Chesapeake Bay Bridge and
Tunnel
Depth: Sixty feet
November 11, 2017
Dan found the ‘spare air’ bottle in his bag. The small cylinder about the size of a water bottle had been presented to him during the Seal Team Two’s farewell roast the night before. He insisted on including wives and girlfriends at the event and hoped that this departure from previous formats would keep the night a bit more civilized. He grasped the first model of a self-contained rescue device that contained less than two cubic feet of compressed air, the equivalent of thirty breaths relaxing at your picnic table. Here, blind and trapped under the bay, Dan’s breathing rate increased with the panic he felt. He calculated his odds at 10,000 to 1. As he turned the small valve on top of the tank, Dan wondered whether it had been used or had any air in it at all. He put the mouthpiece in his mouth and drew in a full breath of old, metallic-tasting air.
He found a child’s ‘Sea Hunt’ style mask that had been another gift from the evening and pulled it over his head. The mask skirt was brittle and leaked, but it was better than swimming blind with nothing to protect his eyes. He pulled himself over the back seat, crawled along the roof and after saying a silent, painful goodbye to Jill and the boys, exited the jeep through the driver’s side door, blindly feeling his way ahead…but to where? Maybe he was just postponing the inevitable or making a difficult problem worse for the recovery effort that would be underway in the next week.
The entire team came to Dan’s send-off, and he’d been given the spare air bottle and mask by Tom Bryant as one of the many joke gifts. Dan and Tom had reported to the Seal Team within a couple of weeks of each other. They’d become good friends ever since the stupid challenge that had been spawned after they’d completed a training operation from a wet submersible Seal Delivery System that had been developed to insert six Seals to the objective area from a ship or submarine operating ten to fifteen miles off-shore. On the trip to the beach, the two had argued about the length of USS Wisconsin (BB-64) that was saved from being scrapped by joining Missouri, New Jersey, and Iowa as floating museums. The Iowa class battleship had become a popular attraction on the Norfolk waterfront and was berthed right downtown at Waterside. The argument ended with Tom betting Dan that he could swim the length of the ship underwater. Dan quickly took the bet and thought nothing of it until two months later.
“Hey, Dan,” boomed Tom’s voice in the conference room after the usual Wednesday meeting. “The ship is 884’ long…you still want to swim or do you want to just hand me the win without getting wet?”
Dan’s mind flashed back to the long, cold ride to the beach. Without a thought he said, “You’re on.”
That night Dan told Jill about the bet. She was not happy.
“You’ve got to be kidding me. You are supposed to be an adult. We’ve got two boys who want to be just like their dad, and you come up with this stupid manhood challenge. I can’t believe it.”
When they were first married, Dan would sputter and try to defend his actions but soon learned that Jill would not buy it, and her sweet disposition could turn cold as ice. He found that his only viable strategy was to let her vent long and loudly without trying to explain himself. Over time, he’d worked hard to limit the number of times he’d engaged in what she so correctly called s squared or Seal Stupidity.
Since this kind of wager would never be sanctioned by the Seal Team’s leadership or the Norfolk police, it would take place at night. Dan and Tom donned their masks and fins and jumped into the harbor with several team members watching from the deserted pier. After a few minutes of hyperventilating and agreeing that this was their last stupid wager, the two submerged and swam past the massive bronze propellers swimming about six feet apart on either side of the keel. Tom was kicking strongly and pulled ahead a few feet. Dan could barely see the glow of his underwater light through the turbid water. He wondered how close to the bottom they were swimming.
Suddenly Dan pulled even with Tom and swam right by him. Something was wrong. His first thought was shallow water blackout as he swam quickly to Tom’s side. Dan grabbed his arm and there was no reaction. He shined his light into his face. His mask was gone and blood gushed from the middle of his forehead. Dan grabbed the back of his wetsuit and started to drag him along the curve of the hull to the surface. Dan cursed to himself: no buoyancy compensator to speed this trip to the surface, no idea of where he was along the hull and no knowledge of what might be alongside the ship’s hull on the surface to make this a longer swim. Oh yeah, most important, his lungs were ready to explode, and he was feeling a bit of panic.
Before they reached the surface, Tom regained consciousness and swallowed several gulps of water. When Dan reached the surface, Tom was discovering the new seam in his skull and wondering what happened. Within seconds, the two were surrounded by other team members who got them out of the water and onto a boat pontoon.
The sun was just coming up when Dan, Tom and several of the team left the hospital and headed back to the base. Commander Hank Owens had paid a visit to the two, muttering about the reports and the questions he’d get on this one once it was splashed all over the front page of the Virginian-Pilot. He’d ordered an immediate “Safety Stand-down” for the entire team as a damage control measure. Dan knew that the skipper’s “Safety Stand-down” would be far less painful than the one that Jill would impose when he got home.