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  Bond first met Walt Mazzone late in the fall of 1958. Mazzone had recently arrived to run the School of Submarine Medicine at the New London base, where Navy doctors and hospital corpsmen received specialized training before being assigned to their boats. Mazzone had come to manage the curriculum, run academic review boards, oversee the students’ required projects, and generally juggle the demands of a top administrator. But he could often be found serving as a valued mentor, mingling with the new medical personnel and offering practical pointers about Navy customs and the rigors of submarine life, which he knew well.

  Mazzone was at the Medical Research Lab one day that fall when Bond strolled in. Mazzone had barely been introduced to Commander George Bond when Bond jauntily grumbled about his recent trip to Washington, home of the surgeon general and the headquarters of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. The bosses there had been none too pleased about the American Weekly article, but now it became the catalyst for a conversation during which Bond impressed Commander Mazzone as a charismatic visionary, and Mazzone was not easily impressed. Bond invited Mazzone to join his nascent animal research project, which he intended to pursue with or without official approval. As Mazzone would quickly learn, Bond believed God said it would be done and it was time to give the Lord a hand.

  In Mazzone, Bond had found a true acolyte, but not an obvious one. Mazzone was not a diver. He was not devout. He was not on the research staff of the medical lab. His duties were largely administrative, not scientific. There were also the disparate routes by which these two middle-aged commanders—Bond had just turned forty-three and Mazzone would soon be forty-one—had attained their ranks. Unlike Bond, the son of a well-to-do lumberman, Mazzone came from a working-class family of Italian immigrants. Determined not to follow his father’s footsteps into the Steinbeckian world of California’s canneries, Mazzone went to San Jose State College, not far from his family home, and earned a degree in biological and physical sciences. His sights were already set on medical school when he graduated in 1941, but with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor he went to war instead.

  Mazzone chose the Navy over the Army, mainly because a couple of relatives were Navy men. He also loved the ocean. As a kid growing up in San Jose, young Walter and his family, and often a few neighbors, would drive their Model A cars over the Santa Cruz Mountains to the beach. Mazzone would return many times during his youth, hitching rides when he had no car. During the Depression, the families could help feed themselves by fishing and, when the tide ebbed, digging up clams and plucking mussels and sea snails.

  About the time that Bond began his studies at McGill, living Mazzone’s dream of going to medical school, Mazzone was aboard the submarine Puffer, whose crew endured, among other things, a prolonged nightmare of a stalking around the eastern side of Borneo. For nearly forty hours Japanese destroyers threatened to send Lieutenant Mazzone and his shipmates to the bottom of the Makassar Strait. But the Puffer crew dodged the repeated depth charges and finally slipped away.

  Mazzone was thickly built, like Bond, but shorter and more compact. He was a boxer in college and apt to express himself in staccato bursts—a manner well suited to a line officer who had to bark orders. Mazzone spit words like bullets, in sharp contrast to Bond’s lolling pulpit baritone, and his vocabulary drew more heavily on the profane than the sacred.

  After the war Mazzone left the Navy and enrolled at the University of Southern California for a degree in pharmaceutical chemistry. But pharmacy work made him restless. By 1950 he had rejoined the Navy, just in time for the Korean War and to become part of the new Medical Service Corps. This time around Mazzone was stationed in Occupied Japan at the newly commissioned U.S. Naval Hospital at Yokosuka. After the war Mazzone worked out of an office in Brooklyn and within five years he became a high-ranking manager in the Armed Services Medical Procurement Agency. It was a good job, with responsibility for big budgets and vast supplies of blood, blood derivatives, drugs, and chemicals, but submarines were in Mazzone’s blood. When he got an order to report to the New London base, he welcomed it.

