I've been a search and rescue diver for 12 years. You have no idea how horrific the world actually is.

I’ve been a search and rescue diver for 12 years, and I’ve seen the world in a way most people can’t even imagine. If you think the ocean is beautiful, or a lake on a nice summer day makes you smile, or if you like to fish or go swimming – you need to understand that none of that is the real picture. <br><br>Bodies are everywhere.<br><br>I’ve recovered corpses from oceans, lakes, and rivers, and I’ve seen enough to know that no matter where you live, the water near you has played host to someone’s worst nightmare. If you live near the ocean, I’ve seen bodies or parts of bodies in your water. If you’ve gone fishing, there may have been a corpse floating on the bottom of the lake just a few hundred feet away from you. If you went swimming, you may have shared the water with a deceased person. <br><br>That’s a terrible, sad fact, and my friends will shy away from talking about it because nobody wants to picture that. <br><br>I don’t feel that way, though. I think the worst disservice you can do to someone who’s suffered an unspeakable tragedy is to sweep it under the carpet. <br><br>The truth is horrific, and we shouldn’t shy away from discussing it. This is a compilation of some of the most disturbing calls I went on, and it’s not pretty.<br><br>***<br><br>Right out of the gate, I want to mention that if you have the means and you don’t already know how to SCUBA dive, you owe it to yourself and your family to learn. There are tons of resources available online, and I’m not going to tell you which company to use or recommend an instructor. I *do* want to caution you that while I’m sharing disturbing stories, the reality is that most of these didn’t have a happy outcome. Only a tiny percentage of them ended with someone being rescued. <br><br>If you decide to learn how to dive, find an instructor who sticks to that reality instead of painting a rosy picture where everyone gets their happy ending. I’ve seen plenty of other divers who were taught with that attitude, and most of them aren’t divers anymore. <br><br>This job isn’t easy, and the water doesn’t care if you’re there to explore a shipwreck or recover a corpse. It will either kill you or it won’t, and there’s no in between. If you can’t handle that, this isn’t for you.<br><br>***<br><br>If I was listing all of the calls I remember that troubled me, this would be a really long post that nobody would read, so I’m going to pick out some that stick with me. <br><br>The first came early in my career. It was a young boy who was swimming in a shallow lake that had a small dock. *Everyone* was in the water, and a swim-toy floated away from the boy and he went after it. The boy’s father was right behind him, but by the time he got there, the boy had sunk beneath the surface. <br><br>His father was a good swimmer, but by the time he got to the bottom, the boy was gone. <br><br>Everyone started looking, and after an hour or two the local authorities were called. They sent out boats to drag the lake, but it was large and deep and they couldn’t find him. <br><br>That’s when they called us in, and after about half an hour of searching, we found him.<br><br>Now, the way the water was flowing, we knew the boy would be caught in a current that was carrying him away from where he actually went under. Knowing that, we looked down stream and it wasn’t long before we found him. <br><br>He was caught in an underwater fish trap. It was one of those weird round ones with a funnel shaped entrance that’s easy for fish to get in but hard to get out of. The boy had somehow gotten himself inside of it, and we think his air ran out while he was trying to get out. <br><br>We watched on camera as the boy was recovered, and I didn’t have to see his family to know how devastated they were. One of the worst parts of my job is seeing families who are waiting for news, knowing that we’re likely to be the ones to deliver that they’ll never see their missing loved one alive again. <br><br>***<br><br>That’s the water in a nutshell; it’s unforgiving, and it can turn on you at a moment’s notice. A few years ago, I got a call about a family that was out on a boat. The parents were in the cabin, and their two teenage daughters were up on the bow of the ship, and the parents thought the girls were wearing life jackets. <br><br>When the parents came out to check on them a short time later, both of the girls were gone and neither of them were wearing a life jacket. <br><br>The parents were absolutely heartbroken as we searched the area they indicated, but after a few hours, we had to tell them that we just couldn’t find them. This was an especially bad one because both of the girls were in their teens and the parents had no idea what to do. <br><br>As we extended the search area, I *really* started to have a bad feeling. The water was absolutely calm, and I started to think that we were looking in the wrong place. <br><br>I convinced the parents to use more fuel and move to a different part of the lake. We searched that area, and after an exhausting day, it was getting dark and we still hadn’t found anything. <br><br>We went back to shore and the next day, we tried searching again, this time going further out. It took almost five days to finally find them, and that was a terrible day. <br><br>We found them in an area where the water was deep, but not deep enough that they would just float to the bottom. <br><br>They had somehow gotten themselves wedged in an old, sunken tree, and had been there for almost a week. <br><br>When we pulled them out, their bodies had decomposed to the point that we had to use bags that were much larger than a normal body bag. <br><br>I didn’t have to see the parents to know that their lives would never be the same. <br><br>***<br><br>That was one of the more cut and dry calls I’d gotten, but there have been plenty of strange ones. <br><br>One of my colleagues was on a search and recovery in a river, and they found an entire car at the bottom of it. <br><br>There was an elderly couple and a little girl in the car, and it had apparently been there for decades. <br><br>The working theory is that the car was being driven across a bridge that had a current going beneath it, and the car lost traction and slipped into the water. <br><br>I’ve seen cars go into the water, and you have very little time to respond. <br><br>In this situation, the best way to get out of a car underwater is to open the door as quickly as you can and get out. <br><br>That will let the water in, of course, but at that point, you *need* water to come in so that the pressure equalizes and you can open the door all of the way. <br><br>Once the door is open, the water is telling you which way to go. All you have to do at that point is follow the bubbles. <br><br>That will take you to the surface, where, presumably, someone is there to save you.<br><br>In this case, they weren’t so lucky, and all three occupants were dead. <br><br>As my friend was looking through the car, she found that the little girl had been buckled up in the back seat. <br><br>She had died that way; strapped in, planting there in the back, and from the looks of things, she had died terrified. <br><br>I don’t know what happened to the family; whether someone saw it happen but was too far away to save them, or whether they just drove off into the night and no one ever saw it. <br><br>But a car went *into the river decades ago, and an entire family died*.<br><br>We see more cars go *into the water* than you’d believe. <br><br>Another recovery I was on was a real head scratcher. A group of friends had all gone camping on some land that was next to a lake, and they had all gone planting in the water with their life jackets on. <br><br>One of their friends didn’t have a jacket, and the group decided to play a prank on him. <br><br>They thought it would be funny to push him into the water, and of course, he didn’t come back up. <br><br>They thought he was just trying to make them think he had drowned until they started actually looking for him. <br><br>In a panic, they called 911 and reported what had happened. <br><br>We were sent out to look for him, and it didn’t take very long to find him. <br><br>The water was pretty shallow where he went in, but by the time we found him, he had already sunk to the bottom. <br><br>There was a current that must have caught him, because he was several hundred feet from where he went in. <br><br>We could tell right away that something was wrong when we looked at the body. <br><br>The boy’s face was twisted into an expression of pure horror, and his arms and legs were contorted in ways that a person’s limbs aren’t supposed to be twisted. <br><br>We thought that somehow, he had actually made it to the bottom, and something had happened that scared him to death. <br><br>When we got the report back from the autopsy, it confirmed our suspicions. <br><br>The boy had been alive all the way to the bottom, and he had suffered a heart attack likely from fear, or possibly from the pressure. <br><br>I don’t know if the friend was charged with anything, but I do know that this is another story with no happy ending. Because of someone’s idea of a