The Work — What Army Divers Did in Vietnam
Most people think of war in terms of what they can see.
The Delta Divers worked in places where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
The rivers we dove in weren’t blue — they were thick, coffee-colored, and moving. You didn’t swim through them so much as feel your way through them. Every move was by touch. Every step was a guess backed up by training and experience.
Bridges, pilings, hulls — anything that sat in the water eventually became our problem.
What we were looking for wasn’t always obvious. Damage. Obstructions. Charges. Sometimes nothing at all — but you still had to go down and prove it.
Training teaches you the mechanics.
The river teaches you everything else.
Mike Garver preparing to go under in Vietnam. No glamour. Just the job.
Anchor Recovery — Soai Rap River, 1968
Most of what we did had nothing to do with visibility. It was about feel — working along a line, checking structures, solving problems you couldn’t see.
Like a job Garver and I got called out on in late ‘68:
It was an anchor recovery job on the Soai Rap River, about 20 miles south of Saigon.
A boat had dropped anchor, but the line wasn’t strong enough to haul it back up. Our job was to get a heavier cable down to it. We’d need to mark the location of the anchor.
We shackled a length of line — about twice what we figured we’d need — and attached it to an empty 5-gallon gas can. Then the two of us went hand-over-hand down the original line, towing our improvised marker with us.
The anchor line had been tied off to a deuce-and-a-half on shore, but it came off at too steep an angle — too high above the water — for us to slide down it. So we improvised. We went in upstream, rolled onto our backs, and let the current carry us — grabbing the line as we passed under it.
Somehow, it worked.
We lost visibility at about one foot.
From that point on, everything was by feel.
I led the way with Mike behind me hauling the can and line. It was slow going. Every movement had to be deliberate. We weren’t seeing anything — we were working by tension in the line, by touch, by instinct.
About fifteen minutes in I could feel something wasn’t right with Mike.
I worked my way back up the line to check on him.
When my hand found his, he grabbed it and guided it to the line on the can — motioning for me to pull.
We were at the end of the line. Obviously the dive was going to be deeper than we were told. We had to work our way back to the surface and come with another plan.
Borrowed from “The End of the Line” — Chapter 19, The Delta Divers of Vietnam: We Were There — You Just Didn’t Know It
Looking Back
From the surface, it never looked like much.
A couple of guys in the water. A problem to solve.
What mattered happened where nobody could see it.
That’s where the job was.