  If he followed George Bond’s lead, Mazzone would have an opportunity to do the kind of research that had made him want to study science and medicine in the first place. Besides piquing Mazzone’s academic interest, Bond was offering an opportunity to learn to dive, which had an added appeal for an adventuresome soul who had lately been confined to an office. Mazzone’s only experience with diving had been brief, cold, and courageous. Toward the end of the war Mazzone was on the USS Crevalle as part of a submarine group sent on a mission to the Sea of Japan. For a month the sub group dodged mines and attacked Japanese shipping. They eventually made their escape to the north, through La Perouse Strait and into the Sea of Okhotsk. On the way out, the Crevalle crew noticed its sub was making an irksome whining sound, enough of a noise to be picked up by Japanese sonar. A propeller may have been damaged, or perhaps the sub caught a mine cable and was dragging deadly cargo. Someone was going to have to dive in and have a look around. Lieutenant Mazzone volunteered.

  The submarine surfaced and Mazzone crawled out the hatch of the aft torpedo room and put on a Jack Browne, a basic face mask fed with air through an umbilical for shallow-water dives. In the event that a fast getaway became necessary, a shipmate stood by with the grim task of cutting Mazzone’s umbilical. If Mazzone felt his air supply cut off, he was to swim away from the sub and up to the surface. The sub would return for him, if it could. So, wearing only the Jack Browne and a pair of shorts, twenty-seven-year-old Mazzone jumped off the submarine’s deck into the icy Sea of Okhotsk. He ran his hands along the idled propeller blades, noting some damage and looked for errant cables or other possible sources of the whining. At least the sub was dragging no mines. Once back on board, his reward was whiskey and, rarer still, a hot shower. Mazzone gave no further thought to diving until the day he met George Bond at the New London lab.

  Bond arranged to have Mazzone sent to the dive school at the Washington Navy Yard. It was an unorthodox move, since there was no official need for a top administrator like Mazzone to take a month or two off to go through dive school, but Bond had a way of making things happen, something that Mazzone admired. Mazzone made an ideal student—sharp, willing, energetic. He read up on the history and science of diving, embracing a favorite maxim of Cicero along the way: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man’s lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times? Or, as Mazzone summed it up: Don’t reinvent the goddamned wheel!

  Not long after completing his dive school training, Mazzone was with Bond, Cyril Tuckfield, and the rest of the crew for the deep submarine escape trials from the Archerfish. During the first couple of days at sea, in preparation for Bond and Tuck’s record buoyant ascent, Mazzone and a partner made successful blow and go escapes from 150 and also two hundred feet—impressive feats in their own right. Bond and Tuck made ascents from those depths, too, prior to the grand finale, their daring escape from three hundred feet. Mazzone would gladly have attempted the three-hundred-footer with Bond, but instead dutifully served as one of the safety divers, along with Charlie Aquadro. This was one of Mazzone’s early lessons in stepping back to allow Bond to take center stage. Their working relationship might not have lasted if Mazzone shared Bond’s appetite for publicity. Mazzone worked well without fanfare and preferred it that way. He was happy to let Bond be Bond, and considered it a small price to pay for the opportunity to work with a visionary.

  Once the animal research experiments got under way in the late 1950s, Mazzone assumed a leading role, albeit on the moonlighting basis made necessary by his official duties. The main physiological issues were, first, to find the right gaseous recipe for an artificial atmosphere that would sustain life under pressure for indefinite lengths of time. Second, there was the matter of devising a decompression schedule. Nitrogen would have to be either reduced or eliminated—its narcotic haze would become deadly lo
ng before a diver set foot on the continental shelf, six hundred feet down and nearly twenty atmospheres away. Oxygen, too, would have to be carefully regulated. Oxygen toxicity, or oxygen poisoning, could quickly be brought on by the same laws that govern all gases. When pressure on a gas is increased, the concentration of the gas—a measure known as its “partial pressure”—undergoes a proportionate increase. Under the pressure of two atmospheres, a depth of just thirty-three feet, the concentration of pure oxygen doubles, and that’s enough to cause the twitching, dizziness, and convulsions associated with oxygen poisoning, which in turn could be fatal to a diver. Jacques Cousteau found this out the hard way when he tried to dive with an oxygen-only breathing apparatus but went into convulsions forty-five feet down, lost consciousness, and nearly drowned.

