Shadow Divers

by Robert Kurson

  Most of all, Chatterton refused to give up. He began to see that a commercial diver could be a top welder, an expert demolition man, a champion pipe fitter, but if he wasn’t compelled by blood and instinct to finish the job—no matter what—he could never be great. “No matter what” happened every day in commercial diving, and it was for those moments that Chatterton lived, and it occurred to him that it was for those moments that he had been living for a long time. One day, he broke the welding lens in his helmet. Replacing it would hold up the project. He decided to weld without one, eyes closed—a blind welder. The men topside just stared when Chatterton came up with the broken lens and said, “Job’s done, fellas.” Chatterton drove home grateful that night that he had found a calling, a life’s work that allowed him to be excellent again.

  By 1985, Chatterton had joined the dock builders’ union, moved to Hackensack, New Jersey, and was earning an excellent salary and benefits as a commercial diver. He dedicated much of his free time to scuba diving off nearby beaches, especially at a nearby Catholic retreat where two small shipwrecks, one steel and one wood, lay in the shallows just a few hundred feet offshore. Chatterton never tired of exploring them.

  The small wrecks made Chatterton want to see more. He dropped in at a dive shop to inquire about other nearby shipwrecks. A clerk nodded toward a pile of green mimeographed flyers announcing the shop’s upcoming charter schedule. Chatterton ran his eyes over the smudged writing, gulping wondrous names like USS San Diego and Mohawk and Texas Tower. Listed under trips for August was a name that stopped him: Andrea Doria. Chatterton could scarcely believe it—the Andrea Doria was famous, it was history. Television had made documentaries about the wreck. He asked the clerk if there was still space on the Andrea Doria trip.

  “The Doria is Mount Everest, buddy,” the clerk told him. “It’s only for the best. Guys die on the Doria. Start with something smaller.”

  Chatterton signed up for charters to modest inshore wrecks. Each trip fascinated him for the history he envisioned attached to the ship. He returned from these dives so enthusiastic that Kathy found herself signing up for diving lessons. Together, they explored dozens of nearby shipwrecks, and Kathy could have been content diving these wrecks. But Chatterton got hungry. He decided to work toward his scuba instructor’s certificate, the most sensible way he could think of to prepare to dive the Doria.

  Late in the summer of 1985, a dive shop owner took stock of Chatterton’s passion for shipwreck diving and suggested that he join some of the shop’s more experienced divers aboard the Seeker, a charter boat owned and run by Bill Nagle, one of the sport’s legends. The owner told him, “Nagle can be an abrasive bastard, but you two seem to share a certain spirit about diving.”

  The Seeker was revelation to Chatterton. Nagle and his customers carried double air tanks, sledgehammers, crowbars, backup lights, and three knives. They studied deck plans and traveled offshore, as far as necessary, to explore the best wrecks. Sometimes they even chased sketchy numbers in hopes of finding a virgin wreck, an impulse that floored Chatterton because it seemed so closely parallel to the spirit of the early American explorers, a group he admired.

  Nagle hardly grunted toward Chatterton on their first trips together, but Chatterton drank in the captain. Nagle was a pisser—that much was clear before the boat left the dock—but he also seemed consumed with aiming big. Chatterton loitered closer to Nagle, always listening. “What kind of fucking man,” Nagle would growl, “says that something’s impossible? What kind of man doesn’t go look?” Chatterton signed up for every Seeker trip available.

  On weekends aboard the Seeker in 1986, Chatterton began to notice that the skills he had developed at work seemed to transfer naturally to the business of shipwreck exploration. He found himself willing to swim into crushed and dangerous quarters because he knew he could find his way out. He became calm in low visibility, even as mushrooming silt clouds turned shipwrecks black, because he knew that his body could see. He rolled with the unexpected—and much was unexpected on Seeker trips—because he believed in “No matter what.” In 1986, when Chatterton volunteered to retrieve the dead diver from the Texas Tower, no other Tower virgin would have considered it. Chatterton went for the guy. Twice.

