a nuclear power plant was humming along a few miles away.

The nuclear reactor was so safe and so controlled that people hardly know it’s there. Seth’s job was to make sure that the reactor functioned as it was designed to.

After the final six months of training, Seth was given his orders to report to the USS Ohio, a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine stationed in Bremerton, Washington. He would be stationed there for the next six years.

The USS Ohio, a nuclear submarine, moored in Guam.

There were two crews assigned to this submarine, and they would take turns being on duty – three months on land and three months of being at sea.

“Three months on, three months off, was the theory,” Seth said. “But it did not always happen that way.”

When his crew was not on the submarine, he would have a normal 9 to 5 office job. When they were on duty, he would spend weeks and often months out to sea. The longest Seth ever went without seeing the sun was almost two months. During that time, he did not even poke his head out of the top of the submarine.

Some submarines travel the world and spend a lot of time in port and those sailors get to see the world. Nuclear submarines like the USS Ohio are designed to stay out to sea almost forever. The people on board need a break for oxygen and sunlight long before the sub needs to come into port.

They went all over the Western Pacific – to Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, but mostly to Guam. They went to Guam a lot because it is a U.S. territory, and there is a submarine port there.

Seth Atsma with his engineering department. Seth is in the front middle taking a knee.

The submarine that Seth Atsma was stationed on often stopped in Guam. Pictured above are the beautiful waters around the island of Guam.

“Guam is beautiful,” Seth said. “It has the most beautiful water I have ever seen.”