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USS Mariano G. Vallejo (SSBN 658)

USS MARIANO G. VALLEJO was one of the BENJAMIN FRANKLIN - class nuclear powered fleet ballistic missile submarines. Generally similar to the LAFAYETTE - class, the twelve BENJAMIN FRANKLIN - class submarines had a quieter machinery design, and were thus considered a separate class.

Decommissioned and stricken from the Navy list on March 10, 1995, MARIANO G. VALLEJO went through the Navy’s Nuclear Powered Ship and Recycling Program at Bremerton, Washington, from October 1, 1994 to December 22, 1995. When she emerged from the program, she no longer existed as a complete ship and was classed as scrapped. However, MARIANO G. VALLEJO's sail was preserved and is now located at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, Calif.

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Crew List:

This section contains the names of sailors who served aboard USS MARIANO G. VALLEJO. It is no official listing but contains the names of sailors who submitted their information.

• Click here to view the list.

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• Click here to see which USS MARIANO G. VALLEJO memorabilia are currently for sale on ebay.

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About the Ship's Name:

Gen. Mariano G. Vallejo, born 7 July 1808 at Monterey, Calif., entered the Monterey Presidial Academy in 1823. Appointed Secretary to the Governor of California in 1825, he later served as Commander of the Presidio at San Francisco, and in 1836 was appointed Commandante General and Director of Colonization of the Northern Frontier, the highest military command in northern California. That appointment terminated during the Bear Flag Revolt, General Vallejo, in spite of substantial losses suffered as a result of that revolution chose to remain in his home State and support separation from Mexico and annexation by the United States.

An influential member of the State’s Constitutional Convention, he was elected a member of the first State Senate (1850). He continued to devote his energies to the development of California for the remainder of his life. General Vallejo died at Sonoma, Calif., 12 January 1890.

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USS MARIANO G. VALLEJO History:

The fleet ballistic missile submarine USS MARIANO G. VALLEJO was ordered on August 8, 1963, as part of the last group of "Forty-one for Freedom" boats that formed the backbone of the United States' seaborne nuclear deterrent during the Cold War. The contract went to Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo, California, the city named for her eventual namesake, Californian political and military leader Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo. Her keel was laid at Mare Island on July 7, 1964, and the yard shaped her as a BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-class boat with a length of about 425 feet, 33-foot beam and the standard single-reactor, single-shaft nuclear propulsion plant of her generation.

MARIANO G. VALLEJO slid down the ways at Mare Island on October 23, 1965. The sponsor was Patricia Oliver Vallejo McGettigan, a great-great-granddaughter of General Mariano G. Vallejo, reflecting the strong local connection between the boat, the shipyard and the city. After fitting out, she was commissioned at Mare Island on December 16, 1966, with two complete crews. Commander Douglas B. Guthe took charge of the Blue Crew and Commander John K. Nunneley commanded the Gold Crew, aligning the boat with the twin-crew concept that allowed the fleet ballistic missile submarines to spend as much time as possible on deterrent patrol.

Following commissioning, MARIANO G. VALLEJO began an extensive shakedown and training period. She operated along the United States west coast, in the Caribbean Sea, and off the Florida coast to work up both crews in nuclear submarine operations and ballistic-missile procedures. These early months coincided with the late stages of the Polaris A-3 era and with continuing Cold War crises, including the Vietnam War escalation, which maintained strong emphasis on continuous at-sea deterrence. After completing her initial trials, the submarine transited the Panama Canal for the second time on March 21, 1967, and headed for her assigned homeport at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. She arrived there on April 10, 1967, and continued acoustic trials and crew training before briefly returning to Mare Island for post-shakedown work and final adjustments.

From Mare Island she sailed back to Hawaii and, effective August 1, 1967, became a fully operational unit of Submarine Squadron Fifteen, the Pacific Fleet's forward-deployed Polaris squadron. SubRon 15's operational support hub had shifted from Pearl Harbor to Apra Harbor, Guam, where the submarine tender USS PROTEUS (AS 19) and associated facilities sustained the Western Pacific Polaris force. Contemporary photographs and veterans' accounts show MARIANO G. VALLEJO alongside PROTEUS at Apra Harbor in 1967, confirming that her early deterrent patrols were supported from Guam.

In this period, she carried POLARIS A-3 missiles and followed the standard pattern used by the "Forty-one for Freedom" boats: roughly 70-day submerged deterrent patrols, alternated with refit and upkeep periods alongside the tender, with Blue and Gold crews rotating to keep the submarine on station as continuously as possible.