  In 1987, Chatterton proposed to Kathy. Since he had bought her a pistol for home protection, Kathy had transformed her affinity for the weapon into a competitive shooting career. She traveled across the country to matches, and was on her way to owning several national records. The grind was hard on the couple, reminiscent of the days when Chatterton was at sea fishing for weeks at a time. It made them feel as if they were living separate lives. They missed each other when Kathy was on the road.

  For his part, Chatterton’s intense personal standards of excellence bled into his expectations for others. If a friend or family member or Kathy behaved in a way that Chatterton found wanting, or even believed something that ran counter to his core values, he might go days without speaking to that person. Once, a friend who had promised to help Chatterton rake leaves at nine A.M. arrived instead at noon. Chatterton walked away from the man, then did not speak to him for a month. “He’s not reliable,” he told Kathy. “I can’t be living like that. Reliability is everything.”

  The couple married on a diving trip to Key West. A few months later, Chatterton earned his scuba instructor’s certificate. He now felt ready to challenge the Andrea Doria. Nagle was running a five-day marathon to the great wreck, for which Chatterton signed up and chose a bunk. The trip was historic and produced several museum-quality artifacts. The Doria was now in Chatterton’s blood. He began to dream about the wreck. There were places on the Doria that no diver had ever seen, places presumed out of reach. But what did “out of reach” really mean?

  In the early months of 1988, Chatterton began training for a return to the Doria and asking himself why he was so drawn to shipwrecks. As the Doria trip drew closer, he believed he understood. A shipwreck was a vast repository of secrets. Some of these secrets could be uncovered through exploration; they came up in the form of artifacts. Other secrets inside the shipwreck were less tangible. Those were secrets about the diver himself. A shipwreck gave a man limitless opportunity to know himself if only he cared to find out. He could always press further, dig deeper, find places no one had mastered. To Chatterton, there always seemed to be opportunity on a shipwreck, even the simple wrecks: the opportunity to confront the problems really worth solving, and this meant everything to him, this was the act that made his life feel worthwhile. He started to tell colleagues that wreck diving had a lot to do with finding out about yourself.

  For the next three years, Chatterton owned the Doria. He penetrated into third class, second class, the first-class galley—all groundbreaking achievements that for years many had thought impossible. In a sport famous for hoarding, he gave away priceless Doria artifacts, asking fellow divers, “How many teacups does one guy need?” He gained a reputation as one of the best shipwreck divers on the East Coast; some said he might be among the best in the world. One day Nagle paid him the highest compliment by saying, “When you die no one will ever find your body.”

  As Nagle spiraled deeper into alcoholism and resentment, Chatterton managed much of his friend’s business, so that the Seeker could remain viable. He seemed always in good cheer, ready with a dry one-liner and his booming baritone laugh. Yet he was capable of intense reactions when his sense of principle was offended. He could not tolerate the lazy or the immoral in others any more than he could in himself, and pity those offenders who crossed his path.

  In 1990, he got word of a dive shop owner who had removed a human bone from the wreckage of U-853, a U-boat sunk near Rhode Island. Chatterton phoned him. By now, almost every diver on the East Coast knew Chatterton’s name.

  “I hear you’re taking bones off the 853,” Chatterton said.

  “Ah, yeah, I guess word gets around,” the man replied.

  “You got it up in your house?”

  �
��Yeah, I do.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Chatterton roared.

  The man chuckled nervously.

  “I’m not laughing,” Chatterton said.

  “Look, man, they were the enemy. Fuck the Germans. We won.”

  Chatterton’s voice exploded through the receiver. “I’ll tell you what. You’re so proud of what you did, I’m going to call the newspapers and have them come over and interview you. Then you can tell them how proud you are to be a grave robber, and everyone in the state will appreciate what a hero you are for stealing bones. Let’s make this a big business opportunity for you. I’ll call the newspapers right now.”

  There was silence on the line.

  “What do you want me to do?” the man finally asked.

