The Snorkel and the Tomb

I have been treading water over a graveyard, and I can tell you the dead make excellent neighbors. They keep to themselves. More than nine hundred of them are down there in the dark, sealed inside the rusted hull of the USS Arizona, just below the surface of the Pacific chop, where they have been since a December morning in 1941. The ship still leaks oil. A weep at a time, decade after decade, it surfaces in slow black coins on the water. The Navy has a name for it. They call it the black tears.

And into that water, last August, lowered the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation — mask, fins, the works — for an activity the government's own emails describe, in writing, with the bureaucratic confidence of a man ordering a sandwich, as a “VIP snorkel.”

A VIP snorkel. I have been staring at that phrase for the better part of an hour and I am no closer to the bottom of it than those nine hundred men. The Associated Press dragged it into daylight with a Freedom of Information Act request — the journalistic equivalent of prying a floorboard up with a butter knife — and underneath the floorboard was Kash Patel, in a snorkel, paddling above a war cemetery while the rest of us were told the trip never happened at all. Previously undisclosed, the reports say. Of course it was.

Here is the part that curdles. The snorkelers — and let us sit with the word snorkelers, applied to the leadership of federal law enforcement — were formally instructed, by a Navy captain named Jodie Cornell, “not to touch/come into contact with” the sunken ship. They were briefed on its “historic significance” as the “final resting place/tomb” for hundreds of service members. Someone had to say that out loud. Someone, a professional adult, had to look the Director of the FBI in his goggled face and explain that the thing he was about to swim over was a tomb, and please not to kick it.

Diving the Arizona is not a thing one simply does. The water is closed. It opens for Marine archaeologists and for the National Park Service crews who tend the wreck like a wound, and for almost nobody else. No FBI director going back to at least 1993 — and the bureau has had some real characters in that chair — ever decided the appropriate use of the site was recreational. They went, they stood on the memorial, they put a hand on the marble wall of names, and they left. It took the current management to look at a military grave and see a water park with a VIP line.

The full itinerary reads like a summer a teenager would plan with someone else's credit card. Hawaii first, for the Honolulu field office. Then Australia and New Zealand — the day before the snorkel, Patel cut the ribbon on the FBI's first office in Wellington, genuine government business, the kind of thing that belongs on a calendar. Then back to Hawaii. Two more days. And then — and I want to be precise here, because the precision is the joke — he flew to Las Vegas. Honolulu, Wellington, the tomb, two days off, Vegas. The structural integrity of that schedule is roughly that of a screen door on a submarine.

The bureau, asked to account for itself, said the visit “was part of the Director's public national security engagements.” Public. The man's spokesman, Ben Williamson, went further, calling the AP's reporting an attempt “to spin an invitation from the Commanding General of Indo Pacom to a military base as a party or vacation, which is so stupid.” I have read the Williamson statement four times now and I notice he never says the snorkeling didn't happen. He says it was an invitation. As if the gravesite issued one. As if the nine hundred sent a card.

A Marine veteran named Hack Albertson put it cleaner than I can.

It's like having a bachelor party at a church. It's hallowed ground.

Stacey Young, who runs a group called Justice Connection, called it part of a “pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions.” Both of them are being kind. Both of them still believe the word distraction implies there is something the man is being distracted from.

The Navy, for its part, confirmed the swim happened but said it could not determine who set it up. Nobody initiated the VIP snorkel. It simply occurred, the way weather occurs, the way oil rises off a sunken battleship one slow drop at a time. Anyway. The snorkeling, by every account, was excellent. Visibility good, current mild, the dead politely silent the entire time.

That is the thing about hallowed ground in this republic. It holds whatever you decide it holds. To nine hundred families it is a tomb. To a Navy captain it is a site requiring a touch-nothing briefing. To the Director of the FBI it was, for one warm afternoon last August, a pretty good place to get in the water. The black tears keep coming up. Eighty-some years, and the ship still has the decency to grieve. That is more than I can say for the man who swam over it.