A June day finds us once again diving around the battleship USS Arizona, whose sunken remains lie in Pearl Harbor. Larry Nordby surfaces beside me clasping his large plexiglass slate; a piece of mylar taped to it is covered with scribbled notations from his dive. â??Navyâ??s here,â? he announces. I look toward the boat ramp where a small landing craft full of â??mudzoosâ? is tying up to the dock of the memorial building that straddles the wreck. Mudzoos are navy divers assigned to the Mobile Diving and Salvage Unit (MDSU) based at Pearl Harbor. We have a symbiotic relationship with these men, whose primary mission is as far from science and historic preservation as ours is from ship husbandry and underwater construction. Our allegiance instead is to the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit, whose bureaucratic title refers to a group of diving archeologists, artists, and rangers employed by the National Park Service to promote preservation of historic shipwrecks and other underwater archeological sites.
This unit was formed in 1980, when the agency leadership decided to establish a mobile team that could help park managers â??maintain responsible stewardshipâ? over such sites. Coincidentally, I had just completed a large project in the Southwest, researching prehistoric sites flooded by reservoirs, and had pulled together in Santa Fe an effective team of park service diving archeologists. Unlikely as it seems, I found myself the first chief of a team of professional research divers based in the arid mountains of New Mexico.
In 1983 we began to survey the Arizona and subsequently the one other vessel still lying at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, the Utah, a battleship that had been converted for use as a training ship. Over the years we have found that our skills are complementary with those of the Navy. They have boats, heavy equipment, youth, brawn, and large numbers; we know shipwrecks. As older, more experienced diversâ??the â??park rangers,â? they call usâ??we have a kind of underwater street savvy that the Navy personnel respect.
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