  “You know what? You fucked up. And you fucked up bad,” Chatterton said. “I’m on your ass now and I’m not going to get off. Those were sailors on that submarine. That’s a war grave you robbed. You’re going to take that bone back and you’re not going to put it on the outside of the wreck, you’re going to put it inside the wreck exactly where you fucking found it. And then you’re going to call me back and tell me that you did it. And only then will I be off your ass.”

  A week later, word had it that the bone was back inside the submarine.

  By 1991, Nagle’s drinking had made it impossible for him to dive. Doctors told him his alcoholism would kill him. Still, at night on the Seeker while customers slept, Chatterton and Nagle spoke about exploration, about how diving was really about searching, about how beautiful it would be to find something new and important, something no one knew was there.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CRAZY DEEP

  CHATTERTON STEPPED INSIDE U-505, the World War II U-boat on display at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. In every direction fantastical mechanisms jutted from the walls and ceilings in a forest of technology—gauges, dials, pipes, conduits, speaker tubes, plumbing, valves, radios, sonar, hatches, switches, levers—every inch a protest against the idea that men cannot live underwater.

  The roomiest spots stretched barely four feet wide and six feet tall—in many places, two children on the museum tour could not stand side by side. To pass into some sections, a crewman would have had to shimmy headfirst through a circular steel door. No one, including the commander, had a bunk that looked long enough to accommodate his body.

  The audio tour in Chatterton’s headphones told about life aboard a U-boat. Crewmen slept in three shifts on the ship’s tiny bunks. In the forward torpedo room, the U-boat’s largest compartment, perhaps two dozen men slept, worked, and ate atop potatoes, canned goods, containers of sausages, and up to six live torpedoes. Rough seas often turned U-boats like this one into bathtub toys, tossing crewmen from their bunks and shaking the boat’s single cooking pot from the galley’s dollhouse-like stove. In icy seas, these overhead pipes dripped with condensation, freezing the necks and scalps of the crewmen; often, the only escape from the chill was in the diesel motor room, where gargantuan twin engines pounded out deafening metal symphonies, creating one-hundred-plus-degree temperatures with stifling humidity and causing hearing loss to some of its operators. Wafting carbon monoxide produced by the engines chipped away at mental acuity, caused sleep disorders, and became the only recognizable flavor in whatever meal the chef could squeeze out of his postage-stamp–size galley.

  Chatterton could see that ventilation was designed for survival, not comfort. U-boats quickly began to stink. Though most U-boats had two bathrooms, or “heads,” one was usually reserved for extra provisions, leaving the other to service as many as sixty men. Flushing was a subtle skill taught in training; if performed improperly, ocean water could backwash into the boat and even sink it. In the war’s early days, when U-boats spent much of their time on the surface, garbage was hurled overboard. Late in the war, when commanders kept the boats submerged to avoid detection, crews improvised as the trash began to reek. They stuffed waste into torpedo tubes and pressed FIRE every few days—a maneuver they dubbed the Müllschuss, or “garbage shot.” Soon, the stink on the men exceeded the stink of the garbage. The submarine could accommodate almost no personal effects, including wardrobes. Few men owned a change of underwear, opting for “whore’s undies”—a single pair of black shorts that hid the evidence of a month at sea. Chatterton thought, “I cannot believe sixty men lived inside here for months at a time while they terrified the world.”

  Chatterton moved slowly with the audio tour, pressing STOP on the player every few seconds to orient himself and make careful mental notes. He studied the composition of shelves, components, gauges, and floors, envisioning each as it might appear covered in sea anemones and rust after fifty years on the Atlantic floor. He craned his neck around machinery and into off-limits areas, looking for anything—a tag, a builder’s plaque, a diary—inscribed with the U-boat’s number so that he might search for the same in New Jersey. Everything he did annoyed other visitors. He blocked impassable aisles, backed up into children, wiggled around seniors. When a tour guide asked him to move along, he exited the U-boat, got back in line, and waited for another turn.

  The next time he only pretended to push the buttons on his tape player. In the officers’ quarters he took note of wood cabinets that might survive a half century underwater and hold important documents. He stopped for a full five minutes at the chart table, pretending he could not hear people complaining behind him. The chart table stood beneath shelves of navigational instruments; if he could find those instruments on the wreck he might have a prime clue in identifying his sub.

