Shadow Divers by Kursson

Ref: Robert Kursson (2004). Shadow Divers. Randomhouse Trade Books.

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Summary

A German U-boat is discovered 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey and studied by retired Captain and renowned deep water diver Bill Nagle, his friend John Chatterton, and ten other divers using Nagle’s boat “the Seeker”; the wreck lies at the limit of open circuit scuba diving, marking the beginning of tech and mixed gas diving.
The wreck is identified as U-869, destroyed by its own torpedo, known as a Circle Runner.
Not all divers succumb to panic as Drozd did. A great diver learns to stand down his emotions. At the moment he becomes lost or blinded or tangled or trapped, that instant when millions of years of evolution demand fight or flight and narcosis carves order from his brain, he dials down his fear and contracts into the moment until his breathing slows and his narcosis lightens and his reason returns. In this way he overcomes his humanness and becomes something else. In this way, liberated from instincts, he becomes a freak of nature.

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If an undertaking was easy, someone else already would have done it.
If you follow in another’s footsteps, you miss the problems really worth solving.
Excellence is born of preparation, dedication, focus, and tenacity; compromise on any of these and you become average.
Every so often, life presents a great moment of decision, an intersection at which a man must decide to stop or go; a person lives with these decisions forever.
Examine everything; not all is as it seems or as people tell you.
It is easiest to live with a decision if it is based on an earnest sense of right and wrong.
The guy who gets killed is often the guy who got nervous. The guy who doesn’t care anymore, who has said, “I’m already dead—the fact that I live or die is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is the accounting I give of myself,” is the most formidable force in the world.
The worst possible decision is to give up.

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When you die, no one will ever find your body.-Nagle.
Always swing while the other guy is telling you how he’s going to kick your ass.
Always answer the first problem immediately and fully.
Most men, it seemed to them, went through life never really knowing themselves. A man might consider himself noble or brave or just, they believed, but until he was truly tested it would always be mere opinion.
Life is a matter of luck, and the odds in favor of success are in no way enhanced by extreme caution.-Eric Topp (WWII German U-Boat CDR).

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