CHICAGO, Illinois (19 Aug 2005) -- A few years ago, writer Robert Kurson watched a PBS documentary about two scuba divers who had made a discovery: a sunken German submarine, a World War II U-boat, 60 miles off the New Jersey coast, 230 feet deep. The documentary fascinated Kurson, but it stuck mostly to the mechanics of how the ship ultimately was identified, right down to its crew members and three-digit military designation number. Kurson wanted to know more: Why would these two fellows risk incredible dangers in a six-year quest involving a ship that contained no treasure? In short, he wanted the human story, and what a story it was: From 1991 to 1997, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler led a team of divers through twisted metal, silt that reduced visibility to zero at times, and other hazards, all to determine which sub this was. To complicate matters, the German government denied a U-boat could be in that location. The endeavor would claim the lives of three of Chatterton and Kohler's fellow divers. And it would claim Kurson's imagination, and ultimately hundreds of thousands of readers. His book, Shadow Divers, has been an enormous success since its hardcover publication last year. A movie is in the works. And the story, now in paperback, is the current selection of the FYI Book Club. Kurson discussed it all in a recent telephone interview from his home in Northbrook, a Chicago suburb. Q. That documentary intrigued but frustrated you, didn't it? A. It concentrated solely on technical issues, such as the history of the U-boat war, U-boat construction, and the nuts and bolts of the mystery these divers set out to solve. What I wanted to know was about these two men: Why were they risking their lives for what seemed to be such a small footnote in history? Anyone could understand why they would be ruining their marriages, bankrupting themselves, coming close to dying and watching their friends die if there were some great treasure in the wreck. But there was no gold, no beautiful artwork, nothing but a three-digit (identification) number they were looking for. As you found, one major reason is they were driven by the intense curiosity. But it seemed way out of proportion to the potential reward. And that's when my antenna goes up, when I believe there's something more interesting to know. In a nutshell, what did Chatterton and Kohler tell you? What was the most significant thing that drove them? Even diving at that depth is difficult; crawling around inside a submerged sub — which obviously had had something catastrophic happen to it, since it had been blown practically in half — was insane. "They … had to do this or they would die inside. It was preferable for them to die physically than for them to die inside, the way they would have if they'd turned their backs on this mystery." Shadow Divers entered The New York Times nonfiction best seller list at No. 4 last year and has been a smash ever since. It debuted at No. 4 and went to No. 2 for a couple weeks. Only Bill Clinton separated me from real glory; I couldn't overtake (his memoir, My Life). How many hardcover copies did it sell, roughly? There are about 400,000 in print in hardcover, and more than half a million in print in paperback. Readers have told me the book reads like a good novel. But to make a nonfiction book read with that kind of drama presents challenges for a writer, doesn't it? One of the challenges was that, like a good baseball umpire, I knew I had to get out of the way of the story. The story was so good that if I told it properly, I didn't want to be very visible as a writer. I hear that there's a movie in the works and that Ridley Scott, who directed "Blade Runner" and "Alien," will direct? Ridley Scott will direct, and William Broyles Jr. is writing the screenplay; he wrote "Cast Away" and "Apollo 13." He's a very good writer. That's the team that's going in. It hasn't been cast yet. I think they'll shoot it next year, probably summer or fall of 2006. One of the most harrowing passages in the book involves the deaths of the father-and-son divers, Chris Rouse and Chris Rouse Jr. They basically died from the bends after the son panicked and shot to the surface. The thing that still resonates with me was the father's instinct to follow the son up. The father was never in any danger. The son had gone inside the wreck … and became trapped under a fallen steel cabinet. The father had every opportunity to leave him alone and go to the surface. He didn't do that; he went inside the wreck and got the kid out. Even after they came out, they both had the opportunity to make it to the surface uninjured. But the kid panicked again and shot to the surface. Divers must decompress, going to the surface slowly. But the father knew, didn't he, that following him up wouldn't save him? There's nothing he could've done. Still, the father followed him. That will live with me forever. Those guys bickered all the time. They were more like brothers than father and son. In fact they looked like brothers; they were only 19 or 20 years apart. But when life was on the line, the father acted in the most beautiful, paternal way — he knew it was going to cost him his life, but he went after his son. That riff really runs through your book: There's a tension between people knowing that the logical thing to do is one thing, but the passionate thing to do can obliterate logic. Chatterton, Kohler and most of the other divers lived through this experience. But you could argue that the U-boat wreck was so dangerous that none of these fellows, experienced as they were, ever should have gone near it. None of this, technically, was a good idea. They were going places you should not be going, doing things you should not be doing. Yet