“We Cannot Let Him Die”

“We Cannot Let Him Die”

By RONALD SCHILLER

It was past midnight on the Mediterranean islet of San Pierto, a few miles off the southwest coast of Sardinia. Bundled against the wind, eyes turned skyward, the islanders waited tensely for a rescue helicopter.  Lips moved in silent prayer for the stranger none of the knew, a German, who at that moment was about half a mile offshore, fighting for his life in the depths of the wild sea.

Ulrich neuffer, 35, a mechanic from Limburgerhof, had been camping on the island with his pretty blond wife, Hannelore, and their 11-year-old son, Thomas.  The Neuffers spoke no Italian, but on the ferry to San Pietro they had met a young Luftwaffe airman, Werner Schatz, who spoke the language fluently.  He shared Ulrich’s passion for scuba diving and, as luck would have it, was spending his vacation at the same camping ground.  Before the half-hour crossing was over, Uli and Werner were fast friends.  At the campsite, Werner introduced them to other diving enthusiasts—40-year-old Master Sergeant Antonio “Tonino” Algana, of the Italian Air Force, and 43-year-old Daverion Giovannetti.  Uli jointed the team.

The days that followed that summer of 1969 were idyllic.  Every morning at 8:30 the four men showed off for a jutting rock four miles from the beach, where they wriggled into their rubber suits and aqualungs and spent hours exploring the fantastic undersea caverns, harpooning edible fish and photographing brilliantly colored ones.

But scuba diving is by no means all-carefree fun.  The problem is nitrogen, which composes almost 80 percent of the air we breathe.  At normal atmospheric pressure, the body eliminates most of the nitrogen.  But as the diver descends and the pressure on him increases, the nitrogen dissolves, instead, in his blood.  This does no harm so long as the diver remains at depth, and no harm when he comes up if he ascends slowly enough to permit the dissolved nitrogen to be “bubbled off” in his lungs.  But if he shoots to the surface too quickly, the nitrogen forms millions of bubbles throughout his blood vessels.  These may coalesce into “air embolisms” which cut off the circulation of oxygen through the body and result in permanent paralysis of agonizing death.  Uli was well aware of this phenomenon, known familiarly as the bends.  But it did not worry him.  He knew exactly the proper rated of ascent.

On Friday, August 22, Uli was on ledge 110 feet below the surface, harpooning beam.  His air gauge showed that his tanks still held 90 of their original 220 atmospheres, but suddenly he found himself gasping for breath.  Uli detached the gauge and knocked it against his leaded belt, then screwed it back on the air tank.  To his horror, the needle fell to zero—enough air for five minutes at most, instead of the 14 minutes needed for decompression while surfacing from that depth!  Keeping his cool, Uli rose as slowly as the remaining air allowed.

As he took off his gear in the boat, Uli said nothing about his mishap to Tonino, who was in the boat with him.  But as he sat warming himself in the sun he suddenly experienced severe stomach cramps.  Then his chest began to feel as if it were encased in iron bands.  Though gestures, he mad Tonino understand what happened.  The Neapolitan, who had once watched a coral fisherman die of the bends, knew that the only thing that could save Uli now was to get him back into the water to decompress.  Snatching up another aqualung, he strapped it to the German’s back, then put on his own; without waiting to don diver’s suits the two plunged to a 65-foot depth.

The moment he reached deep water—where the nitrogen again dissolved—Uli’s pains disappeared.  After taking 18 minutes to the surface, the two climbed back in the boat.  Other than being chilled to the bone, the German felt fine.  But when they reached the beach, his legs felt stiff and tingled, as though they had fallen asleep.  This sensation, known as “diver’s fleas,” is an unmistakable warning of too-rapid decompression.  Werner relayed the symptom to Tonino, whose orders were curt: “We’re going out again.”

This time they took 31 minutes to come up, far longer than normally required.  Again Uli’s symptoms disappeared and again he felt fine, though very tired.  But a short time later, back in camp, the prickling numbness returned and grew rapidly worse.  Grimly, Uli’s companions decided that the only hope was to get their friend to decompression chamber in Sardinia’s capital, Calgary, about 70 miles away.

Uli’s friends helped him to the car—for by now he was almost completely paralyzed from the waist down.  “No need to worry,” they lied to his frightened wife and son.  “We’ll have him in Cagliari in three hours and he’ll be back tomorrow ready to dive again.”

They raced to the ferry ship, honking their way to the head of the line, where Tonino ran to the phone to alert the hospital in Cagliari.  Moments later he was back with the bad news; the decompression chamber there was out of order, the nearest available unit was in Rome, an impossible 310 miles away.

