[Garden & Gun] On February 17, 1864, eight sailors aboard the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley detonated two hundred pounds of black powder against the hull of the USS Housatonic, sinking the Union warship in the waters off Charleston, South Carolina. The Hunley also sank, never seeing the surface again until she was raised in 2000, the remains of her crew still at their posts. Though she had finally returned to port, there was no indication of the cause of the Hunley’s demise. Did her own torpedo sink the submarine along with the Housatonic? Was she doomed by an underwater collision or breach in her hull? Had mechanical failure led to slow suffocation for the eight men trapped beneath the waves? The mystery of the Hunley’s end persisted.
As a U.S. Marine with a love for military history, I followed the Hunley’s story closely. But in 2001 my own wars interrupted that and everything else. Four years after the submarine reappeared, on a cold night in Iraq, a truck carrying nine of my Marines struck an anti-tank mine filled with twelve pounds of high explosive. The explosion destroyed the truck, leaving all nine men injured. The most pernicious injuries were those caused by explosive shock waves, the signature wound of America’s post-9/11 wars. Those seemingly unrelated bits of history, 140 years apart, give me a more than passing interest in the forces central to both. They also give life to Dr. Rachel Lance’s important, timely, and deeply entertaining book, In the Waves.