During the late 1960s, MARIANO G. VALLEJO's operations formed part of the broader U.S. strategy to deter the Soviet Union by maintaining missile submarines at sea in relatively secure patrol areas. While the details of individual patrol tracks remain classified, the boat's assignment to SubRon 15 and her documented presence at Apra Harbor place her within the Western Pacific ballistic-missile posture that complemented carrier and surface-ship deployments off East Asia during the Vietnam War and the wider superpower confrontation. Through the end of the decade, she cycled between Guam, patrol areas in the Pacific, and periodic maintenance, with her two crews sharing the workload in the established Blue/Gold rotation.

By the early 1970s, the U.S. Navy began upgrading the older POLARIS-armed SSBNs to carry POSEIDON C-3 missiles. MARIANO G. VALLEJO was selected for this modernization and shifted from Pacific to Atlantic waters to enter the yard. According to class-level conversion records, she began a major overhaul and weapons-system conversion at Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Virginia on August 21, 1972. During this yard period, her missile compartment and associated fire-control systems were modified to handle the larger, multiple-warhead POSEIDON C-3 missile, and she received associated updates to navigation, sonar and ship's systems typical of a mid-life refit. The conversion was completed on December 19, 1973, returning her to the fleet as a POSEIDON-capable SSBN.

After rejoining the Atlantic ballistic-missile force, MARIANO G. VALLEJO operated within the network of forward refit sites that supported POSEIDON-armed boats, notably Holy Loch in Scotland and the Rota and Charleston complexes, although the publicly available sources give only fragmentary glimpses of her movements. A photograph published in later years shows her departing Holy Loch in 1972, indicating that she participated in the well-established pattern of Atlantic deterrent patrols supported by the floating infrastructure in that Scottish anchorage, where tenders such as USS CANOPUS (AS 34) and other support ships kept the SSBNs at high readiness.

As with the Pacific phase of her career, much of this work consisted of routine but strategically important patrols, conducted under strict secrecy against the backdrop of détente, the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) and continuing competition with Soviet strategic forces. Specific test and evaluation events bring parts of this period into sharper focus. On November 22, 1974, the Gold Crew of MARIANO G. VALLEJO successfully launched four POSEIDON C-3 missiles in what is recorded as the eighth Operational Test of the POSEIDON system. This series of firings verified missile performance, fire-control reliability and crew proficiency under operationally realistic conditions and demonstrated that the converted boat had fully integrated the new weapon into the fleet deterrent posture. In subsequent years, she continued Atlantic patrols as one of the POSEIDON-equipped BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-class boats assigned to the NATO theatre.

On May 21, 1978, MARIANO G. VALLEJO again appears in the missile-test chronology, when she successfully launched four POSEIDON missiles in a Follow-on Operational Test. This later series evaluated long-term system performance after years of fleet service and underlined the continued importance of the older SSBN force at a time when the new OHIO-class TRIDENT submarines were still in construction and early service. Through the mid-1970s, therefore, the boat moved through a pattern of refits, patrols and test firings that reflected both technological evolution and the strategic need to maintain a credible second-strike capability in the Atlantic.

The late 1970s brought another major change as the Navy began backfitting selected BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-class boats with the TRIDENT I (C-4) missile to bridge the gap between the POSEIDON force and the emerging OHIO-class. MARIANO G. VALLEJO's last operational patrol with POSEIDON was completed on August 18, 1979. Less than a month later, on September 7, 1979, she commenced Part I of the industrial phase of the TRIDENT I backfit at the Fleet Ballistic Missile support site in Charleston, South Carolina. Unlike the earlier conversion at a dedicated shipyard, this modernization was carried out pier-side with support from the FBM tender and shore facilities, and she was the second POSEIDON SSBN to undergo a TRIDENT I backfit in this manner. The work altered her missile tubes, guidance interfaces and shipboard systems to accept the longer-range, MIRV-capable TRIDENT I C-4 missile, positioning her among the first legacy SSBNs to receive this intermediate TRIDENT capability.

The class-level record of the BENJAMIN FRANKLIN boats notes that the process of rearming the selected SSBNs with TRIDENT I was completed by July 20, 1982, listing MARIANO G. VALLEJO among the submarines whose conversion and rearmament had been finished by that date.

By the early 1980s, she was therefore operating as a TRIDENT I platform within the Atlantic strategic force. As infrastructure at Kings Bay, Georgia, expanded from a support site into a full TRIDENT submarine base, TRIDENT-equipped BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-class boats like MARIANO G. VALLEJO became part of the transition force that introduced TRIDENT capability to the Atlantic while the OHIO-class units were being delivered. Kings Bay's chronology records the growth of the base's facilities, including arrival of the tender USS SIMON LAKE (AS 33) in the early 1980s and the establishment of Strategic Weapons Facility Atlantic, which together sustained the TRIDENT I backfit submarines as they conducted deterrent patrols from the southeastern United States.

