Trainees swam in circles on the bottom with scuba as cadre floated above. Over-and-unders in the pool, breath-holds, chest heaving air among the alveoli for any last molecule of oxygen, the throat holding in its secret: I do not belong down here. Push-ups, flutter kicks, and mountain climbers on the pool deck. How long can you survive if your ship goes down in the middle of the ocean? was the koan, Until I can wade ashore the horrifying answer. Months of school in Panama City: morning PT, classroom instruction, afternoons in the pool. Okay, I thought, my face and scalp tight from the cold water. The air from the steel tank tasted like ozone, and the hiss and bubble-burble of the regulator mimicked the in-and-out of my breathing. Breathe out when you come up or you’ll, like, die, he said and left me there. I dove for the first time, with Karl’s old scuba gear, in his parents’ neighbor’s pool, four feet deep, dead leaves on the bottom. If I failed the qualifying course or dive school itself, I would not go back to my old job but would be “reassigned according to the needs of the Army,” and god only knew what those were. The Army itself made the choice as momentous as stepping off a ledge. We drove to Atlantic City and threw French fries to the gulls. He and I had planned to swim down the shore, but the Atlantic was cold, rough, and dangerous. The smell of gasoline and damp in my LUV truck, little engine straining through mountains at night and in the dawn. We drove to Jersey to drop off Karl’s wife and children before driving to Virginia for the pre-screen and to Florida for school. I was a yo-yo who flung himself out as far as he could imagine and happened to return. I feel retro-concern now for my 19-year old self, who never realized how alone he was in the adventure. But I had forgotten how to swim and had barely glimpsed the sea. My friend Karl, who was scuba-certified, said we should apply for the Navy dive school from our mid-south Army post. One activity was the inspection of a submarine by Navy divers. Raised in the Midwest, I watched Cousteau documentaries, pored over catalogues from the US Divers Company (Cousteau again), and read books such as The Golden Guide to Scuba Diving: Handbook of Underwater Activities. To learn to live within and without, as if metaphors were mere fancy?Ī friend reminds me that I have written about being an Army deep-sea diver, but I have never written the experience. To breathe differently? To be of two worlds? Is it a need to see that ships’ screws do not wiggle on their bushings and that their blades are not bent, chipped, or fouled with line to tap a hull for soundness to map underwater rocks, wrecks, and sandbars to search for lost tools, weapons, and bodies (salvor is not savior) to build and pour concrete underwater and blow up and raise the sunken to cut apart with thermic rods that melt granite? To Army divers, this was a terrific joke.īeing in the sea is a problem different from living near the sea or on the sea. We asked our friend Chris how he got to five, and he chuckled and let drool run from his mouth. In the breath-hold contest at the bottom, most made it three to four minutes. The next person grabbed his ankle as he disappeared and was pulled down too, and so on. When everyone was ready, the first person would grab the eyelet of the weight and be yanked down headfirst, pinching his nose and blowing to prevent ear squeeze. On summer days, we would hang at the surface, hyperventilating, kicking lazily with bare feet, and looking down through the water table as someone lowered the weight from the deck. The training tank was a 33-foot high cylinder with steel stairs winding up the side and steel decking welded to the top. Eustis, Virginia, we used a 100-pound weight. Getting to the bottom of it is easy, in one respect: All it takes is an iceberg, concrete shoes, a pocket full of stones. Navy Diver by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jayme Pastoric.
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