The Last Dive

by Bernie Chowdhury

  Do these examples of divers’ extreme, life-changing, and sometimes life-taking behaviors mean that all risk takers are compensating for something, perhaps some loss, or some unfulfilled desire? For those divers who are dead, we cannot know for sure. In my own case, the journey of examining my motivations that I had begun with Dr. Hunt after my 1991 accident led me to conclude that my extreme diving was all the more enjoyable because it led to both recognition and a sense of belonging to a community, both of which I lacked as a child. My father’s constant criticisms, like Chris’s behavior toward Chrissy, spurred me to seek positive reinforcement from my activities. The tightly knit community of technical divers gave me something that I had never had as a youth moving from one country to another. Identifying with a particular diving community—whether recreational or technical—and internalizing that community’s standard of behavior is a phenomenon that Dr. Hunt found strongest in the divers who dived most frequently and who were most active with things like diving clubs and organizations; their identities as people were closely connected to their status among their fellow adventurers.

  For all the camaraderie they created and all the risks they took, Chris and Chrissy Rouse were among those intrepid divers whose explorations met with mixed success. They did not discover new forms of life, as they had hoped they might in Pennsylvania’s Lahaska Cave, or elsewhere. They did not set remarkable records the way Sheck Exley did in cave diving. Nor did they uncover the mystery of the U-Who, although they died trying. They did, however, successfully recover artifacts and lobsters and also experimented with new ways of conducting sport dives and participated in a dramatic change in sport diving. Their gruesome deaths have ironically brought them the fame they sought through their triumphs.

  Although the Rouses’ deaths saddened him, Steve Berman has continued to dive. He still regularly leads diving expeditions to Mexico’s spectacular warm-water caves and teaches cave diving and mixed-gas diving to the legions of enthusiasts drawn to his vigor, smarts, and experience. He has now accumulated over forty dives on the Andrea Doria and has recovered hundreds if not thousands of artifacts from the luxury liner. Yet amid his trophy collecting he too encountered trauma.

  On one dive, Berman recovered the body of a diver untrained in mixed-gas diving who had used his 50 percent helium mix not only to breathe from but also to inflate his drysuit, which may have made him hypothermic in the 42-degree water. Or he may have been unaware that he was breathing the lightweight gas far more rapidly than he would have used up heavier compressed air. Berman found him lifeless in the bottom of a cargo hold, his tanks empty, yet another victim of an ocean liner that after nearly half a century still claims the careless and unwary.

  On another dive inside the Doria, Berman was diving alone when he saw massive clouds of silt billowing from a hole leading into a notoriously obstructed area. Berman could hear a diver screaming through the silt, and he heard banging on the walls. He had to make a choice about whether to plunge into the silt to try to save the diver. As in the dive where Chrissy Rouse had saved the diver who was low on air and confused at 170 feet outside of the shipwreck, Berman was not personally acquainted with the other diver. But he knew from the banging and screaming that the other man was already in the throes of panic.

  Trying to save the diver was simply too risky, he realized. Had Berman gone inside, blinded by the silt, he was sure to be entangled in the flailing arms and gear of a diver too panicked to let himself be rescued, and there would most likely have been two fatalities instead of just one. Steve’s friends and loved ones console him as best they can; he made a wise and inevitable choice, they tell him. The man could not be helped. Berman is still haunted by the man’s screams. He still wonders if he made the right choice in not risking his own life to try to save the other man. His recriminations bring to mind the Frenchman who watched unmoving as a man committed suicide by throwing himself into the Seine. Years later, haunted by the image of the drowning man, the Frenchman said, “Oh, God, please let that man throw himself into the water again so that I may save myself!” Ultimately, Berman knows that realistically there was nothing he could have done, though that does not appreciably lessen his anguish.

  Berman had another force pulling him away from the silted-out Doria chamber that day: his family. Unlike many other divers, whose allegiance leans more to the deep than the domestic, Steve Berman has a close relationship with his wife, Anita, and the two children from her previous marriage who live with them. If he takes unnecessary risk and dies, his wife and family are left without their husband and stepfather; that is a consideration he did not have to take into account during the many years of his diving career when he was single, when it was mostly only his colleagues who cared whether he survived to reach the surface.

  Berman nonetheless dived deep to the ocean liner Britannic, one of the Titanic’s two sister ships. During World War II, the Britannic had been converted by the British for use as a hospital. It was painted white and had a red cross painted on it signifying that it was a non-military vessel. When the Britannic sank off the Greek island of Kea in 1942, with the loss of twenty-one lives, many thought the Germans had torpedoed it, and others now think that it might have hit a mine. The British diver Kevin Gurr organized the first sport-diving expedition to the Britannic in 1997 and set out to find out what caused the sinking. Although the Britannic rests in clear, warm water, the 380-foot depth of the wreck both makes it challenging and gives precious little time for divers to solve the mystery.

  Berman participated in the third expedition to the wreck, an expedition that was also unable to locate the wounds in the ship that would determine what sent it to the bottom. Fortunately he survived that challenge of the deep.

