If Ken Hartle's life was written as fiction, no one would believe it.
Salvage diver, prune-picker, ranch hand, kicked in the face by a mule, stabbed in the neck, six heart bypass surgeries, and that's only a small part of his life.
Hartle died recently, age 103, at a care center in Escondido, California,
He was a Navy diver during the Second World War with the unenviable task of retrieving bodies from vessels sunk by the Japanese after the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941 that destroyed numerous ships, among them the battleship Arizona which went down with 1,177 crew.
