Warrior Wednesday: Master Diver Carl Brashear
The diver’s face was drenched with sweat. Each step forward more difficult than the last. He marched onward. Three more steps. Then two. Then one.
12 steps total before he collapsed into a chair. Exhausted but triumphant. The diver successfully conquered perhaps the most difficult obstacle of his life. And his life was full of difficult obstacles.
Carl Brashear
Navy diver Carl Brashear successfully proved he could complete the required 12 steps, unaided, on dry land while dressed in 300 pounds of full dive gear.
What made Carl’s accomplishment shocking to the audience, was that he succeeded despite recently enduring the amputation of his right leg.
The scene is brilliantly captured in George Tilman Jr.’s Men of Honor starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as Carl Brashear. Robert De Niro and Charlize Theron co-star in arguably the most underrated performances of either of their careers.
Men of Honor follows the life of Brashear from his youth as the son of a sharecropper in rural Kentucky to joining the U.S. Navy and eventually becoming its first black Master Diver.
Brashear dreamt of making something of himself. He dreamt of a life beyond the soil and small town of his youth. After the Army rejected Brashear, the Navy…