  To prevent the concentration of oxygen, or any gas, from rising to dangerous levels under pressure, you had to put less of it into the mix the divers breathed. Two hundred feet down, for example, where the pressure is seven atmospheres, you need one-seventh the amount of oxygen found at sea level. So to equal the healthy surface equivalent of 21 percent oxygen in an artificial gas mixture for diving you would need an oxygen concentration of about 3 percent. While depth and pressure are the major variables in determining the composition of breathing gases, others that come into play include water temperature, the diver’s individual physical and mental characteristics, and the degree of exertion an underwater job requires.

  Much of this was familiar science. Ever since the Squalus rescue, it was known that helium was a good substitute for nitrogen because it eliminated the haze of narcosis. Some researchers experimented with other gases, mainly hydrogen and neon. Whatever the gas recipe, most experimentation followed the paradigm that deeper dives would be of very limited duration. The standard decompression schedules did not go beyond dives of about four hours, but even that boundary was untested in practice. The unmistakable message in the standard dive tables was that the deeper you go and the longer you stay, the longer your decompression penalty. In other words, beware the depth barriers. It was not uncommon to spend more time decompressing than working on the bottom. At 240 feet, the depth of the Squalus operation, a half-hour of bottom time would require about two hours of decompression. Even if a rescue diver lasted a full hour on the bottom, the decompression penalty would approach three hours. This double whammy of limited bottom times and long decompression penalties made underwater work inefficient and added to its expense.

  But what if diving were approached differently? What would happen to a man breathing an artificial atmosphere, under pressure, for much longer than anything outlined in the standard dive tables? Some researchers had suggested that longer-duration deep dives might be feasible. Among them was Albert Behnke Jr., the renowned Navy scientist who discovered that nitrogen was responsible for narcosis. Working with Swede Momsen in the 1930s, it was Dr. Behnke who pioneered the use of helium in time for the Squalus rescue. Although Behnke retired from the Navy just as Bond entered the scene, he remained active in the field of hyperbaric medicine and became a supportive elder and friend to Bond.

  Behnke and a few others had taken some preliminary and relatively shallow steps over the years into longer-duration dives, mainly by testing their subjects in pressure chambers. But those experiments didn’t break depth barriers the way Bond believed they could and should be broken. One leading researcher, Dr. Edgar End at Marquette University medical school, concluded from a one-hundred-foot test he ran in a chamber that twenty-seven hours was about as long as a human being could stay under high pressure without risking his life. Until Bond came to New London in the 1950s, no one was actively exploring the concept of long-duration deep dives, a concept known as “saturation diving.” Saturation diving, a term bandied about in the mid-1940s to describe some of the rare longer-duration dives, was never part of everyday diving lexicon until it became the holy grail for George Bond. The basic concept of saturation itself, however, had been understood for years.

  Much as a sponge absorbs liquid, bodies absorb gases. The human body becomes “saturated” as the gases a person breathes disperse into the blood and tissues. At the ordinary pressure of one atmosphere, everyone on earth is saturated, mostly with nitrogen, the major component of air. But saturation levels can rise or fall, depending on the depth or altitude pressure at which a person is breathing. At greater depths, for example, a diver has to breathe higher-pressure gases, so the degree of potential saturation goes up—sort of like a dry sponge absorbs more liquid the longer it’s held underwater. As the diver breathes, he gradually becomes more saturated, up to the point at which the concentration of gases absorbed in his body reaches the same level as in his pressurized breathing gas. At that point of equilibrium—whether at one atmosphere, two, three or more—a body would be considered saturated. Like a soaked sponge, it could absorb no more unless depth and pressure were increased.

  But it wasn’t completely clear how long it took for a body to become thoroughly saturated. Furthermore, neither Bond nor anyone could be sure that allowing a diver to become saturated, the key to saturation diving, would open the door to breaking the old depth barriers. Bond’s team would have to experiment with artificial atmospheres, learn to maintain a healthy breathing mix for extended periods, and also devise a decompression schedule to bring a saturated diver safely back to the surface.