  When he’s not diving or parenting his stepchildren, Berman still actively teaches sport diving at its highest level, both full-cave and mixed-gas classes. He’s been at it for twelve years now, and he’s seen a lot of changes in his students. “We’re now seeing a much better, more dedicated, better-trained diver who comes to us for full cave training than we saw ten years ago,” he tells me. “Before, you had a lot of people coming to Ginnie Springs and they’d maybe take the cavern-diving course out of curiosity. Most of those people never went anywhere near the cave course, which is probably good anyway, because they just didn’t have the right mind-set for cave diving. Now, when somebody comes down here, most of the time they already know what cave diving is about from the information that’s out there. They know that they want to become full cave divers and that it’s going to take training, practice, and dedication to get the skills and experience they need to survive, and to have fun in the sport.” Berman is quick to point out that he avoids teaching anything but the most advanced sport-diving classes. For that reason, Steve’s clientele are mostly referred by others he has trained.

  Many of Berman’s students today remind him of the dedication of his friends Chris and Chrissy Rouse, divers who understood that they needed to dive a lot to be good and who were willing to take their time in developing their skills. At least once a month, however, Berman sees other divers who stand in stark contrast to the Rouses. These other divers are overeager to move quickly through the ranks; they buy all the best gear immediately, and then they attempt to do dives that are beyond their skills and experience. “People who are in too much of a rush and who push it too far, too soon, run into trouble,” Berman observes. “The lucky ones see the flowing robes of Jesus down there, survive a very close call, and then when they get out of the water, the first thing they do is sell all of their gear and give up diving.”

  Close calls can happen in any environment. As the Wahoo’s owner, Steve Bielenda, often says to divers on his boat, to his students, and to his audiences at presentations during diving conferences, “Experience is something you accumulate over time. You’ve got to pay your dues and do lots of dives. Then, when you’re doing something underwater and you run into trouble, you have some insurance to fall back on to get yourself out of a
situation. If you’re doing anything at all underwater, something will happen and you will need that experience to get out of a close call.”

  What Berman and Bielenda do not say publicly is that even if he builds experience slowly, a succession of things can still happen to overwhelm the diver, and tragedy can still occur. The acumen the Rouses gained through their hundreds of dives over four years did not prevent them from dying. But it did get them out of a shipwreck under circumstances that would probably have killed most other divers.

  At thirty-eight, Berman reflects on his choice of career and says, “Heck, I’ve got the best job in the world. I thought about going to work in some sort of office environment. But I see how stressed out the guys who come down to dive with me are about their office jobs. Those guys—only after they’ve been down here almost a week do they start to relax. And just when they’re relaxed, their vacation time is over and then they have to go back to the grind again. Me? I get to go diving all the time, I get to take off for weeks at a time when I want to, and go and do neat stuff like dive the caves in Mexico, the Doria, the Britannic, and even weenie stuff like shallow diving for lobsters in the Florida Keys. Man, I can’t imagine any job other than teaching diving!” Unlike Chris and Chrissy Rouse, whose light burned bright and then flared out, Berman has become what the wisest divers aspire to be: a survivor.

  John Chatterton, John Yurga, and Richie Kohler, all of whom were on the Seeker during the Rouses’ last dive, took on a quest that they acknowledge became obsessive: solving the mystery of the U-Who. “No matter where I would go in the world,” recalls Chatterton, “no matter if I was diving on the Lusitania, or the Britannic, or the Doria, people would always ask me, ‘Hey, did you ever find out the identity of that U-boat?’ And I realized that no matter what I did in diving, that was going to define me.” After the Rouses died, all three divers wondered whether the risk was worth it. “The U-boat was a cruel wreck, an incredibly difficult wreck to dive,” says Chatterton. “We had already lost Steve Feldman and then we lose Chris and Chrissy Rouse. We wondered how many more divers are gonna die before this thing gives up its secret.” But for this trio, identifying the wreck would be not only a technical-diving achievement but a memorial to their lost comrades.

  After Chatterton recovered from the wreck a dinner knife bearing the inscription HORENBURG on its wooden handle, Chatterton, Yurga, and Kohler examined the archives in Great Britain and in Germany to try and find out more about Horenburg, who they assumed was one of the U-boat’s crewmen. They visited the U-boat archive in Cuxhaven, Germany, where the U-boat veteran Horst Bredow had compiled an impressive amount of material related to U-boats, including wartime diaries and war patrol records. The archive also has a memorial wall that lists the name of every U-boat man, including those who died, by U-boat number. Chatterton and his teammates found only one Horenburg registered, a man who had been the radio operator on the U-869. Logically, then, the U-Who should be the U-869. But the U-869 was recorded as having been sunk on February 28, 1945, off the coast of Casablanca, the victim of depth charge attacks from the U.S.S. Fowler and F.R. L’Indiscret.

