He stops and laughs, thinking of something else. “But not on night dives; that’s when everything comes out to hunt. There’s a lot of killing going on then.” He smiles, thinking of the barracuda and other predators that gather around the rusting hull of the
At Karpata, we follow the chain deeper. At 120 feet, I stage my nitrox cylinder on a nest of rocks to pick up on my ascent. At 150 feet my dive computer is already beginning to beep, warning me that I’ve gone beyond the established, if somewhat arbitrary, 130-foot limit of recreational diving. Schoonhoven and I glance at each other and both of us make a pronounced “okay” with our thumbs and forefingers to signal we’re good to continue, no problems. At 200 feet the sloping angle of the reef becomes vertical and this world of water becomes almost silent except for the iron-lung-like sounds of my inhalation and exhalation through my regulator. For a sense of security, I hold the mouthpiece of a second regulator, my backup, attached to a second air cylinder clipped to my chest on the D-rings of my buoyancy compensator device, or BCD. The BCD is a harness with a U-shaped bladder that I can fill with air or deflate to achieve neutral buoyancy, a kind of equilibrium where I neither rise nor fall but suspend myself in the water. I’m not so worried about my regulator failing, but I know that a rupture in the tiny plastic part called an O-ring, which costs only pennies but helps maintain the life-giving seal between the regulator and the airflow from the cylinder, could be fatal. I wonder, however, as my limbs become heavier with every foot we descend, whether I will even be able to find my mouth with the backup if I need to. I’m already starting to feel some of the strange gauziness of nitrogen narcosis, a drunk-like state many divers begin to experience at depth. I look over at Schoonhoven; I can see in his eyes, he’s calm, relaxed, but I can tell he’s not sure he sees the same thing in mine. Still, we give each other the “okay” sign another time as we continue down the wall.
Now my world has become the narrow tunnel that I can see from my mask. My breathing and my beeping computer (warning me I’ve gone beyond, way beyond, my recreational diving depth) seem to me like a vitals cart next to a hospital bed, signaling the patient is still alive. We descend through several thermoclines, layers of increasingly colder water, before we reach the bottom of the wall. We stand for a moment, looking out at the darkness that separates us like a black curtain, but we go deeper still. I look at my computer. It reads 296 feet. I look at Schoonhoven as he peers into the darkness. Is this the place where one need never think of war again? Or is it farther still? I move forward, seeking only four more feet, a benchmark number, but an arm waves me back. It does, at that moment, seem like the small membrane of difference between living and being lost in the blackness below. But the blackness, while devastatingly lonely, still beckons. I wonder if the pressure would envelop me like a snug blanket if I tipped past the edge into its seductive void. Is this the place where the world above and the past can’t find us? My considerations seem infinite but last, in reality, only a few moments. I look at Schoonhoven. There is no time for uncertainty or lingering. This is a “bounce” dive, the risky practice of touching a depth beyond the normal recreational limits but not spending enough time there to require extensive decompression. You “bounce” off the bottom and go up. Spending even a few minutes on the bottom can mean running out of breathing gas in the shallows as we decompress. Doing so could mean we both get bent, wracked by nitrogen bubbles expanding inside our tissues and organs. We also risk pulmonary and cerebral embolism, larger bubbles that can block our blood vessels to our lungs and brain, killing us. We need to go. Schoonhoven jerks his thumb upward—the sign to ascend. Slowly, we begin swimming toward the surface, controlling our ascent, making sure not to outrace our air bubbles. While it was easy floating down, the wall seems steeper now. I press the auto-inflator button on my BCD to add a little air into the bladder, giving me a tiny lift, but am careful to not fill it too much, knowing the air will expand as the pressure decreases during our swim up. If it expands too much the BCD can take me on a rocket ride called a runaway ascent, which, again, has a good probability of ending ugly, especially considering the depth from which we just bounced. I pick up my nitrox cylinder and at ninety feet, we stop at the mouth of a cave and make the gas switch from regular air to the higher-oxygen-content nitrox, the logic being more oxygen in our bodies’ cells pushes out harmful residual nitrogen, helping us to “off-gas” faster. At thirty feet we begin a full half hour of decompression, swimming in circles and exploring the now-shallow bottom of the shoreline, to help us while away the time before we can surface and talk excitedly about what we’ve just done and survived. It was a brief return to the type of adrenaline rush that Schoonhoven and I both experienced during combat, but this time there were no bombs or bullets. Yet, it was just as dangerous, perhaps more so at times, than some of what we experienced in war. When we reach the top, we’re elated, psyched about our accomplishment, high-fiving each other. The celebration will be short. Later, a young colleague who came with us to act as a safety diver tells the assistant manager of the dive shop we both work for what we did with our day off. While we have a right to kill ourselves with our cowboy shenanigans if we need to, we’re told, we don’t have a right to do it using the shop’s gear and risking the shop’s reputation.
While we lived through the dive, our jobs are now in jeopardy. Only through profuse apologies do we both avoid getting fired, and we will both be in the penalty box for several weeks. The gravity of our recklessness is compounded the next day, when another diver dies at Karpata, a victim not of deep diving but a reported pulmonary embolism. This diver found death but, unlike us, wasn’t looking for it. Because I pushed to make the dive, I begin to feel guilty about the fallout for Schoonhoven. It’s true he’s a big boy and able to make his own decisions, but he probably doesn’t need the added temptation of reckless endeavors dangled in front of him daily by someone who is supposed to be listening to his stories, not egging him on to new ones. However, he does not hold it against me. Despite our foolishness, we now have a bond that goes beyond our shared war zone experiences. Together we experienced the danger but also the solitude and peace of the deep. There is, we know, a bond of loyalty to each other in that as well.
A few days before I leave Bonaire to return to the United States and begin my fellowship at Harvard, I ask Schoonhoven why he agreed to share his stories with me for my book. He looks down, gathers his thoughts and sighs.
“I want a job where I can make okay money, enough to support my family and my [future] kids,” he says to me. “If there is a book with my memories in it, then I don’t have to hold them in my head; at least that’s what I hope.”
After the birth of their first child, a daughter named Robyn, Sebastiaan and Carolien Schoonhoven returned to the Netherlands. A year and a half later they had their second child, a son named Finn.
Epilogue: Deus Ex Machina
And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
In my initial reporting and writing of this book, I was troubled that the stories featured here might collectively represent an indictment against hope. I’m glad to know now that I was wrong. War both gives and takes from those most intimately involved in it. It wrests from them delusions of innocence and reveals, as we’ve explored, a shadow self capable not only of taking life but sometimes of finding fulfillment in the process. This undoubtedly creates confusion for both soldiers and the societies they fight for, as the seduction of violence challenges self-perceptions and even our beliefs about our own humanity. Additionally, living in the midst of death, witnessing the killing of comrades and friends, suffering physical and psychological injuries, compounds this disequilibrium for warriors in the aftermath of battle. So how, then, does one go forward in a world marked by pain and loss, and steeped in the moral inconsistency that those capable of the greatest violence win?