  Decompression and its underlying theories were not simple matters. Saturation decompression theories, being new and untested, created yet another layer of complexity. Human bodies are, after all, far more complex than a sponge as is the process of gas absorption in the body. Inert gases like nitrogen or helium can be absorbed more quickly into tissues with a rich blood supply, like the brain and spinal cord—two areas where bubbles from the bends are especially dangerous. These more readily absorbent, “fast” tissues, as they became known, get saturated much more quickly than tissues less well supplied with blood, like the joints, which were categorized as “slow” tissues, and where the bends were notorious for causing severe aches and pains, but not necessarily death.

  Depth and duration were of course the primary variables of decompression theory, but there were others, like gas solubility. Nitrogen is about five times as soluble in fat as in water, for example. So fatty tissue can absorb significantly more nitrogen and thus take longer to saturate than tissues with a higher water content. That difference also applies in reverse, during decompression. Fast tissues “desaturate” more quickly than slow tissues.

  Mathematical models representing the full range of tissue types were the key to predicting saturation, desaturation, and decompression rates. But just as musical notes on a page cannot be heard and fully judged until played by musicians, these models had to be tested on real bodies to find out whether they produced a harmonious result. The optimal schedule was the one that could be completed in the shortest time possible while doing the diver no harm. If someone got bent, paralyzed, or killed in open-sea dives or in controlled chamber tests, a decompression schedule would have to be altered. This trial-and-error science of decompression, along with the technological and mathematical tools to pursue it, had been evolving since the first diving tables at the turn of the twentieth century. George Bond was a beneficiary of that evolution, and to help puzzle out lingering mysteries in the physiological interplay between math and medicine he called on his friend and fellow medical officer Dr. Robert Workman.

  Soon after George Bond took over as officer-in-charge of the Medical Research Lab in mid-1959, Dr. Workman succeeded Bond as assistant officer-in-charge. Bob Workman was studious and genial, but a bit reserved, especially compared to his gregarious boss, who was by then planning his daring three-hundred-foot submarine escape. Workman had neatly combed dark hair, earnest eyes, a broad face, and a dimpled chin like the actor Robert Mitchum. At six feet he was a couple of inches shorter than Bond and six years younger. Like Bond, he was a pipe smoker. He grew up in a small town in central Iowa and had always wanted to be a
doctor. After college and medical school at the State University of Iowa he put in a couple of required years with the Army, and then started a rural practice in northwestern Iowa, much as Bond had in Bat Cave.

  In the early 1950s, for some reason, Workman went scuba diving. Perhaps he got the idea from The Frogmen, a 1951 movie about underwater commandos in which scuba plays a central role. Or he may have been among the myriad readers captivated by Jacques Cousteau’s first magazine articles and The Silent World. Whatever the case, it was Cousteau’s new Aqualung that had made it relatively simple for almost anyone to dive. Workman and his buddy donned the gear and explored the silent world beneath the surface of Iowa’s Lake Okoboji. Dr. Workman underwent some kind of conversion. It helped that he, like Bond, had come to know the unrelenting rigors of a rural medical practice. Not long after his first diving experience Workman changed career course and joined the Navy. A couple of years after Dr. Bond, he, too, went through dive school en route to becoming a submarine medical officer.

  Workman soon distinguished himself as an outstanding and well-liked Navy scientist. He was a virtuoso with a slide rule and had a keen feel for the mathematical models underlying the physiology of diving and decompression theory. In 1958, the year before Workman joined Bond’s staff in New London, he won a year-long postgraduate fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania and studied with Dr. Christian Lambertsen, a leader in the field of diving physiology and equipment development. Lambertsen’s many contributions included his amphibious respiratory unit, a breathing device used by combat swimmers during World War II. Lambertsen even shared credit for coining the SCUBA acronym.