Tension on the high seas off the Korean peninsula in recent weeks brings Louis Decell back to strategies played out following the end of the Korean War — missions that dictated a high-stakes game of hide-and-seek.

“We’d scramble like airplanes, you know,” Decell said of his days in the Navy aboard the USS Clamagore.

Decell and his mates inside the flagship of Submarine Squadron Four met more fortuitous fates than sailors aboard the Cheonan. Still, threats of being on the wrong end of enemy fire were as constant as seeing periscopes of Russian subs peeking through the waters dividing the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean.

“They’d be on the surface, we’d see the periscopes. We’d be on that side, and they’d be on that side. All the torpedoes were in the tubes. It was a little game we’d play for four or five hours or so. That went on for two years or so. It was the old Cold War game, you know.”

Decell, 74, spent four years on the top-flight, Balao-class submarine and was an Engineman Second Class in 1955 when he and fellow crewmen steered deep-cover missions spurred by the stalemate in the Korean conflict and the burgeoning arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

That year, the sub departed Charleston, S.C. to photograph Soviet shipping fleets in forbidding waters near the northwest Russian port city of Murmansk. Decell and others on the sub weren’t told of their destination at first.

“We left out of Charleston and they told us we’d be gone two months or more and that if anything happened to us, the U.S. would disavow any knowledge of us being there,” Decell said. “Well, the Russians caught us and they started depth-charging us. We went to the bottom and sat for about 18 hours and had to make a run for it to get out of there.”

A secondary mission took them to the Denmark Strait, between Greenland and Iceland, to test the submarine defense system while backup subs in the fleet remained stateside in case of danger. Once there, the foe wasn’t fire, but ice.

“Late one night, we hit an iceberg,” Decell said. “The bow of the boat started down, and it kept going down — more than our 350-foot test depth.”

Once the crew powered the 311-foot diesel-electric mammoth out of trouble, the battered and bruised sub limped into Naval Station Argentia, a key naval base in Newfoundland, which has since been decommissioned.

“We had been submerged for 59 days. We were supposed to be home after two months,” Decell said, adding the crates of apples brought to them by base staff was something of a godsend.

“They looked better than Marilyn Monroe, at that point,” Decell said. “We did get some decent photos (in Russia) before they caught us, but just not as many as we wanted.”

Skirmishes at sea between the two halves of Korea — a remaining vestige of Cold War-era conflict — have claimed lives on both sides in the decades following the 1953 armistice.

A torpedo struck the South Korean warship Cheonan in the Yellow Sea on March 26, killing 46 sailors. Experts have said the strike came from North Korea, prompting renewed threats of all-out war from the totalitarian nation and moves by the U.S. to beef up a presence in northeast Asia, particularly in Japan.

Decell says the sinking reminds him of what he and others on the Clamagore, now a national landmark stationed at Patriot’s Point Naval & Maritime Museum in South Carolina, felt daily whether they were keeping tabs on the Russians or simply training in the Gulf of Mexico.

“It kind of starts sinking it on you after you spend a couple of years on there,” he said. “Let’s do everything right.”