Carl Brashear

He saved a sailor, then fought his way back beneath the sea.

Carl Maxie Brashear grew up in a Kentucky sharecropping family and enlisted in the U.S. Navy on 25 February 1948. He pursued diving despite racial discrimination and qualified as a Navy diver in 1954.

On 23 March 1966, during the recovery of a lost nuclear weapon off Palomares, Spain, Brashear pushed a fellow sailor clear of a steel pipe that had broken loose aboard USS Hoist. The pipe struck Brashear instead, devastating his left leg. For saving the sailor at grave personal risk, he received the Navy and Marine Corps Medal. Doctors amputated his leg below the knee that May.

Brashear refused to surrender his diving career. Training with a prosthetic leg, he regained full diving qualification in 1968 and became the U.S. Navy's first African American master diver in 1970. He retired on 1 April 1979 as a Master Chief Boatswain's Mate, then continued working for the Navy as a civilian.

His story reached a wider audience through the film Men of Honor. Brashear died in Portsmouth, Virginia, on 25 July 2006. The Navy later named USNS Carl Brashear in his honour.