News spread unchangingly fast in San Pietron, and crowd had already gathered.  Carlo Biggio, mayor of Carloforte, the island’s chief port, and Brigadiere Matteo Malgioglio, commander of the island’s six-man force of carabinieri, Italy’s national police, had also arrived.  A call was put through to the Italian naval base at Maddalena, on the northern tip of Sardinia.  “Put the man back in the water and keep him there until he can be flown to a decompression chamber,” the naval surgeon advises.  “But, frankly, his chances are slim.  Even if you manage to fly him to the mainland for treatment, the low pressure at the higher altitude will quickly finish him off.”

The odds against Ulrich Neuffer were long, indeed.  Rocky little Sam Pietro has no landing field.  He could be taken to Cagliari only by helicopter, then by plane to Rome.  The carabinieri in Cagliari had a short-range helicopter, which could take care of the first part of the trip.  But for the 240-mile flight to Rome another plane was needed, and snarls of red tape would have to be unraveled before one could be found.

However, Carlo Biggio is a very stubborn man.  In a phrase that became a rallying cry and quickly spread throughout the island, he declared: “The German is our guest.  We cannot let him die!”  From 7 p.m to 12.30 a.m., he and the Brigadiere kept the telephone wires hot—to the perfect to Cagliari, to the Canadian, German ad Italian commandants of the NATO air base of Sadinia, to the Italian air force, to carabinieri head-quarters in Rome, 40 calls in all.

In the meantime, Uli’s friends weren’t sure he could take much more underwater punishment.  But he, realizing the seriousness of his case, readily agreed to plunge for the fourth time that day.  A 30-knot wind whipped the bay to frenzy.  Below the surface, the water was cold, with currents so strong that, to keep from being sweep away.  Uli had to cling to the anchor rope.  But he was never alone—Tonino, Werner and others, carrying waterproof flashlights, descended in relays to signal encouragement, pat his back and massage his freezing limbs.

Through the long ordeal, Hannelore and Thomas kept vigil on shore.  At one point, the hotel telephone operator ran to the beach announcing that a helicopter was about to land there.  Fifteen minutes later the girl was back to tell them it was a false alarm.  Four more minutes the helicopter was announced, and then denied.

It was past midnight when the last snarl of red tape was finally unraveled, and Mayor Biggio relayed the news that the caraninieri helicopter, manned by air-force pilots and a doctor, was on its way.

Signal rockets were fired to recall the diver’s boat.  They came in the nick of time, for Uli, at the ultimate limit of endurance after 41/2 hours, felt he sipping into unconsciousness.  The first thing he saw as he surfaced was the flare in the sky.  On the shore, Hannelore clutched Thomas in her arms and, for the first time that day, wept.

The problem in Carloforte was where to land the helicopter at night, particularly with the strong wind.  The only flat area large enough was the football field, but the pilot would b\never finds it in the dark.  “Round up some cars and send them to light up the field with their headlights,” the mayor instructed an aide.  Within minutes, practically every car on the island was climbing the hill to the field, which was zooming ablaze with light.

The helicopter and the divers arrived at the football field almost simultaneously.  Uli, whose paralysis returned almost as soon as he was out of the water, was put on a stretcher in the helicopter.  On doctor’s orders, the pilot flew at wave-top level, despite the winds that bounced the flimsy craft up and down like a Yo-Yo.

At the Cagliari airport Uli was transferred to a waiting air force plane that flew to Rome just 650 feet.  By 2:30 a.m.—18 hours after he had first set out in the boat with Tonino—he was at last under oxygen in the decompression chamber of the Polyclinic Hospital, very sick but safe.

The news set off a wild celebration in the camp at San Pietro the next day.  Daverio organized a feast; music blared and a lamb was roasted on a spit.  The islanders clearly considered the Neuffers one of them, their troubles to be shared by all.

When I met Uli in Limburgerhof six months later, he was almost fully recovered.  He had spent six days in the Rome hospital and was miraculously back at work within three weeks of his return.  His legs still tingled and turned numb on cold days, and he could not run as fast as he used to, but he was improving steadily.  The doctors at the University of Heidelberg, where he underwent therapy, attributed his remarkable recovery partly to the decompression divers Tonino and his friends forced on him, and partly to Uli’s own courage and physical stamina.

But Uli had an additional explanation: “I would have quiet a dozen times during those hours in the water, were it not for the knowledge that so many people who didn’t know me were risking their own lives to save mine.  I couldn’t disappoint them.”