TRIBUTE TO A MAN WHO NEVER GAVE UP
The story of Carl Brashear is that of man who has faced adversity and overcame challenges, despite shortcomings, racial prejudice and disability. And indeed, he never gave up! Carl Brashear is mostly known by younger generations thanks to the 2000 movie Men of Honor, an American drama film, starring Robert De Niro and Cuba Gooding Jr. that depicts the life of Brashear.
Brashear (1931-2006) was born into a sharecropper’s family in rural Kentucky. Poor, without much access to education, he always wanted to make a different life for himself. Despite limited formal education, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy on February 25, 1948, and graduated from the U.S. Navy Diving & Salvage School in 1954, becoming the first African-American to attend and graduate, and the first African-American U.S. Navy Diver. Still, Brashear had to face hostility and racism. But his career will bring him to be assigned to escort the presidential yacht the Barbara Anne to Rhode Island. He met President Eisenhower and received a small knife that said, “To Carl M. Brashear. From Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957. Many, many thanks.” After making chief in 1959, he stayed at Guam for three years doing mostly demolition dives.
In January 1966, in an accident now known as the Palomares incident, a B28 nuclear bomb was lost off the coast of Palomares, Spain. Brashear, serving aboard USS Hoist, was dispatched to find and recover the missing bomb for the Air Force. During the bomb recovery operations on March 23, 1966, a line used for towing broke loose, causing a pipe to strike Brashear’s left leg below the knee, causing his lower left leg to eventually be amputated.
The Navy wanted to retire him because of his disability, but he fought to remain on active duty and became the first amputee diver to continue service, an unprecedented feat at the time. He retired in 1979,” explains his son Phillip M. Brashear. He never gave up, despite having endured “Five Great Hurdles during his life. He overcame racism, poverty, illiteracy, physical disability, and before he retired, he committed himself to the Navy’s alcohol abuse course for help with alcoholism. Today he is one of the most celebrated American military heroes.”
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