Once Hoss accepted that he had PTSD, he asked for some pills to make it go away. He soon learned that while drugs could treat conditions associated with the disorder, like depression and anxiety, there was no medication for the PTSD itself. Therapy wouldn’t just be important—it would be indispensable. Hoss found the exposure therapy to be especially brutal. Having to retell his therapist the tunnel horror story again and again was bad enough. But in addition, anytime some shard of memory about the tunnel flashed into his mind, no matter where he happened to be, Hoss had to force himself to think about the accident, in its entirety, from start to finish. The goal was to provoke the anxiety often enough that the nightmares plaguing him would be defanged. Like other victims of PTSD, he was taught to think through five questions: What happened? Why did it happen? Why did I act the way I did at the time? Why am I acting the way I’m acting now? (In other words, Am I crazy?) And will I be able to survive if this happens again? Because having a sense of hope is critical to recovery, Hoss’s therapist helped him confront the absolute worst memory from his trauma. For him, that moment had come after they’d loaded Billy and Tim’s bodies onto the trailer and went to start the Humvee, but the engine wouldn’t turn over. That was when Hoss had felt the weight of uncertainty collide with the fear that his close friend’s blank stare and lifeless body were a preview of his own likely fate.
With that nadir established, the therapist next employed other forms of cognitive behavioral therapy. He instructed Hoss to suit up in his dive gear and go to the bottom of a swimming pool, adding a few minutes to his “bottom time” each time he did the exercise.
Hoss learned that when people suffer a traumatic event within a known territory, that territory can become toxic to them. It isn’t uncommon for pilots who survive a plane crash or firefighters who survive a roof collapse in a tall building to become phobic about some aspect of their occupation, developing, for instance, a crippling fear of heights or enclosed spaces. That phobia is usually just a manifestation of the overall fear that their job—which they may have done heroically for years—has become inherently unsafe. The time Hoss spent suited up at the bottom of the pool helped him understand that it wasn’t the diving, or the air tank, or the act of being underwater or below grade that was dangerous. He came to appreciate that what had been unsafe was the particular job he’d been asked to do in the Deer Island tunnel, and the appallingly inadequate system he’d been given to do it with.
As depressed as Hoss was, he committed himself to seeing his therapy through. He and his wife, Heather, had plans to build a beautiful house on the property in Coeur d’Alene they had purchased before the tunnel job, yet Hoss drew little satisfaction from that. While she continued to work full time, Hoss spent much of his day in bed, sometimes getting up only to attend his therapy sessions. He could tell that his wife was trying to be supportive, but one of the sad by-products of PTSD is that people suffering from it, in their hopeless and self-absorbed state, can often come across as ungrateful to the people trying to help them. Hoss found that he and Heather were speaking to each other less and less.
Eventually, though, he began to see slow, modest improvements in his condition. He tried to recapture more of the person he’d been before the accident, the guy who loved doing thoughtful things for others, the good sport who picked up the tab when no one was looking. He took two of the antique guns he’d found in Tim’s stash and had them mounted in handsome display cases. He sent them as gifts to Tim’s parents and brother. Then he had Tim’s dive helmet thoroughly restored, arranging for Tim’s name to be painted in black cursive onto the side of the yellow hat. He sent that to Judy.
On the first anniversary of Tim’s death, Hoss and Heather once again stayed with Judy in rural Washington, where they resumed the tall task of helping to declutter her house. In one closet, where Judy kept Tim’s clothes, Hoss found a box. When he opened it, he felt his stomach drop. “Judy, I want you to get rid of that box,” he said somberly.
She didn’t have to ask why. “You know I don’t want to.”
The box contained the outfit Tim had been wearing on the day of the accident—his gray sweatshirt, his red sweatpants, even his red underwear. The clothes, which had been cut open by the paramedics as they tried to revive him at the base of the shaft, had been returned to union managers in Boston, who then mailed them to Judy. As was the case with so many of Tim’s things, she hadn’t been able to part with them.
“I think you should,” Hoss told her. He understood her sentimentality, but he thought this was taking it too far. “Maybe it’s harder for me,” he acknowledged, “because when I saw that box it just sent me all the way back a year.” It was, he said, “as though I had never been through any therapy or treatment or anything. It was just like I was in the tunnel again.”
There was something else Judy kept in that closet, a box she herself had brought back with her from Boston. It contained Tim’s ashes. Tim had once offhandedly told her that when he died, he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered at sea. She’d honored the first part of his request but had found it impossible to deal with the second part. Once when Tim’s parents had come for a visit, Judy had removed the box with his ashes from a closet shelf. But scattering them seemed too final, so the box had gone back on the shelf. Their cat Matta, whom Tim had rescued and who loved nothing better than sitting on his lap, had taken to hanging out in front of that closet door.
For nearly two years after the accident, Hoss stayed out of work and in therapy. Eventually he felt strong enough to give diving another shot. He reconnected with one of his earlier mentors from Norwesco, the same diver who had cautioned him against taking the Deer Island job. The guy had signed on with a Seattle company called Global Diving & Salvage. As he explained it to Hoss, the new place was very different from Norwesco. The whole business model was built around safety. The owners might charge their clients a bit more, but because of their zero tolerance for unnecessary risk, the job was far less likely to end in costly injuries or death. Therapy had helped Hoss understand that while his employer had shortchanged his safety on the Deer Island job, his profession wasn’t inherently unsafe. Those assurances were enough to persuade him to make the leap again.
Hoss was relieved to find that his confidence in the water quickly returned. But he also recognized that he was a different type of diver now, more willing to speak his mind when he saw something that didn’t seem right, more demanding of genuine solutions, and less tolerant of pat answers. The best part of his settlement money was the security it gave him to walk off the job whenever he felt things were unsafe, without giving even a moment’s thought to how it might affect his career or his wallet. That confidence also made him more of a leader, since he was always willing to speak the truth.
Hoss’s return to diving went so well that, in time, he ascended to the highest ranks of his profession. He became a saturation diver, which required him to remain underwater in a pressurized bell for up to a month at a time. The work took him from Latin America to the Middle East. He was enormously grateful to Heather for staying with him during his lowest periods and felt he couldn’t have made it without her. Still, the strain of his recovery had taken its toll on their relationship. During one lengthy stint at sea on a Norwegian vessel, he fell for the vessel’s secretary, Karolina, a bright and determined woman from Poland. After returning to Idaho, to the dream house that he and Heather had finally managed to build, he confessed to his affair. He and Heather soon divorced.