Shadow Divers (10 page)

Every day for the next two weeks, Chatterton walked patrol with his platoon. Every day, the men took fire. Chatterton always went to get the wounded guy. And he always went the same way. While most medics picked and crawled along the dirt to minimize their profiles, Chatterton just up and hauled ass, all six foot two of him, to hell with enemy gunfire. Soon enough, “Doc” had developed a reputation more important than any medal or honor could confer. Doc, the men said, was a crazy motherfucker.

Chatterton had been with the platoon for about two weeks when word came down: Mouse had been killed. His squad had taken prisoners and Mouse had been asked to watch the captives. An enemy sniper crept up on the location and looked for a target. He might have chosen one of several Americans in range. But Mouse, carrying his .45-caliber pistol, appeared different from the rest—to the enemy, he likely appeared as an officer. The sniper lined up Mouse in his sights and pulled the trigger, hitting the medic several times.

If Chatterton had retained any illusion about Vietnam, such folly vaporized with Mouse’s killing. He traded in his .45 pistol for an M-16 rifle. 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; men killed one another because they are animals. So he had his answers, big fucking deal. Yet Chatterton still found himself volunteering for every patrol and running for every wounded guy, and when he sat against trees to catch his breath he marveled at how full life felt when a person got to be excellent, and he began to wonder if he might have come to Vietnam to answer questions of a different kind.

“People talked about this kid Chatterton,” says Dr. Norman Sakai, the battalion surgeon. “I hadn’t met him yet. But the first thing you heard about him was that he walked point. That seemed unbelievable to me. Medics weren’t supposed to engage in war. Even going on patrol was stretching it for a medic. But walking point? You never heard of a medic walking point. I thought maybe this guy was crazy. But people said no, he was different. People talked about him all the time.”

As weeks turned to months and Chatterton continued to distinguish himself, he studied himself and others in action, watched soldiers live and die and show courage and break down, paid careful attention to the behavior of men around him, all to divine further insight into the right way to live. Gradually, he distilled certain principles that seemed to him indisputable truths, and he collected these principles like so many medicines in the aid pack of his mind. As he neared the end of his six-month field obligation, he had come to believe these things:

—  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.

—  Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.

—  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.

—  Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.

—  It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.

—  The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.

—  The worst possible decision is to give up.

For four months, Chatterton thought about the right way and the wrong way to live, and he continued to contemplate his principles. As one patrol bled into another and men died, his thinking solidified, and he began to consider that it might have been for these insights that he had come to Vietnam, that when he had looked into forever over the Atlantic as a child and felt sure that there was more on the other side, it was these ideas that were calling him, ideas about how a man should live.

In June 1971, after completing his twelve-month tour, Chatterton returned home to begin a two-week leave before returning to Vietnam for a voluntary six-month extension. His mother was stunned at the sight of him. Her son would not sit in a chair or sleep on a bed but would exist only on the floor. He ate off a cocktail table while sitting cross-legged on the ground. When she asked him to speak, he said nothing for a while, then sobbed and told her about men missing the backs of their heads and screaming for their mothers, about starving, about the first time he’d killed someone, about seeing the worst things a person could see. He would go quiet again after that.

His mother picked up the phone and called a family friend with military clout. Chatterton never made it back to Vietnam. He was reassigned to the dispensary at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and developed a bad attitude. The army referred him to a psychiatrist, where he pretended to be what they wanted him to be until they certified him as healthy. He married a girl he knew from high school, realized it was a mistake, and had the marriage annulled a few months later. Such was his routine for two years—punching the clock, feeling angry and confused, wondering about his future—until he had completed his four-year obligation to the army.

Then Chatterton decided to leave everything.

Chatterton spent the years from 1973 to 1978 trying to find a niche. He lived in Florida, where he tried hospital work and attended college. After his father died of a heart attack in 1976 at age forty-eight, he moved to New Jersey and started a small construction business in the resort town of Cape May. None of this work afforded him the feeling of excellence he had realized in Vietnam, a feeling missing from his life since he’d returned to the States.

In the spring of 1978, Chatterton walked to the Cape May docks and approached an acquaintance for a job on a local scallop-fishing boat. A day later he was at sea. The men explained the business: The boat dragged two ten-foot-wide steel dredges along the ocean floor. Every half hour, the dredges would be hauled up and the contents of their attached bags emptied onto the deck. The crew would dig through the buffet of things that lived in the ocean, pull the scallops out, and throw the remaining junk overboard. Then the men would take the scallops into the cutting house and shuck them. When Chatterton asked which of these jobs would be his, the men replied, “All of them.”

Chatterton took to scallop fishing from the start. He learned to cut and weld steel, tie knots, splice cable—in short, to do whatever it took, an instinct that resonated inside him. He ate like a king from scruffy-bearded cooks who knew scallops and lobster more intimately than chefs at five-star Parisian restaurants. But the part that moved him was watching the ocean floor come to life on the deck. The massive dredges did not discriminate in what they pulled from the bottom of the Atlantic; along with piles of scallops came Russian fishing nets, whale skulls, bombs, cannonballs, mastodon teeth, muskets. And shipwreck artifacts. Lots of shipwreck artifacts. The other crewmen viewed such artifacts as garbage. To them, scallops equaled money; everything else equaled shit that you kicked over the side. To Chatterton, the everything else was the only thing.

The boat captain paid Chatterton three thousand dollars and a ten-pound bag of scallops for the nine-day trip, a king’s ransom in 1978. Better, Chatterton now had a place on the boat. He made several more trips that year, some lucrative, others a flop, none without a treasure chest of ocean artifacts to coax his mind into scenarios. He began to tote home items until his place looked like a B-movie pirate ship—his television atop a lobster trap, a whale skull on the wall, whale bones on the roof, a Russian fishing net strung across the ceiling and booby-trapped to fall on visitors as they entered through the front door.

