Hot bunking is the berthing arrangement John Kiriakou described on 25 February 2026, when a joke about warships being full turned into a description of what full means.
He began by establishing that he was speaking from having been aboard: “Some of those some of those ships, I’ve been on a bunch of them over the years, they’re so overcrowded. You have to hot bunk.”[1]
The arithmetic of a bed
“Like in um submarines, for example, you have hot bunks. So, you have three times as many people as there are beds. And everybody gets 8 hours in the bed. And you you share the bed with two other guys, you share the pillow with two other guys. It’s gross.”[1]
His explanation is not disciplinary but spatial: “But there’s just no space.”[1]
Walking on dinner
The same shortage governs the stores. “You have you have thousands of cans of of canned food that you walk on. And you just eat the canned food as you need it. So, you’re you’re, you know, several inches higher than you normally would because you’re walking on canned food everywhere you go.”[1][2]
The deck of a ship at the start of a deployment is therefore several inches shallower than at the end of one.
Why submarines come up
The detail Kiriakou saves for last is about the crew rather than the boat. “The only reason, especially with nuclear subs, the only reason they come up out of the water is to keep people from going insane. They can stay underwater for 6 months. But people lose their minds.”[2]
On this account the limiting factor on a nuclear submarine’s endurance is not fuel, food or air but the psychology of the people inside it.