Eric's Reviews > Descent into Darkness: Pearl Harbor, 1941: A Navy Diver's Memoir

Grisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining through white deck awnings - into labyrinthine tombs, zones of industrial disaster, poison pockets of chemical menace. Also, as sites of mass carnage, these wrecks shat on the democratic conceit of individuated sailors as sons of families and hopeful citizens - "Join the Navy, Learn a Trade"- and the religious conceit of a named headstone over identified remains. Raymer and the other divers worked in total darkness, felt their way in an oily murk; they were guided by topside tenders explaining the lucid ship's plans through the helmet phones; they risked their lives in every descent to make working, personal surveys of the collapsed decks, the bubbles of explosive gases, the jagged traumas of metal, the clusters of bloated bodies being eaten by crabs, and the absurdly comical bricolage of debris. And, of course, they recovered tons upon tons of shells and still-usable equipment, and righted and dewatered the salvageable ships (there's a war on, you know, and every bullet counts). Raymer is often funny, ribald; he doesn't pretend he and his team weren't also twenty-one year olds thinking of pussy and booze. He describes youthful insouciance and antic shore liberty with nice dirty immediacy, but also describes the daily work so finely that the shadows of later reflection fall just where they should.