THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 18, 1995 TAG: 9509160047
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Long : 173 lines
CARL BRASHER'S courage has always run deep.
You could see why Bill Cosby would want to do a film about the black Navy diver's life the moment you step into his comfortable den in Virginia Beach.
The important particulars of Carl's career are all there. Hanging on the walls or resting on tables: photos, medals, citations.
The most poignant photo was the one taken while Carl was climbing a ladder at Portsmouth Naval Hospital in his shorts. Climbing with 95-pound weights on his back, his artificial leg gleaming with an antiseptic whiteness.
Now in his early 60s, he has the gait of a man two decades younger and the politeness found in many of his generation. But what sets him apart from most men is a determined stare that locks into his eyes from time to time. When you stand in front of that faraway look, it is as though he can see right through you - for a couple of miles.
The look came from his father, a sharecropper in Hardin County, Ky., who could chop down a tree with his own hands and carve a doubletree yoke or an ax handle from the wood.
``He could do anything he set his mind to,'' Carl said.
At the age of 16, Carl was working in a service station in Sonora, Ky., after dropping out of high school. He came home one afternoon and asked his father to sign papers giving him permission to join the Navy.
The year was 1948. A group of young men enlisted with Carl, all ticketed transportation to the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. When they boarded the train in Louisville, Carl was separated from the others. The conductor told him he couldn't sit in the car with the white recruits.
``You've got to go back there to the colored car,'' he was told.
Within four years, the young man who, prior to enlistment, had never seen water in amounts not confined by the creek and pond banks of Kentucky, had risen to the rank of bosun's mate third class.
He was serving aboard the aircraft carrier Tripoli when an accident aboard changed his career plans. A fighter plane went over the side while the carrier was off the Texas coast. A Navy diver with helmet and diving suit was sent to the ship.
``The diver went down about 50 feet and attached lines to the plane so it could be brought up,'' he recalled. ``Everyone on the ship watched him go down with that long air hose following him.''
He said the officers and crew lined the huge deck to watch. Except for his family no one had ever paid Carl much attention. ``That diver was the center of attention and I liked that,'' he said.
He submitted an application for diving school. Three weeks later he had gotten no response. They told him the application must have been misplaced. So he submitted another one.
Same story. When he asked what had happened to the second application he was told the division officer had placed it in his shirt pocket. ``They said it was ruined when the shirt was washed.''
He filled out a third application. This time he walked it all the way through the chain of command to the personnel officer. ``The personnel officer told me the Navy wasn't hiring black divers,'' Carl recalled.
But times were changing. And within the year he was enrolled at the Navy diving school in Bayonne, N.J.
When he reported to the school, the training officer assumed he was there to be a cook in the mess hall.
``When I told him I was there to be a student, his expression changed so quick it was funny,'' Carl said. ``His jaw really dropped.'' The officer tried to discourage him, mentioning that white students wouldn't accept him. And, since he had no high school diploma, he lacked the education required to pass the diving course, he was told.
Once school began Carl was ignored by both officers and fellow students. They rarely, if ever, spoke. But they fixed him with their eyes. He could almost feel those eyes on his neck, at times. At night he found notes from the students on his bunk. The hate notes usually began or ended with the ``n'' word.
Diving school was rough, he said. ``Sometimes you'd work in black water where the mud was over your head,'' he recalled. ``You couldn't see anything. Just black. And have to fit pipes together in the dark and then secure them with 19 nuts and bolts.''
In 1953 he completed the course in air diving, becoming the first black diver in U.S. Navy history. As a diver he gained some respect, but not equality. The chief bosun aboard his first diving and salvage ship told him there was nothing personal in his decision not to invite Carl to parties at his home attended by other enlisted men on the ship.
``I didn't invite you over because you are colored,'' he explained.
Air diving had its limitations. Air divers were not able to operate at depths greater than 285 feet without disorientation and blackouts. Divers functioning at those greater depths required hoses pumping helium and oxygen. It was a region of increased danger. And those who operated at such depths were classified as first class divers.
After seven years of air diving Carl, who had picked up a high school equivalency by passing GED tests, applied for first class diver training at the U.S. Naval Deep Sea Diving School in Washington, D.C. He was enrolled in the school and flunked out.
For the next three years he studied the demanding subjects taught at the school during his spare time. ``The course work was difficult. You had to know a lot of math, physics and chemistry,'' he recalled.
After three years of study, he enrolled in the deep sea diving school again. His hard work was rewarded. He graduated third in his class of 17.
Carl's story would be remarkable if it had ended then. But he was later to recover from a tragic accident - one requiring the amputation of his leg - in a way so heroic that doctors and the Navy were confounded.
After promotion to chief petty officer, Carl was involved in a dramatic mission to retrieve a live nuclear bomb. The bomb had fallen into the ocean off the coast of Spain after two Air Force planes collided in mid-air.
During the mission - in March of 1966 - a launch tied its mooring lines to pipes aboard Carl's vessel - the salvage ship Hoist.
The lines were attached in two places. Strain on the forward line ripped the pipes from their stanchions, flinging them across the deck like scythes. Realizing the second line might break at any moment cutting down crew members with deadly force, Carl raised to the stern shouting: ``Clear the fantail!''
After reaching the fantail, he continued shouting his orders, above the din, shoving five men out of harm's way, literally tossing one clear of the pipes, before the second line pulled the pipes from their stanchions.
He was hit by one of the flying pipes in the left leg, sustaining damage so severe the leg had to be amputated.
``The leg didn't even hurt for the first five minutes,'' he remembered. ``But after that it got pretty bad.''
He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal, given for heroism in saving lives.
His career should have ended then, with a nice pension and that medal to explain why he was walking with an artificial leg.
But it wasn't what Carl had in mind. ``I just didn't see any reason why I couldn't continue to dive, artificial leg or not,'' he said.
He found a supporter at Portsmouth Naval Hospital. The hospital's commandant, Rear Adm. Joseph L. Yon, worked out a series of exercises for him.
From May to December of 1966, while in the Navy hospital, Carl slowly began a program that he believed would enable him to become a Navy diver again. He climbed rope ladders and stairs with weights and scuba tanks on his back.
His doctors, ship mates, officers and the hospital staff all told him the same thing: ``It's crazy Carl,'' the said. ``You don't have a chance in hell of doing it.''
``Something inside me told me I could do it,'' Carl said. He had a friend who risked a court martial by allowing him to practice climbing ladders while wearing a 200-pound deep sea diving suit at the Navy Diving School in Norfolk.''
He sent photos showing his deep diving ability to the Navy's Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. But they rejected his appeal for a return to diver status.
``So I just commenced to fighting them,'' he said. ``I told them if they didn't want to come down to Norfolk to see what I could do I'd go to Washington, D.C. and make it easy for them.''
In March of 1967 the officers at the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery relented and agreed to observe what he could do in Washington. The tasks he was required to perform exceeded those tests normally given a diver because there was concern about the artificial leg.
He passed the tests and was restored to active duty status, becoming the first amputee Navy diver and, later, the first black to hold the title master diver. He retired in 1979.
Carl showed me his father's picture. He said it all came from him. ``My daddy could draw a barn and calculate the number of board feet it would take and then build it himself,'' he said. ``With no education. Imagine that?''
I could. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Carl Brasher...
Navy diver Carl Brasher, who had his left leg amputated, is shown
climbing a ladder at Portsmouth Naval Hospital during his recovery,
with 95-pound weights strapped to his back; Above, Brasher today in
his Virginia Beach home.
by CNB