Heroes in a Dark Realm

They are most often referred to simply as Navy divers, as in “the Navy divers continued the painstaking search for bodies amid the sunken wreckage.” Their collective anonymity is an element in the news again, this time in connection with the crash of Swissair Flight 111, which went down off the Canadian coast last week, killing all 229 aboard.

During a major recovery effort, there will be stories on the victims and their families and on every detail of the plane that went down. You’ll hear plausible and even wildly speculative explanations for the tragedy, over and over again. The faces and voices of the federal investigators will become familiar. But you’ll probably never know the names of the men and women who must take on the gruesome underwater task.

The divers are rigorously trained at the Navy Diving and Salvage Training Center in Panama City, Fla. More than half are based on the ship Grapple. The rest come from Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit Two, Detachment Charlie. Their classroom training includes physics lessons. They must be able to swim 500 yards in 14 minutes or less. Their usual duty is military aircraft salvage, and they stand ready to clear harbors and choke points of sunken debris in times of war.

But there is nothing comparable to the search for hundreds of bodies from a huge civilian airliner, not when visibility is low and the rough water so deep that divers must spend more than an hour in a decompression chamber after every dive. “It’s by far the hardest work we do,” said one diver who went down four times in the search for bodies from TWA Flight 800, which blew apart over the Atlantic in 1996.

At the end of all of it, it’s the divers whom the families of crash victims want and sometimes need to meet, to show pictures and share stories about their lost loved ones. That need to meet is usually shared by the divers as well. These men and women deserve great praise. Who among us could do such work, so well, so modestly?