One of the most clearly documented events of MARIANO G. VALLEJO's TRIDENT era occurred in 1987. The boat completed a deterrent patrol that was counted as the United States Navy fleet's 2,500th strategic SSBN patrol. According to the boat's own association site and the Kings Bay base chronology, she arrived at Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay around April 2, 1987, at the end of that patrol, and on April 4, 1987, a formal ceremony at the base commemorated the milestone. National Archives photographs and associated captions show MARIANO G. VALLEJO being assisted into a dock at Kings Bay by the large harbor tugs OKMULGEE (YTB 765) and TOMAHAWK (YTB 789), with the fleet ballistic missile submarine tender USS CANOPUS and another submarine visible in the background. Vice Admiral Bruce DeMars, then serving as Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Submarine Warfare and a central figure in the submarine community, came aboard the submarine for the ceremony marking completion of the 2,500th deterrent patrol by the SSBN force. In the broader context of the late Cold War, this event highlighted both the cumulative contribution of the "Forty-one for Freedom" boats and the continued strategic relevance of older SSBNs even as the larger, more capable OHIO-class units entered service.

Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, MARIANO G. VALLEJO remained in the Atlantic TRIDENT force while arms-control agreements and geopolitical change reshaped the strategic landscape. The class history notes that by the end of 1993, many BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-class submarines had been decommissioned or placed in stand-down status, but MARIANO G. VALLEJO, together with USS KAMEHAMEHA (SSBN 642) and USS JAMES K. POLK (SSBN 645), continued in service as part of the shrinking group of LAFAYETTE-type SSBNs. This persistence reflected both her updated TRIDENT I capability and the need to maintain patrol coverage while older POLARIS/POSEIDON units retired and the OHIO-class TRIDENT II (D-5) boats gradually assumed the primary load.

As arms-control measures under START I began to take effect and the strategic inventory was reduced after the end of the Cold War, the "Forty-one for Freedom" boats were progressively withdrawn. Multiple historical summaries and veterans' accounts emphasize that MARIANO G. VALLEJO was the last of these original SSBNs to carry out a deterrent patrol, the last to off-load her ballistic missiles and the last to arrive at the recycling yard in Bremerton, Washington, making her effectively the final active member of the group. This status underlined her role as a closing chapter in the era of mid-Cold-War fleet ballistic missile submarines.

Her final operational movements are unusually well documented. On August 2, 1994, MARIANO G. VALLEJO departed Charleston, South Carolina, for the last time. She transited the Panama Canal on August 10, 1994, and during the passage across the eastern Pacific toward San Diego her track passed approximately 20 nautical miles from the epicenter of a magnitude-7.2 earthquake, an unusual coincidence that found its way into later narratives of the voyage. After reaching the West Coast, she continued north to Mare Island, returning to the yard that had built her nearly three decades earlier. There, over an eleven-day period, her crew hosted more than three thousand visitors on guided tours through the submarine, providing the public and the Vallejo community with a final opportunity to see an operational BENJAMIN FRANKLIN-class SSBN from the inside.

From Mare Island, MARIANO G. VALLEJO proceeded to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton, Washington, to enter the Navy's Ship and Submarine Recycling Program. The recycling process formally began on October 1, 1994, even before decommissioning was complete, following the standard practice for nuclear-powered submarines in the post-Cold-War period. The Naval Vessel Register and specialized class histories list her as decommissioned and stricken from the register on March 10, 1995.

Her reactor compartment and radioactive materials were then handled under the controlled procedures of the recycling program, and the overall scrapping process was completed on December 22, 1995, bringing physical disposal of the hull to an end. Although the submarine herself was dismantled, significant parts of MARIANO G. VALLEJO were preserved. Her sail was retained at Mare Island and for years rested on the waterfront, exposed to the elements. In the 2010s, local efforts under the "Save-Our-Sail" project led to its restoration and relocation into a permanent memorial associated with the Mare Island Museum, where the sail and reconstructed control-room elements, including a working periscope, commemorate the boat, her crews and the shipyard that built her.

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USS MARIANO G. VALLEJO Image Gallery:

The photos below were taken by me and show MARIANO G. VALLEJO's sail preserved at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo, Calif. The photos were taken on March 27, 2010.

The photos below were taken by me and show MARIANO G. VALLEJO's sail preserved as part of a memorial associated with the Mare Island Museum at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard at Vallejo, Calif. The photos were taken on July 18, 2024.

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