Reply #60: Wounding would mean that something struck them. [View All]

When a sub strikes something, from what I understand having done equipment installations on one, it's rather like being inside a washing machine and everything must be secured accordingly. As the sub is built to move in three dimensions - unlike a surface ship - the "rollover" plane is not as strict, and people can be thrown "up" or sideways in a way one does not normally see. If you are thrown "up" out of your rack and hit the sharp cableway and piping above you, that would cause a different injury that you would get on a surface ship being tossed "down" or down and sideways from your rack. You might break an arm or leg when you hit the deck on a surface ship. You have a chance to "catch yourself" and won't fall so far. I've fallen out of my rack - a "top rack" before when my ship did "backing down" exercises or in high seas and received nothing more than bruises and a slightly wrenched shoulder. The injuries tend be more of a stress or soft tissue damage.
On a submarine, you can easily crack open your skull as if you were hit with an axe if you were thrown "up" out of your rack and hit the cableway or pipe hangers. If you're sleeping in the torpedo room racks (one division sleeps right under the torpedo stowage cradles - that shocked the hell out of me when we did a LAN install on a LA class a few years back) and the maintenance tools aren't secured properly above you, you can get hit by all sorts of flying items.
Submarines are also very tight spaces; again, there's enough sharp corners and edges on otherwise "common" items that normally wouldn't be a major problem - if you have room to catch yourself before you fall on them or if they're secured properly.

Wounding would probably be the type of injury one would get when a submarine runs aground - as opposed to the standard military definition of simple "injury".

Haele