  Part of the problem with the U-Who’s location was the result of the Allies’ technological breakthroughs. In May 1941, the Allies were able to break the top-secret German naval code after they captured the U-110 intact, thus obtaining its vital codebooks, cipher documents, and code machine. Breaking the German’s code enabled the Allies to read the messages sent from the high command to U-boat captains; often the Allies knew the U-boats’ orders before the captains themselves knew what their superiors were ordering.

  A British technological achievement—radio direction finding, nicknamed Huff-Duff—would help in smashing the U-boat threat but would also add to the dive team’s difficulties in solving the U-Who mystery. Huff-Duff enabled the British to pinpoint a U-boat’s location quickly and accurately from the radio messages that the submarine sent to U-boat headquarters. Radio traffic was the key to coordinating a U-boat “wolfpack” attack: When a patrolling U-boat spotted a merchant vessel convoy, it first had to surface and send a radio message to its headquarters indicating the location, number of ships, direction, and speed of the convoy, and then await orders while maintaining visual contact with the enemy. Other U-boats would be directed to the area via radio signals from headquarters, all coordinated by a numbered, lettered grid over the map of the world’s oceans. The radio communications provided a vulnerability for the British to exploit. Unfortunately for U-boat crews, the German high command refused to accept the possibility of radio direction finding, or the possibility that their military codes could be deciphered.

  The U-869 was reported sunk off Casablanca because the Allies had intercepted an encoded message ordering the U-boat from its position in the mid-Atlantic to the African coast. When the U.S.S. Fowler and F.R. L’Indiscret engaged a German U-boat off the coast of Casablanca and attacked it, the Allies assumed that the presumably destroyed U-boat was the U-869. As a result, Chatterton, Yurga, and Kohler concluded that even if Horenburg was on the U-869 when it sank off Casablanca, his knife must somehow have found its way onto the U-boat they discovered off the New Jersey coast. Maybe Horenburg had left his knife behind when he was transferred from another U-boat to the U-869, and the war records for the first vessel had been destroyed. Or Horenburg might have lost the knife while he was onshore, and someone else might have picked it up and taken it onto the U-Who. In any case, the dive team concluded that the only real way to solve the mystery and positively identify the U-Who was by retrieving from inside the U-boat something that bore the warship’s identifying number.

  But when they got inside the U-Who, Chatterton, Yurga, and Kohler were all disappointed: Every place that should have borne an identifying tag had only screws where the tag had been held in place. The salt water had literally eaten the tags away. This meant that they had not been made of brass or other sturdy material, but tin or another soft metal that quickly deteriorates underwater. The dive team had already recovered a schematic drawing from inside the U-Who that identified it as a Type IX-C boat, constructed at the Deschimag facility in Bremen. They had also recovered a crockery bowl with the eagle and swastika emblem of Germany’s Second World War navy, with the date 1942 stamped onto it. The fact of the absent soft-metal tags was evidence that during the war the air assault against Germany had combined with military defeats on the ground to cause a shortage of war materials such as brass.

  Chatterton was frustrated. Five years had passed since he discovered the U-boat, three divers had died diving it, and each member of Chatterton’s team had invested a considerable amount of time and money in their expeditions to the wreck, and on their trips to archives in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, yet the identity of the wreck remained a mystery. Surely, there had to be something inside the U-Who that would clearly identify it. As the three divers went over the puzzle like detectives solving a gruesome crime, they realized there was only one possibility left to find that elusive numbered tag and that lay inside parts boxes in the electric motor room, the one compartment that they had not been able to enter.

  The electric motor room was the second-to-last compartment as one headed aft. Before the divers could attain that area, they had to go through the diesel motor room, which in most U-boat wrecks would usually offer a narrow but swimmable passage between the two massive diesel motors that had propelled the U-boat on the surface. But the U-Who was so badly damaged and the salt water had so extensively deteriorated the warship that massive pieces of metal blocked the entrance to that compartment. Richie Kohler had already hefted away some debris that obstructed the diesel motor room, only to encounter two more obstacles: a steel beam that had collapsed and now lay at an angle, dividing the already tight compartment into two partitions of roughly equal size, and also a huge metal container that had collapsed from the steel bracework near the compartment’s ceiling. A diver wearing tanks on his back could not pass between the two obstructions. But now, des
perate to solve the mystery, Chatterton came up with what was either an inspired solution, or an elaborate way to commit suicide.

  A television production company contacted Chatterton, asking if he had discovered the identity of the U-Who. “I haven’t solved the mystery, but I’m about to,” said Chatterton. “How would you like to film it?” If the television company would pay for getting Chatterton and his fellow divers to the U-Who site, they would have a compelling story. Chatterton had just upped the ante for himself.

  “We’ll get you out there, but we’ve got to know your plan,” said the voice on the far end of the telephone line. Chatterton described what he planned to do, and the executive agreed. After the call ended, the television company did some research, consulting with other divers. Three days later, the producer called Chatterton back. “You’re not crazy, are you, John?” Chatterton was asked. Other divers had thought Chatterton’s plan insane, and the television company’s executives were alarmed that they might be getting involved with a daredevil.