their hearts compelled them. And there's a parallel there with the German sailors who lost their lives on this U-boat, when whatever disaster that befell it happened in the very late stages of World War II, yes? At that stage of the war, nobody was coming back home to Germany. (Shipping out on a U-boat) was a very bad idea. The sailors were seeing that for every 10 boats that (left Germany), one came back. Yet they possessed a certain sense of duty that forced them down into the water as well. Back to the divers: Richie Kohler strikes me as a man who was changed by this experience. Chatterton always seems to have had a more philosophical bent, but before finding this sub, Kohler's chief interest was hauling treasure out of various wrecks. "Tonnage king," they called him. But he was transformed. Eventually he went and found many of those sailors' surviving family members. He became unrecognizable to his fellow Atlantic wreck divers. They didn't know what had happened to him. They beat him up about it, teased him about it. (But he had become) connected to the spirit of these bones. | | Do you keep in touch with Chatterton and Kohler? I talk to them every week. They're very busy guys now because they are co-hosts of a show on the History Channel called "Deep Sea Detective" that takes them all over the world. They're diving ever more dangerous wrecks, and deeper and deeper. … I worry for them every week, and I'm relieved every time I hear their voices and know they're OK. What about the submarine itself? It's still there, of course. John and Richie will tell you that the boat today doesn't look very much like it looked even between 1991 and 1997 when they were diving on it. The ocean, and fishermen's nets, are tearing the boat apart. Because of those two causes … the boat's not even going to be there in 50 or 75 years. Have people been back down? From what I understand it's very rare that people go look at the boat. Remember, at its best, it had only the answer to a mystery to offer; there was no gold, no treasure. What it had was a hundred ways to die inside. Now the mystery has been solved, and what remains is a very dangerous shipwreck that's hard to get to, expensive to get to and will kill you very fast. That doesn't deter some people. Is there talk of raising it? I hope not. You never know, because when something gets well-known, you don't know who's going to jump in, and there are some very unscrupulous people in the world of deepwater shipwreck diving. You just hope they have enough respect — not just for the boat but for the sailors inside the boat — to leave it as a war grave, which is what it is. Shadow Divers, by Robert Kurson (390 pages; Random House Trade Paperbacks; $14.95 paperback) This excerpt from an early chapter of Robert Kurson's Shadow Divers reveals the perils of deep-sea diving exploration: Deep-shipwreck diving is among the world's most dangerous sports. Few other endeavors exist in which nature, biology, equipment, instinct, and object conspire — without warning and from all directions — to so completely attack a man's mind and disassemble his spirit. Many dead divers have been found inside shipwrecks with more than enough air remaining to have made it to the surface. It is not that they chose to die, but rather that they could no longer figure out how to live. Father and son Chris Rouse and Chris Rouse Jr. ("Chrissy") lost their lives exploring the submerged U-boat Kurson writes about in Shadow Divers. After a horrifying incident in the depths of the Atlantic, the two men failed to ascend slowly enough to decompress properly: Chrissy, terrified at losing his stage bottles and lost on the wreck, made a decision that divers spend a lifetime dreading — to bolt for the surface. His father shot up after him. (Captain Bill) Nagle had a saying about divers who rocketed to the surface after so long in the deep. "They're already dead," he would say. "They just don't know it yet." John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, the two divers chiefly credited with discovering the German submarine after it had lain at the bottom of the Atlantic for nearly half a century, found themselves consumed with trying to identify the boat. When they finally did, after years of investigation, they discovered they still could not let matters rest: Kohler's involvement with (the sub) entered a new phase after he and Chatterton identified the wreck. In 1997, he set out to find the crewmen's families and deliver them news of their loved ones' fates. With help from Kirk Wolfinger and Rush DeNooyer of Lone Wolf Pictures (who directed the [PBS] special), and from the German media giant Spiegel, which had begun work on a television documentary about the divers … he found contact information for Barbara Bowling, the half sister of Otto Brizius, at 17 the youngest of (the) crewmen. The Robert Kurson file Born: April 18, 1963, Chicago Current residence: Northbrook, a Chicago suburb Education: Bachelor's degree in philosophy, University of Wisconsin-Madison; law degree, Harvard Law School Family: Married to Amy Kurson; one son, Nate, 3. Previous book: The Official Three Stooges Encyclopedia. "That really was an outgrowth of the boredom I felt in class at Harvard Law School … to pass time during class, I would make notes on all the names and places and funny things that had happened in Three Stooges movies. There's no real proper writing in it, but it was a labor of love for me." Other jobs before book career: Real estate/corporate lawyer; options trader, sportswriter, features writer. Currently a contributing editor for Esquire. Next book: "A true story about a man who had been blind for life and who at age 47, through a revolutionary stem-cell transplant procedure, gained vision." |