  He got into line yet again. This time, his plan was to watch the U-505 sink from underneath him. Inside the boat he played movies in his mind in which the submarine went down by gunfire, flood, internal explosion, equipment failure. During each movie he imagined how the rooms in front of him would collapse, how wall-mounted instruments might fall, how floors would accordion, how debris would billow. He imagined where the ship might crack to allow a diver access and which places he most effectively might swim through. He got into line six more times, until he knew these movies like old Honeymooners episodes and the tour guide smirked at Chatterton’s pretension to still be using the headphones.

  At O’Hare, Chatterton bought a yellow legal pad, a pen, and a pink highlighter and began sketching U-505. He marked in pink the places that might surrender identification tags or other useful artifacts. He made notes like this in the margins: “Builder’s plaque on periscope and made of brass—could be the thing.” As he boarded the airplane back to New Jersey, he thought, “I accomplished what I came here for. I got a sense, a feeling, an impression of a U-boat.”

  The return trip to the mystery submarine was scheduled for Saturday, September 21, 1991. The crew and passenger list remained the same but for one addition and one subtraction: Ron Ostrowski had a family obligation and could not attend; Dan Crowell, a boat captain and longtime Seeker crewman who had missed the first trip because of a business obligation, joined the roster. As the big date neared, the divers could scarcely sit still for their anticipation.

  Some divers, like Doug Roberts and Kevin Brennan, counted down the days by safety-checking their gear and fine-tuning their setups. Others, like Kip Cochran, Paul Skibinski, and John Yurga, continued to research U-boat construction and lore, hoping for some nugget of insight that might steer them to solving the mystery. Everyone savored the buildup. Wreck divers spent careers dreaming of the chance to write history. These men were three days away.

  Perhaps no one was more excited than forty-four-year-old Steve Feldman, a top props man at CBS’s television studios and the diver who had thanked Chatterton at the end of the discovery trip. Feldman had taken up scuba ten years earlier after a sudden divorce had left him reeling. Feldman had become lonely, obese, and depressed. He chain-smoked Parliaments. His friends thought him a kind, unassuming man and could not stand to watch such a person ache so deeply. They suggested yoga, scuba diving, working out, anything
to coax him back into the world. In his thick New York accent he would only say, “Nawww . . .”

  One day he forced himself to take a scuba lesson. In the water the world opened up. He devoted every hour of free time to learning the sport. His weight dropped and his face returned—handsome Mediterranean features with a thick black mustache and gleaming blue eyes. He quit smoking and joined a gym, all to make himself a better diver.

  For the next few years, Feldman kept his diving shallow and warm. The sport transformed him. The water was a more basic world to him, a place in which a man could be what he was meant to be. He found a girlfriend. He made himself a regular on Captain Paul Hepler’s Wednesday “bug runs,” then cooked the lobster he bagged for stagehands and soap opera actors back at the CBS kitchen. He bought a tent so that he could change into his gear on winter beach dives.

  Soon he was diving shipwrecks. He rarely ventured deeper than 100 feet and he penetrated wrecks only superficially, but he was hooked on the history that wafted from these ships. He began to sign up for as many wreck dives as he could find. Like many New Yorkers, he owned no car, so he often stood on the street outside his apartment at Ninety-seventh Street between Central Park West and Columbus, two hundred pounds of scuba gear on his back and by his sides, trying to flag down a taxi, most of which would slow down to inspect the martianlike figure before speeding away. Feldman’s friends loved the image, but most of all they loved the delight he took in watching the cab drivers’ faces as they passed him by, and they loved that this never upset him, even while he waited in the rain.

  Feldman arrived at charter boats in what became his trademark uniform: wearing a baseball cap with no logo, jeans, and a T-shirt, and carrying a large takeout container of Cantonese noodles with peanut sauce. No matter how high the seas, no matter how brutal the dive, Feldman always ate those noodles, and the empty box in the garbage can became a sure sign on a charter that “Feld” had been along for the ride.