For two years, Chatterton earned a handsome living and learned the sea as a scallop fisherman. He often vowed to go scuba diving, but his intense and unpredictable work schedule prevented it. Chatterton promised himself that when things lightened up, he would strap on the tanks and really see the ocean.

In 1980, flush from another successful scallop run, Chatterton met Kathy Caster, a co-owner of a tiny dockside restaurant in Cape May. He knew he was interested in Kathy before they finished their first drink. While many women Chatterton knew had locked on to safe and predictable paths, Kathy’s life had been creative and open-ended. She had grown up in nearby Atlantic City but had fled to test the California life after graduating from high school. She wore peasant dresses, a sheepskin coat, Stevie Nicks blond hair, and one-day-at-a-time cool. When people talked about Woodstock, she told them she had not only attended the festival but had lived in the town, too.

Chatterton loved her pragmatism perhaps most of all. Kathy did not go in for the girly activities typical of many women he knew. She disliked beauty shops and thought shopping boring. She preferred active sports and the outdoors, and respected that Chatterton made his living on the seas, with his hands.

And Kathy did not seem frightened by him. He was twenty-nine years old but had no college plans. He went to sea for weeks at a time in terrible storms. He was nowhere close to finding himself. Caster respected these qualities. When Chatterton told her he wasn’t sure where he was going in life, she told him she believed in him.

Kathy and Chatterton moved in together. He bought her a .380 pistol to keep in the home for protection while he was out at sea. At the shooting range, he admired her facility with a gun; she had never fired a weapon before, but the bull’s-eyes on the targets kept exploding. This was his kind of girl. Neither seemed in any hurry to marry or have children, and the union felt relaxed and open-ended. “If a woman can put up with these whale bones,” Chatterton thought, “I think she can put up with me.”

The couple had lived together for less than a year when, in 1981, the bottom fell out of the scallop market and Chatterton’s earnings plummeted. Kathy’s restaurant had closed, leaving the couple financially strained. Chatterton signed up for a grueling seventeen-day trip. When the captain wrote him a check for $85 at the end, he knew it was time to quit the scallop business.

At home, he and Kathy discussed the future. His G.I. Bill benefits expired in a year, in 1983, so if he intended to go back to school he needed to do it now. Chatterton found computers fascinating and figured them to be the future. He enrolled in a programming course and was given a starting date.

On the eve of the first class, Chatterton awoke from his sleep and sat bolt upright in bed. He shook Kathy until she awakened. She thought he was having a nightmare or a Vietnam flashback. She grabbed him without turning on the lights.

“Kathy, Kathy, Kathy—”

“John, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t become a computer programmer.”

“What are you saying?”

“I can’t spend my life sitting under fluorescent lights.”

“Okay, okay. You have to be happy, John.”

“I know what I’m going to do now. I’m going to be a commercial diver.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t exactly know. I don’t know yet, but it just feels right to me . . . a commercial diver.”

He fell back to sleep content.

Chatterton did not know what commercial divers did or where they worked. But he felt like the clouds had parted and the rays were coming down. The next day, he rushed out to buy an issue of
Skin Diver
magazine. Inside were ads for commercial diving schools. Now the idea seemed perfect. He had experience in carpentry, steelworking, respiratory medicine, and diving. He was a natural in the water. A school in Camden offered classes. Two months later he drove his purple Gremlin to that school to pursue his new dream.

Chatterton had been in class just a few minutes before he concluded that commercial diving was indeed his calling. The instructor said commercial divers made a career of one-of-a-kind jobs, improvising and solving problems on the spot, working in hostile and rapidly changing environments. Chatterton could barely sit still. This was the setup under which he remembered being great in Vietnam.

He took to the muscular tools of the trade—the twenty-five-pound Desco Pot helmet made of spun copper, the air hoses that connected the diver to topside air generators, the thick neoprene gloves, the dry suit—all of it felt like a second skin. As the four-month course wore on, Chatterton wondered how he had ever gone so long without knowing a man could get paid for diving.

After graduation, Chatterton signed on with a commercial diving outfit that worked in New York Harbor. In his first month he made perhaps fifty dives, each unique in its setting and challenge. In a single week he might be asked to demolish underwater concrete or install experimental pile wrap at the Port Authority Heliport or weld a rusted support beam under South Street. Every time he told his bosses, “I can do it.”

Chatterton faced immense problems in the waters beneath Manhattan. He often worked in zero visibility—in tunnels or caves or under structures so dense in silt and sediment that he could not see his own glove pressed against his face mask. He was asked to pretzel himself into inhuman spaces, then do detailed work inside. His thick neoprene gloves short-circuited his tactile sense. In winter, his dry suit became Saran Wrap in the freezing New York Harbor waters. Overnight tides worked like vandals to undo his daily progress.

At home, Chatterton told Kathy, “This job was made for me.” He felt centered in the water, relaxed when straitjacketed between steel beams, at peace even without his eyes. He volunteered for everything, an act that felt like an old friend.

Chatterton liked to challenge himself. On days when the visibility dropped to zero, he pressed his body against the crevices of his surroundings, assembling impressions from elbows, knees, neck, even fins until the work site came to life like a painting in his imagination. He made hands of his every body part, at once placing, say, a left calf against a wall for orientation, a right knee atop an important set of wrenches, and a boot outside a hole as a barometer for changes in current. As he spent more time in the water, his sense of touch heightened to such a pitch that he could distinguish ordinary steel from burned steel solely by the different vibrations each made against his knife. Often, he needed only brush an ankle or a weight belt against an object to deduce that object’s identity and condition.