At the ripe old age of 103, Ken Hartle had lost count of how many times he’d cheated death. Hartle was fond of retelling many of these tales; he could recount surviving rattlesnake bites and scorpion stings, sailing accidents, car crashes, multiple broken bones, colon and prostate cancer, and sextuple cardiac bypass surgery.
There was, however, one memory he avoided sharing—his harrowing diving missions to retrieve the bodies of the fallen sailors at Pearl Harbor.




