granted. Red Moody jumped into his little rubber boat and went away.
The next day, Admiral Guest paid a visit to Camp Wilson. The admiral approached the beach in a small barge, which couldn't land on shore. Moody sent a rubber boat to pick up the admiral and bring him to the beach. Admiral Guest hit the sand and greeted Moody. “Did you get my message?” he asked. “You're now on my staff.” Moody hadn't received any such message but told the admiral he was up for the job. Great, said Admiral Guest. When will you be ready? Now, said Moody.
Admiral Guest looked at the diver, surprised. “What about your gear?” he asked. “I got people can get my gear for me, Admiral. If you want my services, you got it.” Admiral Guest was headed to a briefing with General Wilson and asked Moody to go along. Red dropped everything and joined him. From that day on, Moody remained close to the admiral. “We seemed to have a special affinity for each other, because he knew I was ready to go,” Moody said.
“He also knew I would not BS him. I would tell him the way I thought it was.” Guest needed all the help he could get. He had been thrown into this operation just a few days earlier — yanked from his post in Naples by an early-morning phone call — and was still trying to get the lay of the land. Guest was a no-nonsense man, hardworking, heavy-smoking, and blunt. He demanded full dedication from his staff and had little patience for slackers. A small man, he was known to some as “Little Bulldog,” less for his growl than for his tenacious grip.
Guest came from a long line of military men, most of whom had served in the U.S. Army cavalry.
When Guest received an appointment to the Naval Academy rather than West Point, his father devised a scheme by which the young officer could transfer to the Army after graduation to carry on the family tradition. Guest, who had fallen in love with the Navy, refused his father's offer. The elder Guest, a wealthy man, told his stubborn son that if he stayed in the Navy, he would disinherit him.
Admiral Guest thought it over and refused the offer again. His father stayed true to his word; according to family lore, the two men did not speak again. When Guest's father died, he left his son one dollar.
During World War II, Guest flew a dive-bomber in the Pacific and achieved a spectacular fighting record. He was the first carrier-based aviator to sink an enemy ship in that war, a feat that won him the Navy Cross, the second highest honor in the Navy. (The only higher award is the Medal of Honor.) During the rest of his service in World War II, Guest won the Air Medal, a Gold Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Bronze Star. The Navy also awarded him several Purple Hearts, which he never wore. After the war, he climbed the Navy hierarchy, becoming a rear admiral in 1962.
In Palomares, Guest hit the ground running, establishing a high-probability search area on the day he arrived, January 24. At the time, he already knew about the Spanish fishermen. But he also knew that the Air Force had found three bombs on land and that Navy divers and minesweepers were picking up debris and sonar hits near shore. It seemed clear that if bomb number four had fallen into the water, it had landed either in the area described by Simo and Roldan or in the shallow debris field adjacent to the beach.
However, at this early stage in the game, Guest couldn't afford to leave anything out. On a map, Guest found the point where the fishermen had plucked Larry Messinger from the sea. Guest knew that Messinger had opened his parachute immediately after ejection. If the bomb had done the same, he reasoned, it probably wouldn't have floated much farther than the airman. From Messinger's landing point, he drew two straight lines to shore, one reaching far north of Palomares, the other far south. This created a triangular-shaped search area encompassing every piece of debris, every sonar hit, and every parachute observed to have fallen into the ocean. The search area was massive: a giant pie-shaped wedge stretching from the Spanish shoreline to a point in the sea. The wedge measured just over fifty square miles, more than double the size of Manhattan. Guest knew he had to narrow it down. This was just too much ocean to search.
Oliver Andersen, left in charge of the divers by Red Moody, was doing his part to cover some ground. His divers, equipped with scuba gear, could make quick dives to 100 or 150 feet — maybe 200 feet, if they really pushed it — and spent much of the early search doing just that. Navy minesweepers collected sonar hits and handed the information to Andersen's divers, who made quick
“bounce” dives to see if the contact might be the bomb. The divers found a lot of debris in the first couple of weeks: fuselage sections, tubing, an instruction manual, a survival kit bag, a wing section, wiring, fuel cells, and a flashlight. No bomb.
After a week, Andersen decided that they needed a more systematic plan. He found the coordinates of the three bombs that had fallen on land and drew a line from those into the ocean, hoping that bomb number four had landed along the same path. Then he picked points to the north and south, farther than he thought the bomb could have drifted. Having no decent maps, he used a handheld compass to mark bearings and sketch out a search area. Then his divers methodically began to swim the full shoreline, back and forth, out to where the water was about eighty feet deep.
Underwater searching is complicated, since divers can't see far and their time beneath the surface is limited. So they use something called a “jackstay.” The setup for a jackstay search is simple. A line is attached to a “clump,” a weight that sits on the bottom, underneath the water. The other end of the line is attached to a buoy that floats on the surface. Then a second line and buoy are attached to a second clump. Finally, the two clumps, resting on the bottom, are joined together by a “distance line.” The distance line can be any length, depending on visibility and the size of the area to be searched.
To run a jackstay search, a diver swims down to a clump, puts a hand on the distance line, and swims to the other clump. (The search can also be done with two divers swimming on opposite sides of the distance line.) While swimming, the diver feels the way in front of him, hoping to find the object he's looking for. “You're basically searching like a blind man,” explained Master Diver Ron Ervin. Lights are not usually useful because of the silt, unless you find an object and want to take a close look.
After the diver swims the distance line and reaches the other end, he picks up the clump and walks, say, ten steps with it in a certain direction. (He's not exactly walking, though — it's more of a half stumble, half crawl, tripping over the fins on his feet.) Then he sets the clump down, taking care to keep the line taut so he stays on course, and swims the line back to the other end. The process continues, the diver slowly covering the search area.
Divers who search for lost objects are perpetually annoyed by people who expect the search to go faster. As Ervin explained, “It's not like walking through a parking lot. You have very little visibility — you're really just putting out your hands and hoping you run into it. If the thing has any surface area, it's going to float off, and if there's current, it's going to go even further. It's like trying to look for something on land and having someone pushing you all the time.”
“That's what pisses you off,” said Ervin. “When people who never dive are saying ‘I dropped it right there, why can't you find it?’ Or even worse, ‘I could have found it myself by now.’” It makes you want to say, ‘Okay, go ahead. I'm taking my toys and going home.’” In Palomares, Andersen's divers had few toys to begin with. At one point early on, the divers needed a way to see how far they were from shore. They didn't have enough line to reel off five hundred yards here and five hundred yards there. So they used toilet paper. “We found out that a roll of toilet paper was about yea so long,” said Andersen. “One guy would walk over to the beach and he would hold on to a roll of toilet paper, and we would get in our boat and we'd steam out at right angles to that little beach mark until we ran out of the roll of toilet paper.” At that point, Andersen dropped a buoy, marking that they were exactly one roll of toilet paper from shore. It wasn't precise, but it was better than nothing.
Back aboard the USS
This would never do. Admiral Guest told the Navy he needed some real charts. On January 27, the USS
