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November 7 - November 25, 2025
Nagle and the sport’s other kings might descend to 200 feet or deeper, virtually begging the forces of nature to flick them into the afterlife, practically demanding their biology to abandon them.
This insight gave Nagle two-way vision; as much as he understood the birth of a ship, he also understood its death.
At times of such stark darkness, the deep-wreck diver is more a shadow diver, aiming at the shapes of a shipwreck as much as at the shipwrecks themselves.
Yet a curious truth pertains to these perils: rarely does the problem itself kill the diver. Rather, the diver’s response to the problem—his panic—likely determines whether he lives or dies.
“Fix the first problem fully and calmly before you even think about the second problem.”
He had come to Vietnam looking for answers about America and about mankind, and suddenly those answers seemed obvious: America was wrong to be in Vietnam;
If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.
If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.
Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.
The worst possible decision is to give up.
The kid knew no skepticism or cynicism; no goal was impossible to Kohler, no idea too grand.
This wreck, even at its tip, refused to surrender its secret.
Chatterton did not necessarily agree with Kohler’s scenario, but he found himself swept up in the man’s enthusiasm, and as he watched Kohler wave his arms and clench his fists, it occurred to him that Kohler’s overarching instinct was dead-on, that if one did not accept written history as gospel, worlds of possibility opened.
Critical thinking based on contagious enthusiasm
That was another thing about wreck diving. So long as you were alive, there would always be another trip.
More than ever, diving had become a reflection of life to Chatterton. The principles by which he had made himself a great diver were the same principles by which he lived. If he were to lower the bar now because he was frustrated, who would he be?
But he also recognized these fallen men as Germans. “These men,” Kohler thought to himself, “came from where I’m from.”
Along the way, each marveled at how easy it was to get an incomplete picture of the world if one relied solely on experts, and how important it would be to further rely on oneself.
The expert falacy
Churchill summoned top military commanders and warned them of the “much more offensive spirit” displayed by U-boats at sea. It was this idea—that the beaten U-boat man was doing more than just trying to survive—that kept Chatterton and Kohler reading.
It was no longer safe to be Goliath in a world where David could turn invisible.
Once sonar echoed off the submarine’s metallic form, a U-boat was tagged for death—unable to outrun the enemy while underwater, a fish in a barrel if it chose to surface and fight it out with its guns.
Now a submarine using its radio—even to report the weather—was as much as announcing its location to the enemy. The Allies wasted little time dispatching hunter-killer groups to U-boats so exposed.
each discovered a new pride for Allied ingenuity and tenacity, for the ability of the United States to dig deep into its instinct for freedom, rise up against one of history’s most terrifying threats, and pound it down until the world was safe again.
Yet neither of them could put out of his mind the crewmen lying dead in their wreck.
Now, educated in the hopelessness of the late U-boat war, they found themselves thinking on a smaller scale, a scale that envisioned the lives of men with whom they had become intertwined.
“is dependent on the other, and is thereby sworn to one another.” To the divers, such a band of brotherhood seemed about the most noble of human instincts,
Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.
Despite knowing his efforts would be futile, he had gone to sea determined to strike a blow. As the divers said good night that evening, each wondered if he might not be moving toward the same kind of test.
The divers responded that until they pulled proof from the wreck, everything else was mere opinion. They had not come this far, they said, to stand on mere opinion.
as he’d done original research that had corrected written history, the jaws of habit had loosened and he’d come to feel himself not just a diver but an explorer,
“I was getting so kooky that if she’d asked me to paint my ass pink and walk backwards I would have done that too. I missed my family.”
“When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself. It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is. Some people never get that moment.
Solving contradictions lead to learning
Over the years, the marriage had evolved into an arrangement of convenience. He understood currents, and the flow of the marriage was moving away from him.
When things are easy a person doesn’t really learn about himself.
It’s what a person does at the moment of his greatest struggle that shows him who he really is.
