One man’s refusal to give up and let his dreams be stolen

“It’s not a sin to get knocked down. It’s a sin to stay down.”

These words define the life of Navy diver Carl Brashear, whose life is the subject of the Fox 2000 Pictures movie, Men of Honor.

Despite starting out in poverty, a lack of education, being black in a white world, and an accident that left him an amputee, Brashear rose to become the Navy’s first black master diver – the highest position possible for a Navy diver.

When he began his Navy career at age 17 in 1948, Brashear, like most blacks, was sent to the steward branch where he cooked and served white officers – a long way from what he had dreamed of before leaving his happy Kentucky home for the Navy.

Brashear might have remained there for the duration of his military career if he hadn’t stubbornly set his sights on becoming a diver – a seemingly impossible goal for a black man at the time.

When he wrote letters requesting admittance to diving school, he was either told that the letters were lost or that the Navy didn’t have black divers. But he didn’t give up. After persistently writing more than 100 letters, he was finally accepted in 1954. It was clear that he was not wanted. The only black man in the program, he found notes on his bunk, saying, “We’re going to drown you today, nigger!”

Though he laughs about it today, in 1954 it was unwise to ignore such threats, and Brashear was about to quit until a staff member at the school talked him out of it. “Show them you’re a better man than they are,” the man advised.

Enduring threats and discrimination, Brashear struggled on to integrate the Navy diving school and open doors of opportunities for blacks in the future.

Though he believed he was a natural-born diver, diving school was a different matter for the young man who had dropped out of school after the eighth grade to help his father on the farm. After earning his high school equivalency diploma in 1960 when he was 29, he failed diving school and was devastated. This time, however, he didn’t even consider giving up. “It just gave me more ambition and determination to go out in the fleet and study the requirements to pass,” he says.

After a lot of hard work, he graduated as a first-class deep-sea salvage diver in 1964 – a decade after he started in the program.

For the next few years, he recovered numerous items from the ocean, including crashed planes, sunken ships, and old World War II ammunition. “Every so often, we would find a torpedo that wasn’t detonated, and then we would have to detonate it,” Brashear says. It was dangerous work, but Brashear was living his dreams.

Then, in 1966, while helping to recover a nuclear weapon that had fallen into the Mediterranean Sea after a plane crash, Brashear was knocked down again.

After the crew brought the nuclear device to the surface, Brashear saw a line break. Though he was able to move quickly enough to knock another sailor out of the way, he didn’t see the pipe that was hurled across the boat and struck his leg with tremendous force. “They said I was way up in the air just turning flips,” Brashear says. After he landed, he jumped up and tried to run. “That’s when I knew how bad my leg was,” he recalls. It was hanging by tendons.

Brashear later went into shock and was almost pronounced dead, but after checking him one last time, the doctor found a “very, very faint heartbeat.”

A surgeon wanted to try to fix Brashear’s leg but said it would take three or four years, Brashear explains. “I said, ‘Go ahead and amputate. … I can’t stay here three years. … I’ve got to go back to diving.’ They just laughed. ‘The fool’s crazy! He doesn’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of staying in the Navy. And a diver? No way! Impossible!’”

This knockdown in Brashear’s life – the amputation of his left leg - threatened to end his career and put a stop to his dreams. The Navy planned his retirement, but he had other ideas. “I had set my goal to be a master diver. When I lost my leg, I was a first-class diver. I had set my goal to be a master chief petty officer. When I lost my leg, I was just a chief petty officer. I had to reach my goals. I wanted to be the first black master diver in the United States Navy.”

Disobeying hospital and Navy rules, he began diving and taking pictures to prove that he was still able to do his job. With this evidence, he was officially accepted into diving school. Because he was required to walk 12 steps in a 290-pound diving suit in front of a Navy court to be restored to active duty, he needed to exercise to strengthen his remaining leg and residual limb. “Sometimes I would come back from a run, and my artificial leg would have a puddle of blood from my stump,” Brashear says. “I wouldn’t go to sick bay. In that year, if I had gone to sick bay, they would have written me up. … I’d go somewhere and hide and soak my leg in a bucket of hot water with salt in it – an old remedy. Then I’d get up in the morning and run.”

After successfully completing his training and proving himself before a Navy court in 1968, Brashear became the first amputee in the history of the Navy to be restored to his position as a diver and returned to full active duty. Two years later, he became the Navy’s first master diver who was either black or an amputee.

“My father was the only role model I’ve ever had, and he had a can-do spirit and a good positive attitude, and that’s what kept me going,” Brashear says. “And, of course, the trust in the good Lord.”

Men of Honor dramatically portrays the obstacles Brashear overcame to reach the pinnacle of success. “It’s very, very close to my life,” the 69-year-old Brashear says, although he readily admits that some artistic license was taken. “This isn’t a connect-the-dots biography,” screenwriter Scott Marshall Smith says. “My goal was to be true to his spirit, not his shirt size.”

That, he accomplishes, according to Brashear, though the excellent movie and the great acting by Cuba Gooding Jr. as Brashear threaten to skew the lines between the man and the myth.

Brashear denies that he was a hero, but his tenacity and indomitable spirit in the face of adversity belie his humility.

Today, Brashear – who retired from the Navy in 1979 as a master chief petty officer – travels around the country promoting the movie and speaking at schools and universities. He’s come a long way for a man who entered the Navy in 1948 with only an eighth-grade education. But, then, for Brashear, it’s never been about where he started, but rather where he finished. And he finished at the top. “If you dream big and work towards those dreams with all your might, you’ll be successful,” he says.

Some of the quotes in this article are from the U.S. Naval Institute’s oral history, “The Reminiscences of Master Chief Boatswain’s Mate Carl M. Brashear.” He is one of only seven enlisted people whose oral histories have been recorded by the Institute – a great honor for a Navy man. A copy of the entire history can be obtained from the Institute’s Web site at www.usni.org/hrp/oralhist.html

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