March 2020 | SMITHSONIAN 39CO
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MY RESEARCH ADVISER at
Duke University was Camer-
on “Dale” Bass, an associate
professor of biomedical engi-
neering, and Dale worshiped
effi ciency. To save time, every
day he wore the same type of
black polo shirt, with black or
gray cargo hiking pants that
zipped off at the knee, and
the same heavy black lace-up
combat boots. The students
in Dale’s lab researched inju-
ry biomechanics: the various
mechanisms by which hu-
man beings got injured and killed. About half the students
worked on car crashes, and the other half, including me, fo-
cused on explosions.
Before coming to Duke, I’d been a civilian engineer for the
U.S. Navy , where I’d helped build underwater breathing sys-
tems. The Navy had sent me back to school to get a PhD in
biomedical engineering, and in Dale’s lab, I was a natural
fi t to study underwater explosions. Most of my medical cas-
es were from sailors injured during the Second World War.
I combed through dozens of reports a day, looking for those in
which a physician reported enough information to let me mod-
el the blast. The stories were usually the same: feeling of a sharp
kick to the groin, with a stabbing pain in the gut. Sometimes
they would immediately vomit blood, sometimes they would
have sudden and uncontrollable bloody diarrhea. Both are
signs of severe trauma to the intestinal tract. Sometimes they
would start coughing up blood, a sign of damage to the lungs.
I would routinely get lost in the misery of the injuries, and
it was during one of these depressing reveries that I heard the
staccato thunk of Dale’s combat boots coming down the hall.
All of us knew that sound. If the boots kept going, we kept
working. But sometimes we heard the boots stop a few steps
past a door, pause and then reverse. This meant Dale had anidea. Today, the boots stopped for me.
“What about the Hunley.” The words were delivered as a
statement. “Can your fancy software model it?” he asked.
“Sure,” I responded, without any idea what he was asking.
“I don’t see why not.” In grad school, unless you already have
a damn good reason locked and loaded, the correct answer to
such a question is always yes. Whatever he was talking about,
assuming it was a boat of some kind, the Navy blast software I
had been using could probably model it.
The boots proceeded down the hall.
I pulled up a new browser window on my computer and be-
gan to investigate what I had signed up for.
People are born with the instinct to fi ght against their
own death, to struggle with their last breath against even
the most unavoidable and uncompromising ends. And that
universal instinct is why the Hunley
case fascinates. The submarine is now
housed at the Warren Lasch Conserva-
tion Center in North Charleston, South
Carolina, where visitors are invited to
“solve the mystery” at the end of their
tour. The museum exhibits off er four
theories: (1) that the torpedo damaged
the hull and sank the boat, (2) that the
crew was somehow trapped inside, (3)
that the submarine collided with an-
other object and sank, or (4) that a
lucky shot fi red from the crew of the
Housatonic struck the captain.
Any of these theories would re-
quire that the crew members, with
ample time to see their own deaths
coming, chose to spend their last mo-
ments nobly in peace, seated at their
stations. But that would defy human nature.
Something killed these men. Something that left no trace on
the boat or their bones.
If people near a bomb die, I always suspect some kind ofTHE HUNLEY
SWAM CLOSER.
IT TOOK HOURS
TO REACH THE SHIP.
Horace L. Hunley
fi nanced the
submarine that
would later bear
his name. He
died inside the
vessel when it
sank during an
open-water test
in 1863.